W. S. Merwin on being an American poet:

I have sometimes puzzled over the possibility of being an American poet (But what else could I be—I've never wanted to be anything else) and certainly the search for a way of writing about what America is, in my lifetime, is a perennial siren. But not, I think, in any way that's obviously Whitmanesque.¹

Merwin's poetry, to be sure, is not Whitmanesque, but, like Whitman, Merwin has been obsessed with the meaning of America. His poetry, especially The Lice and the American sequence² in The Carrier of Ladders, often implicitly and sometimes explicitly responds to Whitman; his twentieth century sparsity and soberness—his doubts about the value of America—answer, temper, Whitman's nineteenth century expansiveness and exuberance—his enthusiasm over the American creation. In The Lice Merwin is interested in “what America is,” and in The Carrier of Ladders he engages in a poetic search—a descent in time—to discover also what America was, to face and assume the guilt of the destructive American expansion across the continent, to invoke the vanished native and face the implications of his absence.

Whitman, in his “Song of the Redwood-Tree,” imagines the “Voice of a mighty dying tree”—one of the last on the continent—chanting its “death-chant.” But its song is far from a mournful tune; the tree bids farewell—“Farewell O earth and sky, farewell ye neighboring waters, / My time has ended, my term has come”—but it also bids welcome to the westering white race that is destroying it: “For a superber race, they too to grandly fill their time, / For them we abdicate, in them ourselves ye forest kings!” The Whitmanian self—a model of expanding America (stretching, embodying all that it comes into contact with, absorbing it into a unified whole)—sees the redwoods, absorbs them, and displaces them. And the bard out in front, leading the American creation west, guides his axe-chopping followers into the last remaining forest void, on the Pacific shore, where they carry on what Whitman perceived to be their artistic creation of America:

Along the northern coast,
With the surge for base and accompaniment low and hoarse,
With crackling blows of axes sounding musically driven by strong arms,
Riven deep by the sharp tongues of axes, there in the redwood forests dense. …

We recall the bard leading his people in “Song of the Broad-Axe,” where their obliteration of the virgin wilderness also was seen as a musical creation (“Fingers of the organist skipping staccato over the keys of a great organ”);³ the song of America was now spanning the blank musical score of the continent, and in Whitman's conception, the virgin land was graciously succumbing to her avid lovers with their penetrating “sharp tongues of axes”; “To duly fall, to aid, unreck'd at last, / To disappear, to serve,” sings the falling redwood. And so Whitman sees the Western “blank” coming to life, “the unoccupied surface ripening,” as the artistic white race touches it and infuses it with meaning:

At last the New arriving, assuming, taking possession,
A swarming and busy race settling and organizing everywhere,
Ships coming in from the whole round world …
Populous cities, the latest inventions. …

With no regrets, Whitman/America goes about “Clearing the ground for broad humanity, the true America,” and “These virgin lands” (the wilderness She) gladly give way “To the new culminating man” (the American He). Whitman wrote this poem (in 1873), he said, “to idealize our great Pacific half of America, (the future better half)—”;⁴ the still-uncreated West would always be, to the future-oriented Whitman, the “better” part of the American creation, for his concern was always with process, never with the finished product; hope was in the still unformed chaos, not in the already formed creation. So Whitman offers a catalogue of Western natural beauty—“skies and airs,” “this amplitude, these valleys, far Yosemite”—and claims that the natural never will really be lost, but instead will simply become part of the conquering white race: “To be in them absorb'd, assimilated.”⁵

In his American sequence in The Carrier of Ladders, Merwin offers a stark response to Whitman's claims of wilderness assimilation. In his ironically entitled poem, “The Free,” he portrays the Indian dispossessed of his land (“… no one hears / our voices / above the sound of the reddening feet”); the Native American senses, as his race disappears, what the Whitman/American possesser would claim about him: “and when we have gone they say we are with them forever” (CL 58). The vast absurdity of claiming that we can “absorb” a race or a wilderness while we systematically exterminate them is one of Merwin's concerns in his American sequence; we play tricks with language that come back to destroy us. Like Frederick Jackson Turner, the historian who in 1893 announced the end of the frontier, Whitman developed a system that proffered an innocent rationale for the Indians' disappearance. In Turner's progression, the Indian simply “evolved” into the trapper who evolved into the rancher who evolved into the farmer, and so on; the Indian was not destroyed, he was just changed.⁶ In Whitman's system, the Indian was not killed, he was absorbed. Merwin answers such euphemistic claims, simply and beyond anger, “No.” We have destroyed, not absorbed; killed, not evolved.

