by Marion K. Stocking
Beloit Poetry Journal, Summer 2006
"for such a journey"
It is clear why Merwin titled this new collection Migration. As in many great narratives, from Homer, Dante, and Chaucer, to traditional tales and ballads, to early explorers' narratives that Merwin feasted on, the journey provides the structure for much of his poetry. 
I can read the early poem "The Station" as an ironic epigraph to his lifework: "No path went on" for the wayfarers at the station, "but only the still country / Unfolding as far as we could see." Each traveler into this uncharted territory has visualized a different end to his exodus, yet, come morning, only a few, "not, to appearances, the bravest / Or best suited for such a journey, / At first light would get up and go on." "Teachers" expresses a dark night of the soul in which "what I live for I can seldom believe in / who I love I cannot go to / what I hope is always divided," yet "toward morning I dream of the first words / of books of voyages / sure tellings that did not start by justifying // yet at one time it seems / had taught me."
Similarly, in "Beginning," the "king of the black cranes" summons his flock: "it is a long way / to the first / anything / come even so / we will start / bring your nights with you." By 1999, "Shore Birds" begins,
While I think of them they are growing rare
after the distances they have followed
all the way to the end for the first time
tracing a memory they did not have
until they set out to remember it.
This late work combines the poet's feeling for the evolutionary force that sends birds on their innate journeys with his intimation that this mysterious inheritance could disappear forever with its species. I read Migration as more than the sum of its parts – as indeed one long journey narrative, a reflection of the poet's own peregrinations into the unknown. I think of Machado's "Caminante, no hay camino. / Se hace camino al andar" ("Wayfarer, there is no way. / You make a way as you go" (from "Proverbs and Songs").
"climbing out of myself"
In Merwin's early books, the I, we, you, they rarely refer to anyone specific. While the poet is still seeking his identity, the general I or we includes the rest of us. It isn't until The Lice (1967) that we watch the speaker lower the mask, first in "For the Anniversary of My Death": "Every year without knowing it I have passed the day / When the last fires will wave to me / And the silence will set out / Tireless traveler / Like the beam of a lightless star." Merwin then speaks even more personally:
It sounds unconvincing to say When I was young
Though I have long wondered what it would be like
To be me now
As far from myself as ever
("In the Winter of My Thirty-eighth Year")
In "When You Go Away" he continues with a memorable image for the inadequacy of the poet to the earlier poems when, in the night, he remembers
that I am falling
That I am the reason
And that my words are the garment of what I shall never be
Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy.
A decade later, in "A Contemporary," he imagines what it would be like to be one blade of grass, with "no name and no fear," who would "turn naturally to the light / know how to spend the day and night / climbing out of myself / all my life."
In the late 1970s Merwin expands this personal dimension. He found a true home in Hawaii, married Paula in 1983, and, in "The First Year," states simply, "When the words had all been used / for other things / we saw the first day begin." In the significantly titled The Opening of the Hand (1983), with his parents dead, the poet is able to write memorably about his relationship with them. Look especially at the haunting story of "The Houses," an extended metaphor, as I read it, of the father's inability to see what his son sees. Then balance it with the painfully courageous "Yesterday," in which Merwin himself and an imagined alter ego talk quietly about his failure as a son. These, with others in this volume, are brave and amazing transformations of autobiographical material into impersonal narrative art.
When the poet has himself wonderfully arrived with his good companion in his good place, some of the ironies of the quest romance remain. Even when he has come to a way station, this poet cannot end the journey; he has to go on. Merwin concludes "Waves in August" with an emblem for "such a journey" – his memory of a boat he had hidden as a youth, only to come back and discover that someone had taken it and left to him
instead the sound of the water
with its whisper of vertigo
terror reassurance an old
old sadness it would seem we knew
enough always about parting
but we have to go on learning
as long as there is anything.
