1This article takes its title from a poem called “The Bird,” published in The Vixen (23), its inspiration from Rita Dove’s statement that Merwin’s poetry illuminates a covenant with the natural world (1), and its corpus mainly from The Vixen and Migration: New and Selected Poems. But since the subject is vast, as is the corpus, the former will be limited mostly to ornithology—of abiding interest to Merwin, and a life-long concern of my own–while illustrations and analysis of the latter will range more widely, and will concentrate on the poetics employed in creating bird and fox imagery seen in The Vixen, in order to gain the coherence established in a single collection. The master image of the collection is evidently the fox, but birds, and wildlife generally are to be found in nearly every poem. The aim is to show how and why Merwin’s poetics work the way they do in establishing a voice that reflects the isolated, imperilled, unstable self, so characteristic of contemporary literature, and this paper will argue that the self in Merwin’s poetry is imperilled because all too often mankind has been alienated from the natural world. As we shall see, a significant part of his poetics may be found in intertextual references to other poets, and his frequently ironic references to the Bible.
- 1 Ellman and O’Clair’s exhaustive 1,500-page anthology of Modern Poetry (1973) dedicates only ten pag (...)
2With a nod to Baudelaire, Merwin wrote of his readers in “Cover Note”: “Hypocrite reader my / variant my almost / family we are so / few now” (2005 291), and it seems true that his readership has always been somewhat limited.1 Merwin’s relatively limited readership may be caused by his experimentation with form, drawing on his love of troubadour poetry, and is associated with a poet’s sense of “the role of time in the poem and the role of the poem in time” (Merwin, 1969 270-272). His experimentation, the existential doubt expressed throughout his poetry, together with his exile from the U.S. means that despite his numerous awards, in a sense he has always been semi-detached from the main stream of America. Thus, the title Migration to his New and Selected Poetry is so apposite, because Merwin’s voyages, reflected in the constant coming and going in his poetry and in his life, mirror those of his migrating birds. A connected reason for his relative lack of readership may be caused by his holistic view of existence in which everything is connected, and because of this he is quite difficult to analyse and dissect, for if you pull on one strand of his poetry, necessarily you abandon another. In The Vixen, every roof is part of the sky, and each prospect has its own birds (1996 26). “In a peculiar sense,” Merwin wrote of criticizing poetry and poetic form, “if you criticize how it happens you criticize what it is” (Merwin, 1969 271, my italics), which might be seen as Merwin’s take on Wordsworth’s “We murder to dissect” (from “The Tables Turned”).
- 2 The concept could be taken back to Plato; to St. Paul’s sermon to the Unknown God, and the conversi (...)
- 3 There is minimal punctuation in earlier collections, and in The Vixen one only finds an occasional (...)
- 4 If the demonstrative pronoun “This” is stressed, then the fact of the end of World War I is foregro (...)
- 5 Merwin is a virtuoso of rhythm and constantly varies stress patterns between rhythmic prose and iam (...)
3From his first poems to his last, Merwin’s writing has been concerned with the natural world, and mankind’s position in that world. His engagement acknowledges a desire for unity, but he is all to well aware that Western humanity (in particular) is responsible for polluting the world, exploiting it, and hence alienating mankind from nature. However, the engagement is not simple, for the phrase “Neither knowing nor not knowing” reveals a philosophical stance of uncertainty and doubt. It is a position that has implications for his ability to say, or indeed not say, and it is for this reason that he constantly employs an apophatic argument—an argument from the negative—of not saying, not naming, (although the apophatic always carries within an opposite, kataphatic argument of saying and naming).2 As Hix writes eloquently: “Merwin makes vivid the ability of what is not there to have momentous consequences for what is” (11). A typical example may be found in “Garden,” referring to the Garden of Eden, where his child-self wonders why “the Lord God whoever that was” had planted a garden somewhere where it could never be seen and “we would know of it only that it could not be known” (1996 14). This cast of mind causes Merwin to examine the natural world by employing apposite poetic figures such as praeteritio, or apophasis (I shall use the former term since the Greek root, “away from speaking,” is a more accurate figure for Merwin’s verse). He also has frequent recourse to antithesis, which may be seen for example in “Completion,” where “home remained familiar and foreign” (1996 54). Apposite logical structures to this mode of thought are found in paradox, while absent punctuation3 and sinuous syntax all play their part in establishing uncertainty and doubt, and contribute to a poetic voice that creates a maximum of ambiguity and uncertainty for his readers. However, one advantage to lack of punctuation lies in the empowerment of the reader to resolve the ambiguities (albeit temporarily) by choosing to stress certain words or syllables. For example, in “Commemoratives” one could stress the first line in a number of ways: “This was the day when the guns fell silent one time” (1996 16). If one stresses either “This” or “was” the meaning subtly changes.4 Absent punctuation also functions to solicit his readers’ share since, like a musical score, the poems demand to be read aloud, and thus stressed subtly differently each time they are “performed.” Lieberman confirms this approach when he writes of Merwin’s “peculiar distancing” of his voice in The Lice: “The poems must be read very slowly, since most of their uncanny power is hidden in overtones that must be listened for in silences between lines, and still stranger silences within lines” (cited in Merwin, 1987 10, 11). Further, Merwin employs techniques including line breaks and gaps in lines, while the rhythm and sometimes the buried rhyme, together with limited analogy and metaphor all combine to form his poetic voice.5 In his interview with Nelson and Folsom, Merwin makes a very interesting point on the flexibility of line length: “a line is making a rhythm of its own by means of stopping where it does; and unless you’re doing it wrong, unless it's working against you and you’ve lost it, lost this line, it's making a continuity of movement and making a rhythm within a continuity” (60).