I

Merwin's answer to Whitman is begun in The Lice, an anti-song of the self. Here, instead of the Whitmanian self expanding and absorbing everything, naming it in an ecstasy of union, we find a self stripped of meaning, unable to expand, in a landscape that refuses to unite with the self, refuses to be assimilated, in a place alien and unnameable. The Lice opens with “The Animals,” a poem about a ruined American Adam who, like Whitman, would like to turn and live with and name the animals, but who finds that there are none left to name: “And myself tracking over empty ground / Animals I never saw / I with no voice / Remembering names to invent for them / Will any come back will one.” And so this self becomes voiceless, as the things he would use his voice to describe disappear; a barren landscape is all that remains, and the poet's stripped, barren words reflect it. Instead of expanding his senses, like Whitman, and intensifying his touch, sight, hearing, so that he could contain the multitudes around him, Merwin's senses, as in “Some Last Questions,” crumble and fade, become useless: “What are the feet / A. Thumbs left after the auction / … What is the tongue / A. The black coat that fell off the wall / With sleeves trying to say something.” All that is left is silence, “As though it had a right to more.” The self is dying, its head returning to “ash” in the withering flames of the twentieth century.⁷

Whitman found the expanding American creation and the American landscape to be perfectly suited to his voice; the American poet would, he said (in “By Blue Ontario's Shore”), make America's “cities, beginnings, events, diversities, wars, vocal in him, / … its rivers, lakes, bays, embouchure in him. …”⁸ But Merwin wanders rootless in this land, searching for a new landscape that might reflect the self and be rendered in his language: “If there is a place where this is the language may / It be my country” (L [The Lice] 46). Unlike Whitman, whose song defined and named himself, whose expanding country reflected his expanding self, Merwin's self seems distantly apart from what he finds to name and from his words themselves: “my words are the garment of what I shall never be …” (L 62).

Merwin faces a void and seeks a new language to describe it, but the void he encounters is not the “Western blank” that Whitman joyously entered into, not a hopeful place for future imposition of form, but instead it is the final void, the place where man can no longer impose any form: “The End” (L 68). “He is,” says Sandra McPherson, “researching the erasures of the universe. …”⁹ So he exiles himself from America (he has lived in France, Spain, Mexico), but he returns periodically to his native continent, and in “Whenever I Go There,” he describes what happens when he sees America again:

In new rocks new insects are sitting
With the lights off
And once more I remember that the beginning
Is broken

The continent is paved over with rock-like apartments, and “the beginning”—the conceptual ideals of the country, the beliefs in life and liberty for all men—is shattered into an empty reality. The poem of America had a noble inception, but something went horrifyingly wrong in its execution. So now the poet finds himself “eating the silence of animals” (few are left to make sounds) as he hovers on the verge of annihilation: “Today belongs to few and tomorrow to no one” (L 24). His concerns, says Anthony Libby, are “human emptiness and cultural death.”¹⁰ The cultural imposition of America on the continent is dying, and the virgin continent it imposed itself on seems already dead.

“The Last One” views America's westering creation as both a genesis and an apocalypse: a beginning followed by a quick end. The poem is filled with imagery of Genesis, but it describes an anti-creation, and of the books in the Bible, Revelation is “the last one.” Here again we have the American Adam (and Eve) who blithely decide to begin to cut into the virgin wilderness; Whitman's grand ideals of a new race are reduced to an empty “why not”:

Well they'd made up their minds to be everywhere because why not.
Everywhere was theirs because they thought so.
In the middle of stones they made up their minds.
They started to cut.