"so short a time"
If, as Donald Sutherland has asserted, classic is concerned with being, space, permanence, and the one; romantic with becoming, time, change, and the many; and baroque with the contradictions and tension between these, Merwin's lifework appears as an evolving journey, from the baroque tension of the early poems toward the romantic (some might say a postmodern romantic), always moving on. His primary concept of time supersedes the tick-tock countable. In "The Counting Houses" he asks, "how many hands of timepieces / must be counting the hours / clicking at a given moment / numbering insects into machines to be codified," and "To the Insects" addresses these "elders": "we have been here so short a time / and we pretend that we have invented memory // we have forgotten what it is like to be you / who do not remember us" as we, the human race, will go, "departing from our selves // leaving you the morning / in its antiquity." With this long view of time, Merwin writes many an elegy: "Most of the stories," he says in his magical "White Morning," "have to do with vanishing..." Most of the quiet long-lined poems in The Vixen (1996) are valedictories to the immemorial agricultural history of that region of France where since 1954 he has owned a house and garden. He watches the upland pastures and shepherds' huts go under the bulldozer, and in poems such as "Present" documents in devoted detail those moments when he can still encounter that deep past. In the voice of the displaced farmer, "The Peasant" addresses "you" – the "Powers Of This World," the devastating "improvers" of the earth – lamenting the social price of economic change, the irreversible loss of his ancient culture of survival, but ending with the bitterly ironic "I am bringing up my children to be you."
In his Paris Review interview ("The Art of Poetry XXXVIII") Merwin tells Edward Hirsch that from the time he was very small he had an "urge to love and revere something in the world that seemed to me more beautiful and rare and magnificent than I could say, and at the time in danger of being ignored and destroyed." He told Hirsch that he felt the loss of languages, cultures, and our own language to be tied to the extinction of species ("Several species a week... and this is an accelerating process. It's all because of human action."). A leitmotif through his mature work is a protest against the loss of whole ecosystems. In "Chord," one of his most eloquent poems in The Rain in the Trees, the two notes are the end of Keats' life and, simultaneously, the destruction of ancient Hawaiian forests – a counterpoint, a discord, of chords.
Despite his resignation to the Heraclitan sense of time as an infinite river compelling resignation to change, Merwin laments the precipitous rush of ancient forms into extinction. All the poet can do, as he told Hirsch, is to love what remains and "attempt to articulate it." Like Denise Levertov, he speaks for those of us today who cherish the good life we live in a beautiful place while increasingly impelled to move beyond complacency by the injustice and impoverishment and devastation of the world we live in. In "Waves in August" Merwin inscribes a wry circle:
I thought I was getting better
about that returning childish
wish to be living somewhere else
that I knew was impossible
and now I find myself wishing
to be here to be alive here
it is impossible enough
to still be the wish of a child
That quiet surprise, that reversal of anticipation in line six, with its fresh cadences and simple language, condenses the old romantic dilemma, familiar in Goethe's Faust and in the great odes of Keats: the hopeless passion to arrest the torrent of time, to imprison the perfect moment. It has always been one of the triumphs of poetry to find words to make that moment seem immortal, just as it evolves from being to becoming.
And moment is a recurring word in Merwin's work – his rock in the onrushing Heraclitan current, anchored in memory as the stream of change pours on. In many of these poems he concentrates on that moment in which the implications of a story are charged with energy, something very like epiphany. "If you could get one moment right," Merwin told Christopher Merrill, "it would tell you the whole thing" (Poets & Writers, July/August 2005. 40). Addressing the dead in "The Hydra," he says,
One thing about the living sometimes a piece of us
Can stop dying for a moment
But you the dead
Once you go into those names you go on you never
Hesitate
You go on.
When the moment has passed into history, the emptiness precipitates something close to nihilism – a wasteland that darkens the way of the mental traveler. In his grimly beautiful "The River of Bees," "We are the echo of the future // On the door it says what to do to survive / But we were not born to survive / Only to live." And to live assumes always becoming, through a dark time.