4Merwin’s poetics are employed to express these thoughts on doubt and knowing, staying and going, and his position in this uncertain world. Doubts that are exemplified in another line from “Completion” where “home was a knowledge that did not suit every occasion” (1996 54). Everything is connected in Merwin’s world: sound and sight; the birds, animals, and himself; the trees and rivers; and thus it is perfectly natural that he also has frequent recourse to synesthesia. Merwin enables the reader to visualize pauses, by creating gaps and breaks in lines, in his collection Opening the Hand (1983). The strategy is discovered from the opening poem “Strawberries”: the typography of the poem leaves extra space between words within a line, and double spaces between some lines. The poem opens: “When my father died I saw a narrow valley // it looked as though it began across the river” (2005 237). In these two lines a break in the rhythm is signaled to the reader by gaps in typography between “saw” and “a narrow valley,” and also in the double line break between the first two lines of the poem; this layout, which acts as a visual prompt to the “narrow valley,” follows the same pattern through many other poems in Opening the Hand. The effect of gaps in typography creates visual caesuras, which not only allows space for breath, but also for a reflective pause.
5There are numerous examples of saying through not saying, in the collection, but one more will make the point. In “Night Singing,” Merwin runs through the gamut of previous poets who have written of the nightingale before announcing that there is nothing at all for him to say, and anyway he can see nothing (which actually doesn’t matter that much, for it is almost impossible to see nightingales), but then he lets out all his poetic stops and summons up the voice of the bird. He:
[…] can only listen and ride out on the long note’s
invisible beam that wells up and bursts from its
unknown star on on on never returning
never the same never caught (1996 32)
6These are the moments one waits for in poetry, when the sensuality of the thing is caught and held in words. Merwin constantly wrestles with words, between knowing and not knowing, as seen in his vision of the natural world in “Rimbaud’s Piano,” where it seems that finally language cannot achieve an “alchemy” (2005 297), although every now and again the word really will mean the thing, as in “Inheritance” for example, where the language miraculously evokes the sensual experience of the pears: “its / syllables ripe with anticipation / honeyed and buttered with praise” (2005 304). Or again in “Present,” in The Vixen, when an old lady makes him a present of a bag of mirabelles, and the tiny globe of the fruit becomes an image in microcosm for the whole wonder of nature in the great globe itself: “look she said / how you can see through them and each of us held up / a small golden plum filled with the summer evening” (1996 21).
7After a brief overview of The Vixen collection, this paper will now concentrate on fox and bird imagery, including Merwin’s dialogue with Ted Hughes’ poem “The Thought Fox,” and Montale’s absent muse “Volpe,” before developing an analysis of Merwin’s apophatic arguments in The Vixen, and the poetics he employs to inscribe himself in this world. The paper concludes with an attempt to summarize Merwin’s achievement in voicing his concern for the extensive loss of habitat in the natural world due to humanity’s destructive behaviour, together with his life-long attempt to remember and celebrate nature and native peoples; concerns that are most clearly manifest and developed in The Folding Cliffs: A Narrative. In this long, complex poem Merwin’s sympathy for the native protagonists’ love of nature, and their organic connection to the natural world is given its most extended and heartfelt form. Merwin’s position with regard to man’s relationship to the natural world may be seen in direct contradiction with Genesis, where God is described as giving “dominion over all the earth”, to man who subsequently named all the creatures of the earth (Gen. 1.26, 2.20). Folsom and Nelson write that for Merwin language “has granted us an unlucky dominion, and the only things that are safe from us are the things we have not yet named” (3). Merwin’s poetic voice expresses the necessity of a connection with nature, and the dangers of separation from nature.
- 6 “Then we, / As we beheld her striding there alone, / Knew that there never was a world for her / Ex (...)
8But first a voice; let it be Merwin’s voice reading his poem “Air” recorded at the Florida Studio Theatre (4 May 2013). In this recording he speaks of music being air, that air is poetry, and that we are breathing the same air as Shakespeare. Without considering whether breathing in the same air as Shakespeare, over four hundred years ago, which might be found a little fetid, let us accept Merwin’s conceit that air is poetry, and certainly breath and space for breath in his poetry are vital. What strikes one about Merwin’s voice is its incantatory quality. He is a poet reading in the great tradition of Tennyson reading Maud, or Yeats reading “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” or Dylan Thomas reading anything. Merwin’s is a rhythmic voice, a singing voice, a voice like Stevens reading “An Idea of Order at Key West” with his triple-beat pause on “Singing […] made.”6 In the short video clip of Merwin reading “Air,” his body is inhabited by the poem, and he can be seen beating an approximate tempo with his left hand.
- 7 See Righelato 27-30 for the complex reasons of habitat loss.
