SOURCE: Andersen, Kenneth. “The Poetry of W. S. Merwin.” Twentieth Century Literature: A Scholarly and Critical Journal 16 (January-October 1970): 278-86.

[In the following essay, Andersen characterizes Merwin's work as a poetry of evolution based on a philosophy that depends on an ever-changing point of view.]

W. S. Merwin's poetry (The Dancing Bears, Green with Beasts, The Drunk in the Furnace, The Moving Target, The Lice), is a poetry of a distinct evolution. In these five books of poems, he has created not only diverse works of art but also, within this art, a synthetic philosophy which depends on, for its very foundation, a vital, changing point of view. As a poet Merwin begins in disenchantment and isolation. He has felt the malaise of the “Wasteland,” and it conditions his early, personal poetry, The Dancing Bears. In Green with Beasts the poet travels across the sea in an Odyssean quest of a secure home, and of the human answers to the riddles of existence. The search extends onward in The Drunk in the Furnace, and he arrives home in his family portrait poetry. The search seems completed in The Moving Target, for not only is its form relaxed and contemplative, but its spirit is somewhat affirmative and secure. Yet Merwin's last book of poems, The Lice, continues the quest again, in a poetic style that is both refreshingly new and refined.¹

Merwin's The Dancing Bears (1954) is a book of melancholy poems. It betrays the poet's bitter isolation and alienation from the human community. He is the intellectual Eliot of the “Wasteland” with his closed, neat style, his numerous allusions, and his disenchantment with the present myths and beliefs. Curiously, his poetic style is muted, understated, and restlessly gentle; he “does not hug terror so tightly.”² Instead, he obscures that terror in allegory, fable, and allusion. The personal note in this early poetry is suggestive and at times vehement, yet it is consciously restrained within an ordered, balanced, and “patient” form. His diction is delicately chosen and metaphorically complex, and his near-syllabic verse has a “metaphysical” toughness to it. As a poet, Merwin conceives of his artistic function, as did Wallace Stevens, to create “new fictions,” to make order out of chaos; yet the prevailing chaos which he feels has not only destroyed myths and beliefs, but it has also destroyed the basis for his creation of myths as a poet. He cannot write credible fables; he feels that he has lost his creative function in the human community, for he thinks he is

A stranger up from the sunned
Sea of your eyes, lady
What fable should I tell them,
That they should believe me?(3)

As an alien artist whose myths have no validity or meaning in the modern world, the poet feels obligated to stand detached and apologize for his having created myths and poetry. Thus in the poem, “Fable,” he excuses himself with the words,

I am a mad precarious man
Making a prayer for folly
At the midnight and heartless hour,
Moon-beset, and my best of prayer
Is incontinently to complain
Upon a foolish story.

(24)

He realizes with a bitter tinge that he is “rendering a story, and complain[ing] / Heartless and foolishly” (27). Where Shelley in his “Ode to the West Wind” could personify that wind, making its inspiration his, Merwin cannot find that spirit. He is cut off from the poetic inspiration which once gave order and meaning to existence:

(But caution: for the west wind
Is secret, the west wind's hunger
All love and ghost
May not satisfy)

(39)

The west wind is forever a “secret” because all revelation is, as the poet implies, dead. All belief in faith and myth (“love”), and in illusions and artistic fantasies (“ghosts”), comes to naught, because the wind does not respond to the artist's creations. It is silent, it only hungers insatiably. It is like the sea of his later poems, a sea of fatal attractiveness, both intoxicating and destructive.

Yet if the poet is disturbed by the futility of his endeavors, by the frailty, and perhaps the fallacy of myth in the modern world, he has, nonetheless, employed fables and myths to elucidate and sustain his poetry in The Dancing Bears.⁴ He has created order out of chaos simply by writing these poems whose wealth of allusions substantiates, somewhat, Merwin's belief in the positive function of art and poetry. If, in “East of the Sun and West of the Moon” (41), the poet can have the skeptical bird of experience say, “All magic is but metaphor” (50), in the end the girl of innocence triumphs when she affirms poetry in our age with the words, “All metaphor … is magic” (59).⁵ Revelation then, is in the “west wind,” and its “secret” will be unveiled for Merwin through metaphor, myth, and fable in his succeeding poetry.

