In discussions of the later poetry of W. S. Merwin, there seems to be critical agreement on two points: 1. its obscurity; 2. its refusal to yield its meaning in paraphrase. Most criticism of Merwin has therefore avoided detailed analysis of his difficult poems, contenting itself with more general approaches to the work as a whole, since Merwin's later work would appear to fit Archibald MacLeish's formula (which works particularly well for bad poetry): “A poem should not mean / But be.”

It is the thesis of this essay, however, that Merwin's best later work not only is but means; that though the poems may not yield to paraphrase (what poems do?) they profit from a line by line analysis; that Merwin, while positing a higher faculty than man's rational ability, nevertheless writes poetry that can be surprisingly rational.

At least part of our difficulty in understanding Merwin's later work arises from its dependence on unfamiliar traditions. Like medieval man he places faith before reason, but finds no real conflict between the two. Like medieval man he does not have to work his way toward mysticism; his intense spiritual life is simply one of the facts of existence. And like medieval man he sees both nature and man in general rather than natural detail. Most significantly, like medieval man he sees life as a moral journey.

Almost every poem in Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment (Atheneum, 1973), for example, concerns travel. A glance at the titles reveals many poems about movement: “The Distances,” “Looking Back,” “Under the Migrants,” “On Each Journey,” “Beyond You,” “The Current,” “The Wharf,” “The Chase,” “Nomad Songs,” “Horses,” “Ship,” “By the Cloud Path,” “The Search,” and “Travelling.” Most of these journeys involve a search, usually a search for a meaningful life in a world apparently devoid of meaning.

The journey theme crops up in several surprising contexts. In “Surf-Casting” one casts for the great Foot, a magical means of transportation to a better world:

if only it will strike
and you can bring it to shore
in two strides it will take you
to the emperor's palace
stamp stamp the gates will open
he will present you with half of his kingdom
and his only daughter
and the next night you will come back
to fish for the Hand

To fish for the Hand! What a surprisingly logical ending to the poem, for even when a man possesses half the kingdom and the king's daughter his quest continues. The alternative? Stagnation, a partial life—for contemporary man exists in fragments. In “The American Scholar” Emerson noted that the idea of a Whole Man had been lost when society became too specialized:

The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about like so many walking monsters—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.

Merwin's journey becomes a search for this lost vision of unity, a journey of discovery, a journey toward death. Just as the moral qualities of objects along the medieval road depended upon whether they helped or hindered the journey, Merwin's objects assume moral qualities for the same reason. Even abstractions, frequently personified, fit this moral framework.

But the modern journey is not always in the same direction. At times it goes into the future, at times into the past. Sometimes, as in “The Wharf” (p. 38), the poem flows in both directions—first the future, then the past, then both together as the future becomes the past. Our graves sail off into the future without us; we arrive too late for them and find the harbor empty. Then suddenly the poem reverses direction.

but our gravestones are blowing
like clouds backward
through time to find us
they sail over us through us
back to lives that waited
for us
and we never knew

From some place in the future our gravestones go backward in time to find us, and almost before we can adjust to the change of direction, they go through us because we have already become ghosts. Suddenly the gravestones are real and we are not. At the end of the poem lives we have neglected mourn at our graves.

Not only people take journeys in Merwin's work; objects, even abstractions, join the search. At times they seem like the supposedly-chance companions of a fairy tale who go along because they have nothing better to do and turn out to be absolutely indispensable to the hero. In “Bread,” for example, people travel inside bread, which in turn takes them into its own past where they “find themselves alone / before a wheat field / raising its radiance to the moon.” They arrive at the source of life.