9As noted previously, everything is connected in Merwin’s writing, and the incantatory rhythm of his performance of “Air” is yet another reflection of the manner in which his verse inscribes an appreciation of the natural world where, in The Vixen, nearly every poem has some mention of birds. These birds, found in the vicinity of his house in Lacam, are mostly common or garden pigeons, magpies, thrushes, blackbirds, crows, wrens, finches, owls etc., sometimes there is a wryneck (“Distant Morning” 68) or a warbler (“Walkers” 11), and an occasional redstart also appears (“Garden” 14). There are nightingales, but they are not entirely Merwin’s for these songbirds carry poetic baggage with them, as versed previously by Ovid, Hafiz, Keats, Eliot, and Ransom, and their song functions as a counterpoint to the destruction of the natural world. The nightingale’s song, contrasted to mankind’s destruction of nature, is exemplified in “Chord,” a poem found in The Rain in The Trees: “while he [Keats] listened to the nightingale they heard their own axes echoing through the forests” (2005 286). Yes, Merwin’s birds are the birds of everyday; it is what he does with them that is extraordinary. And if birds form such a rich vein of imagery in his poetry it is because they answer to the duality of his vision: the ephemeral and the permanent, the constant change of seasons, the coming and going, the loss and return that is manifest in the life-cycle of migrating birds, the so often referenced swallows, cuckoos and larks; whilst territorial, sedentary birds might be said to reflect the stability and permanence of Nature. Unfortunately, it is precisely these owls, partridge, pigeons, and birds of prey (there is only one, a black kite, found in The Vixen, in “Distant Morning” 68), that are most at risk from the noxious chemicals (mis)used in contemporary agriculture. A risk which is exacerbated by the loss of hedgerows and of habitat generally. Loss of habitat is responsible for a reduction of biomass whose catastrophic loss is further compounded by global warming.7 Birds are, literally, the canaries in the mine, for they respond so rapidly to changes in their habitat, and are some of the first signifiers of an increasingly polluted planet; they are the first to suffer disease and death. The dual aspect of existence found in the life-cycle of migrating birds is also reflected by the fox of his title, for the vixen too lives between two worlds: it has a natural, wild existence, but is frequently found in suburban gardens; it is an animal that has adapted (like gulls) to humanity’s buildings and humanity’s trash.
- 8 This is true only of Migration; in the original collection “Dry Ground” and “Battues” are interpose (...)
10Richard Howard claimed that The Vixen is “one poem in 64 sections” (quoted in Young), and certainly one sees multiple connections of loss and recovery in the natural world found in poems such as “Passing” (22), followed by “The Bird” (23), or “Romanesque” (34), with its images of the Garden of Eden, which is naturally followed by “Snake.”8 Only a few may be said to stand alone, such as the three individually named poems “François de Maynard 1582-1646” (27-28), “Hölderlin at the River” (29), and “Peire Vidal” (45), although these poems also connect to the themes of the collection as a whole in terms of the natural world, loss, and memory.
11In terms of location, The Vixen is for the most part dedicated to his house in Lacam, the inhabitants of the surrounding villages, and above all to the natural world and its wildlife. The scenes, many events and most characters described have to be inferred, for very few elements are named specifically. And some names are completely off the map such as those found in “Forgotten Streams”: “the Vaurs,” “the Divat,” and the mellifluous-sounding “Siou Sujou Suzou” (20). The names of these streams signify in the negative—we can neither know nor find them. Exceptions to the rule are Viellescazes who makes a couple of appearances, and Edouard who is reprised from The Carrier of Ladders collection (2005 153). Edouard reappears in The Vixen: in “Oak Time” he “is gone” along with everyone else in the village (6); and in “The Shortest Night” he is described as “older than the century” (57). But Merwin writes rather of the villagers’ absence, their memories, and their ghosts. On the surface it seems utterly banal, but the moment one probes the simple-seeming vocabulary, and wrestles through the absent punctuation, one becomes aware of something radically insecure and hesitant.
12The Vixen is composed of relatively short (for Merwin) poems of irregular length, unrhymed (although there is considerable internal rhyme), with varied rhythm, and unpunctuated, except for gaps and astute line breaks. Merwin often writes of a general situation before inscribing his poetic voice within it, and the thought process is frequently a movement from a general evocation of an unnamed place, with concrete detail regarding the natural world, when suddenly a shift into the personal takes place—were he writing in sonnet form, it would be appropriate to talk of a volta. For example, in “White Morning” we find an accumulation of wild flowers and shrubs, the signs of cows (only their footprints are present), birds too are absent, though their empty nests remain, and all nature is caught in an image of early morning mist which “has held it all in a cloud / unseen the whole night as in a mind” (17, my italics). When suddenly, in the middle of that line, we read “where I came / when it was turning white,” the transforming metaphor “as in a mind,” thus shifts the significance of the perceivable mist in its natural state into a mist held in the poet’s mind, as he continues observing and thinking. It is by such means that Merwin solicits the reader into sharing his own concrete experience; his linguistic playfulness and wit perform much the same function, as will be seen later.
- 9 A second poem with the same title appears later in the collection (55).
13The uncertainty generated from the expression: “neither knowing nor not knowing” may be seen in the first “Passing” (22)9 a poem that loads with concrete imagery a situation of mutual incomprehension, expressed in language further loaded with biblical imagery. Merwin’s house almost burned down; his father arrives unannounced and rather than attending to the crisis, demands information on changing money, and trains for “the Holy Land.” His father’s religious term “Holy Land” rather than the more geographically functional “Israel,” juxtaposed with a request to change money, nudges the reader towards the New Testament story of the moneychangers cleansed from the Temple (Matt. 21.12-17). But Merwin did not “know that it was the only time” he and his father would meet like this: they are both passing through, as it were, although his father’s “passing,” as the reader will soon discover, is permanent. “Passing” is followed by “The Bird” (23) which opens with a hesitant question: “Might it be like this then to come back descending”—presumably from a plane on his way to bury, or having buried his father (but like so much else, that has to be assumed, for it is not stated, and the poem is ambiguous—more than most). There seems to be no certainty in this world established from the opening question “Might it be” and continuing through a landing that finds a city “half dissolved / like a winter” (23). An ecological disaster seems to have occurred since the city’s faces are piled in their own wreckage, and above them, in an evocative image for skyscrapers, there are “towers of empty mirrors” which reflect the vanity and self-importance of the society that created these buildings: “TRUMP TOWER” writ large. Color is absent here (and generally infrequent in the collection), rivers are “pewter” and the hour is “grey”; the poem transitions through the seasons from winter to “the first hesitations of spring,” marked by the song of the sedentary wren. The hesitant tone of the poem is reinforced:
[…] doubting
belief neither stranger nor true inhabitant
neither knowing nor not knowing coming at last
to the door in sunlight and seeing as through glasses far
away (23)
- 10 Merwin’s poetry is often enriched by subtle, sometimes ironic, reference to biblical cadences: “the (...)