Green with Beasts (New York, 1956), the next published book of Merwin's poems after The Dancing Bears, marks a distinct change in the poet's evolution. No longer is his poetry the cry of a forlorn and despairing outcast; no longer does he treat myth and fable with skeptical and detached irony. His scope broadens and becomes more comprehensive and versatile. His art tends to be more sophisticated, more expansive, and more complex. The poet is beginning to feel humanity's problems and not just his own. He begins to “see” more, and his increasing knowledge of the world is evident in the variety of poetic subjects he has chosen to write about (from the “Blue Cockerel” to “A Sparrow Sheltering Under a Column of the British Museum”). Throughout the book Merwin is creating myths of profound import, all of which sustain his affirmation that “all metaphor … is magic.”

In his “Blue Cockerel” (13), we find a poet who reminds us of the verse of Wallace Stevens or of Gerard Manley Hopkins:

… this bird balances,
His blue feet splayed, folding nothing, as though
The too-small green limb were ground; and his shout
Frames all the silence. Not Montezuma nor all
The gold hills of the sun were ever so plumed
As the blue of his neck, his breast orange, his wings'
Blazing, and the black-green sickles of his tail.
It seems to be summer. But save for his blue hackles
And the light haze of his back, there is no sky,
Only the one tree spreading its green flame
Like a new habit for heaven.

Merwin here is a fine connoisseur of a myriad of glittering, luminous colors, of rich, luxuriant surface textures.⁶ Through a counterpointing of the soft assonantal sounds of the “o” and “a” with the sharp, brilliant consonantal sounds of “ck” and “z,” the poet creates interior rhymes which are at one and the same time mellifluous and startling, fluid and taut.

In his sea poems, the highlight of Green with Beasts, Merwin is adrift on his sea voyage homeward bound. The sea represents to the poet, first of all, power: the bursting, violent, archetypal, primeval force with which Melville was concerned. It is “Leviathan”:⁷

… the black sea-brute bulling through wave-wrack,
Ancient as ocean's shifting hills, who in sea-toils
Travelling, who furrowing the salt acres
Heavily, his wake hoary behind him,
Shoulders spouting, the fist of his forehead
Over wastes gray-green crashing, among horses unbroken
From bellowing fields, past bone-wreck of vessels.

(11)

The calculated complexity and interwoven design of these first few lines is such that one can almost feel the whale bursting the bounds of the poetic form. Expecially significant are the alliterations of “black … brute … bulling”; “wave-wrack”; “shoulders spouting”; “fist … forehead”; and “gray-green”: all of which catch the quality of characterization through forceful, consonantal repetition. In addition, the participles create trochaic and dactyllic rhythms of the brute whale bulling and thrashing through ancient sea-swells of motion.

The sea, while representing the turgid and boiling energy of the whale, is certainly intoxicating; but it is also treacherous. If Merwin can say in “River Sound Remembered” (57) that “It will be the seethe and drag of the river / That I will hear longer than any mortal song,” he nonetheless warns us in “Fog” (80) that “whether we float long / Or founder soon, we cannot be saved here.” For the sea is fatal; it is “everywhere” (“Sailor Ashore”) with its “screaming silence” and its deceitful “whiteness” (“The Frozen Sea”). Merwin's hero becomes the “entranced man in a boat, lost at sea yet as ‘found’ as fatality will permit anyone to be. He ‘knows sailing,’ but that knowledge can protect him for only just so long.”⁸ He is protected only so long because of the fear of seeing a “Sea Monster” or approaching the treacherous waters of “Cape Dread,” or “lifted by the wake” of the ill-starred “Portland Going Out” (these past few poems are from The Drunk in the Furnace). The only guidance that he finds in such fatality is in a “Fog-Horn” which gives

… warning of something we dare not
Ignore, lest we should come upon it
Too suddenly, recognize it too late,
As our cries were swallowed up and all hands lost.

