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Merwin Recollected: Echo-Futures With or Without Us
"The sound of it"

On Sound: Merwin, Shelley, and the Alps

Aaron M. Moe

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Fig. 1 Aaron M. Moe, Adams Falls in Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park of North America, 2024.

Fig. 1 Aaron M. Moe, Adams Falls in Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park of North America, 2024.

1My title lacks.

2A reflection on sound cannot be limited to two poets and one mountain range, but should include Emily Dickinson’s “elemental Freight / Of a delivered Syllable” whose “weight” would “crumble” any “mortal lip” that dared to “divine” it (609). Any lip that tried to discover it, utter it, would be crushed. How could one syllable hold so much weight?—so much sound?

3Such a reflection should also include Gertrude Stein’s atomic fission and fusion of sounds throughout Tender Buttons, and e. e. cummings’ (un)braiding of sounds throughout his poetics of fragmentation.

4And Toni Morrison’s philosophy from Beloved: “In the beginning there were no words. In the beginning was the sound. […] the sound that broke the back of words” (305, 308).

5And Whitman’s bomb of “original energy” that broke open the possibilities of what sound can become in and through and across poetic form, from the phoneme (and smaller) all the way up (188). “There can be no theory of any account,” Whitman claims, “unless it corroborate the theory of the earth” (367).

6The reflection should also include Rukeyser’s theory of the growth of a poem as she explores its deep kinship to the “minute pulsations” at work in the growth of a “crocus,” or an “inorganic shell,” or the “horn” of a sheep. Like any growth on the planet (and beyond), the poem “moves through its sounds set in motion,” and like any energy that produces sound, the “wavelength of the sounds themselves can be traced” (171). Following Whitman, her theory of sound “corroborate[s] the theory of the earth.”

7But perhaps Theodore Roethke said it best in his lines, “Granite on granite pressing the earth down, / Each singing thing straining to come to form” (82). Forms of glaciers, and ridges, and rivers, and chasms, and canyons. Forms of sound finding its way into syllables, words, lines, and poems.

8What drives this “straining to come to form”?

9What is the origin and impetus of the song of the “singing thing” toward which Roethke points?

10And the image of the waterfall and stream that begins my reflection is not from the Alps. It’s an ocean away on the lower section of Adams Falls in Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park of North America (fig. 1). I took the picture on a hike not far from where I live, early in the summer of 2024. My reflection, therefore, crosses the borders the title suggests, moving beyond Merwin, Shelley, and the Alps—though the title stands as it captures a moment in time I found myself hiking both sides of the Chamonix Valley, en route to the Merwin Across Borders conference in Paris, with both Shelley and Merwin on my mind.

11Admittedly, the differences between Shelley and Merwin are quite spectacular to the point where some may question whether the two should share the same space in an essay—especially Merwin’s work from The Lice onward. The focus, here, though is on how they share a common denominator in their sheer obsession with sound. Sounds roiling within the syllables of human languages; and sounds roiling in and throughout the Earth, from the atom (and smaller) all the way up.

12To start, sound had a profound, gravitational pull on Shelley’s being. Poem after poem he lingers on a roaring stream cascading through a canyon, or chasm, along cliffs, or through a ravine. In “The Daemon of the World,” he asks “Hark! whence that rushing sound?” (20). In Prometheus Unbound, he speaks of “The vale,” which is “girdled with their walls” with its “howl / Of cataracts from their thaw-cloven ravines” (257). In “Alastor,” he develops the image of a “stream” with “larger volume” that “Rolled through the labyrinthine dell.” From the dell, the stream “Fretted a path” into the “descending curves” of a narrow channel of “Rocks” and their “unimaginable forms” of a “precipice” on both sides. The water, churning through these “black gulfs and yawning caves” utters forth “ten thousand various tongues” of raw, wild sound. Several lines later, Shelley further emphasizes the multitudinous sound ushering forth from this chaos of energy as he speaks of “the howl/The thunder and the hiss of homeless streams” (14). And near the end of the poem, Shelley underscores the “mystic sympathy” held between the “Poet’s blood” and the “ebb and flow” of nature’s sounds (16).