14The aperture of the door shifts the focus as he now sees “as through glasses far / away” and again the reader is nudged towards a Biblical reference, St. Paul’s: “For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face; now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known” (1 Cor. 13.12).10 The shift in focus leads to an ambivalent longing for migration, to stay and to leave. He writes of the absence of animals, holding everything “as uncertainly” as blown flowers or the empty half of a bird’s egg, “flung out of the bare flailing branches” (23), which leaves the reader to reflect on the violence of “flung” and “flail” as to whether cuckoo or wind were responsible for the empty nest, and lost life. It is worth noting how often Merwin has recourse to apertures: images of gates, windows, thresholds, and doors abound in his poetry, for these are the lenses through which he sees, and thus knows, and yet can only express the wonderful reality of the world by not saying.
15There is an elegiac quality to many of the poems, as though he is saying goodbye to this part of his life forever. This little world, now lost to him, except in memory, has been damaged and its surviving inhabitants have emerged damaged by their experiences in two world wars (just as their ancestors have suffered throughout the whole of mankind’s violent history). His world is populated by survivors, and furnished with the graves of those who did not survive. Memorials to those who were sacrificed are found in “The Red” (53), where Merwin recalls the worst barbarism when, having executed the men, women and children: “the Germans set fire to the buildings / with the animals inside”—and the line break, creating delay, suspense, and shock, attests to the horror he felt at this atrocity. An atrocity compounded by the Germans’ total lack of empathy, as though they had finished an ordinary day’s work and so they “went off down the lane and the fires burned on / and the smoke filled the summer twilight and then the warm night.” The peaceful, commonplace scenes, and the soft euphony of the words and images, contrast most shockingly with the brutality of their actions.
16The elegiac tone in The Vixen is significant from the opening poem in the collection “Fox Sleep”:
and the places where I had been a stranger appeared to me
to be where I had been at home called by name and answering
getting ready to go away and going away (1995 4)
17“Fox Sleep” is composed of five sections. In section one, the poem focuses on a fox carved into a grindstone: “nose in tail seeming to be / asleep.” The short second section describes his alienation from something that ought to have been familiar to him. The third section describes a man turned into a fox, the fourth is devoted to a dead fox, while the last section is an elegy to his lost home—living foxes in this poem are notably absent. The stone fox and the grain it once ground are personified and share the poet’s emotions, they endure and remember, as the poet remembers, for this all happened “many years ago,” when he was walking with a friend on a mountain road. As usual in Merwin’s verse the seasons are signaled, it is turning to autumn (and we note his choice of the European word, rather than the American “fall,” as though to underline his European location). The scene is again curiously colorless, true there are some “flickering yellow leaves” on autumn trees, but mostly his concern is with shades and textures rather than colors: we find “clear” streams, “black” rock, slates glisten “white” in the hoar frost, relics are “pale,” and a cradle is “the color of dust.” The carved fox seems to be asleep, and thus its sculptured form is paradoxically animated, which introduces the significance of the sculptured animal in the second section of the poem. In his memory, the fox is almost worn away “where it / had gone around and around grinding grain and salt / to go into the dark and to go on and remember” (31).
18The phrase works backwards to the grain, grindstone and fox, and leads to a hesitant memory in the second section, where he is at home and not at home simultaneously, getting ready to go away and going away. His hesitancy, migration, and the functioning of his memory is given almost definitive form in the following lines:
- 11 In these lines we are not far from Hamlet’s ontological questions of whether to be, and how to be t (...)
What I thought I had left I kept finding again
but when I went looking for what I thought I remembered
as anyone could have foretold it was not there (3)11
19The first section of “Fox Sleep” speaks of loss, together with a gallant attempt to salvage something from that loss through the power of memory, while the second focuses on finding foreignness at home and vice-versa.
- 12 The questor for the Grail must ask a question: “what are these things for?”, or “whom do these thin (...)
20Kitsune, a fox spirit from Japanese folklore, inspires the third section of the poem. This part is situated long in the past for the unnamed old man has been a fox for five hundred lives. The third section is circular, repetitive, and very ambiguous since unidentified voices—“he,” “they,” “an old man,” “I” interact in a dialogue concerned with reality and its simulacrum. The poem asks “when someone has wakened to what is really there / is that person free of the chain of consequences” (4). On that occasion the answer to the question was “That person sees it as it is” which, in the manner of the Grail question and answer,12 has great significance since it releases the old man from his fox-body, which can be buried only then. However, a further question remains unanswered: “what if he had given the right answer every time.” No answer is provided to that question, proving once again that Merwin’s poetry resists closure.