(3)

Security can come, paradoxically, from a “dead thing”; from a “Bell-Buoy” which can

… assure you
Of where you are, though it knows nothing
Of where you are going or may have been.

(13)

Yet Merwin's approach to such a stark reality, the treacherous and chaotic sea about us, does not always have either the crashing discords of “Leviathan” or the “screaming silence” of “The Frozen Sea.” In other poems, Merwin “close[s] in on panic so gently and unexpectedly” that it is only quietly that we finally come to “realize the depth of the waters, the / Abyss over which we float among such / Clouds” (“The Iceberg”).⁹

This technique of “clos[ing] in on panic so gently and unexpectedly” is amply manifest in Merwin's poem from Green with Beasts, “Evening with Lee Shore and Cliffs.” This poem deserves a close analysis, for the mood which exudes from the poem is sustained by the complex variation on the sounds within the poem itself. I quote it in its entirety:

Sea-shimmer, faint-haze, and far out a bird
Dipping for flies or fish. Then, when over
That wide silk suddenly the shadow
Spread skating, who turned with a shiver
High in the rocks? And knew, then only, the waves'
Layering patience: how they would follow after,
After, dogged as sleep, to his inland
Dreams, oh beyond the one lamb that cried
In the olives, past the pines' derision. And heard
Behind him not the sea's gaiety but its laughter.

In the first line, the use of the dactylic foot (“sea-shimmer”) and the repretition of the “s” sound catch perfectly the vibrating surface of the sea. The assonance in the “ai” and “az” sounds, plus the use of two spondees in “faint haze,” slows the description down in order that the thick, misty air might come through with full force. In the second line, “A bird / Dipping for flies or fish” picks up the rhythm again in the iambic feet, in the assonance of the “i” sound, and in the double impact of the repeated “f” alliteration. In the second sentence, the action decelerates in the spondaic “Then, when …,” and this halting motion is complemented by the long “a” assonance of the words, creating a drawn-out interior rhyme. The movement picks up again in the dactyl “suddenly,” in the trochaic “shadow” and “skating,” and in the rising and swelling “s” alliteration. The motion is then left precariously at a tenuous height in the “i” sounds of “with a shiver / High in the rock?” Following this, a contrast is built between the sea and the air in the soft, mellifluous assonance of “the waves' / Layering patience.” This relaxed, fluid rhythm is then contrasted to the sharp, serpenty “i” sounds of the land (“his inland”). The alliteration of the “p” sound in the ninth line emphasizes the hard, sputtering “derision,” as it does the forthcoming “laughter.” The emphatic “h” sounds of “heard / Behind him” following into the tenth line not only focus attention upon the speaker, but also prepare the reader for the variation on the “h” sound in “sea's gaiety.” This light, bouncing rhythm is only to be broken abruptly by the hard, rasping “ter” sound of “laughter,” a word which is tellingly reminiscent of the first word in the poem, “sea-shimmer.” The end rhyme scheme is also subtly organized: there are the slant rhymes of “over,” “shiver,” “after,” and “laughter”; and the consonantal rhymes of “bird,” “inland,” “cried,” “heard,” “shadow,” “shiver,” “shadow,” and “waves.” This poem is, then, highly structured, and in that its form is organic to its subject, the poem succeeds in “hugging terror”; but it does so very quietly and softly.

Merwin “hugs” the fatal sea in such a way that his art, like a “man's bones” in his poem, “The Bones,” gives “shapes to the sprawled sea, weight to its winds, and wrecks to plead for its sands.” If the poet has lamented in an earlier poem, “What fable should I tell them, / That they should believe me?,” he now has his answer. For he will tell them of “man's endeavors” to “give shapes to the sprawled sea” by creating myths and fables in an attempt to construct order in a world of chaos. He will create poetry which is close to traditional iambic form, but is far enough away to retain some of the “chaos” of organic, or naturally rhythmic, form. It is a straining form which in its visual abruptness (e.g., “beyond the one lamb that cried / In the olives”) points out the limits of the poet's ability to contain within his art the chaotic and ever-changing sea; and which, in its soft, assonantal sounds (e.g., “farther than a man can see”) reflects the fluid eternality of a sea which can never fully be contained within the mortal art of the poet.