Traditional symbolism of dark and light informs Merwin's portrayal of time, as time informs the prosody. Writing "On Open Form" in 1969 he proposes that "what is called its form may be simply that part of a poem that had directly to do with time: the time of the poem, the time in which it was written, and the sense of recurrence in which the unique moment of vision is set" (in Regions of Memory: Uncollected Prose 1949-82). Here he is, in "Substance," writing in the late 1990s about his life on the French uplands a half-century earlier:
I could see that there was a kind of distance lighted
behind the face of that time in its very days
as they appeared to me but I could not think of any
words that spoke of it truly nor point to anything
except what was there at the moment it was beginning
to be gone
The drop from beginning to the next line – the very lineation and syntax – enacts what the poet has no words for. That remembered moment carries its incandescence down to the reader's present through the poet's mastery of cadence – in its original and its musical sense – "proved upon the pulse," as Keats had it.
"I who have always believed too much in words"
Though Merwin accepts that languages evolve and drift and eventually drown in the stream of time, he mourns the extinction of nonliterate poetries, losses he compares to the library at Alexandria. The Rain in the Trees is rich with poems on this subject: "Losing a Language" begins, "A breath leaves the sentences and does not come back / yet the old still remember something that they could say // but they know now that such things are no longer believed / and the young have fewer words // many of the things the words were about / no longer exist." In "Witness," just eighteen words long, he confronts this double loss – of the forests themselves and of the words for what was there: "I want to tell what the forests / were like // I will have to speak / in a forgotten language."
What to do? Cherish and celebrate what remains, and "attempt to articulate it." In his early "Learning a Dead Language" he declares that "what you come to remember becomes yourself." But he does not assume that human speech is the only or even the best language, satirizing in the wrenchingly comic little poem "The Fly" his own obtuseness to the limits of words. He would include in language the multiplicity of ways nonhuman organisms communicate. In "The Cold before the Moonrise,"
It is too simple to turn to the sound
Of frost stirring among its
Stars like an animal asleep
In the winter night
And say I was born far from home
If there is a place where this is the language may
It be my country.
Although finding the right words may be the only way a poet can mourn the lost and the disappearing, protest injustice, preserve a symbolic moment, Merwin over and over asserts the inadequacy of human language to arrest time or to express all that he experiences – the perceptions and passions and visions beyond language. Here he stands at the opposite pole to his contemporaries for whom language itself is the be-all and end-all. In "Lament for the Makers" he speaks of carrying with him "that breath that in its own words only / sang when I was a child to me // and caught me helpless to convey it / with nothing but the words to say it." Yet those very makers have inspired him, with all that he has inherited from them, to emulate their success. And he can still declare (in his interview with Hirsch),
I have a faith in language. It's the ultimate achievement that we as a species have evolved so far. (I don't mean that I think we are the only species with a language.) It's the most flexible articulation of our experience and yet, finally, that experience is something that we cannot really articulate.... That's the other side, one of those things that makes poetry both exhilarating and painful all the time. It's conveying both the great possibility and the thing that we can't do.
"At the fountain of thistles / Preparing to sing"
In his first book in the twenty-first century, Merwin in The Pupil comes to "waken backward" through time – his own seven decades and back "beyond time beyond memory." In "The Wild" he recalls his earliest passion for nature unmediated by language, implied in his many references to "the forest":
First sight of water through trees
glimpsed as a child
and the smell of the lake then
on the mountain
how long it has lasted
whole and unmoved and without words
the sound native to a great bell
never leaving it
He told Hirsch that when he was about three he saw men cutting limbs off the one tree in the yard, flew into a "real rage," ran out, and started beating on the evildoers. Ever since he created his enchanted white bear in "East of the Sun and West of the Moon" he has continued to make voices for the beasts. "Lemuel's Blessing" (recalling Kit Smart's cat Jeoffry) takes the voice of a domesticated dog, blessing the wolf and aspiring to learn from him. "Noah's Raven" asks "Why should I have returned?" since he had "found untouched the desert of the unknown, / ...my home. / It is always beyond them." In "The Widow" Merwin defines the inherent divergence of our species from the rest of nature:
How easily the ripe grain
Leaves the husk
At the simple turning of the planet
There is no season
That requires us
More appalling than our divergence from the rest of the natural world is our responsibility for its devastation. As a romantic apostle of the "many," Merwin protests the loss of diversity of species, accelerating in our time. "Inheritance" laments the lost lusciousnesses, in barely a century, of "as many as four thousand / varieties of the opulent pear." "In Autumn" begins, "The extinct animals are still looking for home / Their eyes full of cotton // Now they will / Never arrive." The full force of the poet's irony bites through "For a Coming Extinction," which opens,
Gray whale
Now that we are sending you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing.
