SOURCE: Clifton, Michael. “Breaking the Glass: A Pattern of Visionary Imagery in W. S. Merwin.” Chicago Review 36, no. 1 (1988): 65-83.

[In the following essay, Clifton explores Merwin's visionary poetry—poetry that deals with altered states of consciousness—written between 1962 and 1977, asserting that it exhibits a progression from a negative to a positive vision and a coming-to-terms with the unconscious and death.]

After quoting Blake's own words to establish his work as essentially “‘Visionary,’” and then defining that term as the “view of the world … as it really is when it is seen by human consciousness at its greatest height and intensity” (143), Northrop Frye suggests an important but largely ignored point for criticism in his essay “Blake After Two Centuries” when he observes that works like Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception “seem to show that the formal principles of this heightened vision are constantly latent in the mind,” and that it is this constant availability of vision, near at hand but suppressed, which “perhaps explains the communicability of such visions” (143).

Frye is right, of course, but there is another reason for his observation's importance to criticism, which is that the imagery and perceptions of visionary experiences, whatever their cause, occur in readily identifiable clusters, the affective nature of which is determined largely by the emotional reaction of the person experiencing them. Because of this, and because there are poets and authors other than Blake whose work is also visionary—that is, concerned to a large extent with the imagery and perceptions of what we now call altered states of consciousness—one can construct from various works and research on these states a visionary schema that will indicate not only when such a writer's subject is the unconscious, but whether his or her emotional reaction to it is positive, negative, or some ambivalent combination of the two.

By means of such a schema, for example, it is possible to trace through W. S. Merwin's deep image poetry a pattern of, and reconciliation with, the unconscious: to argue that, in the works published from 1962 through 1977, he moves from a generally negative sense of it to a far more positive one. Though individual poems in the collections ranging from The Moving Target to The Compass Flower reflect varying senses of the unconscious—there are quietly happy poems in his darkest collection The Lice, for instance—the general pattern in these books and those published between is one of a coming-to-terms with the unconscious, a movement visible largely as a coming-to-terms with death.

Before arguing that this acceptance of death is no less than a willing (rather than a fearful) acceptance of the self-surrender necessary to any visionary experience or altered state, even one as specialized as the successful writing of deep image poetry, it is necessary first to provide the general outlines of the schema mentioned above, and then to establish that Merwin's work, like Blake's, is in fact visionary. Three things—Merwin's autobiographical essays in Unframed Originals [hereafter referred to as UnfOr], the autobiographical nature of many of the poems in the relevant collections, and the poet's strict accuracy when recording his subjective sense of the unconscious—make the second task (i.e., a reading of these works with the phenomena of altered states in mind) a relatively straightforward one.

For the visionary schema itself, however, one must turn first to the work of Aldous Huxley, whose 1956 work Heaven and Hell outlines the general features of visionary experiences as a sense of light and bright colors in intricate, organic patterns resembling jewels and/or flowers (103-04). These are accompanied by a sense of joy and wholeness—provided the experience is a positive one—or by a crushing sense of horror if the experience is a negative one, the key to the differing perceptions being the presence or absence of negative emotions (137-38). If one is fearful or angry rather than at peace, in other words, the flood of unconscious material into the conscious mind still occurs, but the resulting vision is a nightmare inversion of its positive counterpart. Together with an intriguing pattern from experimental psychology—that subjects resisting the effects of LSD feel themselves to be separated from reality by a thick, glass wall (Pahnke and Richards 411)—Huxley's work provides the basic schema for visionary elements in a writer's work: the brightly-colored jewels and flowers, the presence or absence of a glass barrier, and above all, the awareness of light—these are diagnostic.

The color and brightness of this visionary light depend on both the intensity of the experience during which it is seen and on one's emotional reaction to having such an experience in the first place. At its most positive, it is a rich gold hue, filling the subject with a warmth that seems simultaneously interior and exterior. At its most terrible, however, the light is “infernal—an intense electric glare without a shadow, ubiquitous and implacable” (Huxley 134). The most famous instance of this light in American literature is Roderick Usher's odd painting in Poe's “The Fall of the House of Usher,” consisting of a hermetic, underground “vault or tunnel” through which pours a terrible light—a “flood of intense rays”—that “bathe[s] the whole in a ghastly and inappropriate splendour” (Col. Works 2: 405-06).

