Salt of the Sky: James Merrill's Poetry

published in the Harvard Review, Number 21, Fall 2001

Instead of vying for fame, for titles and the center, James Merrill stood to one side, doing "his own thing" as the purveyors of cheap chic to the self-indulgent recommend. Merrill stood at the edge, worked the gift he so richly possessed and, believing entitlement from the start, at length became the center. Fashions and ideas have come round -to his work; he has not moved, as the consistency of Collected Poems (Knopf, 2001)-like a Taj Mahal of poems-demonstrates, shimmering with coherence, each part reflecting and illuminating the others. Not for Merrill a life of "periods," restless stages when the intellect quested onward, as with Yeats or Picasso, but a steady, ever enlarging enterprise, one vision and poetic knowledge. Over this life work, the genial, witty presence of James the man presided.

One spring I invited Merrill to come to Vermont to teach a class and give. a reading in a poetry workshop I had started. To make the reading list for the audience to come, I looked him up-in those palmy pre-computer days of 1976 when you actually looked books up in Books in Print. What on earth was the James Merrill title The Admiral's Sailor-duly listed with Nights and Days and Water Street and the rest? Here was a book I'd never come across, though I had read Merrill's poetry for years. I phoned him; he was delighted. In his patrician drawl he said he had never heard of the book. The Admiral's Sailor? He would love to have written that one! What a charming thought! It was like Merrill, I would learn, to be kind, generous, amused, turning the simplest exchange into an opportunity to bring his wit to bear. We talked. Here he was, instead of taking umbrage at this mistake of mine (and Books in Print), playfully making light of it.

There is a great body of work: sixteen collections of poetry, two novels, a book of criticism, his memoir, dramas, long fields of correspondence that will be harvested for years to come..'. and above all, the odd, discursive epic trilogy The Changing Light at Sandover. There is so much it is'hard to see it whole, and this volume helps us to see just that: its engrossing, amazing amplitude, more, its unity, the powerful sense that the Collected Poems is one coherent enterprise, if not one long poem; it has the unity of style and manner that informs, say, Stevens' Collected Poems, the delight in formal and metrical expertise, of which one cannot say there is more form than content, each in balance.

Merrill's was the most urbane intelligence among. the poets of his generation: In a life that was one long (if not languorous), ludic charette, designing combinations of words to be mansions of pleasure, Merrill was both wise and playful, a sage and a cardplayer: In the words of Richard Howard, Merrill was not only the wisest and most intelligent friend he had but also the most frivolous and silliest.

Collected Poems is a far cry from a "complete poems" (a likelihood that the editors J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser mention in their succinct introduction). It is somewhere between a "new and selected" and an "authorized edition of the works" without the vers de circonsfance, the anagrams and Ciu Li Po constructions, miscellaneous uncollected lyrics, or . The Changing Light at Sandover. But here is the best and most of the rest. Here is the "othemess of thought with all the stops pulled out," in Paul Quinn's happy phrase. Here everything is strongly worked, articulated in brilliantly effective stanzas; nothing muddled, lost in a moment of inspiration too easily relied upon to carry over to us the brief first flush of its apprehension.

Merrill is inveterately inventive, playful, with language; his work gives a new, exponentially expanded meaning to the label "wordsmith," of late so freely bandied about among whole herds of postulants in summer writing programs. In his greater lyrics we see the best craftsman of his time wielding a staggering technical proficiency as if twirling a daisy on an idle afternoon. Such poems as "The Charioteer of Delphi," "High and Low," "Samos," "Lost in Translation," "Days of 1935," "A Downward Look," will remain part of a larger canon than that of Merrill alone. Not to find "Samos" in Collected Poems is a disappointment, for this is one of Merrill's masterpieces, a canzone of intricate formal requirements that introduces the central section of Scripts for the Pageant in The Changing Light at Sandover and thus appears in that volume. For me, to grasp the achievement of Merrill one needs "Samos" and at least some sections of The Book of Ephraim; granted Collected Poems is already a massive book, it's a pity these facets of his work are not on show.