The speaker boasts that "we were made / On another day," and concludes,
When you will not see again
The whale calves trying the light
Consider what you will find in the black garden
And its court
The sea cows the Great Auks the gorillas
The irreplaceable hosts ranged countless
And foreordaining as stars
Our sacrifices
Join your word to theirs
Tell him
That it is we who are important.
After these hortatory poems, even more moving for me is "Empty Water," called by a poet I respect "perhaps the greatest poem of the second half of the last century." Merwin's dedication to protecting and restoring the ecological wealth of the Hawaiian Islands recalls Marguerite Yourcenar's telling a Maine interviewer, "I've always loved islands. You feel you are standing on the border between the human world and the rest of the universe." "Empty Water" is worth considering as a whole, for what it says, for what it implies, and as an example of this poet's mature art:
I miss the toad
who came all summer
to the limestone
water basin
under the Christmasberry tree
imported in 1912
from Brazil for decoration
then a weed on a mule track
on a losing
pineapple plantation
now an old tree in a line
of old trees
the toad came at night
first and sat in the water
all night and all day
then sometimes at night
left for an outing
but was back in the morning
under the branches among
the ferns and green sword leaf
of the lily
sitting in the water
all the dry months
gazing at the sky
through those eyes
fashioned of the most
precious of metals
come back
believer in shade
believer in silence and elegance
believer in ferns
believer in patience
believer in the rain
Try reading this poem a line at a time, reenacting the process of composition. Ask what would happen if one ended the poem there. Ask how each hypothetical terminal line casts its light back over the preceding lines, determining what the poem is "about." What it gives me is an overlay of thirty-three delicately different poems in a succession of voices – the affectionate observer, the historian, the gently amused ("left for an outing"), the ecologist, the metaphor maker, and ultimately the voice of formal supplication. Reading "Empty Water" in the context of all that preceded it, I hear resonance of the famous toads in folk literature; I hear Merwin's concern for geologic and natural history (no mask here: the poet speaks of his own spot of time on earth); I hear and am moved by the shifting rhythms of the syntax and lineation, by the limpid lyric progressions, by the clarity and simplicity of the words, always conscious of the silences behind them, and by repetitions all culminating in the incantatory litany. "A poem," Merwin has said, "is an act of attention." His attention here contemplates with sensuous intension a small creature which, in its absence, signifies something crucial about our future on this planet.
"it's even worse now"
Merwin's environmental commitment illuminates his lifelong engagement in political action. Though he has declared himself profoundly bored by "politics themselves" with their "power to manipulate other men's lives," he cannot be silent to "injustice, official brutality, and the destruction on a vast scale of human liberties" ("On Being Loyal," on refusing to sign a loyalty oath, New York Review of Books, 19 November 1970. More recently, see his "Statement of Conscience" in Sam Hamill's Poets Against the War). At a time when so many poems in English are self-absorbed, narrow in their field of vision, Merwin reminds me of Yannis Ritsos, who when asked in 1970 by Stelios Pattakos, vice-president of the Greek military junta, "You are a poet. Why do you get mixed up in politics?" replied, "A poet is the first citizen of his country and for this very reason it is the duty of the poet to be concerned about the politics of his country."