As G. S. Thompson observes, the source of this light “lies in the artist's subconscious” (Poe's Fiction 125); more specifically, the vault is the visual image of the artist's unconscious, an inner space both highly aroused—i.e., vividly illuminated by the glare of the terrible visionary experience—and imprisoning: because there is no exit, the artist who saw to paint it is more securely caught than the miscreant in Poe's pit.

W. S. Merwin's brush with this visionary light in his autobiographical essays both resembles and differs from Usher's painting. Falling asleep on his first night in the abandoned house of the French farm he has bought, filled with a sense of the place's “immeasurable antiquity” and inevitability—a sense that “Every decision of mine and my parents had been leading toward that half ruined, half finished structure” (UnfOr 168)—Merwin dreams of his own strangely-lit chamber, writing

In my dream I had been lying there, right where I was [inside the farmhouse], and a gray, greenish light like a luminous shadow had revealed to me, as though by moonlight or lightning, the inside of the heavy front door, a few feet away. An iron bolt ran across it into the masonry. I do not remember whether or not I had locked the door before going to bed. In the dream I could see that it was tightly bolted. But as I watched, fingers, and then a hand, a left hand, more a woman's than a man's but not obviously of either sex, and of no determinate color—the color of the light—appeared around the edge of the door, groping along it. The wrist followed, and part of the arm, and fingers felt their way to the bolt, which began to turn and loosen. I could hear the bolt grate and the door begin to move. Then I woke. The house was dark and the night was still.

(UnfOr 169)

Merwin is far less appalled than Poe by the odd quality of the light in his version of this inner chamber; not so intensely negative, it is “gray, greenish,” and “like a luminous shadow,” or like “moonlight or lightning.” Although he describes himself as seeming to wake “with a feeling of oppression and fright” to the scene depicted, he also comments that his reaction at the time to the dream itself was not altogether negative: “Not that I imagined the dream's content to be nothing but menace and warning” (UnfOr 170).

The reason for his different, essentially ambivalent, perception of the chamber and its light rests perhaps in the second essential difference between Poe's image and Merwin's, which is that Poe's vision of the aroused unconscious is completely isolated—the vault is both empty and sealed—whereas Merwin's is not. Rather, it has a door, the “heavy front door” of the French farmhouse, and it is also occupied, not only by Merwin but by the owner of the hand—“a left hand, more a woman's than a man's but not obviously of either sex”—about to unbolt that door. Unlike Poe, Merwin has a guide, though his/her/its identity is not apparent here.

Although Merwin's encounter with such light in the farmhouse is circumstantial, its close association with a flickering imagery he sees before falling asleep there—“at the back of my eyes the road [i.e., scenes from his life] kept appearing and then fading out like an early film that broke for longer and longer intervals” (UnfOr 168)—argues that his later encounters with both are deliberate, meditative, and central to the “deep image” style emerging not long after. In a piece called “The Diver's Vision” from The Miner's Pale Children [hereafter referred to as M'sPC], for example, a flickering “slow film” precedes the visionary light:

When he reaches that point [“the top of his dive”] he looks down. On the water far below him he sees the little slick where he will enter it. A shifting apparition, its edges tattered and melting in a slow film of colorless flames. He waits, hanging in the air, staring down at it, and beholds his face appear as a veil in the middle of that bit of surface. His own face shifting, tattered and melting but clearly his, and at moments filled with a blinding radiance that always seems to belong to an instant just past or about to occur, rather than to the present. Still he waits, and then around the face he catches a glimpse of a perspective which he can never describe afterwards, a landscape leading into other worlds, their love, their silence, the sight of it filling him with a tenderness sudden as lightning, and with a joy that would turn to terror unless he moved at once toward his vision. And so he falls. And as he does it disappears. It fades from his eyes, from his lungs. Not altogether from his memory. Not so completely that he does not know that it will be waiting for him the next time, however the interval is measured.

(M'sPC 217-18)

Because the diver will repeat the act, staring into his own reflection each time he takes the metaphoric plunge, his dive is a paradigm for the writing of a poem, a notion Merwin strengthens with the imagery of poems that concern writing in The Moving Target [hereafter referred to as TMT], the first collection in the new style. One such is “Lemuel's Blessing,” addressed to the wild spirit of the new poetry, whom Merwin beseeches

But lead me at times beside still waters;
There when I crouch to drink let me catch a glimpse of your image
Before it is obscured with my own.