21The fourth section by itself might represent the ideas of migration and repetition put forward in this paper. It begins: “Once again I was there and once again I was leaving / and again it seemed as though nothing had changed” (4). The first section was set in autumn, just turning into winter, and now we have returned to autumn again, with “sunlight tawny in the fields where the shadows / each day grew longer.” Although autumn has returned, yet something had ended: he sees friends for the last time, a “long marriage was over” and, as though to symbolize these endings, in an echo of Tennyson’s envoi, the poet “was crossing the bars of shadow” (5). The reference seems a premonition of his own death, embodied in the dead vixen, which he finds still “warm in the dewy grass.” With great tenderness he “carried her home”—not its carcass, note, but “her”—her fox identity and dignity are still intact. He buries the fox in his garden “in the morning of the clear autumn that she had left / and to stand there afterward in the turning daylight” (5). Merwin’s empathy for the dead animal is shown in his reflective stance at this moment. His verse evokes a feeling that the fox has chosen to cease existence, rather than appear as a victim, and her spirit is kept alive by his own vigil.
22The fifth and last section of “Fox Sleep” is an elegy for the lost house and location; paradoxically all is now alive as weasels run, light kindles the cherry leaves to gold and, in a move redolent of Thomas’s “Adlestrop” or Hardy’s “Channel Firing,” Merwin shifts focus, moving from a close-up to a wide-angle pan-shot that moves outward through space, and backward through time and the seasons. Each concrete aspect of the location is summoned into his memory, and then from memory into the poem by incantatory repetitions of “there is” “there are” phrases in the present tense. Initially, by the chimney, he sees the roof and window; then he looks onto the garden; then “there is the field below the house”; then to the broad valley; then to the river; to a strand of sky; he seems to see (for there is no verb of hearing) the notes of bells rising in a synaesthetic image “faint as smoke,” the visual haze evoking the distant sound; until finally beyond the valley he remembers a line of mountains. A line of mountains that then segues into his own poetry since he recognizes them “like a line of writing / that has come back when I had thought it was forgotten” (5): the house in Lacam is preserved forever in the lines of the poem. “Fox Sleep” epitomizes Merwin’s message of a connectedness with nature, not simply in The Vixen but throughout his œuvre.
- 13 “Volpe” is identified by Pellegrino as Maria Luisa Spaziani (Pellegrino “Volpe”).
- 14 I am grateful to Ed Folsom for information on journals and jury.
23Merwin’s poems in The Vixen are centered on a minute observation of nature in a garden or in his house in Lacam, but all of his poetry is connected to the great literary heritage of pastoral and romantic genres. The images and tropes of poems past inform his poetic present. Merwin’s shifting focus from the microcosm of his garden out into the world is analogous to the enrichment of his poetic voice through intertext, and these intertextual references connect his poetry with the great tradition. Merwin’s poetry is full of literary references: we have already noted some biblical echoes, as well as references to Baudelaire, Ovid, Tennyson, Hafiz and Keats, and in his collection Garden Time additionally we encounter Eliot, Frost, and Blake. His poems on foxes are no exception. For it seems there is a dialogue between Ted Hughes’s “The Thought-Fox” (14), with the fox images found in The Vixen, as well as with “Volpe” Montale’s absent muse.13 That Merwin was aware of Hughes’ and Montale’s work is evident. He stayed with Hughes and Plath in London, and they with him in Lacam and elsewhere. He published in the same journals as Montale over an extended period, as well as being on the jury when Montale was awarded The Academy of American Poets prize for The Storm in 1985. 14
- 15 See Merwin’s “even now you are unharmed even now perfect / as you have always been now when your li (...)
24In “The Thought Fox,” Hughes is attempting to write, apparently uninspired and, unusually for him, located inside, on a cold winter night, in the process of gazing through a window, seeing nothing, while a “lonely clock” is ticking; an epithet which transfers his own isolation onto that of the timepiece as he faces a blank sheet of paper. In almost the same repetitive style and rhythm adopted by Merwin in the title poem “Vixen” (69) Hughes summons up the fox, which “now, and now, and now / sets neat prints into the snow”.15 Until, in the final stanza, the fox enters his head, with a “sudden sharp hot stink” redolent of the material, corporeal, fox-thing, and although the window is still starless and the clock is still ticking, yet the page is miraculously printed—the fox is both the inspiration, and is also the poem itself, a fully achieved six-stanza poem rhyming ABAB, with frequent half-rhymes, and alliteration. A similar situation is found in “Vixen” towards the end of Merwin’s collection, and as so often in his poetry, the subject is evoked through the negative and through paradox. The vixen is a “comet of stillness”; a “princess of what is over,” uttering a “high note held without trembling without voice without sound.” Paradox is encapsulated by the image of a comet, normally an epitome of speed, seen here as “still.” The vixen’s velocity is latent and potential. She is capable of great speed, yet for the moment she is “still” here in time, and she is “still” unmoving in space. The high note of her bark, and her high status as “a princess” (she “over” in the class hierarchy sense of “above,” but her life is also “over” since it has ended), she is portrayed through the negative, her existence is perfected, as she is seen as perfect in line 12, and her voice is without sound. The image of the vixen is now held forever in his memory. The fox is described in images of human communication: she is “a keeper of the kept secrets,” of stories destroyed, of dreams and of sentences; she is a “sibyl of the extinguished / window” which predicts her final transformation into the poem. The animal is located in a landscape modified by humanity, she is seen at the foot of a wall, then on a bridge and, in a final movement, he begs to see the fox again going over the wall one last time “before the garden is extinct and the woods are figures / guttering on a screen.” And here Merwin joins Hughes, for now the natural world, the fox, the garden, the woods all become transformed into words on the cinematic screen of his memory: “let my words find their own / places in the silence after the animals” (69). Like Hughes’ fox, Merwin’s fox has become the poem. And for both it seems the fox is a redemption, an embodiment of the natural world, which in Merwin’s case enables him to slip “from the calendars / from the creeds of difference and the contradictions / that were my life,” and makes him whole (69).