Merwin's acts of protest throughout his life and especially many of his poems of the 1960s and 1970s express his anger and near-despair at the Cuban missile crisis, the renewal of nuclear testing, and the war in Vietnam. The most explicit is "The Asians Dying," which begins, "When the forests have been destroyed their darkness remains," and his most cynical, "When the War Is Over." His "Presidents," sad to say, might have been written this morning. The nightmare poem "The Old Room" seems to address the Holocaust but to me suggests, beyond that, our anger compounded of potent guilt and impotent outrage in the face of atrocities done in our name. Evidence that such outrage has deepened since then is his most desperately ironic "Thanks" (1988), where he counterpoints gratitude for our comfortable private lives with a dissonant catalogue of the atrocities of our public life. The last stanza draws in many of the objects of Merwin's philosophical and political protest:
with the forest falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
Bad as it appeared then, "I think it's even worse now," Merwin told Hirsch. But anger, he goes on, is a dead end. If it "is to mean anything, it has to lead you back to caring about what is being destroyed. It's more important to pay attention to what it is that you care about."
Ultimately, what Merwin cares about is the fate of the earth. As he told Hirsch, "When we destroy the so-called 'natural' world around us we're simply destroying ourselves. And I think it's irreversible." One of his deservedly best-known poems is "The Last One," which begins, "Well they made up their minds to be everywhere because why not." It indicts not only our invasion of Vietnam but also all our "globalization" of natural "resources," a protest more explicitly and comically dramatized in "Questions to Tourists," on the commodification of a crop, the pineapple, that exhausts the fertility of ancient soil.
"to the islands of the ancients"
I hope I have convinced my reader that Migration is an essential book for our time. But before I go on to examine his latest volume, I have to mention my own candidate for the most important poem of the second half of the last century, Merwin's true epic poem The Folding Cliffs: A Narrative. (You can read my BPJ review in Winter 1998-99 at www.bpj.org.) Here the concerns and powers that distinguish this lifework combine. In a 1981 interview, Merwin discusses a prose work on Hawaii he was working on as a "gathering together of almost all my interests – interest in non literate peoples, in their and our relation to the earth, to the primal sources of things" (Regions of Memory). He continues with "our relation to and necessary opposition to the overweening authority of institutions and institutionalized greed, the destruction of the earth for abstract and greedy reasons." The narrative of Pi'ilani and her family in The Folding Cliffs not only chronicles a deeply moving love story but also provides us with a true epic poem for our age. As the New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics has it, the epic follows a figure (or group) central to the traditions and beliefs of a culture, "at a period when a nation is taking stock of its historical, cultural, and religious heritage." I do not know of any poem in the past century that so completely fulfills this need. The period of Merwin's epic is when Western expansionism and exploitation were appropriating the ancient lines of Hawaiian authority and replacing them with evangelistic capitalism, representing, as I've written before, "the whole history of colonialism, still today evolving globally with new leprosies, new deforestations, new economic and political and cultural imperialisms." In the rich and varied poetry of The Folding Cliffs, Merwin sublimates his rage in order to record and honor the pre-contact environment and the values of its culture.
"As though beginning went on and on"
Merwin's twenty-fourth volume of poems, Present Company, borrows from Neruda's Odas Elementales the idea of a book of dedications – about a hundred new poems on the specific ("To a Mosquito"), the abstract ("To Purity"), and the imaginary ("To Zbigniew Herbert's Bicycle"). The themes that recur through Migration are here, from the journey that "turns / into the traveler," to the ever-evolving, often inadequate, words – "you that were spoken / to begin with / to say what could not be said." With only shadows here of the raging political poet, these poems nevertheless do confront grief, often through elegy, and – obliquely – with the way of the world.
Two qualities struck me freshly in this book, both anticipated in earlier volumes but flowering more freely here. First, the quiet humor – not so much the wry, ironic humor of the 1970s, but the playfulness of a seriocomic spirit. In "To the Face in the Mirror" he asks, "how do you / know it's me." "To My Teeth" develops a hilarious epic simile. And "To the Present Tense" begins,
By the time you are
by the time you come to be
by the time you read this
by the time you are written.
