WS Merwin - Biography

SWIMMING UP INTO POETRY

http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/poetry/antholog/merwin/pdmerwin.htm

The Atlantic's poetry editor reflects on the career of W. S. Merwin
whose long association with the magazine spans great distances
of geography and art

by Peter Davison

August 28, 1997

Over the past twenty-five years the poems of W. S. Merwin have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly's pages more frequently than those of any other poet. The editors have been deeply attracted to the vivid movement and activity of his poetry, which seem to flow up from an underground river that lies beneath mere speech, as though written in some pre-verbal language of which all later languages have proved to be a mere translation. Here's a sample from a 1970s poem called "The Dreamers":

a man with his eyes shut swam upward
through dark water and came to air
it was the horizon
he felt his way along it and it opened
and let the sun out

Merwin's work has followed his life. Born seventy years ago in Union City, New Jersey, he was raised first in a Presbyterian rectory looking across the Hudson toward the towers of New York and then later in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He graduated in 1947 from Princeton University, where he learned from John Berryman, and set out for Europe to encounter the Romance languages. During the early 1950s he lived as a translator of Latin, French, Spanish, and Portuguese on Majorca (where he tutored the children of the poet Robert Graves) and in Spain, Portugal, and England. He eventually settled in the south of France and headquartered there during most of the 1960s, though after a time he spent parts of nearly every year in New York. Later he wandered into Mexico for several years. Since 1975 he has resided in Hawaii, where he maintains a miniature forest of trees and plants of species that are threatened elsewhere in the world.

Merwin's early poetry was formal and medieval in its overtones, shaded by the influence of Robert Graves and of the medieval poetry Merwin was translating. He was awarded the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1952 by W. H. Auden. In his fourth book, The Drunk in the Furnace (1960), he turned toward American themes, after spending two years in Boston, where he got to know Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Adrienne Rich, Donald Hall, and other poets who were breaking out of the rhetoric of the 1950s. With The Moving Target (1963), The Lice (1967), and The Carrier of Ladders (which won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1970), he began exploring the hazy and animate forms of poetry for which he is famous. Merwin's poems from here on tend to escape from punctuation; they search beneath the surfaces of incident and feeling to the depths of our understanding, a territory of comprehension that anticipates language, that catches perception at the point where it has not yet wholly located words, encountering thought and feeling as they hesitate in the process of formation. In The Carrier of Ladders, for example, the character of a ladder is taken to reside not only in its rails and rungs but in the spaces between them, and the poet carrying it takes responsibility for all the dimensions of a ladder, not only for its character as a climbing contraption.

Merwin's recent poetry, to borrow the words of Robert Frost, may be thought of as "the tribute of the current to the source." During the 1980s and 1990s Merwin has gradually allowed his mind and language (which in a poet are especially hard to separate) to range across the wide regions of his own reading and travelling, while also plumbing the feelings and reasonings that arise from his deeply held beliefs. He is not only profoundly anti-imperialist, pacifist, and environmentalist, but also possessed by an intimate feeling for landscape and language and the ways in which land and language interflow. The Rain in the Trees (1988), Travels (1993), and The Vixen (1996) take the reader inside the implacable intentions of conquistadors, naturalists, and explorers, across the Pacific to the ravaged jungles of the Philippines, into the gentle tilt of a Pennsylvania pasture, to the flicker of health in a New York hospital or the business of a weasel in the wall of an old French farmhouse. Increasingly he has been arrested by an intensely sensuous involvement with place. His beautiful prose work, The Lost Upland (1992), and The Vixen are both book-length eulogies to the ancient farming country above the Dordogne River that Merwin left thirty years earlier -- written in Hawaii about France, a tremendous expedition through time and space to encounter the remnants of our medieval past. And listen to this recollection in another prose work, Unframed Originals (1982):

The smell of barns drifted even through the market towns that were themselves not much larger than villages, and in the evenings cows swayed through the streets guided by peasants with the same long sticks. Pigs grunted behind arched cellar doors, and were butchered in back alleys, with groups of experts standing around, and the cobbles running blood. The farm dogs appeared to be a random mix, but many of them had one pale and one dark eye. They knew their jobs. They ate soup. The language on the farms was a patois descended from a Languedoc tongue older than the French of Tours and Paris.