With the advent of his family portraits in the latter half of The Drunk in the Furnace (New York, 1960), Merwin finally comes ashore from his early alienation and his later penetrating sea voyage. Yet he does not give up the Odyssean quest of the ultimate answers; rather he puts them in a familiar and tangible context in which he can see before his own eyes the struggle being reenacted. He is at once sympathetic and understanding, compassionate and benign.

Thus we find that his poetry has come another stage in its metamorphosis. His style loosens from the calculated complexity of his sea poems and becomes more direct: “Oh / Kill it at once or let it go” (“Plea for a Captive,” 29). It can even be brutal, albeit it is realistic: “Do not look up. God is / On High. He can see you. You will die” (“Small Woman on Swallow Street,” 36). The poet looks about himself at humanity, and with both sympathetic pity and envy, he occasionally pays tribute to them: “Except for coughs they are quiet; / Sober; they always knew something would happen, / Something would provide” (“The Gleaners,” 37). His poetic gift becomes increasingly more “innocent,” and more evocative, as when he invokes “Summer” to “be of this brightness dyed / Whose unrecking fever / Flings gold before it goes / Into voids finally / That have no measure” (25). And at times he can offer friendly and paternal advice, for he has in store the knowledge of his sea voyages: “Helpless improver, / Grown numerous and clever / Rather than wise or loving, / Nothing is newer than ever / Under the sun …” (“Under the Old One,” 20).

In two of his grandmother poems, “Grandmother Watching at Her Window” and “Grandmother Dying,” the poet seems terribly troubled and the personal note is agonizing even if it is stoically endured:

                                        but God loves you so dearly
Just as you are, that nothing you are can stay,
But all the time you keep going away, away.

(42)

and again, in soft, modulated tones,

                              and her chair went on
Rocking all by itself with nothing alive
Inside it to explain it, nothing, nothing.

(44)

If this seems but a bleak and despairing view, it is nonetheless not the disenchanted view of the alienated poet of The Dancing Bears. Instead, the poet now convinces us of his essential humanity by his personal and heart-felt connection with the tragedies of which he speaks. He is now sharing a common destiny with them, just as he, as poet, is capturing, through image and metaphor, all of those feelings and emotions which were hitherto unexpressed. And if the speaker seems frustrated before the inexorable laws of birth, life, and death, he can nevertheless affirm that same cycle in “Burning Mountain,” where he soliloquizes in these lines: Before long it [the “Burning Mountain”] practically seemed normal, / With its farms on it, and wells of good water, / Still cold, that should last us, and our grandchildren (48). And perhaps the highest note of affirmation amid the poet's somewhat resigned melancholy comes in the last poem of The Drunk in the Furnace, the poem of that name. For it is here that the artist affirms, even if comically, his continuing artistic function as a creator of myths: “Where he gets his spirits / It's a mystery. But the stuff keeps him musical …” (54). Significantly, in the poem his “musical spirit” rises in stature above whatever knowledge and wisdom the “Reverend” is able to give. This is indeed a high tribute for a melancholy poet to pay to his art and to his art form.

In Merwin's next published book of poems, The Moving Target (New York, 1960), the poet becomes increasingly less complex in form as he becomes more various in his selection of poetic subjects.¹⁰ The most noticeable aspect of this poetry, perhaps, is the selection of epigram poems that are distributed throughout. In their simplicity of statement, they catch the essence of a thought or an observation quickly but profoundly. For example, in a short poem like “Separation,” the poet twists words metaphysically in order to refresh a prospective: “Your absence has gone through me / Like thread through a needle. / Everything I do is stitched with its color” (9); or similarly, in the “Dead Hand,” “Temptations still nest in it like basilisks. / Hang it up till the rings fall” (14).

