The early poetry of W. S. Merwin finds the poet caught in a dichotomy of “here” and “there.” The “here” is the feeling of a split and distance between words and the objects they signify, between meaning and activity, and between a sense of self as an entity and as an active participant in the creative process of the world. It is the emptiness within—the sense of lack and the desire for fulfilment, as it is faced with the silence without—the world that is tacitly felt to be there and is the source of experience but is beyond the words that the self projects onto it. The giving of words to the silence is the act of belief that orders things. It is the assertion of man's will while the world is subjugated. The opposites of man and world are solved by restricting and repressing the world into man-made language. For the Merwin of the early poems, tacit experience becomes knowledge or art only through a willed invention set up in opposition to the silent world. This willed invention is itself under the auspices of a Shadow of Time which constantly turns the created light of a present invention into the darkness of something finished, as one becomes again empty within and faced with the silence without. Besides this feeling of split between man and world, there is also a gulf between man and the divine. The divine presence becomes a divine absence that seems to be there whirring on the edge of the world but is always missing when one reaches out to it. The “there” is fulfilment, the joining and interparticipation of meaning and activity, art and life, self and world, and man and god. But the “there” is outside. It is observed and desired, and it is silent and even absent as it is recounted in words. It is an ideal that is nullified when the “here” attempts to come to terms with it.

This dichotomy is the problem of Mask For Janus, Dancing Bears, and Green With Beasts; though Green With Beasts, while being the culmination of the split, lays the groundwork for what happens in Merwin's later works. In Moving Target and the two following books, The Lice and The Carrier of Ladders, the poet moves away from the dichotomy and into an interplay of the “here” and “there.” The “here” is divested of its self asserting will as it becomes an engaged entity vibrating with the silence of the “there.” With that engagement, Merwin moves toward what he calls the great language:

But the original [idiom] seems more and more frequently to be, not a particular mode of poetry, but the great language itself, the vernacular of the imagination, that at one time was common to men. It is a tongue that is loosed in the service of immediate recognitions, and that in itself would make it foreign in our period. For it conveys something of the unsoundable quality of experience and the hearing of it is a private matter, in an age in which the person and senses are being lost in the consumer, who does not know what he sees, hears, wants, or is afraid of, until the voice of the institution has told him.¹

To achieve the great language Merwin rejects what is normally considered human. He wants to discover a means of expression that, of course, is invented and thereby human, but is in the service of immediate recognition. The language must reveal that which is beyond the human, the silent world and the divine, while at the same time it is the realization of the half knowledge and limited power of man. From a self trying to assert itself in the face of silence, he moves toward an art of recognition, an art that conveys the unsoundable quality of experience, the silence and the divine, in the sounding human voice.

“The Prodigal Son,” “The Annunciation,” and “Learning a Dead Language” from Green With Beasts illustrate better than any comparable selections from either Mask For Janus or Dancing Bears both the split of the early volumes and the groundwork Merwin lays for the later interplay. The first deals with the distance between the self and the hope for fulfilment and duration as the emptiness within comes to face the silence without. “The Annunciation” presents the drama of a divine revelation—the Word becoming flesh in Mary's womb, and “Learning a Dead Language,” a secular version of “The Annunciation,” explains how the self can be brought into a perceptive relationship with a created meaning outside of itself; in other words, the self is vitally present as it is aware of and becomes a part of a common ground of experience.

“The Prodigal Son” is a literal and scenic presentation of the Bible story, but as Merwin informs it. The mood that pervades the poem is that of stillness, a dead calm, and a sense of empty finality

Except for the flies, except that there is not water
Enough for miles to make a mirror, the face
Of the afternoon might seem an empty lake,
Still, shining, burnished beyond the semblance
Of water until the semblance of afternoon
Was all the surface that shimmered there, even
The dust shining and hanging still, the dusty
Carob trees and olives gleaming, all hung
Untouchable and perfect, as in its own
Mirage.(2)

It is the light of the full noon, the distinct, brilliant and clearly distinguishing light of perfection, when most of the shadows and ambiguity of form brought about by the half light of dawn or dusk disappear. But this solidity of form that would be considered real, because it is so clear and distinct, is a semblance hung in its own mirage, a surface of an empty lake. It is like the mirage of water that one sees in the distance on a hot day.