(TMT 8)

The act of writing is pictured forthrightly here as that staring into water in which the diver engages; the “image” Merwin hopes to glimpse, therefore, is like that “slow film of colorless flames” and the visionary “landscape” emerging from them.

There is also “The Nails,” a poem in which Merwin, lamenting his loss of assurance in his old style, writes again to the spirit of the new:

… I've been to see
Your hands as trees borne away on a flood,
The same film over and over,
And an old one at that.

(TMT 19)

More explicit here about what he will glimpse when gazing into water, Merwin alludes once more to the flickering, pictorial imagery seen in the French farmhouse, again employing the image of a film, specifically an “old” one, exhibiting the same jerky motion seen earlier. More important, though, is that his having “been to see” the film “over and over” implies a deliberate reattainment of the special state of awareness in which such cinematic imagery becomes visible.

The heart of his new style, in other words, is meditative, as Merwin outlines more than once in the collections written since The Moving Target. One of the poems relating the mechanics of this meditative style is “A Scale in May” from The Lice [hereafter referred to as TL], which begins,

Now all my teachers are dead except silence
I am trying to read what the five poplars are writing
On the void

(TL 50)

A Zen concept, the void is everything that is not us, that we tend generally to ignore; one becomes aware of it only by stilling one's busy awareness (Kapleau, ed., The Three Pillars of Zen 74). It is essentially a listening, and is the attitude Merwin openly adopts in the last two lines of the second stanza: “… I desire / To kneel in a doorway empty except for the song” (TL 50). The song to which Merwin refers here is a wordless, transcendent tone behind all other sounds or silences; it is, so to speak, reality's groundtone, which he often characterizes as (or as sounding like) the ringing of bells, the singing of birds, or the chuckle of running water. It is not audible to our ordinary awareness, but only to one who “listens,” that is, one who enters a meditative state of awareness.

Having stated his desire to enter such a state, Merwin turns later in the poem to a description of the perceptions peculiar to it, writing,

The walls of light shudder and an owl wakes in the heart
I cannot call upon words
The sun goes away to set elsewhere

(TL 50)

The first change in his perceptions, that the “walls of light shudder,” apparently describes the alteration in one's vision, a widening of the pupils, as one switches from the sympathetic nervous system to the parasympathetic, attaining what is known as the relaxation response (Cade and Coxhead 83, 263). Simultaneous with this widening of the eyes is the act or attitude imaged as “an owl wakes in the heart,” an apparent reference to a kind of alert receptivity known as “bare attention,” fundamental to all Buddhist meditation; it is the essential attitude required of anyone practicing the discipline (Naranjo and Ornstein 86).

The trance-state Merwin has reached at this point is essentially nonverbal, since any attempt to talk (or to behave actively in general) invokes the sympathetic nervous system and its accompanying flight-fight response (Cade and Coxhead 12); Merwin refers to this characteristic in the next line of the stanza, “I cannot call upon words.” The following line (“The sun goes away to set elsewhere”) alludes, then, to that other identifying characteristic, one's loss of an ordinary time-sense: he is not actively aware of the sun's setting from moment to moment; it simply “goes away.”

The deepest tone of this descending scale describes the aim of Merwin's meditative practice:

At the end of its procession through stone
Falling
The water remembers to laugh

(TL 50)

This lowest tone duplicates the song described above as reality's groundtone, and the laughter, typical of one's reaching a state of awareness capable of recognizing that tone, appears in this context to be part of the exhilaration identified with an ecstatic state, the classic end of some forms of meditation (though not that of Zen; Merwin's practice departs from tradition in this respect).

The other poem of Merwin's to “enact” the entering of a meditative state is less a description of his subjective perceptions than it is a lesson to others. The forthrightly titled “Exercise,” from 1973's Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment [hereafter referred to as WtoUA], begins,

First forget what time it is
for an hour
do it regularly every day

(WtoUA 69)

A primer of unlearning, the poem progresses next through tracts of time, arithmetic, numbers in general, and letters, ending with the four elements:

go on forgetting elements
starting with water
proceeding to earth
rising in fire
forget fire

(WtoUA 70)

What remains after forgetting fire is simply an attitude, the poised alertness essential both to meditation and to such poetry. Either these two poems or others less obviously like them lead Harvey Shapiro in his review of Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment to label Merwin's poetic effort Zen-like, writing that “With the publication of The Lice in 1966 [sic], W. S. Merwin embarked on a spiritual discipline: to so rid the landscape of place and person that he could work out for himself, as if in Zen exercises, a way toward ultimate light” (New York Times 22 June 1973, Sec. 1: 12).