* * *

Merrill did not hit his stride until the 1966 volume Nights and Days (with its disarming title alluding to Hesiod but wittily exchanging the ancient poet's works for the modern poet's nights), a collection for which he won the National Book Award. Public recognition was at hand; some fresh firmness of approach has caused the dense, "lapidary" urbanities of earlier work to give way before longer poems and more daring formal extensions. The Fire Screen (1969) celebrates a stage of the poet's growing-outwards and contains memorable, freshly knowing lyrics such as "Abdication," yet in the context of the Collected seems a lesser accomplishment in light of what is to come. Nights and Days was soon followed by Braving the Elements (1972) and Divine Comedies (1976) and it's to these sections of the Collected Poems that I would refer beginning readers.

Here in Nights and Days a major phase begins with the beautiful strategies of "The Broken Home," "Days of 1964," "The Thousand and Second Night," and "From the Cupola." We had not seen poems like these before, a formal perspective opened for us through their rangy confidences, formally varied sections; sonnet sequences relaxed metrically but still sonnets comprising narratives (a device that would become a staple); the colloquial tone quietly drilling to deeper themes and metaphorical riches.

One thinks of the later sequences of Yeats, more heightened and rhetorical in manner, or Stevens' reserved meditations, more elaborately framed longer poems, and especially of the sonnet sequences and elegiac poems of Auden. One senses that Merrill is indebted to Auden, Yeats, Bishop, and Stevens for permission by example, yet indebted only in , passing, as the younger poet assimilates the lessons of the masters and moves on. Merrill has made the poetic sequence his own with his urbane manner, colloquial insouciance, and his ability to achieve depth and propound wisdom without the rhetoric or hortatory surmises of Auden or the triumphalist assurances of Yeats as statesman ("Easter 1916" and others).

Nights and Days enlarges Merrill's voice and themes. There is a fresh freedom and awareness of artistic telos, invoked in "Nightgown," the brief lyric which opens the volume: with discreet polish, it takes a tidy look backward and-in its Keatsian theme of poetic entitlement and vocationmakes a bold surmise about the poet's future dedication to and mastery of his art:

A cold so keen,
My speech unfurls tonightAs
from the chattering teeth Of a sewing machine.

When words appear to warm,
Dear heart, wear mine. Come forth
Wound in their flimsy white
And give it form.

There are many enriching ambiguities of language here, the poem blooms with metaphors. The cold may be a cosmic or bodily one, speech unfurls as if a flag to announce with pride what now will constitute Merrill's work; he will sew a gown of many colors; work like an operator in a factory, at the machine of his craft, industriously doing piecework for a living, and so forth; into the second stanza in which the figure of language as garment gives bodily warmth and like a garment gives more, gives form and shape to the ineffable spirit of the poet. As ever, the wordplay veers between the decorative and organic, as in "Monung Glory":

A Poem's giving up its throne
For life, the commoner,
At her messy vanity—disposable issues
And cleansing screams, her latest instrument
To curl the hair ...

Unlikely as it is that any reader of this Review will be a stranger to Merrill's poetry, I offer here a sketchy primer for the inquiring ephebe who would know where to dip in. There are so many memorable lyrics, masterful narratives, such a trove of darbs the bard leaves us, it's hard to know where to start. Why not with "Primer" from First Poems (1951)? With "The Charioteer of Delphi" and "Mirror" he may cross into The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace (1959). "Prism" and "Childlessness" take him to Water Street (1962)—named for Merrill's address in Stonington. I've mentioned poems from Nights and Days; from The Fire Screen, I would add "More Enterprise" and "Flying from Byzantium." Thereafter, the stream becomes a regulated torrent; one would be hard put to single out a few crests. Such, however, might include, from Braving the Elements, "Days of 1935," "18 West 11th Street," "Up and Down," "The Victor Dog," and "Syrinx." From Divine Comedies come "The Kimono," "Verse for Urania," "The Will," "Lost in Translation," ("The Book of Ephraim," the lion's share of this collection, having transmigrated to Sandover). And the reader would encounter "Clearing the Title," "Peter," and "Santorini, Stopping the Leak," in Late Settings, as well as "Bronze," from this collection, (as I've suggested elsewhere) one of Merrill's sagest meditations.