The father sits

                                                                                                    Brooding upon distance
Upon emptiness. His house behind him
                                                                                                    … is in fact the same
In which lifelong he has believed and filled
With life, almost as a larger body, or is it,
Now suddenly in this moment between mirage
And afternoon, another, and farther off
Than the herdsman, oh much farther, its walls glaring
White out of a different distance, deceiving
By seeming familiar, but an image merely
By which he may know the face of emptiness
A name by which to say emptiness? Yet it is the same
Where he performs as ever the day's labour,
The gestures of pleasure, as is necessary,
Speaks in the name of order, and is obeyed
Among his sons

“Believing is conception.”³ The father is the willful maker of images, the giver of names and words to the silent world. In the effort to gain power over an overpowering world, in the effort to achieve some order and meaning, and then to guarantee the continuation of that order and himself, the father fences off land, builds his estate, and engenders sons. The estate is the willed order set up in opposition to the otherness of the world. The sons are the guarantee that the father's order will continue long past his death. They are his ticket to immortality as they carry on his work through the physical maintenance of the estate and through the remembrance of his dictates. But he sits “brooding upon distance / Upon emptiness,” as “There is no distance / Between himself now and emptiness.” One of the sons has refused to accept the order and has taken his portion and left. That which is in the father's image turns against him and becomes distant. The son is now “A name with which to say emptiness,” as all names are when the world has denied their order. The father realizes the emptiness of his order and the distance between what he has made and the hope of its enduring.

So he broods upon his own emptiness while surrounded by the profound silence of the world:

                                                                                                              But distance,
He remembers, was not born at a son's departure
Nor died with his disappearance; and he recognizes
That emptiness had lodged with him before,
Lived with him in fact always, but humbly
In corners, under different names, showing
Its face but seldom, then had been for the most part
Ignored.

That which has always been there, that which he has subjugated under his rule and filled with his conceptions, comes back to him with intensity. It is a recognition—the act and the word—that becomes important for the later poems.

In his revolt, the son becomes just like his father: “He went out / Looking for something his father had not given, / Delights abroad, some foreign ease, something / Vague because distant.” Feeling discontent, he desires new experience, a satisfaction that he thinks is only possible in some distant place. His desire is like his father's, but instead of the otherness of the world against which an estate must be erected, it is the estate that the son views as alien to himself and against which he must set up or discover a substantiality that he feels is satisfying. But this is his first attempt and what it is he seeks is as vague as that which he thinks he leaves behind. Unlike the other sons who follow the dictates of their father and live an indifferent, almost object-like existence, the prodigal son desires and discovers “Emptiness only, found nothing in distance, / Sits finally in a sty and broods / Upon emptiness, upon distance.” He discovers the distance between his desires and the world that confronts him. In emptiness he projects a type of fulfilment into the “there.” Home, that which is distant from the “here” of the pig sty, becomes a desired goal, a mitigation for his feeling of frustration, and a place for reunion with that which has been lost.

However, “in the empty frame of an old man's / Mind the figments of afternoon / Wait between a substance that is not theirs / And an illusion that is another's.” The home the son invents is an illusion of substance. The father has discovered that the substance is but the surface of an empty lake, a momentary semblance of order and meaning that is in that distance far up the road, and when one arrives “there” the emptiness of the vision is disclosed. At the moment of disclosure one type of distance is dead. That which is found is that which is left behind. The emptiness and silence that one leaves in order to attain substance and fullfilment is the emptiness and silence one finds, though it may be more intense, as the distance to fulfilment opens up in another mirage further down the road. The father realizes the emptiness and feels impotent to continue the fight. The son, come to a recent realization, still believes in the mirage of coming fulfilment so he “takes the first step towards home.”

“The Annunciation” begins in a stillness that is similar to “The Prodigal Son,” but instead of a present tense reverberating with loss, the event is recounted—it is past and is brought into the present as something that has happened and has been lost. Again Merwin discovers in a Biblical story, this time the Holy Spirit descending to Mary to bring about the incarnation of Jesus, forms for his poetics. But whereas the Bible tells of how the divine knowledge is conveyed to man—God through the Holy Spirit speaks the word Jesus and Jesus becomes incarnate as the salvation of man is guaranteed—Merwin presents the Annunciation with overtones of rape and unsolvable mystery. It is almost like Yeats's “Leda and the Swan.”