The problem for Merwin, as for Poe before him, is that his perception of that light, once he has reached it, is less than positive. He parodies his ambivalence in a piece from The Miner's Pale Children called “The Trembler,” which depicts another fearful visionary, describing his odd avocation to an acquaintance:

He described for me the manner in which trembling, properly conceived, became what could only be called an activity of the soul, whereby every possible source of dread was imaginatively conjured from the circumstances of a given life and then taught to perform its peculiar dance in which the entire emotional being of the participant was caught up, sometimes to the point of ecstasy, of self-annihilation. Did I not see that the practice did away with the old separation of inner and outer, subjective and objective, self and environment, in one profound vibrancy? Did I not see, did I not see?

(M's PC 76)

The end of the Trembler's efforts, the “profound vibrancy” toward which he aims with his transformation of dread, is reality's groundtone, the ecstatic aim of the meditative scale in “A Scale in May.” Merwin eventually admits to this ambivalence in the poem “The Guardians” from The Compass Flower [hereafter referred to as TCF]:

Fear is one aspect of joyful guardians
because of the way I came
and clearly I have been in love with some of them

(TCF 17)

One of the central efforts of his spiritual and poetic discipline, then, has been to rid himself of this fear, and he does so in part by confronting his deepest fears in various poems and prose pieces. Perhaps the most remarkable of these is the litany “Fear” from The Carrier of Ladders [hereafter referred to as CofL], which addresses a general dread and ends

there is fear in everything and it is
me and always was in everything it
is me

(CofL 44)

It is this attempted self-healing that lends his early and middle deep image collections their notable emphasis on the negative: only by confronting his deepest fears can he purge his visionary joy of its mitigating terror.

Merwin's progress toward undiluted joy is most visible in the poems that deal with the gradual overcoming of his fears of death. The reason for this is simply that the unconscious, because of the deficient time-sense referred to above, feels like death to the frightened conscious mind, which interprets any alternative to its active time-sense as nonbeing (Nalimov, Realms of the Unconscious 87); consequently, Merwin's attitude toward the unconscious corresponds precisely with his attitude toward death, a subject surrounded by visionary images of water, light, and glass when it appears in his work.

Such images appear in the context of death, for example, in another dream recounted in Unframed Originals, in the essay, “La Pia,” concerning his mother. After staying at a large lake between Yugoslav Macedonia and Albania, he writes, “I had dreamed of lakes and boats,” of “a beautiful green and tawny hillside covered with clear streams, above a lake I had loved in my childhood.” In this positive context, the landscape surrounding the lake radiates the same visionary light the diver sees in his reflection: “Deep woods surrounded the hill, and light came out of it and out of the streams flashing along it like veins running down to the lake” (UnfOr 195).

However, the lake also appears in the essay in an altogether different guise. Merwin has another dream about lakes on this journey:

I had dreamed that I was beside a vast dark lake which also resembled the one I had loved as a child. A number of friends were assembled there together: young men and women. We were all about to emigrate across the lake and leave behind our present citizenship. On the far side, just visible in the misty evening, was a low stone building where there was room for each of us, below the level of the lake.

(UnfOr 195)

Although this lake, too, resembles the one he “had loved as a child,” it is altogether different; rather than being filled with light this time, it is a “vast dark lake,” the crossing of which amounts to an emigration, the leaving behind, for Merwin and his friends, of “our present citizenship.” Crossing this lake involves a basic change, not simply in one's national, but in one's spiritual “citizenship”: to cross this lake is to alter one's essential state of being—to die, in short. The chamber of the unconscious, appearing as the French farmhouse in the dream discussed above, appears here in the vault-like form of the “low stone building” that is specifically “below the level of the lake” and “just visible” from his living perspective, on this side of the lake.

