[In the following essay, Sherry provides analysis of Merwin's merging of traditional forms in his early works with his later use of free association and surrealism, discussing poems from The Compass Flower as examples.]

The poetry of W. S. Merwin comprises things both old and new. Since his first volume A Mask for Janus won the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1952, he has in his own way looked forward and backward, developing a distinctive voice as he has mastered a diversity of influence. There have been the years of apprenticeship to Robert Graves on one hand, and on the other the residual but potent influence of the medieval literature in which he has translated extensively. With the recent publication The First Four Books of Poetry (1975) he has collected and, it seems, set off and signatured the poetry of an “early period.” There is in it a traditional formal clarity, a command of stanzaic and prosodic forms—though it suggests the mannered reserve of an apprentice. With his fifth book of poetry, The Moving Target (1963), he undertook an experiment with the aims and methods of surrealism. Implementing the poetic of the “dream voice” with practiced lyric skill, he evolved techniques to penetrate to new and often startling areas of psychological experience. The Compass Flower (1977)¹ seems to me to combine and surpass the achievements of his two major stages.

The occasional medieval posture and the attention to traditional forms in the early years gave way quite abruptly to the dynamics of free association and the psychological dimensions of surrealism. The poetry of the last ten years, however, has explored and broadened the connections between these two seemingly divergent strains. The Drunk in the Furnace (1960) actually begins the transition, and it shows the difficulty in achieving a balance. Merwin speaks here in a strained and roughed-up dramatic colloquy, both consorting with and contrasting elaborate stanzaic forms. A good deal of the volume seems in retrospect to be the expression of an imaginative psyche that growls about the chains which he insists on gilding. The Lice (1967) witnesses an imaginative liberation which in a way ransoms its freedom with the gold of that same inheritance. In “The Asians Dying,” for instance—one of many poems in which Merwin addresses the enterprise in Vietnam—he brings the national experience under the head of the historical myth of Manifest Destiny. His images have a symbolic content, while his disposition is reminiscent of the medieval allegory in which he is so well versed:

The ghosts of the villages trail in the sky
Making a new twilight. …
Pain the horizon. …
The possessors move everywhere under Death their star
Like columns of smoke they advance into the shadows
Like thin flames with no light
They with no past
And fire their only future.

There is a unique and beautiful combination of the old and new here. The images acquire an allegorical significance, and there is a context and point for what can be, in the hands of the lesser surrealists, the merely gratuitous imagery of a dream flow. By the same token, the dream voice chastens the rather plangent rhetoric of disenchantment that had become the lingua franca.

Merwin has turned slowly from the estrangement and condensed bitter eloquence of The Lice. In The Compass Flower he draws upon his personal experience, realizing the possibility of emotional fulfillment in a love relation whose crown and focus is the sequence of love poems “Kore.” His new priority shows everywhere in a celebration of life lived along the fibre of the sensual being. In this regard, the “Flower” in the title is a symbol of the perfected body of love. The “Compass” is a figure of journeys. Life and art interpenetrate. The book marks a milestone in his attitude and a turning point in his poetic. In the first of its four parts, we see the poet Merwin in transition. The new experience is approached through the processes of the new poetic. There is, likewise, a self-conscious reorientation of earlier techniques.

The journey of the lovers in “The Arrival” parallels the process of the poem. They set out “early in the evening of every verb”:

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 in 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. …

The fresh sensuality generates a new kind of poetic limpidity and transfigured clarity that one might describe in terms of light and water. So too, in the conclusion, there is a self-conscious allusion to his third volume Green with Beasts; the kind of allegorical symbolism used freely and often densely in the early work is strikingly recast:

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.

“the green wooden doors thrown away” are the ghost of the old allegorical poetic (though the lover-child is an idealization reminiscent of the medieval allegory of love). Most important, the phrase crystallizes the tension between the phenomenological and the noumenal, the world of nature as experienced and as formulated in symbolic meanings. That is a problem which, when faced, is turned into a poetic strength—we think of Wallace Stevens. Merwin brings the issue into the compass of his own poetic career. One poem serves in this regard to index the dialectic internal to his accession to new areas of imaginative experience.

In “Guardians” Merwin constructs a symbolic tableau that is almost Spenserian in complexity. He is representing that problematical relation between the poet's impulse to formulate meanings and his insulation from experience. He evolves a solution in terms of his new poetic:

Fine rain drifts along mountains to the south of me
graying the first month …
eight sacred fears keep watch over me
behind each of them one of the porches of dissolution
in the place of the ninth an open gate
each of them holds the end of one strand
of a rope made of the eight ribs of the world
which leads through the fearless gate
the swan drifts over mountains to the south of me …
fear is one aspect of joyful guardians
because of the way I came
and clearly I have been in love with some of them
with her who is Fear of the Journey
who has repeatedly and faithfully led me …
ready to bear me up in ageless hands
of cloud and glass
for as long as I need them.