In the stillness of the afternoon, Mary thinks of her coming marriage to Joseph; from the “here” the “there” of knowledge is anticipated. She says “that from a man / She learns many things and can make names for them / That, before, she was empty of.”⁴ The marriage will bring the full knowledge of sex, the knowledge that her virgin mind can only vaguely conceive in her desire to learn. As she reflects a fragrant light comes in at the window, which causes her to forget what she is doing, to glide out in a secret stillness, and to become “what I was, in myself / I was nothing.”

At the point of the Annunciation, Mary's body is a nothing which receives the Holy Spirit, while her conscious self is off on the fragrant light looking in and only distantly feeling the power and force that is joining with her:

How if I had not gone out on the light
And been hidden away on the vanished light
So that myself I was empty and nothing
I would have surely have died … and there was
Like a whisper in the feathers there, in the wings'
Great wind, like a whirring of words, but I could not
Say the shape of them, and it came to me
They were like a man … Only, in the place
Where, myself, I was nothing, there was suddenly
A great burning under the darkness …
                                                            flames like the tearing of teeth
With noise like rocks rending, such that no word
Can call it as it was there, and for fire only,
Without the darkness beating and the wind, had I
Been here, had I not been far on the hiding light
I could not have borne it and lived.

Joseph will bring her the names and the words for the things Mary does not understand. He will clear her vagueness and give her the tools of knowledge. The Holy Spirit comes unnamed and unknown. He is a winged darkness that embraces Mary with intense and inhuman power. Instead of the clearness of knowledge he is a dark force. His words are only what Mary imagines the whirring in his wings to be. In the “here” of the light, Mary hears something like words in the “there” where her body is being overcome, but she cannot “say the shape of them.” It seems as if a man is embracing her, but she has had no experience of men. However, there is mercy. Unlike the indifferent swan of Yeats's poem, this God makes the light, the point of safety, from which Mary can experience this ultimate and live. But, as the rest of the poem proves, the mercy is problematic; it mitigates and mediates rather than allows the full experience.

When the event ends and the silence closes “like a last clap of the thunder / And was perfect” and there seems to be knowledge, there is a loss:

Though in itself it was like a word, and it was
Like no man and no word that ever was known
Come where I was; and because I was nothing
It could be there. It was a word for
The way the light and the things in the light
Were looking into the darkness, and the darkness
And the things of the darkness were looking into the light
In the fullness, and the way the silence
Was hearing, like it was hearing a great song
And the song was hearing the silence forever
And forever and ever. And I knew the name for it
There in the place where I was nothing in
Fullness, I knew it, and held it …
I held it, and the word for why. Or almost
Or believed I knew it, believed, like an echo

Where she is nothing, her womb, is filled in an orgasmic joining and coming to fullness, as the dark looks into the light and vice versa. The light of the “here” on which the mind floats interacts with the darkness of the “there.” There seems to be a word, a Divine Word, in which everything comes together in an ultimate union and fulfilment. Mary seems to hold it and, through it, to gain the power of knowledge, for she can now name and thereby know everything. But the moment passes. The event falls into the shadow of time as the Word becomes an echo and the knowledge becomes doubt. All that remains of the Word is an echo of that which seemed to have sounded clearly during the embrace. All she has are the human words that fall so painfully short of the Divine Word, and even though she carries something within her, it is a mystery.

She comes to an intense realization similar to the Prodigal Son:

Afterwards, though, there was the emptiness
And not as it was before: not drifting
About the place where I stood, like the afternoon
Light and the smell of the bean-flowers, but as though
There was emptiness only, and the great falling

While the Prodigal Son realizes the emptiness of human conceptions, Mary faces a Divine Word that has become a divine absence. The human emptiness and the silence of the world exist tacitly as they are the ground of experience and the source of the desire to invent. One makes words in order to deal with the world, to give it some human unity and meaning; but the unity is only momentary as the world in its silence, its tacitness, surpasses the sounding words within which man tries to restrict it. But the divine is beyond the human inventions. On the way to it “the words / Die.”⁵ The divine is the ultimate other and ultimate fulfilment that can never be attained. It is “there” but never “there.” For the gods,

The air itself is their memory
A domain they cannot inhabit
But from which they are never absent(6)

The divine's presence is felt as an ultimate absence that can only be mitigated but never fully known. Mary experiences it, but only as it is mediated by the merciful light that allows her to watch from a distance. The Annunciation is as it is remembered. In a distant “here” looking back, Mary recounts what has happened.