13And in the second section of “Mont Blanc,” Shelley goes further as he crafts a single sentence spanning thirty-seven lines all an homage to this “mystic sympathy” between what drives both the “Ravine of Arve”—the “Dizzy Ravine!” with its “many-voiced” sounds roiling through “caverns echoing to the Arve’s commotion”—and what drives the poiesis of a poem (571-572). It’s as if he tries to place all the energy of the river coursing through the chasm into a single sentence coursing through one section of his poem. A crevassed sentence of concussed sound.

14I hiked to an overlook where the Arve flows from the Ravine and read Shelley’s poem there (fig. 2). The experience shifted my perspective of the poem “Mont Blanc” as well as the Mont Blanc Massif itself. Prior, I seemed to think that the summit of Mont Blanc was the point of the poem (and the Massif), for the fifth section states “The power is there” where “Mont Blanc yet gleams on high,” but seeing the Ravine and reflecting on all the chasm-imagery in Shelley’s work shifts the emphasis to that second section of the poem—the homage to the “Dizzy Ravine!” I don’t think Shelley ever wanted to summit Mont Blanc; he would rather sit at the mouth of the ravine and listen to the roiling, churning sounds echoing and reverberating all along those gnarly, narrow walls.

Fig. 2. Aaron M. Moe, “The Ravine of Arve,” behind which presses the Mer de Glace glacier

Fig. 2. Aaron M. Moe, “The Ravine of Arve,” behind which presses the Mer de Glace glacier

15In consulting both my image and memory of the ravine—as well as a map—the ravine appears to be around 75 meters tall and around 400 meters long. I witnessed it in October and could only imagine what it would be like to hear it during spring runoff. The map shows that behind the ravine sits the massive glacier, Mer de Glace, which snakes around the Mont Blanc Massif. Mer de Glace is fed by massive glaciers reaching all the way to the summit as well as by glaciers descending from other summits in the area. Mer de Glace is the glacier that Mary Shelley has Victor and his monster climb through in Frankenstein; it is therefore a glacier that captivated the imagination of both Shelleys. So much power, then, gets funneled into the Ravine. Power that is a mixture of both kinetic and potential energy. Yes, glacial ice is kinetic as it is always moving. Yes, glacial ice makes sound. But Shelley pinpoints the moment when that ice, changing form into water, unleashes a torrent of sound that fills and echoes up that narrow canyon. The “Dizzy Ravine” is where all the potentiality locked in ice transforms into the rushing water that so stirred and animated Shelley’s being.

16The mystery and power of sound also stirred Merwin’s being, but in a much more subdued way. In early poems such as “Leviathan,” the sounds of the lines roil not unlike Shelley’s poetry, but after the shift in The Lice (1967), Merwin’s sound is filled with a haunting silence. A juxtaposition of “Leviathan” from Green with Beasts (1956) with the later whale poem “For a Coming Extinction” from The Lice makes the shift evident. However, throughout Merwin’s career, he, like Shelley, pursues the origin and impetus of sound. Book titles such as The River Sound (1999) and The Rain in the Trees (1988) reveal this pursuit. In Finding the Islands (1982)—a book of tercets where Merwin distills turn after turn within the smaller units of what makes a poem—he speaks of a “lizard” who “listens” through its “hands” to the vibrations of the “Rain” on the “ceiling” of “the tin roof” (27). This is a deep listening on part of the lizard, and this lizard becomes a symbol for the poet who is extremely sensitive to the wavering of sound, in silence, as it journeys toward syllable.

17Following Pound’s advice to “Read seeds not twigs,” Merwin, the translator, spent much of his writing life listening to the sounds-syllables-words of other languages and finding a way for such energy to have a home within the English language (Merwin, 2013 289). In one poem from the Sanskrit, he shows, again, just how enamored with sound he was:

Water pouring from clouds
in the night
of palm forests
large ears motionless
they listen
the elephants
eyes half closed
to the sound of the heavy rain
their trunks resting on their tusks (Merwin, 2013 257)

18He translated this poem in 1972, early, that is, in his planting of the palm forest in Hawaii. I see this translated poem foreshadowing The Rain in the Trees (1988), and it points, too, to the many decades Merwin spent listening to the rain fall in his garden. In the poem, the palm leaves morph into elephant ears as if the whole forest and every creature in the forest listen to the same sounds the Sanskrit poet listened to—the sounds that Merwin tries to hear through the process of translating the poem into English.