Because Merwin's journey concerns a vision, we find it often presented in visual terms. The eye is of such vital importance that it often travels by itself, another example of fragmented modern man. In “A Purgatory” (p. 46) it rises from its grave to look at its past life and finds that life devoid of meaning.

once more the eye
reveals the empty river
feathers on all the paths
the despairing fields
the house in which every word
faces a wall

The result is naturally another journey.

and once more it climbs
trying to cast again
the light in which that landscape
was a prospect of heaven

But it cannot recapture man's medieval sense of purpose.

everywhere
the vision has just passed out of sight
like the shadows sinking
into the waking stones
each shadow with a dream in its arms
each shadow with the same
dream in its arms

The poem, however, bears the title “A Purgatory” (note that there are others), not “A Hell.” Although the eye must suffer, eons perhaps, Merwin believes it will ultimately be rewarded, just as medieval man believed the souls in purgatory would eventually attain heaven. The suffering has purpose.

and the eye must burn again and again
through each of its lost moments
until it sees

Moreover, these poetic journeys may not only be symbolic journeys in time but actual travels in space. More specifically, they may refer to Merwin's trips to and from the United States. Such a poem as “Whenever I Go There” (The Lice, Atheneum, 1967, p. 24) becomes quite readily understandable in this context.

Whenever I go there everything is changed
The stamps on the bandages the titles
Of the professors of water
The portrait of Glare the reasons for
The white mourning

Of course the first line is ironic. The stamps on the bandages have changed, not the bandages themselves. And the professors still thrive under different titles. The portrait of Glare has changed, but Glare still wields power. (One thinks of presidential portraits as well as neon advertisements.) And people still mourn under the guise of rejoicing (“peace with honor”), though the official reasons have changed.

Merwin contrasts the glorious ideal of the American dream with American actions in Vietnam. Few poets have written so many moving poems of protest that have been so studiously ignored: “Under the Migrants,” “For the Asians Dying,” “Unfinished Book of Kings,” “The Last One,” “Bread at Midnight,” “Caesar,” “The Mourner,” “The Gods”—to name only some from The Lice. In “Old Flag” (Writings, p. 23) he laments that he wants to write of joy but is stopped by a man called Old Flag who appears in the doorway. (Doors, where journeys start and end, assume special importance in Merwin's work.) The man may well stand for chauvinism, even patriotism, but perhaps the most natural explanation is that he represents America itself. The poet wishes to speak of “the sweet light / on a grassy shore,” but he cannot:

he is there
and my words have never forgotten the bitter
taste of his hands
the smell of grief in the hollow sleeves
the sadness
his shoes
and they run to him laughing
as though he had been away
they dance at his feet as though
before a throne

In this context “The Finding of Reasons” (The Lice, p. 74) becomes not a poem against rationality, as one might carelessly assume from the title, but, in one reading at least, a poem against the specious reasoning that “justified” the role of the United States in Southeast Asia. It begins:

Every memory is abandoned
As waves leave their shapes
The houses stand in tears as the sun rises

And it ends:

To listen to the announcements you would think
The triumph
Were ours
As the string of the great kite Sapiens
Cuts our palms
Along predestined places
Leaving us
Leaving
While we find reasons

The kite departs, leaving us behind “to explain.” And how fitting that its name is given in a foreign language, for the “reasons” clearly have nothing to do with wisdom.

There is, then, little arbitrary about the philosophical basis of Merwin's later poems, and this philosophy finds its expression time and again in the metaphor of life as a moral journey, a metaphor quite helpful in detailed analysis of individual works.

One of Merwin's most puzzling poems is “The Man Who Writes Ants” (The Moving Target, Atheneum, 1963, p. 82).

Their eggs named for his eyes I suppose
Their eggs his tears
His memory
                              Into
The ground into the walls over the sills
At each cross road
He has gone
With his days he has gone ahead
                              Called by what trumpet
His words on the signs
His tears at their feet
                              Growing wings
I know him from tunnels by side roads
I know him
Not his face if he has one
I know him by his writings I am
Tempted to draw him
As I see him
Sandals stride flag on his shoulder ship on it signalling
Mask on the back of his head
Blind
Called
By what trumpet
He leaves my eyes he climbs my graves
I pass the names
He is not followed I am not following him no
Today the day of the water
With ink for my remote purpose with my pockets full of black
With no one in sight
I am walking in silence I am walking in silence I am walking
In single file listening for a trumpet

Keith Gunderson in Kayak #3 asks who is the man who writes ants and what precisely is being said about him. Then he withdraws the questions. “Unfortunately, these two questions are the wrong questions to ask. They are based on the assumption that older sets of criteria are relevant here; and it is simply critical dogma to suppose that unless they can be clearly answered, the poem about which they are asked is deficient in clarity.”