Even with the mediation to prevent her from being destroyed, the divine overpowers her in another way. Instead of living forward, instead of concentrating on her coming marriage and the human mysteries that Joseph will name and reveal to her, Mary feels “There is that in me still that draws all that I am / Backwards.” She spends her time trying to remember and trying “to make the word with my breath.” So she tells the story as she echoes the event and attempts to resound the unsounded word. Instead of living, she wants to reconstitute an absent fulfilment. She is left in the “here” with an ultimate sense of the infeasibility of fullness.

If there is any hope in the three poems, it is expressed in “Learning a Dead Language”:

There is nothing for you to say. You must
Learn first to listen …
Learn to be still when it is imparted,
And, though you may not yet understand, to remember.(7)

Like Mary, one is still and ready to receive, but unlike her one is not carried off on a light. One is learnedly receptive. The revelation is not the quick flash of the Annunciation, but the gradual unfolding of something that is permanent “in the perfect singleness / Of intention it has because it is dead. / You can learn only a part at a time.” Memory rather than being the echo of an absence is here the process of incarnation:

What you remember is saved …
What you are given to remember
Has been saved before you from death's dullness by
Remembering. The unique intention
Of a language whose speech has died is order
Incomplete only where someone has forgotten.

This language, that is complete because it is no longer used, is held together and made incarnate in the present by memory. Which sounds like the sons maintaining the father's estate.

However, the incarnation of the language is an act of awareness:

What you come to remember becomes yourself.
Learning will be to cultivate the awareness
Of that governing order, now pure of the passions
It composed; till, seeking it in itself,
You may find at last the passion that composed it,
Hear it both in its speech and in yourself.
What you remember saves you. To remember
Is not to rehearse, but to hear what never
Has fallen silent. So your learning is,
From the dead, order, and what sense of yourself
Is memorable, what passion may be heard
When there is nothing for you to say.

The language is pure of the effects it had on its contemporaries and of the passions it tried to simulate, but it exists and is memorable for the one thing that composed it. That saving passion, that which has never fallen silent and that which is heard when there is nothing to say, is the ground of human experience. It is the desire to fill the emptiness within and the silence without. That is the desire that has caused the will to compose all order. Instead of the intense feeling of loss that the Prodigal Son and Mary experience when they realize the emptiness, there is a sense of hope. Instead of placing his faith in the inventions of the will, those momentary projections of fulfilment that fall apart, Merwin will believe in what is before and what is left when the inventions are extinguished. the “here” and “there” join as the “there” becomes a dead language, a purer and more encompassing version of the desire that pervades the “here.” He transcends his own loss by being aware of and becoming a part of the great loss and desire that is the human condition as it is embodied in the dead language. But there is still the split between the inventions of the desiring mind and the silent world. The “here” and “there” join together but only as a distant human consciousness, the dead language, finds expression in the individual consciousness of the present moment. It is still one invention speaking through another while surrounded by a greater unknown. The poem, like an instruction manual, is an act of will that attempts to instruct one in how to get rid of the will.

There has to be an awareness of the emptiness and the silence for human activity to be vital and real, while the hope for fulfilment lies in trying to achieve some interplay between human inventions and the silent world. The attempt to transcend the individual experience by merging with a corpus of human desire is an assertion of the dichotomy rather than its solution. If the poet is to overcome the split of the “here” and the dichotomy he has to join the words and the world in a vital relationship and shorten the gap between the poet and the divine. While taking a step toward this relationship in The Moving Target, Merwin also leaves behind the human drama of “The Prodigal Son” and “The Annunciation.” His poetry becomes more abstract. He even ceases to use punctuation, those marks that restrict and clarify, those fences that mark off an estate of differentiated significance. Sentences join and can be read more than one way. There is a sense of flow and process that is only limitedly restricted.