The appearance of this visionary imagery in the essay concerning Merwin's mother has specifically to do with his association of her with the idea of death. Her sense of death strikes him as oddly characteristic:

Maybe she was never afraid of it. Ever since I was a child I have heard her say that it held no fear for her. All my life she has spoken of her death as rest, a rest to be earned, something she looks forward to. I cannot tell when she began to feel that way, but she knows that the series of deaths that marked and defined her childhood and youth formed and set the feeling, and gave it its bitter sweetness … it has seemed as though her attitude toward death is the response to those early losses, and it has not changed with time, except to deepen.

(UnfOr 204-05)

His mother's attitude toward death, then, is relatively unafraid, something to which she even “looks forward.”

Following from the argument advanced above that one's attitude toward death accurately reflects one's attitude toward the “timeless” unconscious—in her case, a positive one—it seems clear that Merwin's mother also represents for him the unconscious in its most positive light, i.e., in the jewel/flower imagery described at the outset as diagnostic of the positive visionary experience. Speaking of Dante, and of the reticent character La Pia for whom this essay is named, Merwin first explains that her silence is due to the fact that “She stands deeper in his mind than he, the protagonist, knows, and it may be that when she speaks to him he can recall nothing of her, that he has forgotten her” (UnfOr 229). And her words, the few utterances we have from her, he calls “At once lapidary and ghostly,” as well as “oddly remote from the experience [they place],” especially her last words. Of that enigmatic last sentence of hers from the Inferno, Merwin writes,

And the rest is her story, which no one now can claim to understand historically, yet which everyone, I imagine, is caught by, hearing something unplaceable but distantly familiar: “he knows it who, first betrothed, had wedded me with his gem.” The words knotted out of order, and ending with that gemma: the stone, the humanly prized thing out of the earth, the crystal, the focus, the symbol, the gauge, the promise, the enduring impersonal source of radiance.

(UnfOr 230-231)

La Pia's brief utterance captures the elusive essence of Merwin's relationship with his mother. And though this utterance begins with La Pia's marriage—like that of his own mother to his father, the act that first links the histories of mother and son—Merwin's focus here is on her last word gemma. The word itself is a “focus,” a “symbol” of the unconscious and its meditative summoning seen in the most positive light. Indeed, the visionary radiance that appears in the image of the diver gazing into the water also appears here. The difference is that the light, so fleeting there, is fixed in this image: she, and that single word of hers, are the “enduring impersonal source of radiance,” the virtual embodiment of the spirit or guardian Merwin invokes in “Lemuel's Blessing” from The Moving Target.

The most striking connection between Merwin's mother, death, and the unconscious, however, is his investiture of her as sole resident, away from her duties to him and his sister, of

a trackless, twilit, secret country open to no one. Not a dreamland or a cherished mystery into which she retired. It has always been right there with her, like her shadow, whatever she has been doing or saying. It is still there, the real source both of her words and her silence, and Hanson's headstone marks one of its boundaries.

(UnfOr 218)

It is clear neither to the reader nor, perhaps, to Merwin whether his mother's sense here of a “trackless, twilit, secret country open to no one” images her abiding awareness of death or of her own unconscious; probably it images both. While at pains to point out that this odd awareness of hers is not an escape of any kind—“Not a dreamland or a cherished mystery into which she retired”—it is nevertheless both as familiar as her own “shadow” and unutterably strange to us in this life, since “Hanson's headstone marks one of its boundaries,” a reference to an elder brother who died the day he was born. Not an escape, then, nor death per se, but death-like—bordered by death—and mysterious, a “trackless, twilit, secret country.” What Merwin describes here, with the careful accuracy typifying all such descriptions in his work, is his sense of his own unconscious, an awareness he nevertheless identifies as peculiar to his mother and perhaps learns from her.

The crucial reference to Hanson in this context provides a link to the fearful image of the glass barrier. In the poem from The Moving Target called “To My Brother Hanson,” for instance, Merwin addresses this missing older brother as “My elder, / Born into death like a message into a bottle” (TMT 94). Virtually the same image reappears later in the same collection, this time as the essence of the new poetry:

The message sang in its bottle it would find me
I knew the king of the moths I knew the watchman's
country
I knew where the phoebe lost herself I knew the story
I stepped in the lock I
Turned

(TMT 94)

In the first case, it is death trapped inside glass and, in the second, the “song” of the new poetry; given the dual status of the unconscious-as-death in its connections with his mother (and with the lake), these are two versions of a single image: what sings behind glass is neither one nor the other but both—death's song. It is Merwin's central image of the unconscious, which one hears only on the edge of sleep (or in a meditative state), and at the time these poems were written, such listening was painful to him. In the poem for Hanson, for example, Merwin writes “I listen to the painful song / Dropping away into sleep” (TMT 29).