With a sense of meaningless manifest destiny, “they cut everything because why not.” Suddenly the whole American westering process, as it does in Whitman,¹¹ comes to a halt at the Pacific Ocean: “Well cutting everything they came to the water.” And the wilderness has been laid to waste; of a whole continent of trees, now “there was one left standing. / They would cut it tomorrow they went away.” In Merwin's vision the final tree, unlike Whitman's last, dying redwood, sings no praise to the axe-bearing men who chop it down. Instead, with a strange combination of Biblical solemnity and monster-movie horror,

The night gathered in its last branches.
The shadow of the night gathered in the shadow on the water.
The night and the shadow put on the same head.
And it said NOW.

The men come in the morning and cut the last tree down, but when “They took it away its shadow stayed on the water.” Bothered by this turn of events, man tries all of his ingenious ways to rid himself of the shadow: shining a light on it, covering it up, exploding it, and sending smoke up between the shadow and the sun. But all of this is to no avail; the shadow remains, and then it begins growing. “That was one day,” announces the poet in an echo of the Genesis-creation which here indicates the beginning of the end. Man continues his efforts to eradicate the shadow as it grows onto the land, but the shadow, as it touches man, seems immediately to deevolve him; he moves from the machine age to an age of primitive tools back to an age before tools:

They started to scrape the shadow with machines.
When it touched the machines it stayed on them.
They started to beat the shadow with sticks.
Where it touched the sticks it stayed on them.
They started to beat the shadow with hands.
Where it touched the hands it stayed on them.
That was another day.

Then the shadow (a dark, all-devouring blob) grows on and on, like some anti-Whitmanian force (reversing Whitman's American expansion into and absorption of nature), which now expands into and absorbs (or obliterates) man: “Then it swallowed them too and they vanished.” Only a few “lucky ones with their shadows” remain, hidden “as far away” as they can get (L 10-12).

This poem, says Harvey Gross, “dramatizes nature's revenge against men. …”¹² It is, as Jarold Ramsey says, “an ecological version of the apocalypse.”¹³ But it is not nature gaining her revenge so much as nature's shadow—a hollow, dark force of non-nature, of obliterated nature, a dark, non-palpable reminder of what used to be. It is the lack of nature that creeps back over the continent, obliterating man. It is the exhaustion of natural resources that causes the machines to cease functioning and leads man back to a primitive state, forced once again to use sticks and his hands, because there is no energy left for his machines. As so often in The Lice, Merwin here personifies emptiness or nothing; the Nothing of destroyed nature is what will kill man, finally; Americans think they have conquered the wilderness, only to find that No-Wilderness will conquer them. This poem demonstrates the anti-creation of America; the movement here is from west to east as the poem of America is erased, the creation of America wiped out, and nothing is left, finally, but barren, empty, lifeless land. The virgin She was destroyed, and now her destroyer, the American He, is likewise demolished. Nothing remains. There is no sense of hope further West in the Far East (no “Passage to India” as there was for the later Whitman); the only (faint) hope is in the few chastened men who escape with their shadows, left to gnaw the crust of the earth in some remote corner of the ruined country.

Later in The Lice, Merwin looks at America's continued attempts to expand westward by going to Viet Nam. In “Asians Dying,” the same process of de-creation is described as Americans destroy another wilderness further West in the Far East: “When the forests have been destroyed their darkness remains / The ash the great walker follows the possessors / Forever.” Creating a nothingness, an obliteration, behind them, the Americans push on toward infinite new Wests: “Pain the horizon / Remains.” In Merwin's vision, the Americans are guided not by any Whitmanian ideal, but only by “Death their star,” which leads “The possessors … everywhere …” (L 63). Even if Americans seek to complete Columbus' original goal to voyage to the Far East, suggests Merwin, they will only lay it to waste, too. The frontier, for Merwin, seems to be the meeting point not of “savagery and civilization” (as Turner defined it),¹⁴ but of pure nature and ash, the great walker. As man advances into the wilderness, ash follows behind him, and as he heads toward the horizon, he brings endless offerings of pain until nature is obliterated; the seasons are now but meaningless, silent variations in weather: “They are paper bells / Calling to nothing living” (L 63).