But these are precisely the questions one must ask to understand the poem.

Who is the man who writes ants? First of all, there are ambiguities in the title. The man could write to ants; he could write about them; or, considering Merwin's reluctance to limit the interpretation of his words by italics or punctuation, he could be writing the word ants. Strangely enough, whichever interpretation the reader chooses (and I choose all three), the next two lines make sense, for the writer has made his mark. He has performed the first and most important function of a creator, that of truly naming things, and in so doing he has left his name behind as a memorial. In fact, he has apparently written ants so well that his existence and theirs have become irrevocably intertwined. His memory pervades their existence. (The ants could be actual insects, but picturing men in society as ants is certainly nothing novel.)

Having done this one thing well, the writer has gone. Has gone? How then do we explain the present tense in the title of the poem? The question almost answers itself: the writer has done his task so well that what he has written truly lives, so that the poet speaks of the work in the present tense. The poet, travelling the same road, sees signs of the writer's passage in the words he has left and in the writer's tears, which are being transformed (“growing wings”—note the present tense).

In fact the poet feels he knows the writer so well he is tempted to sketch him, though he has never seen his face.

Sandals stride flag on his shoulder ship on it signalling
Mask on the back of his head
Blind

The sandals and flag with a ship are certainly appropriate to the journey upon which the writer has embarked and which the poet is following in his footsteps. Perhaps the flag denotes no particular country but travel itself, always central in Merwin's work. The mask on the back of the head makes it appear the writer is looking in one direction (where he has been) instead of the way he is actually looking (where he is going). Blind refers of course to the mask, but it can also refer to the writer himself who may not only have been blind to certain things but physically blind as Homer was said to be, physically blind like the canaries that sing the sweetest.

The spacing of the poet's question “Called // By what trumpet” gives the impression of the poet listening intently even as he asks. The answer comes not in sound but in movement: “He leaves my eyes he climbs my graves.” Of course the line makes literal sense if the writer is passing out of the poet's vision and the poet loses him in the distance. The poet has not seen his face, but he knows the writer from his work and has perhaps seen his back on occasion. He has, after all, been tempted to draw him “As I see him.” But the writer may also be leaving him eyes with which to see the road ahead, eyes that become, or perhaps always were, the poet's own. Yet the eyes may at one time have belonged to the writer who leaves them for the poet—one reason he is blind. And perhaps ants named their posterity for his eyes because he has done the same for them, given them guides on their journeys.

The poet insists he is not following the man who writes ants, though perhaps he protests a bit too strongly and we find Merwin mocking himself at this point. The poet may have followed the writer's footsteps because they are both searching for the same thing, following the same sound, though the poet has not yet heard it distinctly. Note how carefully he walks, how he insists on silence. The idea of one person walking in single file may be somewhat humorous, but it also connotes extreme care. The phrase suggests a line of writers invisible to each other travelling the same road. Perhaps the line is historical and the writer first wrote ants back when man was evolving language. The writer has gone before the poet, others will come after. The poet waits for his “remote purpose,” the blackness of his pockets suggesting both death and ink. And he goes on.

“Night of the Shirts” (The Carrier of Ladders, Atheneum, 1970, p. 65) had also been cited as an irrational poem.

Oh pile of white shirts who is coming
to breathe in your shapes to carry your numbers
to appear
what hearts
are moving toward their garments here
their days
what troubles beating between arms
you look upward through
each other saying nothing has happened
and it has gone away and is sleeping
having told the same story
and we exist from within
eyes of the gods
you lie on your backs
and the wounds are not made
the blood has not heard
the boat has not turned to stone
and the dark wires to the bulb
are full of the voice of the unborn

In an essay in American Poetry Since 1960 (Carcanet, 1973), James Atlas asks several pertinent questions about the poem—then throws up his hands and assumes they have no answers.