The Schubertian charm of much of The Inner Room (1988) ("Prose of Departure," "Eight Bits") has dissipated by the time of the final volume, A Scattering of Salts (1995). Here is a collection as strong and vibrant as Yeats' or Stevens' late work; no falling off or divagatory scherzos; light touches, yes, but not Hardy's Winter Words or latest Auden, or late collections of poets like Wordsworth or Tennyson. A Scattering of Salts is a fitting capstone to a half century's poetic productivity. This is one of Merrill's best books, and it is resplendent. It continues and-in fresh professions, disclosures, confidences-crowns Merrill's life work with more than the old hearty wit, with something new, a fresh "simplicity"; the poet unbuttoned but fastidiously—as it were; acknowledgement of failure, a tragic awareness of life; his own steady, "spindrift gaze." Many of the poems are starkly occasional, some all but oblique and static with a verbal density that is its own justification. Yet the control and manner so long a part of his being stand firm here in chatty arias like "Alessio and the Zinnias," and a kind of gleaming opacity in dream poems such as "Novelettes." "A Downward Look," "Cosmo," "Pledge,""Losing the Marbles" show Merrill at the top of his form, truest pitch, all in the pathos of his taking leave.

If all elegies are as much about their authors as their subjects, here are lyrics frankly so—as ever Merrill is plumb, straight, above board—inventions of farewell beyond our widest hopes, dearest expectations. "Pledge,"
a poem in the ancient genre of drinking song or toast, but translated to a higher plane, is ingenious; and turns elegiac for a life at closing:

You who have drained dry
Your golden goblet are about to learn—
As in my turn
Have I—

How life, unsweetened, fizzing up again
Fills the heart.
I drink to you apart
In that champagne.

The elegiac blends with Rilkean penetration of observation in "Cosmo," surely the finest dog poem in the language, in which without sentimentality the poet evokes the bond among all creatures. In this sprightly meditation (even at this pass he can pun about a celebrity canine), Merrill builds to an affirmation of the common life of a dying "man and his best friend." The poet is "tired by errands":

                              Heading back to bed,
I pass you open-eyed deep in your bed
on the toy-littered pantry floor,
jaw propped upon a ledge of faux sheepskin ...
I lay myself down deep and open-eyed
lonely upon the ramparts of goosedown—
doing what? Experiencing Repose.
Each in the same position, the same mood.
Cold, shutter-filtered sun. A lassitude
learned from you by me? by me from you?
Nothing to think of or look forward to.

Helen Vendler wrote that readers of poetry wait for Merrill'sbooks, "to know that someone out there is writing down your century, your generation, your language, your life." With this final gathering of poems an irrevocably poetic sensibility shapes and informs a central fact of our world: disease and death across the earth, the "wrongful death" touching everyone, in states of poverty and privilege alike. In this sense Merrill is a poet for our age and for any age.

Bryant's "To a Waterfowl" was the most perfect brief lyric in the language, according to Matthew Arnold. But he might have judged differently had he read Merrill's "Days of 1964" or others that might be judged, likewise, by some Cham of modern letters, the most perfect lyric poem. The brio and control, the wisdom and generous feeling of the great lyrics, add up to a sum greater than the parts, and by reflected brilliance, each good thing stands out in this book and makes us notice its companions. (Hardly ever does his work veer toward tour de force when more effect and wit are wrung from the amethystine rock of lyric than one would have thought possible, or fitting... But these-jewels in the crown of many poets' workare the lapses in Merrill, and they are few indeed.)

* * *

It is nourishing for a writer to find here a scarce gathering, The Yellow Pages, a volume published in the seventies by Temple Bar Bookshop in Cambridge, which included fifty-nine poems rejected by Merrill from earlier volumes. We see at once how cunningly Merrill organized and presented the poems in each collection, and how many did not make the final cut. Many of these lyrics are early drafts of poems in previous collections, or simply scraps "from the cutting room floor." No matter; most of us would be glad to have written poems he (at first) cast aside. More, even so superb a technician, impassioned love poet and chronicler of the "family romance" had off hours, down days. He persisted, waiting for the times when he could write what must be termed masterpieces. "If poetry comes not as naturally as leaves to a tree," Keats wrote in a letter to Taylor, "it had better not come at all." Yet no one worked harder on his verse day after day than Keats, unless perhaps Merrill.