And so Merwin sees the best hope as a world without men, a vision he explores in “The Widow.” The widow is the virgin land, the wilderness She, now envisioned as alone due to the death of her mate, the American He. And she seems to get along very nicely without him. Here, says Anthony Libby, “the earth is defined not as man's great mother but as the only survivor of an ancient union with man that long ago ended in opposition. …”¹⁵ And Merwin envisions the widow Earth serenely carrying on her cycles of life in the absence of man:

How easily the ripe grain
Leaves the husk
At the simple turning of the planet
There is no season
That requires us

It is only the man-made impositions on nature that are fragile, that will fade; life itself goes on smoothly without man's aid: “Everything that does not need you is real / The widow does not / Hear you and your cry is numberless” (L 34-35). This is, as Libby notes, an “existenial denial of men: ‘numberless,’ we simply do not count …”¹⁶ It is better for life, ultimately (suggests Merwin), to leave the earth a widow, rid of man, than to leave her dead, along with man.

Throughout The Lice, Merwin's soul tries to fly, to transcend, to surge ahead like a Whitmanian soul, but the future is dead now; we are preparing “For a Coming Extinction” (L 68), and so Whitman's spirit is gone—“The tall spirit who lodged here has / Left already”—and the spirit of the new poet is wingless; it cannot fly or transcend; there is no future to soar into, nothing to expand into and name:

But when you look forward
With your dirty knuckles and the wingless
Bird on your shoulder
What can you write

(L 17)

The bird/soul tries, but can find no opening, no hope; “somewhere in myself,” writes Merwin, “from a corner [come] the sounds of a small bird trying / From time to time to fly a few beats in the dark” (L 48), When the bird does leave its “Life on my shoulder” and tries to fly, it kills itself in the futile effort: “you had to thresh out your breath in the spiked rafters” (L 72). So Merwin imagines his bird/soul as a “fat pigeon” that he tries to force to fly—“Fly I said throwing him into the air”—but each time he throws him, the bird runs back, “expecting to be fed,” and finally, “I found him in the dovecote dead / Of the needless efforts.” “So that is what I am,” says Merwin, “I who have always believed too much in words” (L 73). The soul cannot be made to explore or transcend; the times of expansion are over. Even Theodore Roethke's rose-transcendence of the spent continent (in his “North American Sequence”)¹⁷ is impossible here; the fat bird of the self is too weighted down with a dying past for any hope of transcendence.

The self in these poems is infested with lice, with diseased things it cannot find and kill and so must carry with it. Whitman's self sought to contain all, to embody past, present, and future; Merwin's self seeks to contain nothing, to empty itself of a dead past (“The thermometers out of the mouths of corpses” [L 17]), a shattered present, and a dead and destructive future (“The fist is coming out of the egg” [L 17]). Memory is no virtue for Merwin, for he seeks to break off from a meaningless past. As for what is to come: “We are the echo of the future”; “we were not born to survive / Only to live” (L 33). Our popping H-bombs are only a faint echo of the vast future apocalypse, which man will not survive. Not to repossess the past, then, is to be in total darkness, but at least free; the need here—and it is opposite the need of Whitman—is to empty the self, to find a new void within, and then to listen and learn from the silence of a de-created history: “Now all my teachers are dead except silence” (L 50). Whitman expanded into the external void and sought to contain all; Merwin retreats into an internal void and seeks to empty himself of everything but silence.

Whitman describes the self in “Song of Myself”: There is that in me—I do not know what it is—but I know it is in me. / … It is not chaos or death—it is form, union, plan—it is eternal life—it is Happiness.”¹⁸ This kind of affirmation vanishes in Merwin's anti-song; he finds himself “in life as in a strange garment.” The American self/poem/country has ended its expansion and has entered its inevitable diminishment. The signs are on the pages themselves: Whitman's poems expand and flow, filling the void of the blank page with seemingly endless sentences; Merwin's poems, in stark contrast, are fragments, remnants: short, quiet markings that leave most of the page unfilled; the gaping void is creeping back in, threatening the very existence of speech. It is not a creative void that Merwin faces, not something he expands into and absorbs; rather, it is a destructive void which opens its dark abyss, ready to swallow the poet and all of life with him. It is the anti-creation of America, and the American poet—in contrast to his earlier, arrogant stance—retreats in quiet terror. “Song of Myself” ends confidently, sure of the self, looking outward toward ever-expanding journeys even in death: “If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles. … / Missing me one place search another, / I stop somewhere waiting for you.”¹⁹The Lice ends in a muted echo of these last words, with the Merwin-self divided, unsure, tentative: “Where else am I walking even now / Looking for me” (L 80).