19Evidence from “The Nomad Flute” in The Shadow of Sirius (2008) further shows how Merwin’s poetics of listening drove him as a poet: “I will listen until the flute stops / and the light is old again” (5). These sounds are not the roiling, boiling, churning sounds of the Arve coursing through the canyon cliffs of the Mont Blanc Massif. Far from it. But they are sounds of the Earth, and Merwin cannot not pursue the origin and impetus of such sounds.

20Some readers may still be hesitant to place Merwin and Shelley in the same breath, and so I offer yet another connection: The Folding Cliffs. The Alps do not seem to have made a mark on Merwin. Instead, it is the mountains of Hawaii. The title alone, The Folding Cliffs, speaks to how the mountainous cliffs of Hawaii become, in a sense, like origami. Folds upon folds generate complexity. If Merwin saw a forest as something that “listens” with “large ears,” suddenly the entire mountain becomes one ear, with intricate channels, infinite leaves, all experiencing the vibrations of sound caused by the rain endlessly falling from the sky.

21The origami connection takes greater significance in light of “Utterance” from The Rain in the Trees:

Sitting over words
very late I have heard a kind of whispered sighing
not far
like a night wind in pines or like the sea in the dark
the echo of everything that has ever
been spoken
still spinning its one syllable
between the earth and silence (44)

22It is a marvelous statement to suggest that all the sounds of the Earth—all the aeolian sounds, ambient sounds, including all the sounds within every poem ever spoken or written, including all the sounds of all the critters from the mosquito’s buzz to the sperm whale’s blast of clicks, including all the sounds of every seed on its way toward plant, including all the sounds of every atom, every “singing thing straining to come to form” to echo Roethke—are “spinning” just “one syllable” within a cosmological context. This “whispered sighing” is not at all like the torrents that captured Shelley’s imagination, but it is still sound. It is folded, and in its own way, it is crevassed.

23Dickinson, I hazard to suggest, would most definitely agree. Merwin circumnavigates a syllable with enough “elemental Freight” to “crumble” any “mortal lip” that attempts to “divine” it (609).

24And for Shelley, and I daresay Merwin, there is something sentient in whatever drives sound. Shelley’s nineteenth-century understanding of an atom is not the same as Merwin’s, but he uses the word at least ten times throughout his poetry. In Queen Mab, Shelley sees the “moveless pillar of a mountain’s weight” as an “active living spirit”—where “Every grain” of that mountain, both “in unity and part” is “sentient.” He sees an “atom” as something that “comprehends,” as if it is a self-evident, empirical truth that the physical, material universe hums with consciousness (821; see fig. 3).

Fig. 3. I have no idea if Shelley ever hiked up to La Jonction from where I took this image. Regardless, the glacier can be seen descending as a kind of frozen rapid, churning and churning in all of its “stillness.” It is an excellent counterpart to the roiling rapid of the Arve. The summit of Mont Blanc sits beneath the sun. It is one experience just to witness this scene, but quite another to consider the possibility that every atom singing to make this turbulent form just might have some kind of sentience. That might go too far for some readers. At the very least, then, one must consider the origin and impetus of the energy at work to bring forth such a slumbering and yet dynamic, chaotically folded form.

Fig. 3. I have no idea if Shelley ever hiked up to La Jonction from where I took this image. Regardless, the glacier can be seen descending as a kind of frozen rapid, churning and churning in all of its “stillness.” It is an excellent counterpart to the roiling rapid of the Arve. The summit of Mont Blanc sits beneath the sun. It is one experience just to witness this scene, but quite another to consider the possibility that every atom singing to make this turbulent form just might have some kind of sentience. That might go too far for some readers. At the very least, then, one must consider the origin and impetus of the energy at work to bring forth such a slumbering and yet dynamic, chaotically folded form.