The intentions of Merwin's poetry are as broad as the biosphere yet as intimate as a whisper. He conveys in the sweet simplicity of grounded language a sense of the self where it belongs, floating between heaven, earth, and underground. The tone and directness of his intentions are clearly declared at the outset of Travels in a poem called "Cover Note":

...reader I do
not know that anyone
else is waiting for these
words that I hoped might seem
as though they had occurred
to you and you would take
them with you as your own

It's that ingratiating tone that Merwin's poems take -- confiding, in the most private way, the most generous of concerns -- that has made him so welcome and frequent a visitor to The Atlantic Monthly's poetry pages.

---

Peter Davison is the poetry editor of The Atlantic Monthly. His books include the memoir The Fading Smile: Poets in Boston, 1955-1960 (1994) and The Poems of Peter Davison 1957-1995, recently published in paperback.

WS Merwin - Three French Poems

VEHICLES

This is a place on the way after the distances
can no longer be kept straight here in this dark corner
of the barn a mound of wheels has convened along
raveling courses to stop in a single moment
and lie down as still as the chariots of the Pharaohs
some in pairs that rolled as one over the same roads
to the end and never touched each other until they
arrived here some that broke by themselves and were left
until they could be repaired some that went only
to occasions before my time and some that have spun
across other countries through uncounted summers
now they go all the way back together the tall
cobweb-hung models of galaxies in their rings
of rust leaning against the stone hail from Rene's
manure cart the year he wanted to store them here
because there was nobody left who could make them like that
in case he should need them and there are the carriage wheels
that Merot said would be worth a lot some day
and the rim of the spare from bald Bleret's green Samson
that rose like Borobudur out of the high grass
behind the old house by the river where he stuffed
mattresses in the morning sunlight and the hens
scavenged around his shoes in the days when the black
top-hat sedan still towered outside Sandeau's cow barn
with velvet upholstery and sconces for flowers and room
for two calves instead of the back seat when their time came.

WS Merwin, publ. September 1994



THE SPEED OF LIGHT

So gradual in those summers was the going
of the age it seemed that the long days setting out
when the stars faded over the mountains were not
leaving us even as the birds woke in full song and the dew
glittered in the webs it appeared then that the clear morning
opening into the sky was something of ours
to have and keep and that the brightness we could not touch
and the air we could not hold had come to be there all the time
for us and would never be gone and that the axle
we did not hear was not turning when the ancient car
coughed in the roofer's barn and rolled out echoing
first thing into the lane and the only tractor
in the village rumbled and went into its rusty
mutterings before heading out of its lean-to
into the cow pats and the shadow of the lime tree
we did not see that the swallows flashing and the sparks
of their cries were fast in the spokes of the hollow
wheel that was turning and turning us taking us
all away as one with the tires of the baker's van
where the wheels of bread were stacked like days in calendars
coming and going all at once we did not hear
the rim of the hour in whatever we were saying
or touching all day we thought it was there and would stay
it was only as the afternoon lengthened on its
dial and the shadows reached out farther and farther
from everything that we began to listen for what
might be escaping us and we heard high voices ringing
the village at sundown calling their animals home
and then the bats after dark and the silence on its road.

WS Merwin, publ. September 1994



END OF A DAY

In the long evening of April through the cool light
Bayle's two sheep dogs sail down the lane like magpies
for the flock a moment before he appears near the oaks
a stub of a man rolling as he approaches
smiling and smiling and his dogs are afraid of him
we stand among the radiant stones looking out over
green lucent wheat and earth combed red under bare walnut limbs
bees hanging late in cowslips and lingering bird cherry
stumps and brush that were the grove of hazel trees
where the land turns above the draped slopes and the valley
filled with its one sunbeam and we exchange a few questions
as though nothing were different but he has bulldozed the upland
pastures and the shepherds' huts into piles of rubble
and has his sheep fenced in everyone's meadows now
the smell of box and damp leaves drifts from the woods where a blackbird
is warning of nightfall Bayle has plans to demolish
the ancient walls of the lane and level it wide
so that trucks can go all the way down to where the lambs
with perhaps two weeks to live are waiting for him at the wire
he hurries toward them while the sun sinks and the hour
turns chill as iron and in the oaks the first nightingales
of the year kindle their unapproachable voices.

WS Merwin, publ. September 1994


 

WS Merwin - Three Poems

ANOTHER RIVER

The friends have gone home far up the valley
of that river into whose estuary
the man from England sailed in his own age
in time to catch sight of the late forests
furring in black the remotest edges
of the majestic water always it
appeared to me that he arrived just as
an evening was beginning and toward the end
of summer when the converging surface
lay as a single vast mirror gazing
upward into the pearl light that was
already stained with the first saffron
of sunset on which the high wavering trails
of migrant birds flowed southward as though there were
no end to them the wind had dropped and the tide
and the current for a moment seemed to hang
still in balance and the creaking and knocking
of wood stopped all at once and the known voices
died away and the smells and rocking
and starvation of the voyage had become
a sleep behind them as they lay becalmed
on the reflection of their Half Moon
while the sky blazed and then the tide lifted them
up the dark passage they had no name for.

WS Merwin, publ. 1997



REMEMBERING

There are threads of old sound heard over and over
phrases of Shakespeare or Mozart the slender
wands of the auroras playing out from them
into dark time the passing of a few
migrants high in the night far from the ancient flocks
far from the rest of the words far from the instruments.

WS Merwin, publ. 1997



ECHOING LIGHT

When I was beginning to read I imagined
that bridges had something to do with birds
and with what seemed to be cages but I knew
that they were not cages it must have been autumn
with the dusty light flashing from the streetcar wires
and those orange places on fire in the pictures
and now indeed it is autumn the clear
days not far from the sea with a small wind nosing
over dry grass that yesterday was green
the empty corn standing trembling and a down
of ghost flowers veiling the ignored fields
and everywhere the colors I cannot take
my eyes from all of them red even the wide streams
red it is the season of migrants
flying at night feeling the turning earth
beneath them and I woke in the city hearing
the call notes of the plover then again and
again before I slept and here far downriver
flocking together echoing close to the shore
the longest bridges have opened their slender wings.

WS Merwin, publ. 1997

WS Merwin - Shore Birds

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
at an hour when all at once it was late
and newly silent and the white had turned
white around them then they rose in their choir
on a single note each of them alone
between the pull of the moon and the hummed
undertone of the earth below them
the glass curtains kept falling around them
as they flew in search of their place before
they were anywhere and storms winnowed them
they flew among the places with towers
and passed the tower lights where some vanished
with their long legs for wading in shadow
others were caught and stayed in the countries
of the nets and in the lands of lime twigs
some fastened and after the countries of
guns at first light fewer of them than I
remember would be here to recognize
the light of late summer when they found it
playing with darkness along the wet sand.

WS Merwin, publ. 1998

Online Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/poetry/antholog/merwin/shorebir.htm

Hear W. S. Merwin read this poem (in RealAudio)


 

WS Merwin - Before the Flood

Why did he promise me
that we would build ourselves
an ark all by ourselves
out in back of the house
on New York Avenue
in Union City New Jersey
to the singing of the streetcars
after the story
of Noah whom nobody
believed about the waters
that would rise over everything
when I told my father
I wanted us to build
an ark of our own there
in the back yard under
the kitchen could we do that
he told me that we could
I want to I said and will we
he promised me that we would
why did he promise that
I wanted us to start then
nobody will believe us
I said that we are building
an ark because the rains
are coming and that was true
nobody ever believed
we would build an ark there
nobody would believe
that the waters were coming.