Before the glass barrier appearing here breaks, however, it first expands. In 1967's The Lice, for example, after having spent a great deal of time alone on his farm in France, Merwin finds the bottle has grown to the size of a mountain. In the poem “The Herds,” Merwin first “celebrate[s]” his “distance from men,” and then records his perceptions of a night in the open:

Sleeping by the glass mountain
I would watch the flocks of light grazing
And the water preparing its descent
To the first dead

(TL 56)

Solitude has enhanced his sense of the unconscious, the essentially death-like or timeless quality of which appears here in Merwin's transformation of rain-clouds into “water preparing its descent / To the first dead.”

Following this poem chronologically is one called “The Current,” from his 1973 collection Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment, which contains the beginnings of a shift:

For a long time some of us
lie in the marshes like dark water
forgetting that we are water
dust gathers all day on our closed lids
weeds grow up through us
but the eels keep trying to tell us
writing over and over in our mud
our heavenly names
and through us a thin cold current
never sleeps
its glassy feet move on until they find stones
then cloud fish call to it again
your heart is safe with us
bright fish flock to it again touch it
with their mouths say yes
have vanished
yes and black flukes wave to it
from the Lethe of the whales

(WtoUA 24)

The poem describes Merwin's newfound joy in the unconscious—his discovery, as he puts it in another poem in the collection, of the “sweet light” (“Old Flag,” WtoUA 23)—imaged here as a “thin cold current / [that] never sleeps.” Moreover, the glass barrier imagery here contains a clear attempt at reassurance: not only do “cloud fish call to it again / your heart is safe with us,” but the poem's last two lines contain an affirmation as fundamental as that of Molly Bloom, couched specifically here in terms of death: “yes and black flukes wave to it / from the Lethe of the whales.” In effect, this poem answers the earlier poem “For a Coming Extinction” from The Lice, in which all whales are dispatched by men to “The end / That great god” and, later in the poem, to the “black garden.” In the more recent poem, the sense of death (and therefore, of the unconscious) is far more positive than in the earlier one.

Merwin's ultimate coming-to-terms with the unconscious, however, does not occur until 1977 in The Compass Flower. In “The Arrival,” the third poem in the collection concerning his mother's death, Merwin finally crosses the “vast dark lake” described in his essay on her in Unframed Originals:

From many boats
ferries and borrowed canoes
white steamers and resurrected hulls
in which we were young together
to a shore older than waiting
and our feet on the wet shadowed sand
early in the evening of every verb
both of us at the foot of the mountain laughing
now will you lead me with the smell of almonds
up over the leafless mountain
in the blood red evening
now we pull up the keel through the rushes
on the beach
my feet miss the broken bottle
half buried in the sand
you did not notice it at last
now will you lead with your small hand
your child up the leafless mountain
past the green wooden doors thrown away
and abandoned shelters
into the meadows of loose horses
that I will ride in the dark to come

(TCF 9)

The lake's far shore is explicitly death here—“a shore older than waiting”—a quality merely implicit in the vault- or crypt-like nature of the “low stone building” waiting for Merwin on that shore in the autobiographical essay. With this transitional quality made clear—the fact that the lake's near shore occurs in this life but the other shore out of it—the lake occupies the same metaphoric territory as the “twilit secret country” of his mother, since the far boundary of the latter is “Hanson's headstone.”

Not surprisingly, then, Merwin's mother appears next in the poem. She not only accompanies him in his crossing of the lake but is to act specifically as his guide: “Now will you lead with your small hand / your child up the leafless mountain.” The intimate connections between the unconscious and death, together with the fact that it is her hand that guides him to an acceptance of his own, argue that the hand reaching around to open the door of the dream-chamber so many years before—“a left hand, more a woman's than a man's”—was in fact his mother's, whose acute sense of her own unconscious was to be an “example” to the young poet, an example of which he was already intuitively aware.