25Such an idea gives context to Shelley’s claim at the end of “Mont Blanc” that some “secret Strength of things” both “governs thought” as well as “inhabits” the form of the Mont Blanc Massif itself. He sees the “secret Strength” as a “law,” and he suggests that this “law”—this “power”—is the impetus driving forth form. Forms of mountains. Of folding cliffs. Of crevasses. Canyons. Streams. Of language that finds its way through a sentence spanning a thirty-seven-lined section of a poem. For that matter, of all poems churning with all sounds “spinning” (to echo Merwin and extend Shelley) its “one syllable.”

26In “The Cold Before the Moonrise” from The Lice, Merwin articulates a similar idea:

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 (Merwin, 1993 110)

27The “frost stirring” epitomizes Roethke’s “singing thing straining to come to form.” From the atom, (and smaller) all the way up, sound is generated in the becoming of frost. Merwin tries to listen to such sounds. Impossible to hear—but not impossible to imagine. And what a contrast to Shelley’s listening to the glacial forces of Mont Blanc. Glacier or frost—it’s the same. It’s these atomic sounds in their journey toward form that add even more depth to the idea from “Utterance”—every “whispered sighing” contributes to the spinning of the “one syllable” of Earth.

28What is more, Merwin sees the “sound / Of frost stirring” as a “language” in and of its own right. A loaded term, dripping with anthropocentric bias, “language” assumes sentience, that some sort of consciousness, inherent in the atomic stirrings of the formation of water crystals, drives the becoming of form. When water molecules become frost, the process makes a sound, but the becoming prior to the sound, gets us that much closer to the origin and impetus of all things poiesis, elemental and otherwise.

29Enough cannot be said about Merwin’s infinitive from the first line of “The Cold Before the Moonrise”: “to turn.” The poem turns on the volta. Merwin turns to the “sound / Of frost.” Shelley turns to the sound of a stream coursing through a cavernous canyon. Merwin turns to the sounds of water falling through a forest. The poem turns us toward the Earth; the Earth turns us toward the poem—all buoyed up by the energy of sound.

30And so, in reflecting upon Merwin, Shelley, the Alps (in conjunction with other readings and hikes), we find a common denominator. Both poets turn. Both poets help us turn. Shelley uses the terms “govern” and “law” to capture whatever it is that brings forth forms of the mountainscape as well as what brings forth forms of the poem. Merwin uses the term “language” to capture the sounds emitted from the collision of water molecules as they form frost. One might not see, at first, Merwin’s “sound / Of frost stirring” in the same sublime, epic, and wild context as Shelley’s ravine, but both sounds cannot be “tamed” (572). They are governed by a cosmological law, some language from within the atom.

31I’m not sure if I’ll ever return to the Mont Blanc Massif. I hope so. I hope to experience those moments when I felt buoyed up by all these seemingly silent and motionless forces that are teeming with sound, stillness, and yet, paradoxically, velocity (fig. 4).

Fig. 4. Aaron M. Moe. “Here, I go no higher. I stand at La Jonction, the place where a glacier splits into two—the Bossons and Taconnaz—not unlike a churning rapid bifurcates at a large boulder into two streams.”

Fig. 4. Aaron M. Moe. “Here, I go no higher. I stand at La Jonction, the place where a glacier splits into two—the Bossons and Taconnaz—not unlike a churning rapid bifurcates at a large boulder into two streams.”

32In the meantime, my reflection deepens with every hike in the Rockies of North America. So many trails follow mountain streams. At times, I am able to hike to the edge of a small ravine and listen to the churning sounds ushering up from all that chaotic roar of white water churning over boulder upon boulder. At other times, I hear reverberations and echoes of a stream rebounding off slightly cupped boulders along the trail. It’s strange to hear the sound of a stream coming from multiple directions, and I can only imagine what the sound must be like from the heart of Shelley’s “Dizzy Ravine.” All the features of those canyon walls ricochet and rebound into, Shelley suggests, a “loud, lone sound no other sound can tame” (572).

33Still other times, I (re)visit a humble 12,000-foot peak reflected in a pool not far from my home (fig. 5). I took the image in June of 2021 while backpacking with my brother. We stumbled upon this unnamed pond and its near perfect reflection of Cooper Peak’s southern buttress. In July of 2024, I returned to the peak and scrambled up its north ridge (not pictured here). I had a chance to reflect on all the seething motion of all the energy of electrons, orbiting and spinning their wavelengths of harmonics, singing out their own song. I had a chance to reflect on Shelley’s notion that the mountain is sentient from the atom (and smaller) all the way up. Some knowingness driving “each singing thing.” Cooper peak is a gnarly, turbulent, knotted whorl with a counterpart to the whorls where a branch engrains itself from out of the trunk of a tree. And as Merwin turned to the “sound / Of frost stirring,” we can also turn to stirrings of granitic grains of Cooper Peak—a stirring that stretches across Deep Time—ever humbled by the notion that all such stirrings, all the “whispered sighing[s]” of the Earth, spin but the “one syllable” of a planet straining to come to form. The reflection of Cooper is not world-renowned like the way Lac Chéserys or Lac Blanc reflects the entire Mont Blanc Massif in all its sublime stillness, but it still is stirring, and I hold within both memories.

Fig. 5 Aaron M. Moe, Cooper Peak

Fig. 5 Aaron M. Moe, Cooper Peak

34“Merwin Across Borders” indeed. From Merwin to Shelley to Roethke. From Dickinson to Merwin to Rukeyser to Stein and back to Merwin. From Cooper Peak to the Massif and back. From a stream in the Rockies to the roaring Arve. From glaciers to frost to any atomic stirring. All these folded cliffs and folded sounds. All these braided memories. All this being. This crisscrossing. These ecotones. This gratitude even in the Anthropocene. This pursuit of the long lifted note of all things straining to come to form.

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Bibliographie

DICKINSON, Emily. Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them. Ed. Cristanne Miller. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016.

MERWIN, W.S. Finding the Islands. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1982.

MERWIN, W.S. The Rain in the Trees. New York: Knopf, 1988.

MERWIN, W.S. The Second Four Books of Poems. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 1993.

MERWIN, W.S. The Shadow of Sirius. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2008.

MERWIN, W.S. Selected Translations. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2013.

MORRISON, Toni. Beloved. New York: Vintage, 2004.

ROETHKE, Theodore. Straw for the Fire. Ed. David Wagoner. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2006.

RUKEYSER, Muriel. The Life of Poetry. Ashfield: Paris Press, 1996.

SHELLEY, Percy Bysshe. The Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley. New York: The Modern Library, 1994.

WHITMAN, Walt. Complete Poetry and Collected Prose. New York: Library of America, 1982.

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Table des illustrations

Titre Fig. 1 Aaron M. Moe, Adams Falls in Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park of North America, 2024.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/23776/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 268k
Titre Fig. 2. Aaron M. Moe, “The Ravine of Arve,” behind which presses the Mer de Glace glacier
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/23776/img-2.png
Fichier image/png, 1,3M
Titre Fig. 3. I have no idea if Shelley ever hiked up to La Jonction from where I took this image. Regardless, the glacier can be seen descending as a kind of frozen rapid, churning and churning in all of its “stillness.” It is an excellent counterpart to the roiling rapid of the Arve. The summit of Mont Blanc sits beneath the sun. It is one experience just to witness this scene, but quite another to consider the possibility that every atom singing to make this turbulent form just might have some kind of sentience. That might go too far for some readers. At the very least, then, one must consider the origin and impetus of the energy at work to bring forth such a slumbering and yet dynamic, chaotically folded form.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/23776/img-3.png
Fichier image/png, 1,0M
Titre Fig. 4. Aaron M. Moe. “Here, I go no higher. I stand at La Jonction, the place where a glacier splits into two—the Bossons and Taconnaz—not unlike a churning rapid bifurcates at a large boulder into two streams.”
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/23776/img-4.png
Fichier image/png, 1,2M
Titre Fig. 5 Aaron M. Moe, Cooper Peak
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/23776/img-5.png
Fichier image/png, 2,7M
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Aaron M. Moe, « On Sound: Merwin, Shelley, and the Alps »Transatlantica [En ligne], 2 | 2024, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2024, consulté le 08 février 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/23776 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/134gk

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Aaron M. Moe

Independent scholar

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