It is an instance of Merrill's graciousness and generosity (as well as his love of chapbooks and unusual publishing venues) that the famous poet gave to the unknown Jim O'Neil in Harvard Square—certainly not an experienced bookman by any count (did he ever publish another title?—the privilege of bringing out a volume of his poetry. The Yellow Pages sold creditably, and this act of kindness helped O'Neil to establish himself.

As Gide "is not one of those writers who have no significance beyond what they publish" (David Walker), so too Merrill.Merrill's presence, his "self-assured knowingness" (Sam Schulman's apt phrase), that of an entitled, gifted, charming man above the fray (no getting and spending and laying waste of powers for James), is a salubrious if unattainable ideal, a model for the impecunious, distracted American who would be a poet. Thereby, a certain panoply surrounding the simplicity and ease.

When he came to our house for dinner, he was accompanied by an entourage; several more than expected. James—in whites, a Greek shepherd's vest, Birkenstocks—and his group went first to the garden, where all manner of drinks were set up by Bill, a student playing bartender. Leading the way, James asked for Campari and soda. We had some Campari; plentiful acgua frizzante. In sincerest flattery, each member of his group decorously ordered Campari and soda. We had to send down hill to a better-stocked cellar for Campari replenishment.

Before a later Bennington reading, James was more simply entertained, dining at The Brasserie with his old friend Claude Fredericks, Claude's protege Todd, and myself. Jimmy ordered only an omelet—and ate only half of that—while Claude commanded a complete dinner. The two led the talk; Todd and I mostly listened, onlookers assisting with a copious supply of Côtes du Rhône, while James and Claude engaged in the jovial bickering of old friends—soon building to an argument with discernible edge—over the merits of their mothers' respective tastes in interior decoration. Claude discredited the use of some columns in a living room of Merrill's mother, while Jimmy remembered deplorable drapes in Claude's. Rain fell outside, soon a steady downpour at the window where Jimmy sat. Wearing only sandals on his feet, he worried aloud about getting to the car; Todd offered to carry him. Claude, seconding the idea with a chortle, remarked that Todd lifted weights at home and could manage it easily. Jimmy murmured that he'd love to be carried, but demurred, not wishing to be a burden to the youth. Yet at the door, Todd scooped James lightly up, cradling him in his arms, and carried him to my car.

* * *

Collected Poems must stand beside The Changing Light at Sandover on our shelves: the steady, studied brilliance of the Collected, an orderly unfolding of a very deep-piled magic carpet. This work is balanced by what has been left out; The Changing Light at Sandover comprises The Book of Ephraim, Mirabell's Books of Number, Scripts for the Pageant, and Coda: The Higher Keys and takes up a separate volume. This Lucretian visionary epic communicates with other worlds through the means of a Ouija (Fr. and Ger. "yes, yes") game board. (Frederick Buechner gave Merrill and Jackson their first Ouija board. "What would I give someone," Buechner remembers asking himself, "who had everything?-So I gave him a Ouija board. It was in jest!")

Sandover is an epic work at the margins. The center, to be simplistic, is the Judaeo-Christian tradition; its discursive vastness is heightened play. Merrill's whole effort as a writer was not to live on the entitlement he felt but to marginalize himself, to live quietly in Stonington or Athens, by his own lights and choices, aesthetic, personal and the rest. His native drift was to write a self in the manner of Pope in an age (ours) that rejected Pope as anathema to the arbiters of modernity, of the vogue.

In the words of Paul Tillich, "the first duty of love is to listen:" And listen they did, Jimmy Merrill and David Jackson, through thirty years, taking down the words of the mighty dead, or lesser folk previously unknown to us, like Ephraim. As a character in the opening book suggests, these teacup quests were a folie a deux. Thus, writing of those who speak in the occult venture, Vendler hears Merrill, "a voice recognizably his own but bearing a different name." As if through an antiquated ear trumpet, JM listened to David, DJ to Jimmy, the self talking to the self as if it were another. It is a peregrination into selfhood; entertaining and revelatory; inventive, supremely; totally satisfactory in its structure and "perfect" in its ' vision, perhaps not. It may well be too soon to tell. Perfection of the life or of the work? Though Merrill's life work is never, in Larkin's phrase, "reprehensibly perfect," Sandover may be the work that stands as his effort to venture into-or at least to acknowledge-the incomplete, the contingent, the less than wholly or carefully ordered nature of life, experience, death.