The most significant image in the poem, however, is that of the “broken bottle / half buried in the sand,” imaging at once Hanson's death, the song of the new poetry, and Merwin's fearful perception of his unconscious. The fact that the “bottle” breaks here signals an end to Merwin's ambivalent perception of his own aroused unconscious.

The theme of acceptance in this poem is echoed by another in the collection, in which the other version of the glass image, the mountain, also reappears. In “Apples” Merwin describes his

Waking beside a pile of unsorted keys
in an empty room
the sun is high
what a long jagged string of broken bird song
they must have made as they gathered there
by the ears deaf with sleep
and the hands empty as waves
I remember the birds now
but where are the locks
when I touch the pile
my hand sounds like a wave on a shingle beach
I hear someone stirring
in the ruins of a glass mountain
after decades
those keys are so cold that they melt at my touch
all but the one
to the doors of a cold morning
the colors of apples

(TCF 10)

Although the poem contains enough of Merwin's central images—keys, locks, birds, waves, and so on—to “answer” many of his earlier poems, its importance here rests in its resemblance to the dream in the French farmhouse years before. In the first place, the setting here is like that earlier “empty room” suggesting the chamber of the unconscious. The lighting, however, is no longer ominous: it is the ordinary light of day (“the sun is high”). Reflecting this change, he is no longer “Alone like a key in a lock / Without what it takes to turn” as he declared himself to be in The Moving Target; he finds himself waking instead “beside a pile of unsorted keys.” These are connected with the unconscious: they have “gathered there” during his sleep, emitting a “long jagged string of broken bird song” as they did so, and he specifically associates the “openings” of that part of his mind with the image of the keys, writing next, “I remember the birds now / but where are the locks.” He recalls, that is, the benefits of reaching his unconscious but no longer recalls the difficulties. The birdsong modulates in the next stanza first to a sound “like a wave on a shingle beach,” and then to that of someone stirring “in the ruins of a glass mountain / after decades.”

Like the bottle, that other image of his ambivalent sense of the unconscious, the glass mountain reappears, shattered at last (“after decades”). The sound emitted when he touches the shards is not only related to “bird song” and the sound of a “wave on a shingle beach” (one of the few times the unconscious appears in its “oceanic” context in Merwin's work), but the keys/shards themselves are water—“they melt at [his] touch”—relating the “song” released from them with that of the meditative poem from The Lice, in which “the water remembers to laugh.” What is released here, then, is a positive sense of his unconscious, the most intense form of which is the exhilaration or ecstasy evoked by the earlier line. Merwin's sense of his unconscious has, in short, thawed.

Because of this essential change in attitude, the imagery of the wholeheartedly positive visionary experience appears in force in The Compass Flower. The first of such images, the golden light, appears only once before this in Merwin's deep image poetry, in the “gold chanterelles” he finds while “Looking for Mushrooms at Sunrise” in The Lice. In The Compass Flower, however, this light is ubiquitous; the clearest example of it for my purpose is that in “Kore”:

The candles flutter on the stairs of your voice
gold in the dark
and for this
far time you laughed through your whole childhood
and all those years my beloved spiders
guarded the treasure under my house
unlit until the night before you appeared

(TCF 52)

Like many other poems in the 1977 collection, this one—written to the spirit of a young girl—reflects Merwin's change to a more positive sense of his unconscious. The spirit or girl is, presumably, a new manifestation of the same guardian or spirit addressed throughout The Moving Target, the essential quality of whose voice here, that of “gold in the dark,” contains the light of the positive vision. This light is connected not only with a joyous laughter (“you laughed through your whole childhood”), but with the lighting and guarding of a subterranean treasure, the “treasure under my house / unlit until the night before you appeared.” This new, joyful guardian replaces the “beloved spiders” that formerly guarded the treasure, a restatement of Merwin's essential change from an attitude of ambivalence to one of unmitigated joy regarding the “treasure” of his unconscious.

The other major category of positive imagery, that of jewels or flowers, also appears in several poems in The Compass Flower. An example occurs in “Islands,” which begins,

Wherever I look you are islands
a constellation of flowers breathing on the sea
deep-forested islands mountainous and fragrant
fires on a bright ocean
at the root one fire

(TCF 64)

Merwin's phrase “a constellation of flowers” collapses the jewel/flower variants to the single hybrid image of flowers shining so brightly they resemble stars; the bright colors such flowers would inherently possess, however, would make them seem less like stars than living jewels, and it is this sense of them toward which Merwin apparently aims. The same kind of collapse occurs in the last two lines of the stanza, in which first the islands themselves, and then—in an imaginative telescoping of the image's visual logic—the entire planet becomes a living jewel that burns “at the root one fire.”