What is the purpose of asking all these questions? Is the line “to appear” essential, or just a repetition of the previous line? What motivates the metonymous “heart”? Where is “here”? How does “their days” relate to the stanza? What is “it”? What is “the same story”? How does it happen that “we exist from within / eyes of the gods”? What are “the wounds,” what “the blood”? Where does “the boat” enter in, to what does it refer? What suggests that it should have “turned to stone”? The poem has no meaning, not even a style; it sounds like a poor translation.

I would hesitate to limit the poem by insisting on the purpose of the questions, but certainly one important point is that they are addressed to the shirts. The poet sets up a dichotomy between the shirts and the men who will come to wear them. Of course the shirts cannot answer the poet vocally, but they give an answer of sorts by simply being what they are, white garments lying in a shop window at night. They form an excellent contrast to the hectic lives of their owners, and so the dichotomy between shirts and men extends to a dichotomy between night and day, the world of the imagination and the business world. The white shirts at night have something ghostly about them; yet it is the men who “appear,” as if somehow they were apparitions. Hearts may be metonymous, but the poet also refers to literal, physical hearts which will beat inside the shirts. Their days has at least two meanings: days as opposed to nights, and days as the span of life allotted to the men. It is an appositive of garments. Here refers to the shop where the men's shirts are being laundered. How ironic that instead of a voyage of discovery the men move toward the shop to claim pieces of cloth, tokens of their membership in an essentially meaningless civilization. The stanza ends by associating troubles with the coming of day and the donning of shirts.

In the second stanza the poet speaks again to the shirts. Their repose contrasts with the troubles at the end of stanza one. The shirts say “nothing has happened / and it [nothing] has gone away and is sleeping / having told the same story”—that nothing has happened. There is peace. The phrase “we exist from within / eyes of the gods” can be read at least two ways. (1) The shirts are still speaking and state that they exist not because men come to breathe life into them but because they themselves possess an inner life; they are the eyes of the gods. (2) The shirts have their existence within the eyes of mysterious and infinite beings we cannot hope to comprehend. Either way the statement stresses the peace and calm of the shirts in contrast to the troubles of men.

The third stanza presents an inverted world, very appropriate for a poem about night. The shirts are on their backs (instead of ours), and because they and we repose the violence of civilization has not yet occurred. No one is wounded or angry. The journey, always so important in Merwin's poems, has not yet met with disaster; the boat has not yet sunk. (The stone boat may also refer to boats found in certain ancient burial vaults to ferry the dead to the other world.) And the “dark wires to the bulb” certainly refers to the electricity that gives the poet light by which to view the shirts. He hears in its hum all that will happen when daylight comes, the violence that marks the life of contemporary man.

Merwin's later work may not always be this logical or yield a line by line explication, but we do an injustice to a fine poet if we merely let his words float in our heads like music without attempting to understand their specific meanings. If we seek to interpret his work solely in terms of a private personal mysticism or the traditions of nihilism and contemporary abstract art, we shall miss a great deal of what the poet says. For he belongs in spirit not to the artists of the twentieth century whose names keep cash registers humming, but rather to the anonymous craftsmen of the Middle Ages, artists whose vision was so fixed on the spiritual world and our journey thither that instead of records of their personalities they left universal signs of spiritual values, like the anonymous writer of ants in Merwin's poem.

In a time when many of his contemporaries offer obscure mythology, linguistic manipulations, and psychoanalysis, he offers a quite traditional vision. Poet and reader gain knowledge through experience, particularly travel. Necessary pilgrimages of discovery permeate his work. These journeys, whether in space or time—often in both—lead to a remote period or place which affords a perspective on the present, a vantage point from which to make moral judgments on our lives.