Week One: W.S. Merwin

                  What are Merwin’s poems made of?

On The Shadow of Sirius

Before I opened this volume, the only Merwin poems I had read were the few that we looked at in American Lit. These were different and surprising to me and I found the line structure very interesting. I think The Shadow of Sirius was a great companion to the introductory chapter of The Art of the Poetic Line because Merwin uses the line so effectively. His poetry is unpunctuated in the conventional sense, but his lines (which vary in size) seem to take the place of punctuation. In the poems with shorter lines (which is most of them), the line breaks seem to be more effective than periods or commas possibly could be. This is something that I had never really thought about before reading Longenbach’s many re-linings, if you will, of King Lear’s mad speech. Although the poetic line seemed intentional and important to me in the past, I wouldn’t have been able to explain why I felt this way. But now I guess I can say that the frequent enjambment in Merwin’s poetry helps me see how the speaker’s “mind is in motion” (Longenbach 10).  While I don’t feel that Merwin’s speakers share in Lear’s madness, I do see a lot of emotion in Merwin’s syntax and a reflection of how memory works. Sirius is clearly an older man’s book. I think even if I had somehow avoided looking at the author photo on the back cover of the book I would have known that these poems couldn’t have been written by someone young. The volume—especially in its many references to family and its deep sense of life experience and resulting understanding—reads very much like a beautiful conversation with an elderly person reflecting on the past.

“The Song of the Trolleys” is one that has stuck itself in my brain. It startled me in reading because its subject seems more tangible than most of the other poems’.  The lines—short, halting, but never stopping—gave me a feeling that I’m hearing a memory that both takes some work to recall and also contains more than the speaker can express to the reader. I hope that makes sense—it’s like it’s a memory so old that it’s too full and the speaker has to concentrate to choose the parts to share. In reading the short lines aloud I found that the constant enjambment of these brief lines encouraged me to move quickly through some lines but to linger in the breaks between others. This poem also stood out to me as one of the more rhythmic ones in the reading we’ve done thus far. I enjoyed the way it sounded—echoing the rhythm of the memory of the trolleys’ “song.” The repeated “-ing” verbs made me think, oddly enough, of Poe’s “The Bells,” one of the few poems I remember reading in high school, since I imagine a trolley “tolling” and “clanging” as well.

So, after some rambling, I believe that Merwin’s poems are made of memory, of a full lifetime’s experience, of nostalgia, and of line structure that punctuates better than punctuation. Is the poetic line the punctuation of emotion? I like thinking of it that way.