WS Merwin, publ. 1998

Online Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/poetry/antholog/merwin/flood.htm


 

WS Merwin - Anytime

How long ago the day is
when at last I look at it
with the time it has taken
to be there still in it
now in the transparent light
with the flight in the voices
the beginning in the leaves
everything I remember
and before it before me
present at the speed of light
in the distance that I am
who keep reaching out to it
seeing all the time faster
where it has never stirred from
before there is anything
the darkness thinking the light.

WS Merwin, publ. 1999

Online Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/poetry/antholog/merwin/anytime.htm


 

WS Merwin - Term

At the last minute a word is waiting
not heard that way before and not to be
repeated or ever be remembered
one that always had been a household word
used in speaking of the ordinary
everyday recurrences of living
not newly chosen or long considered
or a matter for comment afterward
who would ever have thought it was the one
saying itself from the beginning through
all its uses and circumstances to
utter at last that meaning of its own
for which it had long been the only word
though it seems now that any word would do.

WS Merwin, publ. 1999

Online Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/poetry/antholog/merwin/term.htm


 

WS Merwin - Unknown Bird

Out of the dry days
through the dusty leaves
far across the valley
those few notes never
heard here before

one fluted phrase
floating over its
wandering secret
all at once wells up
somewhere else

and is gone before it
goes on fallen into
its own echo leaving
a hollow through the air
that is dry as before

where is it from
hardly anyone
seems to have noticed it
so far but who now
would have been listening

it is not native here
that may be the one
thing we are sure of
it came from somewhere
else perhaps alone

so keeps on calling for
no one who is here
hoping to be heard
by another of its own
unlikely origin

trying once more the same few
notes that began the song
of an oriole last heard
years ago in another
existence there

it goes again tell
no one it is here
foreign as we are
who are filling the days
with a sound of our own.

WS Merwin, publ. 1999

Online Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/poetry/antholog/merwin/unknownbird.htm


 

WS Merwin - Green Fields

By this part of the century few are left who believe
in the animals for they are not there in the carved parts
of them served on plates and the pleas from the slatted trucks
are sounds of shadows that possess no future
there is still game for the pleasure of killing
and there are pets for the children but the lives that followed
courses of their own other than ours and older
have been migrating before us some are already
far on the way and yet Peter with his gaunt cheeks
and point of white beard the face of an aged Lawrence
Peter who had lived on from another time and country
and who had seen so many things set out and vanish
still believed in heaven and said he had never once
doubted it since his childhood on the farm in the days
of the horses he had not doubted it in the worst
times of the Great War and afterward and he had come
to what he took to be a kind of earthly
model of it as he wandered south in his sixties
by that time speaking the language well enough
for them to make him out he took the smallest roads
into a world he thought was a thing of the past
with wildflowers he scarcely remembered and neighbors
working together scything the morning meadows
turning the hay before the noon meal bringing it in
by milking time husbandry and abundance
all the virtues he admired and their reward bounteous
in the eyes of a foreigner and there he remained
for the rest of his days seeing what he wanted to see
until the winter when he could no longer fork
the earth in his garden and then he gave away
his house land everything and committed himself
to a home to die in an old chateau where he lingered
for some time surrounded by those who had lost
the use of body or mind and as he lay there he told me
that the wall by his bed opened almost every day
and he saw what was really there and it was eternal life
as he recognized at once when he saw the gardens
he had made and the green fields where he had been
a child and his mother was standing there then the wall would close
and around him again were the last days of the world.

WS Merwin, publ. February 1995

Online Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/poetry/antholog/merwin/green.htm