In “For Now,” the very opposite of “Learning a Dead Language,” Merwin tries to embrace the flow of the world with exultation and humor as he bids goodbye to all that is past and passing. The past has become an emptiness that leads to the more intense split of the “here.” One must not live what is gone, instead one must live toward the silence and the next real creature: “That instances, as they were real, are unrepeatable. He [the poet] has learned this beyond question if he has ever been tempted by cowardice, to repeat them, instead of trying to call the next real creature from the ark.”⁸ In order to move toward the next real creature, Merwin says at the end of the poem:

Goodbye distance from whom I
Borrow my eyes goodbye my voice
In the monument of strangers goodbye to the sun
Among the wings nailed to the windows goodbye
My love
You that return to me through the mountain of flags
With my raven on your wrist
You with the same breath
Between death's republic and his kingdom(9)

Throughout the poem he says goodbye to all memories, all the past experiences trivial and otherwise that have survived as a filter through which the present moment must pass; and at the end of the poem he says goodbye to all that is human. “Goodbye to distance from whom I / borrow my eyes.” The eyes work because there is a distance between them and the object observed. Sight positions objects, distinguishes them, and makes them “out there.” So he is saying goodbye to distinctions, to the distance that makes one thing separate from another; and he is saying goodbye to those products of sight, images, those imitations or reflections in words that are considered pictures of the world. “Goodbye my voice / In the monument of strangers.” His voice is ruled by the monument of language, that invention of generations of strangers handed down from one to the next. It is the father tongue that the son mouths, and it is the static form that has denied silence. He will leave the echo of words past and construct a new language of silence. The unpunctuated poems are a step in that direction. “Goodbye to the sun / Among the wings nailed to the window”: goodbye to the noonday brilliance, to the bright, clear, and solid shapes that fool man into believing that the world is easily known. For in the brilliance the wings of silence and the divine are nailed down, instead of fluttering with their whispered presence. “Goodbye / My love”: goodbye to the desire for fulfilment, for he will let be, passively submit, as he is carried along in the silent becoming. The mountains of flags are the inventions that have opposed the silence. The raven, mentioned in the last lines, is possibly a reference to a poem that occurs earlier in the book, “Noah's Raven.” Sent out by Noah to find dry land, the raven discovers that only the known, the small world of Noah, was flooded, while the deserts of the unknown were untouched. The raven does not return, because its discovery will not be accepted; instead it becomes the voice of the beyond that cannot be understood in the “here.” But Merwin says goodbye to this call of the beyond; for it is solely for those who still reside in the past inventions, those who carry on the father knowledge only to be befuddled like the father in “The Prodigal Son” when their names for things no longer apply. He does not need the raven's cry for he will give up formulating. He will live each real instance as it comes free of mediation.

But the goodbye is an act of will. It is an active rejection, though aimed at achieving a wise passiveness that is something like the learned state of “Learning a Dead Language.” Whereas in the earlier poem the goal was to become a part of the corpus of human desire, here Merwin wants to join with the ongoing process of the world. While the first poem is an acceptance of the split between man and the world, “For Now” attempts to overcome the split by making preparations for a merging with the silence. To do that he has to give up totally the human, which is to undergo a death of denouncement. In an ultimate assertion of the will one destroys the will. But the vision of the poem seems to fail for the same reason that “Learning a Dead Language” did. If Merwin is to write the great language, he has to bring together human desire, the silence, the divine, and the private matter of the inventing poet. His rejection has to be tempered with a species of acceptance, if he is to continue to be a poet while taking part in the calling of the next real creature from the ark.

In an earlier poem, “Air,” from the same book, Merwin says: “This must be what I wanted to be doing / Walking at night between the two deserts, / Singing.”¹⁰ The two deserts are the sense of fulfilment that has passed and the silence and unknown that lie up the road where one could project fulfilment. Instead of trying to recapture the absent past or form the silent future, he walks and sings. He is more than learnedly passive but less than ultimately denouncing. His activity verges on inactivity. He is between but not moving toward either one of the two deserts. There is willed activity but no will. When he says, “This must be what I wanted to be doing,” he implies that there is a choice, but it is inevitable; he discovers himself in the process of doing something and decides that is what he wants to do. He gives in but retains an awareness of the selective act and the possibilities that are before him.