The one poem that most clearly illustrates not only the imagery but the emotional attributes of the positive visionary experience—the sense of joy, of being-at-home in the world, or even at one with it—is “Autumn Evening”:

In the late day shining cobwebs trailed from my fingers
I could not see the far ends somewhere to the south
light hung for a long time in the wild clematis
called old man's beard along the warm wall
now smoke from my fire drifts across the red sun setting
half the bronze leaves still hold to the walnut trees
marjoram joy of the mountains flowers again
even in the light frosts of these nights
and there are mushrooms though the moon is new
and though shadows whiten on the grass before morning
and cowbells sound in the dusk from winter pastures

(TCF 48)

With the last of his fears changed to joy, his “beloved spiders” become part of the light as he writes that “shining cobwebs trailed from my fingers.” His position here is beyond anything reached by Poe and essentially Emersonian: he has become what Emerson referred to as an “analogist,” standing in the “center of things,” so that a “ray of relation passes from every other being to him” (Nature, Col. Works 1:19). These rays are visible here as cobwebs.

Because he cannot “see the far ends somewhere to the south,” the webs implicitly connect him with everything he sees, the “gold light” as well as the “wild clematis,” both the “smoke” from his fire and the “bronze leaves” still holding to the “walnut trees.” The relationship is reciprocal: the marjoram is also connected with him, and he becomes a part of its “joy of the mountains,” in spite of the late season, and surpassing his expectations (he is struck by the presence of “mushrooms though the moon is new”).

In addition to the flowers and jewels, the light and bright colors that identify the positive visionary experience, then, Merwin is also aware of the sense of joy and wholeness which also characterize such episodes. Accepting his own death in this collection, he simultaneously accepts the death-like, timeless quality of the unconscious: the faith reflected in his request that his mother lead him in the “dark to come,” the self-knowledge behind his awareness that “fear is one aspect of joyful guardians,” the love with which he addresses that female spirit imaged in “Kore”—all these underlie his hopeful courting of such states in “The Love for October,” when he writes,” Come again shining glance in your own time” (TCF 47).

It is a long way to have come from the fear and alienation that fill his first deep image poems in The Moving Target and The Lice, but one apparent result of his decision to write such poems in the first place, unadorned by formal style and reached by means of patient “listening,” is that he has first faced his unconscious, detailing his fear in poem after poem, and, finally, come to terms with it, breaking the glass to reach toward the golden light behind.

Works Cited

Primary Sources

Merwin, W. S. The Carrier of Ladders. New York: Atheneum, 1970.

———. The Compass Flower. New York: Atheneum, 1977.

———. The Lice. New York: Atheneum, 1967.

———. The Miner's Pale Children. New York: Atheneum, 1970.

———. The Moving Target. New York: Atheneum, 1963.

———. Unframed Originals. New York: Atheneum, 1982.

———. Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment. New York: Atheneum, 1973.

Secondary Sources

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Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Collected Works. Gen eds. Alfred R. Ferguson and Joseph Slater. 3 vols. to date. Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard UP, 1971-.

Frye, Northrop. “Blake After Two Centuries.” Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1963. 138-50.

Huxley, Aldous. The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell. 1956. New York: Harper-Colophon, 1963.

Kapleau, Philip, ed, intro, and notes. The Three Pillars of Zen: Teaching, Practice, and Enlightenment. New York: Harper and Row, 1966.

Naranjo, Claudio, and Robert Ornstein. On the Psychology of Meditation. New York: Viking, 1971.

Pahnke, Walter N., and William A. Richards. “Implications of LSD and Experimental Mysticism.” Journal of Religion & Health 5 (1966): 175-208. Rpt. in Tart. 399-428.

Poe, Edgar Allan. The Collected Works. Ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott. 3 vols. Cambridge: Belknap-Harvard UP, 1969-78.

Shapiro, Harvey, Rev. of Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment. New York Times. 22 June 1973, late ed.: 12.

Thompson, G. R. Poe's Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales. Madison: U of Wisconsin Press, 1973.