The other quality I especially enjoyed is the dramatic voice, most engaging in Present Company because he is indeed addressing that company, so that each poem, implying a listener, enacts a dramatic monologue. One needs to remember that the you here is the addressee: "Ashes," "the Next Time," "the Mistake," "the Consolations of Philosophy." Merwin abandoned punctuation in 1963 when he wanted to let the syntax, the lineation, and the weight of the words carry the pace, as it does in conversation. This colloquial style is a wonder, never prosy – always richly cadenced, and full of the ambiguities and silences of a thoughtful person caught in the act of thinking. In Present Company I felt that I needed to read every poem aloud – always poised at the line end to anticipate how to pace it and pitch it, feeling that I was reading a dramatic script, on stage in the lyric theater of the mind.
I have always agreed with Merwin that poetry is a way of hearing. Each poem has its own distinctive music. The fluidity of Merwin's composition makes excerpting difficult, but I'd like to sample a couple more, hoping to send you out for the whole book. Here's how "To a Mosquito" opens:
Listen to you
me me me
nothing but me
even without a voice
and rash though it may be
to sing out anyway
here I am
this is me
out for your blood
The ee sound whines through the rest of the poem. A different timbre of ee opens "To Ashes," and different syntactic rhythms and a more complex vowel harmony create this almost hymn-like sonority:
All the green trees bring
their rings to you
the widening
circles of their years to you
late and soon casting
down their crowns into
you at once they are gone
not to appear
as themselves again
These words are both transparent and resonant: crowns, for example, means tree crowns, obviously, but crowns "cast down" also calls up the organ notes of "Holy Holy Holy." And "late and soon" echoes out of Wordsworth. Listen to those last three lines – the sudden shift of the position of the you, creating the dramatic suddenness of "at once they are gone." How different this would be if the poet had written "down their crowns into you."
Now consider that "To Ashes" is the fourth of six extraordinary poems, dated between 10 and 23 September 2001. Knowing how "9/11" has passed into our language and having seen in The Academy of American Poets documentary, The Poet's View, that Merwin's New York apartment had a clear view of the twin towers, I am in awe of the accomplishment. I had already read these six, admiring their variety, their elegance, their freshness, before I noticed that these, alone, had been dated. I read them now as a great gift from one of our strongest living poets, at the height of his powers, and am profoundly moved. "To the Light of September," composed on the tenth, does something very like Keats's "To Autumn." "To the Words," which begins, "When it happens you are not there," suddenly takes on a double meaning. So do "To the Grass of Autumn" and "To the Coming Winter," which carry on from "To the Light of September" without mentioning the disaster, but follow the natural cycle down into the darkness. And there in their midst is that deliciously liberating address to Zbigniew Herbert's imaginary bicycle.
Returning in conclusion to Merwin's own selection from his half-century's poetry and having reviewed the last ten books, I feel more at home. I notice that he has winnowed out much that now might appear sentimental, persistently obscure, or too personal. Among those omitted is "A Scale in May," which I return to now hearing a great deal in its memorable opening lines ("Now all my teachers are dead except silence / I am trying to read what the five poplars are writing / on the void") but understanding why the poet cut it. The images of the poem's eight notes of the scale have never converged into chords. Though sorry to miss those five eloquent wordless poplars, I still applaud most of the cuts in Migration, cuts that help clarify this lifetime's work as a coherently evolving odyssey:
we are words on a journey
not the inscriptions of settled people
(from "An Encampment at Morning")
The individual books are still there for the scholar and critic, but I am grateful to Copper Canyon for providing this handsome collection that allows a volume-by-volume journey through the lifework of one of the most richly rewarding poets of our age.
About the Author
Marion K. Stocking was Editor of the Beloit Poetry Journal from 1954 to 2003, and continues to serve BPJ as Editor for Reviews and Exchanges.
Editors: John Rosenwald, Lee Sharkey
Editor for Reviews and Exchanges: Marion K. Stocking
Copyright © 2006 by The Beloit Poetry Journal Foundation
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission
