William S. Merwin was born in New York City in 1927 and thereafter lived in Union City, New Jersey, and in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He was graduated from Princeton in 1948 and studied romance languages in the Princeton Graduate School for a time. Between 1949 and 1951 he worked as a tutor in France, Portugal, and Majorca. His first volume of verse, A Mask for Janus, was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1952 and was followed in 1954 by The Dancing Bears, which won him the Kenyon Review Fellowship for poetry. His third volume, Green with Beasts (1956), was selected by the British Poetry Book Society. Previously he had written translations for the BBC Third Programme, and in January, 1956, his unpublished verse play, Darkling Child, was produced in the London Arts Theatre. It was written in collaboration with his second wife, Dido Milroy. In 1956 he received grants for playwriting from both the Rockefeller Foundation and the Arts Council of Great Britain and was playwright-in-residence at the Poets' Theatre, Cambridge, Mass. In 1957 he was awarded a grant by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has published two other volumes of verse, The Drunk in the Furnace (1960) and Moving Target (1963). He has published volumes of translation from Latin, Spanish, Portuguese and French. He and his wife live in New York and on their farm near Lot, France.

—ed.

While yet an undergraduate, W. S. Merwin set out to become a poet, and in the fifteen years since his graduation he has amply proven his title. His credentials are the ten volumes of verse and verse translation that bear his name. He has become a professional poet in the tradition of Robert Graves: non-academic, insistent that the muse should bear the responsibility for daily sustenance and be accounted a respectable, upstanding member of society. His first volume, A Mask for Janus, established him as a poet who could write any kind of poem he wanted. The formal perfection of the ballads, songs, and sestinas make it one of the most finely wrought volumes of verse by a young American. Each succeeding volume has shown a new facet of his craft. Moving Target, his latest, is no exception. It is a radical departure both in form and content, a new voice saying new things. One would not have predicted this development on the basis of the earlier volumes, but poets have a way of evading predictions. For this reader, Moving Target brings Merwin closer to that subject he has always been seeking and has not yet found. To imply that the early poems in some way fail would be unfair, but one is conscious during the enchantment of some lack, some reality that has escaped the words in their formal perfection.

Merwin, too, I think, is aware of this absence of being where being might be.

Coming late, as always,
I try to remember what I almost heard.
The light avoids my eye.
How many times have I heard the locks close
And the lark take the keys
And hang them in heaven.

(“The Poem”)¹

After the first volume he is continuously searching for a subject to sustain his verbal talents, to bridge the gap between the personal perception and the verbal fact. This often leads him to an introspective, self-contemplating revery on the subject of poetry (“Hermione on Simulacra,” “On the Subject of Poetry,” “Learning a Dead Language”). Merwin is very much concerned with the significance and meaning of his craft. I suppose the apotheosis of this side of his poetry is the splendid tour de force, “The Annunciation,” where the Word become Flesh becomes the subject of meditation by the Virgin.

Most often, however, he turns to the mythic journey, not to tell an heroic narrative (although this leaning without doubt led him to translate the Cid, Lazarillo de Tormes, and Song of Roland) but to provide a frame for his perceptions. It seems to me significant that the first poem in each volume is some kind of journey poem.

Both these themes are found in his longest poem, “East of the Sun and West of the Moon.” Here the old fairy-tale variant on the Cupid and Psyche story is used to distance the poet's concern with his craft. The tone is highly sophisticated, but the sophistication never gets in the way of the charm of narrative or the power of the language. It begins,

Say the year is the year of the phoenix.
Ordinary sun and common moon,
Turn as they may, are too mysterious
Unless such as are neither sun nor moon
Assume their masks and orbits and evolve
Neither a solar nor a lunar story
But a tale that might be human. What is a man
That a man may recognize, unless the inhuman
Sun and moon, wearing the masks of a man,
Weave before him such a tale as he
—Finding his own face in the strange story—
Mistakes by metaphor and calls his own,
Smiling, as on a familiar mystery?
The moon was thin as a poor man's daughter
At the end of autumn. A white bear came walking
On a Thursday evening at the end of autumn,
Knocked at a poor man's door in a deep wood,
And, “Charity,” when the man came he said,
“And the thin hand of a girl have brought me here.
Winter will come, and the vixen wind,” he said,
“And what have you but too many mouths to feed,
Oh what have you but a coat like zither-strings
To ward that fury from your family?
But I though wintry shall be bountiful
Of furs and banquets, coins like summer days,
Grant me but the hand of your youngest daughter.”

The story ends with the poor bride's realization.

