SOURCE: Burt, John. “W. S. Merwin's The Folding Cliffs.” Raritan: A Quarterly Review 19, no. 3 (winter 2000): 115-34.

Over the last two hundred years, poetry has ceded much of its intellectual territory to fiction. Where once not merely the central myths and metaphysical speculations of Western culture were written in verse but also its legal codes and even its genealogies, verse has become in the twentieth century more and more limited to areas of private feeling, able to speculate on the broadest matters only when, as in Pound or Zukofsky, those speculations are the extended workings-out of a private sensibility's enthusiasms. Every few years there is a brief flush of interest in narrative poetry, but it seems always to turn out that the form is no more likely to revive than verse tragedy is. That said, just as atolls of verse tragedy, such as Prometheus Unbound or The Borderers, have continued to surface even as the great volcanic islands have subsided, so narrative poetry retains a residual, although not a resurgent power. To attempt a narrative poem in the grand style is still the mark of a high poetic ambition, and despite the unpropitious poetic climate for narrative poetry, some narrative poems of high quality continue to be written.

W. S. Merwin's The Folding Cliffs is, with Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red, one of the handful of really distinguished narrative poems of the last decade. The central events of the poem are historical, and almost all of the characters of the poem are real people whose stories can be found in Edward Joesting's Kauai: The Separate Kingdom (1984). The central action of the poem, which is set during the years surrounding the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893, is the attempt of a Kauai family afflicted with leprosy to avoid deportation to the leprosarium at Kalaupapa (made famous by the charity of Father Damien) on the island of Molokai. The horseman, saddlemaker, and expert marksman Ko‘olau, with his wife Pi‘ilani (who does not develop the disease) and his child Kaleimanu, escape up the trails of the Waimea Canyon and over the cliffs into the almost inaccessible Kalalau valley, where other sufferers from leprosy, including an important local judge, have sought to escape from the public health authorities of the Provisional Government. The sheriff's deputy, one Louis Stolz, successfully rounds up most of the others (driving the rest of the valley's inhabitants from the Kalalau as well) and issues a shoot-on-sight order concerning Ko‘olau. But Ko‘olau manages to get off the first shot. Aroused by the death of Stolz, the Provisional Government sends in militia, armed with a howitzer which they terrifyingly but ineffectually direct against what they take to be Ko‘olau's hiding places in the Kalalau cliffs; but Ko‘olau, standing them off at a place where they must climb the cliff single file, manages to frustrate them until they give up the attempt and leave him and his family in sole possession of the valley. Over the next four years, living alone in the cliffs at the head of the valley as the inhabitants begin to return, Ko‘olau and Kaleimanu slowly succumb to their disease. After burying them in secret, Pi‘ilani returns to her parents' house at Kekaha on the other side of the island.

The story of Pi‘ilani and Ko‘olau is well known in Hawaiian circles. I have found announcements, for instance, of Hula societies in California performing commemorative dances concerning their adventure. Merwin's starting point was Pi‘ilani's own narrative, told in Hawaiian to William Sheldon (who published the account in 1906) and recently translated by Frances Frazier for the journal Haloa. William Sheldon himself plays a role in Merwin's poem: when Pi‘ilani tells her story to him, a Hawaiian-speaking white Christian loyal to the recently deposed Queen Liliuokalani, she feels, despite his kindness to her, somehow constrained both by his Christianity and by his Hawaiian nationalism. Merwin intends Sheldon's account to serve as a cautionary example about the ways even very sympathetic (and anticolonialist) listeners might get Pi‘ilani's story wrong, as perhaps even John G. Neihardt, for instance, sometimes heard what he needed to hear in what Black Elk told him. The historical Pi‘ilani's narrative is highly lyrical and ornate in ways that we traditionally associate with oral poetry, although to what extent this style is Sheldon's or Pi‘ilani's own we will never really know. It is easy to see why Merwin was attracted not only to her story but also to her telling of it, although it is also easy to see why he did not closely imitate her style.

Here, for instance, is the historical Pi‘ilani's account of Ko‘olau's death:

And in the middle of the night, during the turning of the Milky Way, the light in the house that was Kalauiko‘olau was extinguished and his spirit returned to the One who made him, leaving only his clay behind for me to lament over—I alone in the awesome loneliness which was peopled only with the voices of the land shells which seemed to lament with me in those hours before the break of dawn.