The difficulty of launching the poetic imagination into experience is the guide; she “who is Fear of the Journey” is the Muse companionable. The antitheses of “Fear” and “Journey” are more finely honed in the image of her hands of “cloud and glass”—protection and exposure, the aura and the transparence which she as tutelar spirit is to inspire. What the poem promises, perched atop this ladder of contraries, is a carefully and consciously defined space in which Merwin's poetic expertise and the facts of his experience can respect each other. Several lyrics may be examined as examples of the precept. Where he succeeds, technique is more than mere mechanism. The poetic embodies a compelling and unique sensibility.

In “An Encampment at Morning,” the “glass” of observation on a scene in a field becomes the “cloud” of the poet's speech:

A migrant tribe of spiders
spread tents at dusk in the rye stubble
come day I see the color
of the planet under their white-beaded tents
where the spiders are bent
to their live instruments
and I see the color of the planet …
as I come that way in a breath cloud …
among the tents rising invisibly like the shapes of snowflakes
we are words on a journey
not the inscriptions of a settled people.

The poem's resonance depends on a shifting of the glass, like a telescope reversed, to view the spiders against the backdrop of the planet's motions. The two angles of vision comprise a rich and prismatic plane of vision, whose most typical and obvious sign is the “cloud” of poetic speech.

In “November”, the cloud and glass take the forms of two antithetical temporal schemes—nature's recurrent cycle and evolution's linear process.

The landscape
of a link disappearing between species
and phyla
and kingdoms
is here
after what we have said good-bye to
and before what we will not be here to see
only we know this
as we are …
the feathers warm around the heart
the memory of unmarked woods
standing facing something we cannot see
exchanging familiar speech
archaic greetings of those who reappear.

The commitment to the data of sense experience has a logical adjunct in a kind of proto-scientific humility and lack of preconception in the face of elementary facts. There is an openness in the whole dialectical structure that includes the pastoral poet's scheme of renascent nature and the scientific outlook. The dichotomy is clear; the last lines respond to that with an utter gratuity. And the rude realistic streak clears the poem of any charge of verbal self-hypnosis. The poem's paradox is built into the poetic of cloud and glass: Merwin succeeds in expressing a sensibility that subsumes longing and reality, prescience and presence, imagination and experience.

The coherent strength of this new poetic is shown in a significant correlative. The idea of the journey of the poetic imagination into experience implies a quest motif. This pursuit seems to me to generate and unify two cycles of poems—the second and third sections of the volume compose one sequence of two parts. The series of lyric moments is a consistent drama of consciousness, addressing the recurrent concerns of sensory presence and emotional and imaginative fulfillment in it. The hero is the poetic imagination, standing behind the glass shield that is his visionary lens. His task is to focus and transfigure all at once. There is a fresh beginning, a struggle and crisis, and an exaltation in the long love poem “Kore.” Drawing in Part II on his years of residence in New York, the poet plays protagonist in the arena of urban experience. The new poetic is put on the line.

In “City,” the first poem of Part II, the speaker approaches the cityscape through a “glass door”:

I have been here before
I have entered through a glass door
at the end of a corridor
surprised to find nothing locked
but knowing that someone was watching …
at this hour before daylight so little traffic
never so like held breath
all the traffic lights dark
never such temptation to drive too fast. …

He comes here with “her who is Fear of the Journey.” The Muse of “cloud and glass” now shows dexter and sinister hands. The facts of the objective urban order are but apparent clarities—deceptive and threatening simplicities. This first poem imparts dramatic psychological tensions to the redemption of such experience—that is, the quest of poetry.

In the third poem, “Estuary,” the “many decks of the stone boat” is an image of the city's concrete elevations, combining the immutable objective factuality of the urban res with the aerial view and task of the imagination:

By day we pace the many decks
of the stone boat
and at night we are turned out in its high windows
like stars of another side
taste our mouths we are the salt of the earth.

The “stars of another side,” a pictorial image for an unknown sector of sky, is as well a verbal figure for the imagination's estrangement. This is a posture in which Merwin could luxuriate in The Lice. It is an index of his reorientation that it is here a dilemma in the imagination's quest to restore the experience at hand. The high aerial outlook rarefies itself against the proverb on the earthly creature. When the imagination is set apart, it is made a passive receptor of impressions, and as such it is no more vital than the urban rock. Thus, in the last lines, the questers are transfixed as objects in a journey that simply happens to them:

we are asleep over charts at running windows
we are asleep with compasses in our hands
and at the bow of the stone boat
the wave from the ends of the earth keeps breaking.

The impasse is a crisis. It gains volume, depth, and resonance in the quest series. He explores it in a larger mythographic outline in the next poem, “The Rock.”

