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William Stanley Merwin - Poems Classic Poetry Series William Stanley Merwin - poems - Publication Date: 2004 Publisher: Poemhunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive William Stanley Merwin(September 30, 1927) William Stanley Merwin (born 30 September 1927 ) is an American poet. He made a name for himself as an anti-war poet during the 1960s. Later, he would evolve toward mythological themes and develop a unique prosody characterized by indirect narration and the absence of punctuation. In the 80s and 90s, Merwin's interest in Buddhist philosophy and deep ecology also influenced his writing. He continues to write prolifically, though he also dedicates significant time to the restoration of rainforests in Hawaii, where he currently resides. Merwin has received many honors, including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (in both 1971 and 2009) and the Tanning Prize, one of the highest honors bestowed by the Academy of American Poets, as well as the Golden Wreath of the Struga Poetry Evenings. In 1952 Merwin's first book of poetry, A Mask for Janus, was published in the Yale Younger Poets Series. W. H. Auden selected the work for that distinction. Later, in 1971 Auden and Merwin would exchange harsh words in the pages of The New York Review of Books. Merwin had published "On Being Awarded the Pulitzer Prize" in the June 3, 1971 issue of The New York Review of Books outlining his objections to the Vietnam War and stating that he was donating his prize money to the draft resistance movement. Auden responded in his letter "Saying No" published in the July 1, 1971 issue stating that the Pulitzer Prize jury was not a political body with any ties to the American foreign policy. From 1956 to 1957 Merwin was also playwright-in-residence at the Poet's Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts; he became poetry editor at The Nation in 1962. Besides being a prolific poet (he has published over fifteen volumes of his works) he is also a respected translator of Spanish, French, Italian and Latin poetry, including Dante's Purgatorio. Merwin is probably best known for his poetry about the Vietnam War, and can be included among the canon of Vietnam War-era poets which includes such luminaries as Robert Bly, Adrienne Rich, Denise Levertov, Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg and Yusef Komunyakaa. In 1998, Merwin wrote Folding Cliffs: A Narrative, an ambitious novel-in-verse about Hawaiian history and legend. Merwin's early subjects were frequently tied to mythological or legendary themes, while many of the poems featured animals, which were treated as emblems in the manner of William Blake. A volume called The Drunk in the Furnace (1960) marked a change for Merwin, in that he began to write in a much www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 1 more autobiographical way. The title-poem is about Orpheus, seen as an old drunk. 'Where he gets his spirits / it's a mystery', Merwin writes; 'But the stuff keeps him musical'. Another powerful poem of this period is 'Odysseus', which reworks the traditional theme in a way that plays off poems by Stevens and Graves on the same topic. In the 1960s Merwin began to experiment boldly with metrical irregularity. His poems became much less tidy and controlled. He played with the forms of indirect narration typical of this period, a self-conscious experimentation explained in an essay called 'On Open Form' (1969). The Lice (1967) and The Carrier of Ladders (1970) remain his most influential volumes. These poems often used legendary subjects (as in 'The Hydra' or 'The Judgment of Paris') to explore highly personal themes. In Merwin's later volumes, such as The Compass Flower (1977), Opening the Hand (1983), and The Rain in the Trees (1988), one sees him transforming earlier themes in fresh ways, developing an almost Zen-like indirection. His latest poems are densely imagistic, dream-like, and full of praise for the natural world. He has lived in Hawaii since the 1970s, and one sees the influence of this tropical landscape everywhere in the recent poems, though the landscape remains emblematic and personal. Migration (Copper Canyon Press, 2005) won the 2005 National Book Award for poetry. A life-long friend of James Wright, Merwin's elegy to him appears in the 2008 volume From the Other World: Poems in Memory of James Wright. The Shadow of Sirius, published in 2008 by Copper Canyon Press, was awarded the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 2 A Codex It was a late book given up for lost again and again with its sentences bare at last and phrases that seemed transparent revealing what had been there the whole way the poems of daylight after the day lying open at last on the table without explanation or emphasis like sounds left when the syllables have gone clarifying the whole grammar of waiting not removing one question from the air or closing the story although single lights were beginning by then above and below while the long twilight deepened its silence from sapphire through opal to Athena’s iris until shadow covered the gray pages the comet words the book of presences after which there was little left to say but then it was night and everything was known From 'The Shadow Of Sirius' Publisher: Copper Canyon Press (September 1, 2008) William Stanley Merwin www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 3 A Letter To Ruth Stone Now that you have caught sight of the other side of darkness the invisible side so that you can tell it is rising first thing in the morning and know it is there all through the day another sky clear and unseen has begun to loom in your words and another light is growing out of their shadows you can hear it now you will be able to envisage beyond any words of mine the color of these leaves that you never saw awake above the still valley in the small hours under the moon three nights past the full you know there was never a name for that color From 'The Shadow Of Sirius' Publisher: Copper Canyon Press (September 1, 2008) William Stanley Merwin www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 4 Air Naturally it is night. Under the overturned lute with its One string I am going my way Which has a strange sound. This way the dust, that way the dust. I listen to both sides But I keep right on. I remember the leaves sitting in judgment And then winter. I remember the rain with its bundle of roads. The rain taking all its roads. Nowhere. Young as I am, old as I am, I forget tomorrow, the blind man. I forget the life among the buried windows. The eyes in the curtains. The wall Growing through the immortelles. I forget silence The owner of the smile. This must be what I wanted to be doing, Walking at night between the two deserts, Singing. William Stanley Merwin www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 5 Another River The friends have gone home far up the valley of that river into whose estuary the man from England sailed in his own age in time to catch sight of the late forests furring in black the remotest edges of the majestic water always it appeared to me that he arrived just as an evening was beginning and toward the end of summer when the converging surface lay as a single vast mirror gazing upward into the pearl light that was already stained with the first saffron of sunset on which the high wavering trails of migrant birds flowed southward as though there were no end to them the wind had dropped and the tide and the current for a moment seemed to hang still in balance and the creaking and knocking of wood stopped all at once and the known voices died away and the smells and rocking and starvation of the voyage had become a sleep behind them as they lay becalmed on the reflection of their Half Moon while the sky blazed and then the tide lifted them up the dark passage they had no name for William Stanley Merwin www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 6 Any Time How long ago the day is when at last I look at it with the time it has taken to be there still in it now in the transparent light with the flight in the voices the beginning in the leaves everything I remember and before it before me present at the speed of light in the distance that I am who keep reaching out to it seeing all the time faster where it has never stirred from before there is anything the darkness thinking the light William Stanley Merwin www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 7 Before The Flood Why did he promise me that we would build ourselves an ark all by ourselves out in back of the house on New York Avenue in Union City New Jersey to the singing of the streetcars after the story of Noah whom nobody believed about the waters that would rise over everything when I told my father I wanted us to build an ark of our own there in the back yard under the kitchen could we do that he told me that we could I want to I said and will we he promised me that we would why did he promise that I wanted us to start then nobody will believe us I said that we are building an ark because the rains are coming and that was true nobody ever believed we would build an ark there nobody would believe that the waters were coming William Stanley Merwin www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 8 Beggars And Kings In the evening all the hours that weren't used are emptied out and the beggars are waiting to gather them up to open them to find the sun in each one and teach it its beggar's name and sing to it It is well through the night but each of us has his own kingdom of pains and has not yet found them all and is sailing in search of them day and night infallible undisputed unresting filled with a dumb
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