- 16 Though Merwin differs from Eliot in having frequent recourse to apertures, while Eliot often employ (...)
25Meanwhile, Eugenio Montale’s poems to his “Vixen” muse might also add another layer of significance to Merwin’s poetry, for clearly Merwin knew Montale’s poetry very well. What the two share above all is a sense of presence in absence, a permanent recourse to the apophatic. About his poem “On an Unwritten Letter (1940),” Montale wrote: “The ‘you’ is far away, maybe not there and that’s why the letter is unwritten” (2012 717). Rebecca West wrote that “Montale typically does not even know what he does not know; thus even unequivocal negative knowledge is denied” (quoted in Montale 725). In “On an Unwritten Letter (1940)” Montale writes: “Only the breakers / crash on the point, empty, at Finisterre” (2012 211). Absence, discovered at the end of the world, is an image that could just as well have come from Merwin as from Montale. Within both Merwin’s and Montale’s poetry may be heard the ineluctable voice of T.S. Eliot, whose cadences and images are found throughout both poets’ work.16
- 17 He is evidently attached to the image since it is repeated in “Emergence” where “sometimes snow has (...)
26“Vixen” presents the reader with the achieved fox poem, and it may be that this is all that can be saved for, as noted, the poems are replete with images of loss and absence, a going away and a coming back, everything held in the memory of the poet. “Oak Time” might stand as an example for all, when “Edouard is gone,” as is everyone else; there are few birds left, and there are no longer any animals led from the barns (1996 6). However, loss and passing are the concerns of individual lives, against which the solace of eternal nature must be placed. In “Untouched” the poetic voice is aware that even in his dreams there is something missing: absent friends, their voices, barns and meadows have all been turned away from, and he has “gone.” But that is not it entirely: the something missing was “always not there” (33 my italics), and yet at the same time, in a paradoxically tactile image the walls are covered “in their furs of snow” (furs of course evoke warmth in contrast to the frozen snow, although wind-swept snow might be said to resemble fur). However, the image works more subtly, because the snow will actually insulate the house, as Inuits build igloos, and sheep bury themselves in snow in order to survive.17 Some inhabitants are named, and Edouard reappears to pick up walnuts, but Merwin has left his neighbors, as he has left everything else, but “whatever I missed / I left the stream running under the mossy cliff.” And we may infer from this that although there is always going to be loss, yet the stream he left will continue to run under the moss-green, humid cliff. The repetitive movement of loss, the going, and the returning are marked by anaphoric structures and repetition: “again and again [he has] turned from it all and gone” in “Untouched” (1996 33).
- 18 Ecco also signifies “here,” just as ciao means both “hello” and “goodbye.”
27The repetitions and anaphoric structures are exemplified by the poem “In the Doorway” (1996 30), presenting the reader with another series of repeated images. The poem begins with a sensual image of the smell of cold stone: “that chill and air without season that acrid haunting / that skunk ghost;” leaving the reader to summon up an image of the ashlars used to construct old door frames (found in every mining village in France), and the image is discovered through an accumulation of declarative clauses: “that breath of the dark,” “that chill and air,” “that acrid haunting,” “that skunk ghost,” and these clauses move the reader from the aperture of the stone doorway, towards the frame of a stone gate. We have commented already on the focus achieved through his frequent recourse to apertures, and here these door frames and gates bring him to an indeterminate “it was there again” (30), which might finally be glossed as nature itself, in its constant flux and movement through the seasons, confronting the reader once more with an absence and balance in terms of positive and negative, plus and minus. There is a welcome, but without welcoming; faith without promise; “echo without echo it was there again.” This is a well-achieved example of praeteritio, for though it is stated that there is no echo, the repetition of the word expresses the very thing it is said to negate, and it is also a buried macaronic joke since “it was there again” (my italics) is ecco in Italian which means “there”.18 And finally in a movement of synesthesia, “finding again” everything present in the frame of the doorway: “knowing no more but listening the smell of touching and going / of what is gone the smell of touching and not being there” (30). The word “finding” in this context operates verbally in the present continuous, but also carries the nominal denotation of a judicial review of the sense impressions found “In the Doorway.” It is a judge’s “finding” in the sense of a forensic examination of the facts, and a judgement made upon them.