II

Merwin, then, speaks from the void, from past all frontiers in a place where there is nothing but a no-land of no-hope. When Merwin arrives at the Pacific, there are no Whitman-like journeys on to the Far East for meditative knowledge. And in “Inscription Facing Western Sea,” Merwin experiences a vision that relates to Whitman's “Facing West from California's Shores,” one of the few poems in which Whitman expresses despair at what the great American creation, now reaching its continental fulfillment, was becoming. Happy to be at the ocean at long last, the poet is still uneasy about what the country's expansion had come to mean: “But where is what I started for so long ago? / And why is it yet unfound?”²⁰ Similarly, Merwin places himself at the Pacific shore, where the “Lord of each wave comes in” and the American expansion is “finished ten thousand miles.” Seeking (like Whitman) the meaning of the completed creation, the poet sees in the waves only “riderless horses no messages”; no hope is carried over from the Far East. So the expanding American lays empty claim to the land and leaves: “he lays down flag bowing quickly and retires.” And the wars and destruction that brought America to the West coast simply continue on: “flag fades / … stars gather to watch the war” (CL 133).²¹

This poem is in The Carrier of Ladders, the book in which Merwin attempts an imaginative descent to the American past, to the native; such descents form a vital and familiar pattern for twentieth century American poets.²² For Whitman, the American direction was West and to the future; for twentieth century American poets, the direction has become, more and more, down—through the various layers of what America is and has been—and to the past. It is not an easy process for Merwin, because generally he seeks, as we have noted, to strip himself of memory, even though he knows he would not exist if it weren't for the past: “I could never have come to the present without you / remember that.” But the past is deceptive; it consists of fragments, half-remembered details, imagined (fictional) events. So the past is false, and true wisdom can only be found in the present, where the future loss of detail has not yet occurred: “what is wisdom if it is not / now / in the loss that has not left this place” (CL 8).

In “The Lake,” Merwin approaches his descent, which finally occurs in the American sequence of poems (“The Approaches” through “The Removal”). “Did you exist / ever,” he asks, as he gets in a boat and sails out in a lake, where he senses how immense the distance below him is to where the Indian (perhaps) exists: the poet is on the surface layer of a continental palimpsest, on the flood of America that has covered (or perhaps obliterated) the native cultures; he looks far down, under, to the past:

I lay there
looking down while the mist was torn
looking down
where
was the Indian village
said to be drowned here
one glimpse and I would have hung
fixed in its sky. …

(CL 30)

He is, as he hovers on the surface of the water in the present, the dead Indian's future; he hangs in the Indian's sky only when the Indian's present is past; there are no natives left in the drowned village (if, indeed, it is still there) to look to the watery sky to see the white man in their future, the new creation that would cover them.

In “The Approaches,” the poet sets out on his imaginative journey to the past, and is deceived in his first glimpse of the Indian, but wanders aimlessly on, hoping to find signs of the past: “I say I may never / get there but should get / closer and hear the sound / seeing figures I go toward them waving / they make off / birds / no one to guide me / afraid / to the warm ruins” (CL 45). In “Lackawanna,” the poet begins in the East (Pennsylvania) in his boyhood, and begins to question the “black river” that seems to flow from within himself: “Where you begin / in me / I have never seen.” The river becomes associated with the past, with American history: “and through the night the dead drifted down you / all the dead / what was found later no one could recognize.” The dead are the Indians, the vague memories of the past on this continent which are now barely recognizable. The poet had been “told to be afraid” of entering into that dark river, but at the end of the poem, he takes the plunge, entering the flow of history: “I wake black to the knees / so it has happened / I have set foot in you / both feet / Jordan / too long I was ashamed at the distance” (CL 44-45). He enters the Lackawanna / Jordan river of history that takes him “to the warm ruins / Canaan” (CL 42), the promised land / wilderness of the pre-Americanized land (Hart Crane too, in his descent to the American past in The Bridge, associated the virgin land with the “Promised Land”).²³