Another concern in this poetry, as the title The Moving Target indicates, is with motion, and with the future in relation to the past. The repeated emphasis upon “shoes” throughout brings this concern to mind. It is first of all a questioning concern, as in “Sire”: “Deaf disappearance in the dusk, in which of their shoes / Will I find myself tomorrow?” (21). Yet Merwin at times, seems somewhat arrogant and self-indulgent in his bluntly stated awareness of his sea journey and the knowledge which he received from it. For example, he can say with a confirmed self-assurance in “Noah's Raven,”

Why should I have returned?
My knowledge would not fit into theirs.
I found untouched the desert of the unknown,
Big enough for my feet. It is my home.
It is always beyond them.

(10)

This particular type of facile reasoning appears also in such poems as “Home for Thanksgiving,” “Economy,” and “Inspiration for a Burned Bridge.” Nevertheless, there are a few poems in this volume which provide us with a more affirmative view of Merwin as a poet and as a man. In these poems, the redeeming factor is the sparse but precious conviction of self which he asserts in the modern age. Thus, in “Departure's Girl-Friend,” the poet insists upon the integrity and validity of his journey in spite of the personal hazards and the common resistance to his course when he says,

                                                                                                              and I step once more
Through a hoop of tears and walk on, holding this
Buoy of flowers in front of my beauty,
Wishing myself the good voyage.

(36)

And in the last poem of the book, “Daybreak,” the artist does not revel either in his arrogance or in his despondency, but rather triumphantly and heroically re-asserts himself upon a future quest into the unknown:

Again this procession of the speechless
Bringing me their words
The future woke me with its silence
I join the procession
An open doorway
Speaks for me
Again.

(97)

The Lice (New York, 1967), Merwin's latest book of poems, represents both a new departure and an old survival. New poetic elements in evidence are an absence of punctuation in the text, making the thought more open-minded and suggestive; an increasing versatility in a number of poetic forms; a maturing sense of the nuances of poetic metaphor and rhythm; and an artistic concern which now reaches occasionally into the public, as opposed to the private, sphere. Merwin's early poetry contributes other elements: a growing appreciation, once again, for poetic complexity, both in thought and in form; a muted, understated, and restlessly gentle style of writing, reminiscent of The Dancing Bears and Green with Beasts; a sympathetic understanding of the inexplicable ironies of life, recalling The Drunk in the Furnace; and perhaps a touch of lingering pessimism. The Lice, then, is a volume of poetry constructed upon a dialectic between the poetic lessons of the past and a healthy experimentation of the present. And it is out of this dialectic, or tension, between opposing influences that the beauty and animation of his poetry comes.

Curiously, the poems in this collection are almost wholly about the future and about death. The titles of the poems easily betray their ominous content: “Some Last Questions,” “The Last One,” “News of the Assassin,” “The Mourner,” “For the Anniversary of My Death,” “The Asians Dying,” “For a Coming Extinction,” and “Death of a Favorite Bird.” The intensity and impact of these poems comes primarily from the last few lines of each verse, where the poet deftly manages to condense a thought, and then suddenly expand it far beyond the barriers of the poem itself: “… but you the dead / Once you go into those names you go on you never / Hesitate / You go on” (“The Hydra,” 5); “… the names / Do not come down to us / On the way to them the words / Die” (“An End in Spring,” 7); and lastly, “… that my words are the garment of what I shall never be / Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy” (“When You Go Away,” 62).

One cannot help feeling that “In the Winter of My Thirty-Eighth Year”, (61), recalling Dylan Thomas, is one of Merwin's finer poems. The poet's persistent theme throughout this collection, the passage of life toward the future and toward death, is here given memorable, and enduring, form. The skill of the artist is evident in many ways: in the telescoping of the thoughts of the future coupled with the remembrance of youth; in the fluid but precise phrasing (“No older at all it seems from here / As far from myself as ever”); in the crisp and evocative images (“Walking in fog and rain and seeing nothing / I imagine all the clocks have died in the night”); and in an uncanny ability to suggest, through the nuances of rhythm and line, the inexorable movement of man toward death and, at the same time, the stillness of a moment of contemplative thought. All of these qualities are perhaps summed up best in the last stanza of the poem, a stanza which, through the image of the stars, catches perfectly the essential loneliness which the poet feels, midway between his birth and his death:

Of course there is nothing the matter with the stars
It is my emptiness among them
While they drift farther away in the invisible morning.