The problem here is that, to borrow a term—outsider art—from contemporary criticism, Merrill and Jackson were using outsider science, and outsider theology, creating systems using impressionistic memories, crossing their awareness of traditional Western science, theology, cosmology. However attractive the scientific and metaphysical speculations are, they are eccentric. By now, the initial astonishment and pleasure taken in this work has faded a bit in the aftermath of its initial reception and in the cool light of reason; somewhere in the third book, the caps and systematizing may cast a pall of celestial bureaucratic redtape. In spite of some of Merrill's finest writing (e.g., "Ephraim" or "Samos"), time may call it the magnificent obsession of JM and DJ and judge it-at least by traditional definitions of epic—a majestic failure. Perhaps the true importance of Sandover is how it heroically achieves a Dantesque vision that makes secular sense for us of the religious quandaries and secular confusion of our lives-of the whole, awful, profane twentieth century.

* * *

As difficult as it is to assess the work of an artist so recently a part of our lives, I agree with Harold Bloom that Merrill reminds us of Pope, with whom Merrill has something in common. His accomplishment in comedy, satire, metrics, sustained inventiveness in rhyme, his mastery of forms (how many more than Pope knew of!) and, over all, his wit. In these he rivals the eighteenth-century master; Merrill's amplitude and finish, everywhere, and the wisdom, the vision the work is a vessel for, invite the comparison. No one since comes to mind so strongly as a summation of his time, curiously central after all, such a valuable possession of the culture whose ornament he was. With his consistent achievement and charged elegance, his thought about the place of man among his fellows and in the scheme of things, he must be of as much importance as the high modernists. Perhaps only his work could have followed theirs and achieved the same air of immediate and necessary consequence. Collected Poems in its impressive bulk helps us to take this view, the fitting way to look at his accomplishment.

"The intellect of man is forced to choose / perfection of the life or of the work." The chestnut becomes a conundrum like that of the chicken and the egg. When Yeats articulated this cranky alternative, he was doubtless generalizing from a particular juncture in his life. The choice, as Oliver Reynolds noted, rests on shaky premises. Without the work an artist's life is naught, without a life the work cannot be realized. In all his dealings, in both his life and work, Merrill achieved integrity, simplicity, directness, wit (in the sense of attractively displayed perception, and more), the insight generosity gives, and the generosity of gesture that wisdom makes possible. He achieved "the most absolute and purified simplicity. Decency, accountability, utter heart," in the words of his friend Allan Gurganus. This "above board" frankness and trueness are precisely the qualities that go into Henry James' favorite honorific; ironically, Merrill is everywhere like the laudable Jainesian characters who are above all straight—in their being, in all their dealings.

It's amusing to apply another dictum, that one must serve God or Mammon. As Merrill was Mammon's very child, he had no need to serve the latter and, considering his creative gift and sense of empowerment, had no occasion to serve the former. Which having said, I do not wish to suggest that Merrill lacked humility, faith or love. He had, apparently, always a sensitive awareness of the spirit. Seriously ill with pancreatitis in Tucson, he phoned Frederick Buechner, who, after they had talked awhile, told him, "I'm going to say some very strong prayers for you." Merrill replied, "That's exactly what I want." Jimmy Merrill's life was generous and productive; he did not bury his talents but put them to work. His works are a monument of American letters for everyone. The cost to him was a life of indulgence, a life difficult to avoid given the coordinates of it. Wordsworth wrote, "Only the good die young, the rest of us burn to the socket." But Merrill's light burns bright in his work. What a great unchanging light he has left for us all.

                               Morning star

evening star      salt of the sky
First the grave      dissolving into dawn

then the crucial      recrystallizing
from inmost depths      of clear dark blue

                              ("An Upward Look")

* * *

At 885 pages, the Collected Poems itself is a weighty tome, two pounds on my scale; not handy. Merrill's books, his collections within this Collected, are separated by blank, black leaves. These dividers serve as tabs, as in a dictionary or bible, useful for quick reference to passages sought in the text. There is a lavender ribbon marker, at least in the (black) cloth binding. This design alludes to the sober finery that traditionally clothes scripture; the design is intended to suggest a sacred book. The hint of cult is, in one sense, needless; in another, regrettable. For the poems inside make the book a cornerstone for any serious reader of modern poetry.