“Other Travellers to the River” included William Bartram, botanist, painter, ornithologist, and writer whose Travels (1791) helped inculcate the idea of the Noble Savage in the white man's mind; the poet, like many sojourners to the past, seeks to see the wilderness through his eyes, his words: “William Bartram how many / have appeared in their sleep / climbing like flames into / your eyes. …” But as those merging with Bartram imaginatively stand at the Mississippi, “gazing out over the sire of waters / with night behind them / in the east,” the darkness overtakes them; the night in the east expands westward and “they would wake not remembering.” Meanwhile the river of history “is bearing off its empty flower again,” inexorably carrying away to the dim past any hope of a glimpse of the wilderness, or of the native who is forever retreating West, forever engulfed in the descending eastern night before he can be apprehended (CL 46).

Moving further westward in his imagination, Merwin looks at “The Trail into Kansas”; he tries to merge with the westering settlers to get a glimpse of the virgin land, but “The early wagons left no sign.” He does find a “line pressed in the grass we were here” (wagon wheel ruts tracing the American journey), and he begins to sense what it was like to enter the new land. The journey is tortuous, but the settlers hoped that they would “heal / there,” in the West, land of hope. As they journey, they sense they are watched, but their movement is inexorable, and they have no fear; the natives are no threat now, for in Turner-and-Whitman-like progression, they continually vanish as the frontier pushes westward: “we know we are / watched but there is no danger / nothing that lives waits for us / nothing is eternal.” (Their confident words, ironically, include them; they, too, as we have seen in “The Last One,” will vanish in an equally inexorable anti-progression.) These Americans are immigrants—“guided from scattered wombs”—who go about “choosing choosing / which foot to put down.” With no affection for the land or the natives they displace, they dig in: / “we are like wells moving / over the prairie / a blindness a hollow cold source / will any be happy to see us / in the new home.” No one, of course, will be there to meet or greet them; the natives will helplessly disappear as the white Americans approach. Merwin, in his merger with the frontier settler, then, senses the Indian watching, but still cannot find him, see him (CL 47).

In “Western Country,” Merwin senses “the exiles,” the natives moving west in hope they can live, not realizing that the ultimate West they head for is death: “I watch the exiles / their stride / stayed by their antique faith that no one / can die in exile / when all that is true is that death is not exile.” The Indian has appeared, but only to disappear; Merwin finds no regeneration in his descent to the past; the Indian rises only to vanish, quickly, again. Merwin's chilled, exhausted voice rises in anger as he watches the dispossession: “and I know what moves the long / files stretching into the mountains,” he says; “my countrymen are more cruel than their stars” (CL 48). They follow vague goals, hopes, “each man with his gun,” as they take over the Western Country. In “The Removal,” dedicated “to the endless tribe,” Merwin sees the natives as “The Homeless”; they are “the echoes [that] move in files [one step ahead of the “long files” of the white settlers] / their faces have been lost / … tongues from lost languages” (CL 60). And the American destroys not just the native, but the native's mother, the land itself; they ravage the wilderness She that had supported the Indian: “the tree has been cut / on which we were leaves.” There are now only remnants; Merwin finds “A Survivor” who carries on the old ways on a reservation, but he is just a vestige: “the old speech / is still in its country / dead” (CL 61). The white man takes all the fertile land: “they leave us the empty roads” (CL 58). Merwin, like Gary Snyder,²⁴ begins to sense the ghost of the Indian haunting the memory of the white man: “We move among them / doubly invisible.” But Merwin finds no hope of actually resurrecting those ghosts: “when we have gone they say we are with them forever” (CL 58). Toward the end of this sequence, as in this poem, Merwin's voice has merged with the Indian; again like Snyder, he speaks (“we”) from the Indian's perspective. But unlike Snyder's native perspective, Merwin's voice comes to us faintly, from a distant, irretrievable past, not from an angry present.