Just as there is the balance between activity and non-activity, will and submission, there is a balance between the inventions of the desiring mind, the willed order, and the silent world in “A Scale in May,” a poem from the next volume, The Lice:

To succeed consider what is as though it were past
Deem yourself inevitable and take credit for it
If you find you no longer believe enlarge the temple
At the end of its procession through the stone
Falling
The water remembers to laugh(11)

Juxtaposed to the act of will, the desire to succeed, and the building of a larger temple—a more impressive thing to believe in when one no longer believes—is the procession of water over stones. Next to created meaning, there is the natural flow of water that moves forward only because it is falling. Beside the making oneself inevitable, there is the water that remembers to laugh. Its memory is only the pull of gravity, as its laugh is the sound of its rushing through the air and crashing on the rocks below. The individual making his existence meaningful is balanced with a world that is in the ongoing process of being there.

The willed inventions of the desiring mind no longer repress the world. Instead they are like that ambiguous activity-nonactivity. They are attempts at stability but instable. Their very instability is a guarantee of the vital awareness of the silence, of their need for the world in order to achieve some balance, of their own reality as they reveal the silence, and of the will's continuance as a creative rather than a repressive force.

Instead of lamenting the emptiness of his order as the Father in “The Prodigal Son,” Merwin accepts his inventions as pretensions. The illusion of substance becomes something of an answer rather than a denial. As he says in “For a Coming Extinction,”

I write as though you could understand
And I could say it
One must always pretend something
Among the dying(12)

Addressing a whale who could not understand the human words, he asks it to carry a message to the great god, The End, but the message is left unsaid. Merwin only pretends that the whale hears him and that he has something to say. Instead of making the silence into the clearly discernible thing it is not, his inventions or messages are admittedly fictions or pretensions. As a momentary formulation unlike the solid substance that the father and the Prodigal Son believe in, a pretension is never complete in itself; it is a veil that will be pulled aside to reveal what is behind. Behind it there is nothing but the silent world and the divine. The pretensions are not false, rather they remind one of man's limitation. The silence and the divine are there, while man's inventions, as he is vitally aware of what is behind his pretensions, come and go as masks in a drama of process.

“In a Clearing” is a pretension of the moment, a wordful opening in the silence where things come together for a happening and then clear away:

Some of the animals
See souls moving in their word death
With its many tongues that no god could speak
That can describe
Nothing that cannot die
The word
Surrounds the souls
The hide they wear
Like a light in the light
And when it goes out they vanish(13)

This word that no god could speak is the many human tongues, the many deaths of the silence. It can only describe those things that can die, that can be made into words. But it is the word that reasserts and recalls the silence; for it only exists in the moment, and when it goes out, everything connected with it vanishes as the silence reappears. The limited power of man's inventions is the assurance that the silence will prevail and that man will continue to invent. It is like the phoenix; in destruction there is new life. Because there is always absence and silence and man's desire for substance and words, there will continue to be poems, estates, and whatever else man constructs.

The poem ends on the note of a destruction that brings new life:

In the eyes of the herds there is only one light
They cherish it with the darkness it belongs to
They take their way through it nothing is
Before them and they leave it
A small place
Where dying a sun rises

The herds and their light, the words and metaphors, are the happening of the moment, “the darkness it belongs to.” There is a coming together in an annunciation of the herds' presence, only to have it rush on into absence. The event whirs inconclusively on the edge of silence only to fall away. When the event is over, there is no effort to recapture it, only the rising sun—the next moment appearing with its pretensions.

But Merwin goes further. His statement about the great language speaks of immediate recognition. The making of the pretension besides being a realization of man's limitations must simultaneously be the realization of the silence as a presence. If man is to close the gap between the divine and the human, the invented word must somehow be present and, at the same time, absent. The word must sound yet convey some of the unsoundable quality of experience. This happens in The Carrier of Ladders with “In the Time of the Blossoms,” “Memory of Spring,” “Signs,” and “Psalm: Our Fathers.”