“All metaphor,” she said, “is magic. Let
Me be diverted in a turning lantern,
Let me in that variety be real.
But let the story be an improvisation
Continually, and through all repetition
Differ a little from myself, as though
Mistaken; and I a lady with foreign ways
To sing therein to my own hair.”
Say the year is the year of the phoenix.
Now, even now, over the rock hill
The tropical, the lucid moon, turning
Her mortal guises in the eye of a man,
Creates the image in which the world is.

Had Merwin's poetry stopped at this stage of development, he would have achieved a high degree of poetry, but the story goes on. Instead of continuing to anchor his perceptions on myth already created, on forms already known, he has taken stock of his perceptions, found them not wanting, and is able to use them to make his poems come into being. I believe that his new note starts with the three beautiful love poems that end The Dancing Bears. It would be difficult to find many modern love poems to equal them. For vitality of language one would have to go to Hart Crane's Voyages, and for directness of feeling back all the way to Spenser's Epithalamion, whose envoi I think Merwin has in mind when he concludes his first “Canso.”

I have pronounced you the single luminary,
And we are housed in an embrace of whiteness,
But shadows would threaten and the dark descend
In all the rooms where we believe. Oh love,
Believe this candor indivisible,
That I, perfected in your love, may be,
Against all dissolution sovereign,
Endlessly your litany and mirror,
About your neck the amulet and song.

This new assertion of the personal over the mythic has brought him new subjects, new insights. I am thinking of the Frost-like “Tobacco,” “Burning the Cat,” “Dog Dreaming,” and “After the Flood” in Green with Beasts and those wonderful, sometimes whimsical, sometimes macabre poems about his relatives in The Drunk in the Furnace.

The poems in Moving Target on the surface look like a return to the mythic, a movement away from the personal wrought into verse. This seems to me erroneous. There is a new note of cynicism and disappointment in these poems, a tone that could arise only from deep involvement.

                                                                                In the future there will be
No more migration, only travel,
No more exile, only distances.

(“Route with No Number”)

The mythic journey is now an endless sojourn without purpose. Symptomatically the forms so carefully fashioned in the earlier poems have become looser, less traditional.

                              This stone that is
not here and bears no writing commemorates
          the emptiness at the end of
history listen you without vision you can still
                              hear it there is
          nothing it is the voice with the praises
that never changed that called to the unsatisfied
                    as long as there was
                                        time
whatever it could have said of you is already forgotten

(“For the Grave of Posterity”)²

The clue to this new style lies, I think, in a poem recently published but not included in the volume. It is called “Tribute” and was published in The Nation for December 23, 1961. It is a poem in the new style and has along the margins of the page as gloss excerpts from a newspaper account of a child born eyeless after its mother had visited a Soviet atomic center. Merwin's latest poems are a reflection of his deep concern over the problems of totalitarianism, disarmament, and scientific threats to humanity. In the last year he has written three articles for The Nation on Agostinho Neto, the Portuguese poet imprisoned by Salazar, on the Quaker protest at the White House, and on the voyage of the Everyman (February 24, 1962; June 16, 1962; December 29, 1962). These articles explain the tone of these latest poems and prove to me that he is not returning to the mythic but painting the dead landscape of our present despair. He is not writing propaganda, and so the poems do not specify the direct affronts to human dignity. Nevertheless they are powerful protests in poetry. The poem “My Friends” at first reading appears flat until the ear has caught the rhythms of ecstatic despair.

My friends with nothing leave it behind
In a box
My friends without keys go out from the jails it is night
They take the same road they miss
Each other they invent the same banner in the dark
They ask their way only of sentries too proud to breathe
At dawn the stars on their flag will vanish
The water will turn up their footprints and the day will rise
Like a monument to my
Friends the forgotten

This poem and many others in Moving Target are too long to quote here, but they all voice the new tone, the new rhythms, and the new tortured images of Merwin's protest. Many will object to the loosening of form and intensification of tone in these poems. I feel that they are a further step in his search for a subject. In writing of Agostinho Neto Merwin says:

Where injustice prevails (and where does it not?) a poet endowed with the form of conscience I am speaking about has no choice but to name the wrong as truthfully as he can, and to try to indicate the claims of justice in terms of the victims he lives among. The better he does these things the more he may have to pay for doing them. He may lose his financial security, if he has any. Or his health, his comfort, the presence of those he loves, his liberty. Or his life, of course. Worst, he may lose, in the process, the faith which led him to the decision, and then have to suffer for the decision just the same.

Merwin might almost be writing about himself, but one may hope that the severities of society will not silence him nor keep him from that search which has already added so much of value to the world of poetry.

Notes

1. © 1960, 1962, 1963 by W. S. Merwin. Reprinted from his volume The Moving Target by permission of Atheneum Publishers.

2. © 1960, 1962, 1963 by W. S. Merwin. Reprinted from his volume The Moving Target by permission of Atheneum Publishers.