America is firmly in control of the continent now: “the president of lies quotes the voice / of God / … the president of loyalty recommends / blindness to the blind.” And the continental network of American communication says nothing of worth: “silence the messenger runs through the vast lands / with a black mouth / open” (CL 57). America talks (boastfully) only of itself, ignoring the “deaths” that “are to be heard / at any moment” in “our language” (CL 56): “there is only one subject / but he is repeated / tirelessly” (CL 57). Andrew Jackson, who supported and directed the vast removal of the Indians to the Far West in the 1830's, is no doubt one of the “presidents of lies,” deceiving and tricking the Indians as they are forced to migrate into hardship. So, in “Homeland,” Merwin offers an Indian-like curse on Jackson as the native homeland is seen divided and desecrated by the white man's boundaries and sense of property: “all the barbed wire of the west / in its veins.” And, finally (in an imagistic revenge of nature on the white man/vampire who has sucked the vitality from the land), “the sun goes down / driving a stake through the black heart of Andrew Jackson” (CL 50). Merwin portrays some of Jackson's work in “The Crossing of the Removed,” as Indians cross the Mississippi River to their barren new homes (Merwin here may be recalling the Choctaw migration from Mississippi [1831] where many natives died in freezing weather crossing over to Arkansas): as they cross, they vanish: “At the bottom of the river / black ribbons cross under / … on the far side the ribbons come out invisible” (CL 61).

John Wesley Powell, the one-armed explorer, becomes the emblem for Merwin of the white man's movement into the wilderness. Powell, a geologist and geographer, led the Geologic Survey (1881-94) that mapped out the West, imposed American lines upon the wilderness; it was while he was issuing these maps that Frederick Jackson Turner announced the closing of the frontier, the end of wilderness. All America, suggests Merwin, was a one-armed explorer: “The one-armed explorer / could touch only half of the country. …” His other arm—the missing one—was “his scout” that reached into the wilderness but “sent back no message / from where it had reached / with no lines in its palm.” Like the lines on Powell's many maps, the hand he kept on the eastern side of the frontier was familiar, known, lined, visible. But no white man knew the western side of the frontier; like an invisible hand, it was unlined, unmapped, unknown, unseen. So, as Powell “groped on / for the virgin land,” he could never find it; like his missing hand, he sensed it was there, but when he reached for it, he found only his real hand again; in seeking the virgin land, he only “found where it had been” (CL 49). He touched the wilderness only to have it disappear, to have it become known at the very touch, to be fused to the American creation. The “virgin half,” the half Powell could never really touch, could be sensed only with the missing hand, the hand of the imagination. So Merwin, in this sequence, tries to touch the virgin land, lost now in time and space, with the “missing hand” of his imagination, for no actual, real descent is possible. But as he moves the imagined hand West into the past, he at first can find only “the dead guarding the invisible / each presenting his message / I know nothing / learn of me” (CL 51). The natives beckon him, but, dead, they can offer no help, no real knowledge; their extinction guards the invisible wilderness that Merwin cannot touch.

Only in “Huckleberry Woman” does Merwin finally fully merge, descend and touch the She with invisible hands. She (a native woman) emerges from the land itself (she cannot emerge from a sense of history, for he, like most Americans, was not taught the Indians's history), and the ground she emerges from is America before it was owned, before the white man imposed property upon it:

Foreign voice woman
of unnamed origins nothing
to do with what I was taught
at night when it was nobody's
you climbed the mountain in back of the house

As day comes, the Indian woman again merges with the land, descends and fades: “before day you put on / the bent back like a hill.” But at night, in imaginative descents, she carries the poet deep down into the continental palimpsest; she unlocks “the presence / of the unlighted river / under the mountains” and the poet is united with her for a moment, but is in pain at the realization of the vast loss she represents, the pain of the immeasurable and bloody distance between her past and the poet's present:

and I am borne with you on its
black stream
oh loss loss the grieving
feels its way upward
through daggers of stone

But at least, for a moment, they are united: “we share it. …” (CL 52). And at this point Merwin crosses the frontier; his attempted mergers with American explorers and settlers cease, and he assumes the perspective of the native, becomes “we” with them, but it is a fading perspective; he is grasping for the Indian as he slips from him and disappears, inexorably. Thus the sequence ends with another Indian woman, a widow, captured by the whites; she is stripped of her land and her compatriots; she is mingled in marriage with the white man so that “everywhere I leave / one white footprint.” And from here, the procession moves quickly to its inevitable end: “at last they are gone / filing on in vacant rooms” (CL 62).