28Along with repetitive structures, which create a sense of recognition and bonding between the poetic voice and his readers, it is worth underlining Merwin’s playful language, occasional punning, and flashes of sardonic humor, because such shared wit is a further solicitation of the reader towards greater proximity with the author’s poetic vision. As we have seen, there are obvious and timeworn plays on “still” as motionless and “still” as continuing through time; or “habit” as custom, or as dress, in “Ancestral Voices” (1996 65). The traditional time / thyme pun may be found in the second “Passing” poem (55) where we find the sparrows flying ahead of him “hidden under the bitter / thymes” (spelled as the herb, but clearly also reflecting the passage of time). There are puns contained in titles such as “Present” signifying either “now” or “a gift.” And there are also ironic titles such as “The Speed of Light” which creates an expectation of unimaginable rapidity in the reader, although the poem begins with images of the natural, organic, slow passage of time (1996 42). His sardonic humor is exemplified in “Possessions” (1996 51) where we find a massive amount of goods catalogued, accumulated over the centuries, until “Madame la Vicomtesse who was heir to it all / found it poor in variety and after her marriage / was often away visiting family and so on.” The line break after marriage, and the phrase “and so on” is an amusingly ironic dismissal of the goods, chattels, the decadence of the family, her general lack of interest, and probably her amorous liaisons in the city. The château is burgled, the jewels stolen, and absurdly she will not be remembered for herself, or her rich possessions, but only for the ephemeral ribbons worn in place of the absent jewels. Merwin’s ironic humor adds a note of self-deprecation to a poet who might otherwise appear over-serious if not tragic. The irony also operates as a rhetorical stance functioning to charm the reader into an easier relationship with his sometimes “difficult” poetry and complex thought.
- 19 His identification with the passage of time reflected in the image of autumn leaves inevitably remi (...)
29We have commented on Merwin focus on loss in The Vixen whether the loss of parents, friends, or lovers. Above all he expresses a concern with mankind’s alienation from the natural world. Since he writes so much about loss, it is logical that his argument is frequently apophatic—an argument from the negative. In writing of the summer solstice, in The Vixen, for example, the moment is not entitled the longest day, but rather “The Shortest Night” (57). The day is revealed by what has already been completed: the harvest is in, the swallows (those harbingers of spring and summer) are settled, cuckoos (another migrating spring arrival) are calling, milking is finished, domestic animals and old people are asleep, and, in short, the rural day has come to an end. But in the village, he and friends talk late into the night, intending to hold a vigil into the next day. Owls slip by, foxes listen, but the moment passes without being observed—the moment has fled. More significantly, at this moment he himself becomes airborne, metamorphosed into a bird: “I thought I had flown over the edge / of the world […] and that I was still flying / and had to wake to learn whether the wings were real” (57). The line break at “edge” is masterly since it forces the reader’s eyes over the edge of the line into the continuation of the phrase: “of the world” which creates an ictus on “of,” as the reader naturally pauses for breath at the end of the line. In Merwin’s last collection, dictated to his wife Paula as he was losing his eyesight, he returned to the notion of night and day in a poem called “Daylight after the Autumn Equinox” (2016 13). Once again, the passage of time is signified by the migration and movement of birds, who “stop with it” (time), and then “doves wake again” in an eternal round of seasonal change and mutability; “dancers move in the arms of shadows,” all of nature celebrates the equinox, as the brightness of the days are going, and these days of summer exist now only in his memory. From the same collection there are similar images of night and day, light and darkness, but even more movingly expressed in the poem “Old Man at Home Alone in the Morning,” where now there is no one left to ask questions of save himself, but alas he cannot respond: “there is no answer.” Meanwhile, there are some questions he no longer asks, while other questions are always “me,” and “that it is / no question at all.” But “this morning” is not old, and in a powerful empathetic move, he identifies with autumn: “I am the morning / in which the autumn leaves have no question / as the breeze passes through them and is gone” (2016 65).19
- 20 “All be subject to mortalitie, / Yet is eterne in mutabilitie” (Spenser 3.6.47.4-5, and cf. the two (...)
30As we have seen, throughout his work Merwin has concentrated on loss and the damage inflicted on nature by man. James Lovelock argued in The Gaia Hypothesis that the world is a self-regulating, self-healing organic whole; it may transform and change, but it will always return to stability much like the pattern of migrating birds (ix). Spenser evoked the same perception five hundred years ago regarding the natural order of things, seen in a permanence of constant flux: all is “eterne in mutability.”20 But I fear that Merwin was right in signaling that we may have very nearly come to the end of that optimistic cycle. The damage we have done, are doing, may be irreparable. Nelson and Folsom write that: “Merwin had been expressing his concerns about nuclear and ecological disaster since the mid-1950s” (9). In a review of two books on birds dated from 1958, Merwin wrote: “I go on the assumption […] that there is some link between a society’s threat to destroy itself with its own inventions, and the same society’s possibly ungovernable commitment to industrial expansion” (1987 9). Merwin invites his readers to reflect on their relationship and attitude to the natural world. His concern for the damage being done is urgent, so let us end where we began with an appreciation of Merwin’s commitment to the planet, to its plants and animals, and to the oppressed peoples who inhabit it. Merwin’s concern for animals and plants is a leitmotiv throughout his entire oeuvre from A Mask for Janus in 1952, in a poem such as “Dictum: For a Mask of Deluge,” where the crows are doomed (republished in 2005 6), until Garden Time, his last collection 2016, where he wrote: “It was always for the animals that I grieved most” (“The Wild Geese” 48). We have commented earlier on the interconnectedness of all things in Merwin’s poetry and that is nowhere better exemplified than in his commitment to the organic unity of the world, its people, and its animals. Merwin concentrates on the plight of Native Americans, Native Hawaiians, and the rural population and animals of Southern France, in contrast to the exploitation of the world and indigenous peoples by marauding, mostly Western commercial interests. Commenting on Whitman, Merwin said: “It makes me extremely uneasy when he talks about the American expansion and the feeling of manifest destiny in a voice of wonder. I keep thinking about the buffalo, about the Indians, and about the species that are being rendered extinct” (1982 31). Brigit Katz, in a recent article drawing on French research published in The Smithsonian Magazine, reports that in France, farmers’ use of pesticides is responsible for a decline of one third of bird population in the past seventeen years, and in particular 50 % of skylarks have been lost; meadow pipit numbers decreased by 68 %, and grey partridge (those we sing about in Christmas Carols) have declined by a staggering 90 %. She writes that recent studies have shown that in Europe there has been an 80 % decline in insect biomass, which has caused the loss of over 400 million birds. If we turn to America, a report published in Science in 2019 states that in the last fifty years one quarter of the birds in North America have disappeared (quoted in Mock). That represents a loss of approximately three billion animals—many of them beautiful, some of them rare. We simply cannot go on like this and expect our children and grandchildren to have any knowledge of nature, lest it be second hand from museums and zoos. Merwin’s message has recently been echoed by the Chief Scientist at Birdlife International Stuart Butchart, who wrote “If we continue to unravel the fabric of life we’re going to continue to place our own future at threat” (Weston).
31Merwin’s concern with the dislocation of mankind from nature is noted in an unsigned article in the Poetry Foundation, which states that:
Although Merwin’s writing has undergone stylistic changes through the course of his career, a recurring theme is man’s separation from nature. The poet saw the consequences of that alienation as disastrous, both for the human race and for the rest of the world. (Poetry Foundation)
- 21 Some of Hardy’s finest poetry is found in “Veteris Vestigiae Flamiae” written directly after the de (...)
32An understanding that man’s impact on the environment provokes disastrous consequences for humanity by separating man from nature points to Merwin’s heritage from the Romantic movement, and the later Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau movements. These literary and artistic movements reacted to the depredations of industry and commerce by returning to organic imagery and forms sometimes employing sinuous, organic lines, not unlike Merwin’s sinuous lines of poetry. One can also see that his poetry is in the tradition of Romanticism when considering the question of how one knows the external world: in that what exists is only existent because there is an observer (the individual poet) who is present there to observe it. Thus, the memory of an event is as significant, if not more so, than the event in nature itself. Merwin’s connection to Romanticism is reinforced when one considers that together with the Romantic poets he is so evidently a poet of place (like Wordsworth or Hardy), and like them some of his greatest poetry emerges following a rupture or loss which then generates memories evoking a lost place, ideal, or person.21 In Merwin’s case this is exemplified in the elegiac memory of his house in Lacam expressed so poignantly in The Vixen.
- 22 Françoise Palleau-Papin has taken this point much further in her fine article on The Folding Cliffs(...)
33Merwin has always been singularly aware of these dangers, and laments lost nature and civilizations in poems like “Lives of the Artists” (2005 310-318), where swallows come and go, but the Native Americans have been massacred “starving through blizzards and / were betrayed and surrounded” (316). The argument is much more extended in The Folding Cliffs, where he has shown the dangers of loss of habitat and the damage done by materialist, imperial expansionism on Native Hawaiians. Perhaps the finest example of Merwin’s empathy in the poem is seen in the way he refuses to italicize native language words, and the only italicized words printed are English words in the mouths of the Indigenous people, words which indicate the absurdity, violence, materialism, and lubricity of the American invaders: “blither blather jabble jumble rumble / berry love Tahiti love baby love woman” (“The Mountain” 60).22 In The Folding Cliffs the protagonists communicate telepathically, they are at one with nature, and all connects in rituals of singing and dancing. Pi’ilani’s and Ko’olau’s final telepathic communication on the shore, thinking the same things, without sadness, as she chants softly, rhythmically patting a shell on her knee “bringing the chant / out of the darkness around them and offering it to the darkness ahead of them” (“The Cliffs” 272). Unity with nature is seen above all, in her wonderful song of farewell to the valley that sheltered them, which now holds her dead husband and child. By naming the tutelary Gods of the cliffs, in all their strangeness, she brings her family alive for us as she sings: “I will remember you / with love until I am nothing but bones in the ground” (“The Shore” 281). With these lines, in context, the title of the poem comes more powerfully into focus—the cliffs have folded themselves, protectively, around her and her family, and will continue to guard her dead child and husband, so that their graves will remain forever undefiled.
34The real history is told in the poem, because it can only be told in a poem—Western attempts at re-telling the story are expressed perforce in stereotypes and in a foreign language. In this long narrative poem, Merwin writes in English certainly, but it is English that contains a massive amount of native language and culture; it is a narrative from within the Hawaiian point of view and, above all, is told through poetry, to which the reader must submit, to understand the nature of the truth and the loss of the culture. One could adapt Wilfred Owen’s statement: “My subject is War, and the pity of War. / The Poetry is in the pity” (31) to the achievement of The Folding Cliffs. Merwin’s subject is the loss of Hawaiian culture through the intervention of American imperialism, and his poem attempts to make atonement for that loss: the atonement is in the poetry; the poem is the atonement.
35Rita Dove wrote that Merwin’s poetry illuminates a covenant with nature, and her choice of the word “covenant” reinforces the almost religious force of Merwin’s message. He believed that it is necessary to care for nature and oppressed peoples, and more particularly animals, for which he has “always grieved,” and it is necessary to express that care in poetry. However, since that commitment cannot be stated directly, it is approached only through the negative. This paper has attempted to examine the function of Merwin’s poetics seen in the animal imagery in The Vixen, The Folding Cliffs, and various other collections. Merwin often uses an apophatic argument, with its apposite rhetoric of praeteritio and, since he sees the world holistically, he has frequent recourse to synesthesia. Merwin writes of loss and argues from the negative, but paradoxically although all has been lost, nevertheless something beautiful, sensual, and permanent remains—the poems themselves: Merwin’s lost world held in words.