With his later poetry, then, especially with the poems collected in The Lice, W. S. Merwin has come of age as an artist. His development, significantly, has been distinguished by his definitions of, his views on, and the confrontation with those ultimate tragic questions which concern us all. As has been mentioned in the beginning, Merwin has created not only diverse works of art but also, within this art, a synthetic philosophy which depends, for its very foundation, on a vital, changing point of view. Thus in his poetry we pass from the personal sense of alienation as an artist (“What fable should I tell them, / That they should believe me?”) in “When I came from Colchis,” to the triumphant answer in the “All metaphor … is magic” success of the resounding “Leviathan”; from the “mad precarious man / Making a prayer for folly” in the “Fable,” to the quiet assurance of a perceptive artist giving “shapes to the sprawled sea” in “The Bones”; from the interwoven complexity of “Evening with Lee Shore and Cliffs,” to the simplicity and innocence of his family portraits in The Drunk in the Furnace; and from an affirmation of the voyaging self in “Daybreak,” to a recognition, in “In the Winter of My Thirty-Eighth Year,” that both the self and the voyage are as elusive as the uncertain future.

Notes

1. Glauco Cambon, Recent American Poetry (Minneapolis, 1962), 16-22, views Merwin's poetic development as a journey from “experience” to “innocence.” Merwin starts his “anabasis,” he comments,’‘where others have ended—poets used to begin in naive enthusiasm and technical innocence, to progress toward technical refinement and philosophical disappointment … but in his case the reverse is true” (18-19). The interesting point to note is that with the arrival of The Lice (1967), Merwin's poetry begins to reveal a “technical refinement” and a muted, understated style reminiscent of his earlier verse.

2. Macha L. Rosenthal, The Modern Poets (New York, 1960), 262.

3. W. S. Merwin, “When I came from Colchis,” The Dancing Bears (New Haven, 1954), 20. All references to this book, and to Merwin's succeeding volumes of poetry, will be included within the body of the text.

4. A perusal of the titles of the poems confirms this mythic element in The Dancing Bears: “Tower,” “Runes for a round table,” “The lady with the heron,” “When I came from Colchis,” “You, Genoese mariner,” “Fable,” “Proteus,” and “December: of Aphrodite.”

5. Cambon, 19. He continues: “The man who ‘knows,’ who has seen through the emptiness of culture itself and says wearily, ‘All magic is but metaphor,’ is hungry for revelation … and that revelation will come from poetry, for, precisely, ‘all metaphor … is magic’” (19-20).

6. It is interesting to note here that the poet's scrupulous descriptive powers are heightened by his intricate network of alliterations (“bird balances … blue”; “habit … heaven … hackles … haze”); assonances (“folding … thought”; “save … haze”; “green … tree”; “gold … so”); and consonances (“neck … sickles … hackles”; “Montezuma … blazing … haze”).

7. Alice N. Benston, “Myth in the Poetry of W. S. Merwin,” Poets in Progress, ed. Edward Hungerford (Evanston, Ill., 1962), 180, calls “Leviathan” “one of his best poems.” She describes the whale as a “brooding shape, both angel and monster,” which “waits as emblem of all the possibilities, the condition of the world that waits for man” (190). Dennis Welland, “The Dark Voice of the Sea: A Theme in Modern American Poetry,” American Poetry, ed. Irvin Ehrenpreis (London, 1965), 210-211, adds: “The whale … brings to mind a disturbing vision of vastness and pre-lapsarian potentiality which to the modern reader can only be tragic.”

8. Rosenthal, 262.

9. Ibid., 261.

10. Stephen Stepanchev, American Poetry Since 1945 (New York, 1965), 118-119, mentions perceptively that the “idiom” of The Moving Target is “in some ways … anti-poetic: there is a deliberate roughening of the line in order to avoid the smoothness, neatness, sonority of the past. Merwin imitates the awkward phrasing, distorted syntax, and irregular rhythms of the inarticulate. … Merwin abandons traditional metrics grounded in iambic measure for the ‘open field’ versification advocated by Charles Olson. … The whole effect is somehow tentative, casual. …”