Joyce's Finnegan, dreaming his labyrinthine way into the mind of his mythical prototype Finn asleep beneath Dublin, has his American counterpart in the central figure of William Carlos Williams' Paterson, the human giant dormant under the city and a symbol of the latent potential of vital human experience within the corporate body. In the mise-en-scène of a subway ride, Merwin appropriates this myth construct. Viewing the subway walls as the interstices of the giant, he penetrates to the particular inspiration of Williams. The outline of the stone giant casts its “shadow” as a framing influence on human interrelation:

Saxophone and subway
under waking and sleeping …
sound of inner stone
with heart on fire
on top of it where it would dream
in the light on its head
and in its shadow
we know one another. …

But:

all
our walls shake
where we can love it happens here too
where we tremble …
where sirens bleed through us
we are bottles smashing in paper bags
and at the same time live standing in many windows
hearing under the breath the stone
that is ours alone.

The speaker's stance “in many windows” reflects the position of estrangement in “Estuary.” When the poet steps back, the urban experience is unregenerate, and the stone giant becomes a pebble under the poet's tongue. When he is both antagonist and protagonist, the problem of the poetic isolato cannot revert to polemics—as it may among the younger poetic athletes. The poetic of cloud and glass underlies the tension between the giant's incandescent outline and the facts of experience. It may be seen in this way as a kind of metaphysical conceit that encloses rich psychological content.

The dilemma is not resolved in the second part of the book. The major symbols and motifs—stone, wasteland, journey, animation as regeneration—are transposed onto a new plane in Part III. The natural setting here is salted with the desire of a lover in a physical relationship, and he uses the symbols and images of Part II to recall and resolve the disaffection of the urban experience. The self is drawn out to the objective world through a relation of reciprocal subjects. While the separate poems work as dramatic moments of consciousness in the lyric mode, they induce and arrive at the substance and shape of a vision.

The first poem, “The Vineyard,” refocuses the image of the barren stone elevations of estrangement in the city. Merwin adds the motif of clear fructifying water; the source of regeneration is the person of the immanent natural bride:

Going up through the hill called the vineyard
that seems nothing but stone
you come to a tangle of wild plum and hazel bushes
the spring in the cliff like the sex of a green woman
the taste of the water
and of the stone.

The indecision of the first two lines surely draws upon the problems in the urban experience of Part II; the images connect in this deeper stratum of personal consciousness to the individual's crises in that section. The moment of feeling is surcharged with the problem of the city, and the solution is claimed in a moment of lyric realization:

clear to the top they call it
the vineyard
where earliest the light
is seen that bids the cock crow.

The night towers of passive estranged fantasy have given way to the heights of a dawn vista accepted and acclaimed by the cock. This figure for poetic speech emerges dramatically from the verbal obliquity of the first two lines of the poem. He heralds the poet's active connection to the immediate experience. The speaker himself has affirmed the word and fact of the vineyard—the fertile garden and New World to which he has arrived through the poetic quest.

There is for Merwin at this point in his career an internal and essential relation between the regenerative processes of love and poetry. The long love poem “Kore” is built on this equation. The cycle of short lyrics is arranged under the headings of the letters of the Greek alphabet; the sum of the parts is a serial form of the poetic grammar; and the whole is the perfection of desire. It reflects the two-fold theme in the title, as I have suggested. It is as well an appropriate place to conclude the discussion of the poetic of cloud and glass. There are two lyrics whose juxtaposition evinces our major points about the tension between longing and fact. Here the cloud and glass take the form of prophecy and attainment:

ο In winter far from you
          at the thought of your skin …
          the tree
          of veins trembles
          at a distance and begins
          gathering in secret the Sibyl's rustling.
π I trust neither memory nor expectation
          but even the white days of cities
          belong to what they do not see
          even the heart of the doubter's light is gold
          even when you are not with me
          in the flowerless month of the door god
          you look at me with your eyes of arrival.

The Sibyl, who foretold the future by deciphering the inscriptions on her leaves, is drawn here as the foil of the love poet. She represents emotion on the installment plan, the investment of desire into an imagined future where longing compounds interest in illusions about what love is or should be. The juxtaposition of the two lyrics comprises the tensions we have seen throughout. The lover's heart doubts when the message of the senses is erased: the hero-poet turns that into a gold lamp on the experience at hand. The absent woman is not the gilded object of imagination: she is an anima to inspire the mode of imaginative relation to “the days of cities”. The hint of a restoration suggests the regenerative role she plays in the natural world of Part III. Her “eyes of arrival” bring us full circle, reminding us of the celebration of the realization of love in “The Arrival.” When her person is cleared of the “memory” and “expectations” of the door-god Janus—who simply doubles the dangers of the Sibyl—the poet may be seen to circle on that other plane of his poetic career. He reorients the allegorical grammar that informs the title and poems of his first book with fresh discriminations. A version of traditional symbolism is preserved to encode his access to real experience, not to record his insulation from it. The Compass Flower marks an end and a beginning in the adventure of this distinctive American poet.

Note

1. W. S. Merwin, The Compass Flower. New York: Atheneum, 1977.