Although the last third of Merwin’s book, The Shadow of Sirius, is a gorgeous representation of the beauty of nature in the fall, it makes me severely depressed when the context is factored in. All the ending poems are written as a reflection and are attempting to accept death as his fate. He seems very much okay with the idea, like he’s already turned the thought around in his mind a few times and has shrugged at it, like it’s just another everyday fact. He’s going to die one day. So will everyone else. It’s like he wrote the poems to make other people aware of the fact, as well. Such as in the poem “To Paula in Late Spring” (84), the first lines are, “Let me imagine we will come again / when we want to and it will be spring”. He is conveying spring as being born again, like the season. In spring, everything is coming to life, that if we come back to this world after we die, let it be spring, where everything is brand new. Because of the title of the poem, we know he is speaking to a friend named Paula, and he says, “we will be no older than we ever were”, almost like they are ghosts in their own version of heaven. I found this poem to be haunting, like he is trying to convince Paula that death is inevitable, so why fear it. Paula was maybe about to die, and this was Merwin’s attempt to ease her into the idea. Rather, he wants to say to her to embrace death, because it will be beautiful.
What I appreciate about Merwin is that although he has one distinct style, he doesn’t let that conform his way of writing. His work, for me, never droned on, or seemed redundant. Plenty of his poems have unique ways of being on the page, which is a very good quality. “September’s Child” on pg. 98 is one of a kind in this collection of work. All the lines are ten to fifteen words long, which is entirely different from any of the other poems. It reads more like prose because of this: “September light gray and rose touches the ridge above the valley / seeps upward at daybreak through its own silence / without beginning without stages with white clouds still cloaking the river”. Compare this to “Little Soul” on pg. 51, where the number of words in the entire poem is shorter than the words of “September’s Child”’s first three lines: “Little soul little stray / little drifter / now where will you stay / all pale and all alone / after the way / you used to make fun of things”. There is just such variety that kept me interested the entire way through. I’ve never had a poet that I could read every single poem in a book and still stay interested before.
Basically, W.S. Merwin’s work is depressingly beautiful and has a unique style that is interesting to read.
To Alyssa, I agree with many parts of your assessment of Merwin. I love how you said:
ReplyDelete“although he has one distinct style, he doesn’t let that conform his way of writing. His work, for me, never droned on, or seemed redundant.”
I definitely agree. I loved how Merwin’s poems, although each one was, I felt, a distinct entity on its own, the whole book seemed to flow very well together. I could go from one poem to another without much effort.
Also your comments about how Merwin reads like prose was also, I felt, spot on. I think its because Merwin seems to effortlessly employ simple (and occasionally complex) language that he can get away with making his poetry read almost like a traditional book.
I didn’t see the final parts of Merwin’s work as depressing, but then again, I am sometimes the depressed sort, so it wasn’t out of the ordinary for me.
I did enjoy how you pointed out the variety in Merwin’s poems and used concrete examples. That was something I would not have thought of. Rather, I just instinctively read the poems and thought “okay, this is different from the last” without really digging deep as you did here.
I also agree with many points made in your blog entry. However, I don't necessarily think Merwin is trying to convince anybody of anything-- except, of course, himself.
ReplyDeletePoetry, for Merwin, represents a profound chance to communicate ideas with himself. He takes an idea and meditates on it. His thoughts are able to be better honed through poetry even if they don't really mean much to us; what is hard to imagine becomes easy to write. Perhaps it goes back to the idea of language's ability/inability to convey experience. For an experience that can be shared and corroborated, language fails to approach a complete understanding or appreciation of it. For something like death-- a subject meditated much by Merwin-- language can approach the conveyance of such an idea because no matter how it is conveyed, no one can really say what's right or wrong. Merwin uses this to his advantage in his meditations on such issues as death; his poems need only have meaning for him.
Also, Merwin's poems WERE (capitals are in place of italics, I'm not yelling at you) surprisingly enjoyable. Even though, he must be doing this for himself, his style suggests a poet willing to invite you in to his thought process, make you think for a while, then leave at your leisure in a very wispy and dream-like way.