Here is Merwin's rendering of the same moment:

And it was in the night that he had died just as
          the I‘a The Fish The Milky Way was turning
and Pi‘ilani after his breath had stopped when his pulse
          was no longer there had put her head down on his chest
with her hair across his body and had listened
          to the darkness below her and the darkness above
her while the last embers of the small fire among the rocks
          at their feet went out and the cold of his hands deepened
and her tears kept turning cold when they ran down onto him
          she heard the darkness of the mountain under her
all the way to the underside of the sea floor
          and through her hair she heard the night winds high in the valley
rising and leaving and she heard ‘uwa‘u ‘uwa‘u
          the cry of the petrels echoing in the cliffs
the stream whispering over the rocks and the faint sounds
          some said were crickets and others said were land snails
singing and they were spirits and when the wind was quiet
          she could hear the sea far below her where all the waves ended
she sat up in the dark and saw where the stars had come
          she picked up a shell and started to pat it rocking
slowly forward and back chanting under her breath
          first she chanted to him by name by the name that she
had called him all her life and already she could hear
          the difference—Ko‘olau Ko‘olau you are going
you are going now you are still here you are going
          you are not sick any more you are not dying now
but if you want to come back Ko‘olau come back come back—

There are differences in these accounts, but one could not call Merwin's version stretched or loaded. The sounds the real Pi‘ilani hears in her own narrative are alien and hostile—they lament with her, but they are not kin to her, and their seeming to grieve with her is something she treats only as a mere appearance, as something which in fact confirms her loneliness. In Merwin's account when Pi‘ilani stops hearing Ko‘olau's pulse she hears instead the natural sounds that might be called the pulse of the valley, so that the burden of her lament is the kinship of the two humans with the looming darkness of nature; Pi‘ilani's grieving chant is one more instance of the pulse to which she attends and to whose presence she opens herself. The real Pi‘ilani's language is personal and psychological; Merwin's Pi‘ilani's language is more emotionally restrained, although it is poetically heightened, impersonal but inward, as if dictated from some nonhuman and chthonic source. It is a chantlike style, good at registering the things that are beneath articulation and which resist articulation, a style at a distance from ordinary emotions but resonant with the feelings of ritual occasions like this one. It is the style of a dignified grief which opens out into eternal things which are beyond grief. Merwin's is a poet's vision of Pi‘ilani, but one not so far removed from her own that one could imagine her taking exception to it.

The considerable research Merwin did for his poem shows in his rich mastery of factual material. For instance, his account of Cook's landing at Kauai shows his study of the writings of Samuel M. Kamakau, who collected oral accounts of the Kauaian side of the Cook encounter about eighty years after the events. It is from Kamakau, for instance, that Merwin learned that at first the Kauaians, seeing the tri-cornered hats of the British sailors at a distance, thought that the British had three-cornered heads, and it is also from Kamakau that Merwin derives both his accounts of the violence that ensued when the Hawaiians sought to make off with metal objects from the British boats, and his accounts of the venereal diseases that Cook's sailors left behind. He has also consulted the writings of Charles Clerke (Merwin spells it Clarke), Cook's second-in-command and successor, and the diaries of George Dixon and Nathaniel Portlock, who visited Kauai ten years after Cook. Merwin indirectly quotes the latter's praise of the skill of the Hawaiian taro farmers' “sound judgment and (I had almost said scientific) skill,” in laying out their irrigated fields and their unremitting diligence in cultivating them, diligence which “would reflect credit even on a British husbandman.” Even small details turn up in historians' accounts of the Ko‘olau story: the name of the steamer that landed the militia at Kalalau (the Waialeale); the fact that Stolz was forcing a leper named Paoa to lead him to Ko‘olau's hiding place when he was shot; and the story of Christian Bertelmann, a white leper and former representative who (after a failed trip to Japan in search of a cure) also hid in the wilds of Kauai (where friends of his, enjoying a musical evening at home, heard him accompanying them in the distance on his flute).

The depth of Merwin's research also shows in his grasp of Hawaiian history more generally. His treatment of the complicated politics of nineteenth-century Hawaii is subtle and detailed. Although motivated everywhere by an anticolonial (and an environmental) anger, Merwin's discussion of the key events of Hawaiian history is always nuanced. Merwin treats the changing three-party relationship between the West, Hawaii, and China with an insight never blurred by his anger (although he doesn't always carefully distinguish the very different roles played by the Americans and the British). The despoliation of Hawaiian forests in search of sandalwood for export to China, for example, was not only the work of Western greed, but was also one of the means by which the upstart Kamehameha dynasty secured its power over the islands and accumulated its wealth. (Merwin doesn't mention this, but one of the important accounts of the sandalwood trade was left by the real Amasa Delano, whom Melville made into the narrator of Benito Cereno.) Merwin tells with skill and evenhandedness the story of the unsuccessful attempts of Taiana (Kaiana), who had sailed with the British to China and mastered British ways and technology, to oppose (and to scheme against) the rising Kamehameha, and Merwin sees both parties to this minuet of conquest and treachery clearly. Merwin's account of the subterfuge by which Kamehameha's son Liholiho finally (after the failure of several attempts to take the island by force) captured Kauai for his family by kidnapping Kaumalii, its last king, and forcing him to become a husband of Kaahumanu, the resourceful widow of Kamehameha, is related with Conradian gusto. Merwin's account of the subsequent futile rebellion by the Kaumalii's feckless, alcoholic son George (named after the King of England), which led to the slaughter of most of the Kauaian aristocracy, is also related with a fair awareness of the folly and misdeeds on all sides. Although Merwin has little sympathy with the white colonizers and the Provisional Government, he sees the faults of the late Kingdom clearly, and he never casts the contest in straightforward terms as either a racial contest between Hawaiians and haoles or a religious one between Christians and those who retain traditional beliefs. (Indeed even the whites, Merwin is careful to point out, are only the most recent of a long train of bloody-minded conquerors of those islands.)

Particularly subtle is Merwin's treatment of some of the historical individuals who play major roles in the main events of the story. The Rev. George Rowell, who marries Pi‘ilani and Ko‘olau (and who had earlier been their teacher as well as their minister), takes great pains to educate the Hawaiians of his parish. He is also willing to quarrel with the local religious authorities in order to enable them to join his church without meeting strenuous doctrinal requirements, and makes a good faith (if ineffectual) effort to find Ko‘olau's sister, Niuli, and to deliver her belongings to her after she is deported with leprosy. In one subtly rendered scene, Rowell pointedly allows the infant Ko‘olau to be baptized with his pagan “night name” as an affront to religious conservatives like Judge Kauai, who, however, doesn't rise to the bait. (That night name turns out to be prophetic: it translates to “the grave on the windward side.” And Pi‘ilani's name, which means “Climbing Heaven,” is also richly earned: in our first vision of her, she is toiling up the steep paths of the Waimea Canyon by night as she seeks the hidden grave of her husband to assure herself that it is still undiscovered.) For all of his uprightness, Rowell is stiff and uncomfortable around Hawaiians, never really understands them, and can't resist the temptation to boss them around like children. The rancher and naturalist Valdemar Knudsen and his wife Anne Sinclair Knudsen are portrayed as roundly as one might hope for in prose fiction, and the intimacy and tact with which they interact with several generations of Ko‘olau's family is lovingly rendered, as are their ultimately unsuccessful attempts to intercede for the lepers in the Kalalau during the deportations, and Anne's more successful protection of Pi‘ilani after Ko‘olau's death. All three are portrayed in ways which accord with their treatment in Joesting's history.

Judge Kauai, the most prominent among the refugees in the Kalalau (and another real figure), is given a shrewd and ironic sensibility such as one might find in a Graham Greene hero. When we first see him, as one of the more imposing members of Rev. Rowell's congregation, he seems to be only a big-shot representative of the interests of the royal family (despite his name, he is not from Kauai). He is also a very successful speculator in land; Merwin implies that through a complicated series of transactions with Valdemar Knudsen, who received an enormous land grant from the royal family, Judge Kauai came off rather the winner. Judge Kauai also sternly opposes Rowell's attempt to open his church to less stringent believers. But as the leprosy crisis sets in, and as the events are set in motion that will lead to the overthrow of the monarchy, the corpulent Judge seems to become a more and more attractive figure. After his flight to the Kalalau, during which, because his feet have become useless, he has to be carried down the cliffs, he increasingly becomes the bitter but prophetic intelligence of the story.

All of these major characters have instantly recognizable voices, although one hears them through the poem's versification the way one sees a figure behind a scrim. Here for instance is Judge Kauai describing the Constitution that Sanford Dole and other white planters forced on King David Kalakaua, whom Judge Kauai had always thought of as a wastrel and (since he felt the throne should have gone to Queen Emma) a usurper:

—Now they have him tied down hand and foot—the Judge said
          —it is what they have been wanting to do from the start
he will not be able to waste money now or command
          any troops at all the foreigners will do the voting
they will let him sit there on the throne in his uniform
          and will tell him how lucky he is not to be in jail
because of this money or that money while they let
          the Americans take Pearl Harbor for their warships
in exchange for making the sugar planters rich
          and we will see what it all means to the likes of us
we will still be their problem their embarrassment
          on the one hand the King and on the other the lepers
and the same voices that profess to be horrified
          at any resistance to authority are the ones
that are shouting to be rid of the King and the last
          remnants of rule by Hawaiians in Hawai‘i

This worldliness and shrewdness never desert him, even as his body begins to disintegrate. Hiding wrapped in a pile of sailcloth under his bed in his filthy hut in the Kalalau, he is discovered at last by militiamen who prod the pile with bayonets. Clambering out from this pathetic and undignified refuge, he keeps his ironical distance and courtesy to the last: “If you burst in upon us so rudely,” the Judge remarks, “you will have to allow some time for us to make ourselves presentable.”

The Rev. Rowell's voice is equally individuated. Here is the account of Rowell's exchange with Ko‘olau when Ko‘olau brings him a box filled with the belongings of his recently deported sister to be forwarded to where she has been sent:

the pastor was alone there hoeing when Ko‘olau
          rode up and he straightened at once and came over and said
—I was shocked and grieved to hear about your sister
          something so painful it is hard to understand it
but Dr Smith tells me that this has to be done
          for the sake of everyone and there is no other way
and I do not know what I can do but pray and I pray
          I pray for your sister

Notice that for all his stiffness, and for all his too hurried insistence that Ko‘olau doesn't really have cause for anger over what Dr. Smith has done since the deportation “has to be done for the sake of everyone and there is no other way,” Rowell does not wait for Ko‘olau to approach him before speaking with him; rather, he approaches Ko‘olau “at once.” What Rowell offers in this speech—explanations, condolences, prayers—looks pretty thin, but under pressure from Ko‘olau he does somewhat better than that, promising to find where Niuli has been sent and to make sure that her belongings get to her, and seeing that Ko‘olau carves her name into the box of her belongings that he has gathered, so that it will not go astray. Immediately following this is a memorable scene where Rowell insists that Ko‘olau bring the box of Niuli's belongings in through his front door and put it in his study, despite Mrs. Rowell's obvious misgivings that the box might be somehow infected. But it's clear even from this speech that Rowell will not ultimately succeed because he will give up when he faces resistance. As it turns out, not only does he find no tidings of Niuli, and not only does the box indeed go astray, but later Dr. Smith denies, perhaps disingenously, that Rowell had even asked him about her.

Deputy Stolz's style is also easy to recognize, not only by its reptilian formality but also by the author's deadpan rendering of his editorial interventions. Notice that by versifying the address, Merwin in effect jeers at Stolz's pretension:

Hon W D Smith Pres Bd of Health Honolulu
          Sir in accordance with your request herewith a complete list
of the residents of the valley of Kalalau there are
          twenty three households four of which consist of only
one old man each In nine households no leprosy
          is visable sic to a casual observer
in three households all the inmates are afflicted with leprosy
          while in eleven underlined households the inmates
are part lepers and part non-lepers the population
          numbers one hundred and two with seventy four apparently
non-lepers and twenty eight lepers eighteen of them male
          eighteen adults ten minors only six rifles
could be heard of and only three of these are available
          one of them belongs to a non-leper the lepers do not wish
to be taken away as they believe the new Japanese
          doctor at Kilauea may be able to cure some of them
J Kauai and Paoa are the two lepers most likely
          to give trouble it is my belief that if these two
and perhaps one or two others were removed most underlined
          of the others would go voluntarily

Strangely, Ko‘olau and Pi‘ilani are less strongly individuated as characters than are these major figures in the second rank. I think the reason for this has something to do with the fact that Merwin chose to represent the second rank of characters in a novelistic register, but chose a mythic one for Ko‘olau and Pi‘ilani, and especially for Kaleimanu, who, with his spookiness and wisdom, never quite seems like a real child.

These differences in character are due, in part, to a tension (partly imposed by the subject matter) between novelistic and mythic elements in the story. They are also due to the stylistic tensions that the clash of these two elements brings into the versification. It is traditional to speak of verse as organized by several binary oppositions: formal and free verse, narrative and lyric verse, Philip Rahv's distinction between paleface and redskin verse (which is to say, verse addressed to the mediating intelligence and verse addressed to the raw authenticity of experience), and so on. These binary oppositions impose different levels of constraint upon poems. The distinction between formal and free verse, for instance, imposes only the most indirect constraints upon the kinds of things poems can say. This is not to say that it makes no difference in what form a poem is written—poets seek to exploit the meaning-making potentialities of whatever forms they use, and if only for that reason no poem written in one form says precisely the same thing as a similar poem in another form, any more than a translation does—but it is to say that the meanings of poems are not utterly constrained in advance by their forms. For instance, while anyone who writes a Petrarchan sonnet must reckon with the history of that form as a locus for meditating upon the vicissitudes of erotic life, and must reckon with the expectation that the white space between octave and sestet will mark a place where the poem turns or where the poet suffers a second thought, the topical and expressive range of the sonnet, particularly since Milton and Wordsworth's explorations of the possibilities of that form, is as wide as one might wish.

The distinction between lyric and narrative verse imposes far stronger contraints upon the content of poetry than the distinction between formal and free verse does. Narrative and lyric verse usually show not only differences in scale but also somewhat different ideas about what counts as an incident and what counts as a point, and slightly different ways of imagining time (lyric moments typically suspend time, narrative moments typically extend it). Still, lyric and narrative remain continuously engaged with each other: much lyric verse is set in the context of an imagined and briefly sketched-in narrative (somebody speaks to somebody else, or is thinking aloud in some situation), and much narrative verse turns upon moments of lyric intensity. The distinction between lyric and narrative does not map onto the distinction between free and formal verse, of course, but the cultural decline of formal verse has had much to do with the decline of narrative verse, since sacrificing the minimal formality of blank verse also sacrifices that middle register in which narrative poems of any length are most easily written.

The contrast between narrative and lyric verse is related but not identical to that between verse which moves in the direction of conversation and verse which moves in the direction of music. This last distinction—let's call it the dual allegiance of verse to talk and to chant—has profound consequences for what can be rendered in verse. To begin a chant is to work one's way into a special frame of mind separate from one's usual state, and to listen to a chant is to align one's self with that frame of mind. Incantation is a technology for inducing a change in consciousness, whether that change be physical (as in lullabye) or metaphysical (as in ritual or meditation). Incantation, however intelligently designed, resists being seen as the invention of its author's intelligence, preferring to be seen as the incarnation of something which speaks through the author, something deep and inward but completely impersonal because deeper than personality, psychology, and biography. The maker of an incantation is possessed, and the hearer of an incantation seeks to take in the contagion of the possession, to enter, through participation, into the time out of time of an illo tempore, the specially demarcated space of poetic consciousness. When chant is restlessly variegated, it seeks to exfoliate the fullness of a direct experience of being; when it is patterned, it seeks to fold experience into that pattern, to lift it out of its dailiness.

When verse inclines in the direction of talk it does not seek to lift itself out of dailiness so much as to critically reflect upon daily experience and assess its significance. It is variegated in the way conversation is, by its desire to follow the restless ins and outs of a developing conversation or train of thought whose turns are never predictable in advance but which always make a kind of sense in the doing and seem somehow to hang together in retrospect. Talk and conversation are patterned, at least to the extent that talk depends by nature upon a common fund of experience and judgment to which speaker and hearer are expected to have easy resort, but they are never predictable, and our experience of intellectual freedom, like our experience of unfolding relationships with other ordinary people, is somehow a function of our ability to engage in the patterned but unpredictable turns of conversation. The ability to render people in their ordinariness is a function of the ability to render the interplay of pattern and variegation in talk.

Talk and chant have profoundly different guiding assumptions about the nature and structure of human personality. Chant lends itself to mythic character, to larger-than-life figures charged with mana, to characters who are embodied forces, who, in Bruno Snell's famous formulation, are possessed by their acts and their feelings. Novelistic character can only be rendered through talk, and only talk can render the moral world of novelistic characters, in which they make decisions under conditions of partial ignorance, decisions for which they are to be morally called to account. It is no accident that the first place one hears conversation in literature rather than reciprocated speech-making—in the early dialogues of Plato—is also the first place one encounters a character, Socrates, who for all of his brilliance and integrity is ordinarily human in the way we think of ourselves now as ordinarily human. Chant is never overheard in the way talk is overheard; one either gives one's self up to it or resists doing so. But talk is always both heard and overheard, and the overhearing is part of the variegation which is its life. Shakespeare's characters, Harold Bloom argues, are persons rather than figures chiefly because they restlessly overhear themselves and react to what they have heard themselves saying.

Merwin is a great contemporary master of chant, and never more so than when he seeks to set the foundations of his poem in the deepest stratum he can imagine. In the poem's opening scene, for instance, Pi‘ilani, long after the main action of the poem is over, is climbing up the trails of the Waimea Canyon to revisit Ko‘olau's grave, which she has just heard that Sheriff Coney may have discovered and rifled. Merwin narrates Pi‘ilani's ascent as a chant, seeing it from the eye of eternity. In the darkness Pi‘ilani knows her trail intuitively, as she knows her night name, as something “that had been hers from the beginning waiting for her / when she woke into the world.” It is as familiar to her as the sound of a heartbeat is to an unborn child “when the belly turns up and the echo of the waves rocks it.” As she reaches the Knudsens' mountain home, Halemanu (where she will unexpectedly discover Anne Knudsen), she reflects about the mountain, reaching down to its dark root beneath the ocean floor, and about the birds that had been “singing out of / a source in the yolk of the unmeasured morning / inexhaustibly beginning and beginning / as the undisturbed trees and flowers kept beginning,” long before the first humans appeared on the islands. She seems at this moment scarcely younger than they.

Merwin wishes to root his story not merely in historical time but in geological time. Here is his description of how the Hawaiian islands, part of a procession of islands stretching back to Kure and Midway, and under the sea all the way across the northwest Pacific, ride their tectonic plate over the hotspot from which they originate:

The mountain rises by itself out of the turning night
          out of the floor of the sea and is the whole of an island
alone in the one horizon alone in the entire day
          as a word is alone in the moment it is spoken
meaning what it means only then and meaning it only
          once with the same syllables that have arisen
and have formed and been uttered before again and again
          somewhere in the past to mean something of the same nature
but different something continuing and transmitted
          but with refractions something recognized in its changes
something remembered from what is no longer there
          and behind it something forgotten as the beginning
is forgotten and as the dream vanishes the present
          mountain is moving at its own pace at the end
of its radius it is sailing in its own time
          with the earth turning away under it as the day
turns under a word and it came late as a word comes late
          with a whole language behind it by the time it is spoken

Describing the succession of plants and animals establishing itself upon the newly emerged mountain, Merwin's language seems not so much to depict them as invoke them:

                                                                                so from the fronds floating in
          on the waves the ferns were formed that woke on the mountain
after the night ran through the narrows of changing
          in the darkness without eyes and some were born in the sea
some in fresh water or on land so in the caves were born
          the crickets of each cave ground crickets and when there were trees
tree crickets swordtail crickets and the sound they made
          that in time would be called singing ran through the mountain
born only there were flowering trees and lobelias
          and birds that discovered them and were changed when they tasted them
born was the plover into flight born were the birds
          each from the wingbeats of the others born were the guardians
the noddy at sea guarded by the owl on the mountain
          birds passed the peak in high streams that blacked out the sun
and at daybreak the wet hollows of the earth opened wings
          and flew up in answer into the light and the infant
shoots of the taro uncurled and reached for the morning.

In both of these extracts geological time and mythic time run together. Merwin's language echoes the language of the Hawaiian creation epic, the Kumulipo, as translated by Martha Beckwith:

The night gave birth
Born was Kumulipo in the night, a male
Born was Po'ele in the night, a female
Born was the coral polyp, born was the coral, came forth
Born was the grub that digs and heaps up the earth, came forth
Born was his child an earthworm, came forth
Born was the starfish, his child the small starfish came forth
Born was the sea cucumber, his child the small sea cucumber came forth

(And so on, through what looks a lot like the natural biological succession.)

Merwin renders narratives of a purely mythic kind with great confidence. After recapping the several waves of conquest of the Islands (by Polynesians from the Marquesas, then from Tahiti) Merwin retells the story of how the volcano goddess Pele arrived (after having been, apparently like the Hawaiians themselves, driven from elsewhere in Polynesia). On Kauai, her first stopping place (the Hawaiians seem to have known that they settled Kauai first, and that it was geologically older than the other islands), Pele “fell in love as a fire would fall in love” with a young chief named Lohiau. What follows is what Merwin means us to recognize as a version of the story of Ishtar and Attis, although set in the Kalalau. But, curiously, the drummers and dancers by Kalalau that Pele meets when she meets Lohiau are already telling their story, which has not yet happened, as if it were old. Mythic stories are timeless stories, always inherited, never invented, older even than the characters whose acts they appear to record. When Pele arrives:

The story was so old that everyone dancing
          there at Haena that night had always known it
it was the same story that they were dancing and it led
          into holding and losing into absence and rage and ashes
and into returning and it was rising out of Pele's dream
          far away on the island of Hawaii and in her dream
with her eyes on Lohiau she chanted Hanalei
          is overcome by the great rain as the flame leapt
between them and it told of her biting his hand
          as she turned to go home and of his sister finding him
when he had hanged himself from the roof-tree after Pele went
          and of his dog refusing to leave his grave and of Pele
waking and persuading her sister Hi‘iaka
          to bring Lohiau to her and of Hi‘iaka
coming at last to the coast below Kalalau
          and seeing in a cave high in the cliff the ghost
of Lohiau and of her bringing him back to life
          and of love waking between them in turn and the barriers
their love came to one after the other and triumphed over
          and then of Pele's own fires burning up Lohiau
and his return to life one more time and reunion
          with Hi‘iaka it was all there in the chanting
in the sound of the drumming at the base of the mountain

Merwin introduces the theme of colonization (or rather, repeats it, since the Hawaiians themselves were also colonizers) as if it were a part of mythic rather than a part of political history: while the dancers are dancing in the story of Lohiau, Merwin tells us,

With Pele had come her brother the Chief of the Sharks
          and the shark rock was there at the headland of Kalalau
the dragon had arrived from the birthplace of Pele
          the owl of the mountain commanded from the cliff
people had settled in all the long valleys running
          in from the sea on the steep north slope of the mountain
they had terraced the green gorge of Nualolo
          with its broad table high above the surf they had taro growing
in Wainiha that narrowed climbing toward Kilohana
          and while they were dancing the darkness went on wheeling
so that they came to nights in which the stars over them
          burned in places where a few hours earlier
they had been seen higher above the horizon
          by Arthur sailing for Iceland and by Merlin
versed in the turnings of western islands and by Brendan
          and the animals with him in the small ark of his summer
and then by Charlemagne's veterans in the dark of Europe
          still furred in its forests that harked back to the ice
with their roots in amber worn faces had looked up through woods
          that they had been given for the felling and later
far north where the nights were blank the Norse followed secrets
          in search of somewhere it seemed they must remember
with a name like time and in time farther west they cheated
          the Skraelings for furs a first touch of a flayed new world

The transition between epic narrative and historical narrative, between chant and talk, is not always so seamless. In the following passage, Ko‘olau and his friend Kua have been tracking cattle near the Knudsens' house at Halemanu near the top of Waimea Canyon. They have just encountered the leper Iwa, who has climbed out of Kalalau in search of something to eat, and from him Ko‘olau has learned for the first time about the existence of the lepers, in the closing years of the Kingdom, hiding in Kalalau from the public health authorities. The still healthy Ko‘olau has also just learned from Judge Kauai that Valdemar Knudsen, like the judge, opposed the accession of David Kalakaua (the white settlers' candidate for the kingship) and favored Queen Emma. Now Kua tells him that Knudsen has been trying to intercede on the lepers' behalf:

As they were riding back down to Halemanu
          Kua said—Knudsen has known about them for a long time
longer than I thought he may have known they were there almost
          from the beginning hearing from friends out by Hanalei
or people at Haena and Wainiha they all knew
          and the canoes that go around Mānā and bring
word back to the ranch at Waiawa whenever Knudsen
          asks me about them I can see how much he knows
he wants them to be let alone there he told me and he said
          he saw it all happen in Norway when he was a boy
he does not want the rats from the Board of Health prowling
          out at the ranch or coming up here he was talking
about the three of us going down into the valley
          to find out what he could do for them maybe later
in the summer when it dries out some more we could
          go down the way we used to when he was looking
for birds on the cliffs I think he is as strong as ever
          only more quiet

If this passage were set in prose, nobody would take exception to it. Indeed, since it does not relate a moment of high drama but only a bit of exposition necessary to the understanding of more dramatic moments to come later, the passage demands to be written in the understated style that Merwin employs for it, although even this modest passage manages to capture not only Knudsen's rectitude but also his indirectness, and it even, at the end, captures something of the undercurrent of amusement the Hawaiian characters show when the subject of Knudsen comes up. (Earlier, when Knudsen, still single in late middle age, begins collecting folk tales and legends from a notorious windbag and liar, the Hawaiian townsfolk remark to each other that what he really needs is a wife.) Even if this passage were set in a different kind of verse, there would be nothing to take exception to in it: The Prelude is full of even prosier moments of exposition than this one. But there is still something off about the versification here. If you were to set the passage about Arthur and Charlemagne above as prose, you would see that clearly something has been gained by putting it in verse. But it would be hard to say the same thing about this passage. And the problem isn't just that the passage at hand has a prosaic task—many passages of blank-verse narrative poems have prosaic tasks to fulfill, yet they are heightened by being set in verse, and this passage is not.

One way of describing the problem is as follows. Sentence by sentence, Merwin is as adept at talk as he is at chant. Ordinary politics, such as this passage describes, demands verse that inclines toward talk. Novelistic characters, like Judge Kauai or Reverend Rowell, also demand verse that inclines toward talk. And, set as prose, this passage, and the quotations from Judge Kauai, Reverend Rowell, and Louis Stolz above, pass some of the harder tests one might ask talk to pass—the ability to render the characteristic turns of phrase and habits of mind of rounded characters. But all of these passages, where the poem requires talk rather than chant, gain nothing from being set as verse. Indeed, they are set in a verse that demands to be seen as chant, so that passages which would not sound flat read aloud, or written in other forms, seem flat when written in this one. Sentence by sentence, Merwin can render talk. Line by line, he seems to wish to transform it into chant, and it resists him.

The problem may have been inevitable given the poem's dual aims to tell the story of a relatively recent political conflict which occurred among basically modern people, and to root that story in eternity and myth. More or less contemporary political conflicts demand to be rendered in the style of talk. Novelistic characters also demand to be rendered in the style of talk. But mythic stories, and mythic characters, demand to be rendered in the style of chant. Chant is the natural medium for the transmission of traditional cultures. But it's a very open question as to what extent Hawaii in the 1890s was still a traditional culture. The story of colonial conflicts is often the story of the destruction of a traditional culture by a modern one, and sometimes that conflict is rendered by giving characters on opposing sides the styles of expression appropriate to those sides. But the results of doing that are always embarrassing: the colonizers speak prosaically, their colonized opponents in a kind of poetry that can't help but turn parodic and descend into Western-movie ugh-talk. That isn't what happens here, because even the Hawaiian characters, with the exception of Ko‘olau's grandmother Kawaluna, are more moderns than not, although in many of their acts, and in many of their speeches, modern and traditional elements are still visibly in tension. But the versification of the poem as a whole has been chosen to align itself with tradition rather than modernity. It is easy to see why this might have been an attractive strategy: if the relationship between talk and chant is the relationship between colonizer and colonized, then by choosing a style which renders chant better than it renders talk, Merwin has chosen his allegiance. But it is a choice with a price. The result is a poem in which chant and talk, tradition and modernity, never quite work out a stable relationship with each other. It's rather like nineteenth-century Hawaii itself.

It would be churlish to end on so ungrateful a note, however, because The Folding Cliffs relates an important story with subtlety and power. And for Merwin to have chosen a course opposite to the one I criticize, to have written in a style more open to talk than to chant, would not only have been to run other and perhaps more dangerous risks, but also to violate central features of his own poetic personality. Many narrative poems must be written for narrative poetry to regain its footing, if only to retrain our ears to its sound. That way, narrative poems might support each other's possibilities, might brace each other. Otherwise, standing alone in a poetic culture that has lost the taste for narrative, single narrative poems might well become bent, like tough, solitary trees on windy headlands.