Merwin's descent ends here; the vacant rooms of the natives' death are vacant rooms in himself, too, as the Indian disappears from his imagination and he returns to the present. Unlike Gary Snyder in Turtle Island, Merwin does not return to the present replenished with the native ways: he returns only with an affirmation of American destructiveness, of man's stupidity and inhumanity, and of an irreplaceable emptiness lying beneath this continent. Having re-taken the Whitmanesque American journey, having relived the creation of the country via the medium of poetry, Merwin finds the American creation to be not a creation at all, but a destruction, an imposed obliteration that he believes will be repaid in kind. The emptiness he finds in himself is the emptiness he finds at the heart of American history; it is the same emptiness that his poems embody, as his words struggle to fill space, short epitaphs scratched on the encroaching void.

Notes

1. Frank MacShane, “A Portrait of W. S. Merwin,” Shenandoah, XXI (Winter, 1970), 7.

2. The American sequence includes the poems in The Carrier of Ladders (New York: Atheneum, 1970) from “The Approaches” through “The Removal” (pp. 42-62). I identify this sequence on the basis of a conversation I had with W. S. Merwin in Rochester, New York, in 1974; he confirmed that the sequence was conceived and written as a distinct entity while he was living in France; he was, he said, attempting to come to grips with the American past, and the word he found for that past was “obliteration.” (Further references to The Carrier of Ladders will be followed by “CL” and the page number.)

3. Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley, eds., Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass (New York: New York University Press, 1965), p. 184.

4. Edwin Haviland Miller, ed., Walt Whitman: The Correspondence (New York: New York University Press, 1961-69), II, 282.

5. Blodgett, Leaves, pp. 206-210.

6. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Annual Report of the American Historical for the Year 1893, 199-227. See especially pp. 209-210.

7. W. S. Merwin, The Lice (New York: Atheneum, 1971), p. 6. (Future references to The Lice will be followed by “L” and the page number.)

8. Blodgett, Leaves, p. 344.

9. Sandra McPherson, “Saying No,” Iowa Review, 4 (Summer, 1973), 84.

10. Anthony Libby, “W. S. Merwin and the Nothing That Is,” Contemporary Literature, 16 (Winter, 1975), 20.

11. See for example “Facing West from California's Shores,” in Blodgett, Leaves, pp. 110-111.

12. Harvey Gross, “The Writing on the Void: The Poetry of W. S. Merwin,” Iowa Review, I (Summer, 1970), 103.

13. Jarold Ramsey, “The Continuities of W. S. Merwin,” Massachusetts Review, 14 (Summer, 1973), 578. Ramsey also suggests (p. 577) that the poem is inspired by a South American Indian myth that Merwin translated. See “The Creation of the Moon,” in W. S. Merwin, Selected Translations: 1948-1968 (New York: Antheneum, 1975), pp. 28-30.

14. Turner, p. 200.

15. Libby, pp. 37-38.

16. Ibid., p. 38.

17. See Theodore Roethke, The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke (Garden City: Doubleday & Co., 1966), pp. 187-205.

18. Blodgett, Leaves, p. 88.

19. Ibid., p. 89.

20. Ibid., p. 111.

21. Merwin's [Asian Figures] (New York: Atheneum, 1975), is a kind of journey to the Far East, but he brings back only stark, stripped proverbs from Asian cultures in this book of translations.

22. Some of the more obvious examples include William Carlos Williams' In the American Grain (New York: New Directions, 1956), Hart Crane's The Bridge (In Brom Weber, ed., The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane [Garden City: Anchor, 1966]), Theodore Roethke's “North American Sequence” (cited earlier), and Gary Snyder's Turtle Island (New York: New Directions, 1974). In all of these works, the poet descends to a vision of the wilderness continent, America before the white man was here.

23. Weber, ed., Crane, p. 105.

24. See Snyder's Earth House Hold (New York: New Directions, 1969), especially pp. 110-122.