Going beyond the human to the silence and absence but with an acknowledgment of the human condition, “In the Time of the Blossoms” deals with a dissolution-creation and an unbreathed music—a music that is human and not human:

Ash tree
sacred to her who sails in
from the one sea
all over your leaf skeletons
fine as sparrow bones
stream out motionless
on white heaven
staves of one
unbreathed music
Sing to me(14)

The tree is called an ash and is in ashes, “your leaf skeletons.” Out of the ashes arises the new life of the blossoms, the flowering in the moment—“The Time”; but they are motionless, just as Merwin motionlessly walks and sings between two deserts. They are also an unbreathed music that the poet either asks to be sung to him if the word “sing” is imperative, or that he “hears” if “sing” is in the present tense. Both usages are implied. Like “A Scale in May,” with one reading you have a sense of loss and the desire to overcome it, with the other there is a sense of the world. But the world is not just there. It is a music conveyed, yet not by the voice, for it is unbreathed. At the end of “The Annunciation” Mary had been so concerned with making the word with her breath. She wanted to echo the divine in human words. An unbreathed music has no echo. It is a tacit experience, silently there, and silently felt; but it comes as a recognition, as a recalling to mind. The music is what Merwin wants to be there—the words of the poem that come together to give form to the experience, and it is what is there—that unbreathed presence of the world that is recalled in the attempt to convey it in words.

The words themselves verge similarly upon the unbreathed music. The two line poem “Memory of Spring” states: “The first composer / could hear only what he could write.”¹⁵ Again there is a play upon meaning. There is a sense of loss and limitation and yet a sense of fulfilment and presence. In one sense the composer can hear only what he is able to capture in words, the word death that can only describe what can die, so that in his desire to invent he loses everything beyond his limited vocabulary. The other sense, which throws the emphasis on hearing and the act of writing, is that through the written word, but not the spoken, he can recall the “Spring” of the title. This is so because the written word is present yet silent. It is silently present there on the page but mentally sounded here in the mind of the reader. Like the blossoms, it is both what is there and what the reader makes or thinks is there, thereby, also like the blossoms, the written word is objectively present but subjectively experienced and invented. It is most like spring yet it is not; it is as silently and vaguely there as spring, but it is something known and applied. The written word exists and has meaning: through the interplay of the “there” that it attempts to present, the “there” of the page, and the “here” of the reader. It is the sign that helps to recall the silence and absence, as it is a pretension, an arrangement of letters organized into a larger group of words which exist because they reveal something. Human desire and the silence, the “here” and the “there” through the written word are together in the private recognition that takes place in the poet's and reader's mind.

“Signs” is a poem of written words in an event of revelation:

Half my life ago
watching the river bird
Dawn
white bird let go
Strange
to be any place(16)

The twenty-nine parts of the poem are like Haiku in which the individual event or happening ripples into universal meaning. In Haiku one envisions the ephemerality of one's life in the passing of a breeze or the flight of a bird, but in Merwin:

Waves sever
sever
Silence
is my shepherd
Born once
born forever

Instead of the human in the natural event, Merwin is intent on revealing the inhuman in human language. Instead of reverberating with universal meaning, the language resonates with universal silence and absence. Whereas Haiku always conveys a sense of scene, Merwin's signs deny visualization. He teases one into believing there is an image: “Silence / is my shepherd,” only to deny one's ever having a clear picture of silence leading Merwin. The signs remain abstract as one at the same time grasps and loses them, makes them into something and is aware of their being beyond whatever one shapes them into. They are a series of pretensions that cover while at the same time disclose the silence and absence.

Then there is “Psalm: Our Fathers.” The canon of Merwin's poetics is contained in this gathering together, as that which is the self's engendering is also a revelation of what is beyond. Each stanza (if they can be called stanzas) is a declaration of that which Merwin is the son of, while it comes together “in the vast / flocks of prayers circling over the gulf / in the unreturning light”¹⁷ that is the whole poem:

I am the son of hunger and hunger in an unbroken line back to the mouths of the coelenterates but even I have been filled
I am the son of remorse in a vein of fossils but I might not have been
I am the son of divisions but the nails the wires the hasps the bolts the locks the traps the wrapping that hold me together are part of the inheritance
I am the son of indifference but neglect is a stage in the life of the gods
I am the son of No but memory bathes its knowledge in desire
I am the son of blindness but I watch the light stretch one wing
I am the son of a silence in heaven but I cried and the dark angels went on falling
I am the son of things as they are but I know them for the most part only as they are remembered
I am the son of farewells and one of me will not come back but one of me never forgets(18)

