Here is the opening stanza of the first poem in W.S. Merwin’s first book A Mask for Janus, published 58 years ago:
Then we poised, in time’s fullness brought
As to a new country, the senses
In the mutations of a sallow light,
A season of signs and speechless;
(“Anabasis” I)
This poem and the poems that appear in Merwin’s latest book The Shadow of Sirius are separated by nearly six decades, during which Merwin transformed himself from a poet of academic and often ornate formal verse to one of our most environmentally political poets writing in what has become his trademark slippery style that eschews punctuation (with a few other iterations in between these two points). And yet, the stanza above contains many of the central elements that Merwin concerns himself with in Sirius: time, light, reading the signs a season is showing you, and how to make speech commensurate to the meaning of those signs. But there is no “new country” explored in Sirius, rather we see the poet searching recursively through his past and “revealing what had been there the whole way” (“A Codex”).
Given the book’s preoccupation with memory, both in specific events from the poet’s past and in a broader musing on the nature of memory itself, often in terms of its relationship to death, these very much feel like late career poems. A common shortcoming of poets’ late poems in general is that they can either become too avuncular or too morose. Merwin’s are neither. The reader does not feel like he is sitting on the poet’s knee, nor are we in the presence of a man composing his own elegy (although one of my favorite Merwin poems is called “Elegy” and is just this single line: “Who would I show it too”).
A few days ago on this blog Darcie Dennigan wondered about Merwin’s poetry and its relationship to wisdom. I was thinking of that too. When I read Sirius, I do not feel that I am being made privy to eternal wisdoms spoken in a vatic manner, although Merwin does occasionally use that voice. Instead I feel like I am reading through a chain of discoveries that the poet is having about his past and present. I can’t say that I’m clear in my own head about the difference between wisdom and discovery, but my point is that these poems feel to me like they are coming to themselves in a way that is not thoroughly calculated beforehand by the poet. These poems do not have designs on me. For example, here is the poem “Night with No Moon” in its entirety:
Now you are darker than I can believe
it is not wisdom that I have come to
with its denials and pure promises
but this absence that I cannot set down
still hearing when there is nothing to hear
reaching into the blindness that was there
thinking to walk in the dark together
In a recent article on Merwin in the Los Angeles Times, his interviewer reports that he writes most of his poems while walking the grounds of his conservancy on Maui, jotting down lines down as they come to him. This is obviously a very romantic portrayal of a poet in process, but if we take it at face value then it puts me in mind of stories of how many classical Eastern poets drafted their poems out in nature, riffing on the landscape around them. They give me the same sense of having authentic spontaneity in the discoveries arrived at in the poem. Compare “Night with No Moon” with the ending of a late poem concerning age from the T’ang Dynasty poet Po Chu-i titled “Wondering About Mind,” translated by David Hinton:
Mind no longer searches for things scattered past and away,
and now that this body is rarely anything but tranquil ease,
it’s done worrying over the body too. Now, whenever I wonder
what remains of mind, I find something beyond all knowing.
Same reaching into blindness and making discoveries through absence, instead of in spite of it. It is important to remember that Merwin is also a practicing Zen Buddhist, another similarity between him and many of T’ang poets, so he trades in emptiness as they did. Part of why we keep reading the T’ang poets, some of whom Merwin himself has translated into English, is that there is a genuine sense of artlessness. Merwin’s style is too prominent to be called artless, but I often felt the poems in Sirius to be cousins with the work of poets like Po Chu-i. They set out to do the opposite of what the speaker of “Anabasis I” sets out to do in those opening lines: they are written not with fullness, but brought forth through emptiness, as if to an old country, where they tell us what it still to be found there.