“I am the son of hunger”; he is the son of desire that causes the will to achieve those momentary satisfactions in the act of inventing. He is the son of divisions, the split and loss of the “here” that propels one to seek the reconciliation in the “there.” The nails, the wires, the hasps, etc., are the inherited human inventions that attempt to bring the world together in some order. He is the son of things of the world, but he only half knows it, as his knowledge is memory—a recalling to mind of the silence in the act of inventing. He is the son of farewells—the self of the moment who dies with the completion of that moment; but there is one who remembers. There is the self who transcends the moment, who remembers the selves of past moments, and who discovers his limits in the inventing of the self of the now—the self who is vitally present with the world around. So, too, Merwin's language exists as it is an inherited body of knowledge, but it comes to be in the moment of his inventing as it brings about a recognition of its own limits and a recognition of the silence and absence.

Besides the thematic recognition, Merwin takes advantage of the way words appear on the printed page and the way one reads to convey an aspect of the world and the restrictiveness of man's comprehension. One reads the printed page a stanza at a time, while the stanza before is always lost as an actuality, and the stanza ahead has yet to occur. Nonetheless, they are there, just as the world is there at any given moment. One looks at a group of trees but loses sight of a lake, and there is a house to the other side that one will eventually see. But they are all simultaneously there. So, too, this poem rather than being a development of thought is a simultaneous occurrence of the many different aspects of one moment. Each stanza is a declaration of what Merwin is the son of, but no stanza logically develops the stanza before. In the shifting of one's sight from the lake to the trees, from one stanza to the next, there is a sense of choice and a sense of diachronic progression. Things do progress from one moment to the next, but man in his limited comprehension creates moments within moments, and distances and differences within that which is actually joined. One can look back to the lake or back to the previous stanza, but then one will lose the trees and lose the actuality of what was before one's eyes. There is always a loss and something ever more about to be as the world races on ahead building moment upon moment and losing man in a welter of possible choices. The poem is more confined but it verges on this; just as the abstractness conveys some of the vagueness of the world, so too the multiplicity of stanzas conveys some of the vastness that man represses when he makes a choice.

The whole poem comes together in a structure whose monotonic construction and rhythmic freedoms resemble a chant. Not only does everything come together in one voice or in one overall pattern, but each section is free to develop its own rhythm. The overall pattern is that drone, that monotony that is like the whirring of the Holy Spirit's wings, and that verges upon the silence in its ongoing oneness. The free rhythm is the individuality and difference propagated by the manner of man's inventions, but which exist only as a pretension that discloses the silence in the ongoing process of becoming absent. Even the “but” that breaks up every stanza in this poem, serves less to differentiate than to show that even that which seems like a split, a dichotomy of opposites, is now only a contrast in a balance of recognition. Instead of contradiction, things come together in a recognition.

The pretensions are necessary. They are the ark from which the new creature can emerge. There must be a mind that can recall the silence in the making of an invention. For Merwin to merge with the corpus of human desire or with the silence is, on the one hand, to live in an emptiness divorced from the world and, on the other, to die. Merwin must float in his ark of pretensions upon the drone, the ongoing process that dissolves everything into silence and divine absence, as he attempts to capture the unsoundable in his sounding voice.

Notes

1. “Notes for a Preface,” in The Distinctive Voice, ed. William J. Martz (Glenview, Ill., 1966), pp. 269-70.

2. Green With Beasts (New York, 1956), p. 28.

3. The Dancing Bears (New Haven, 1954), p. 72.

4. Green With Beasts, p. 33.

5. The Lice (New York, 1971), p. 7.

6. Lice, p. 59.

7. Green With Beasts, p. 62.

8. “Notes for a Preface,” p. 269

9. The Moving Target (New York, 1971), p. 89.

10. Moving Target, p. 50.

11. Lice, p. 50.

12. Lice, p. 68.

13. Lice, p. 70.

14. The Carrier of Ladders (New York, 1971), p. 138.

15. Carrier of Ladders, p. 115.

16. Carrier of Ladders, p. 116.

17. Carrier of Ladders, p. 67.

18. Carrier of Ladders, p. 92.