Just Around the Bend...

In Helen Vendler’s review of Merwin and The Shadow of Sirius, she depicts a vivid link between Merwin and his personal memories and experiences; however, through his poetry, Merwin is able is able to express a more universal experience, evoking a connection in the reader with the words on the page. How is this possible? While language may not have a word to capture a certain feeling, he is able to create a simple image or images that speak to the reader. How can such personal experiences, personal memories that have no direct connection to me the reader, produce a similar emotion? Is it because it is a poem, and we, as a reader, expect some evocative punch line to leave us ethereal?

I think Merwin tests the idea of memory and the lived experience with the bending of time, creating a place in which the speaker resides in a place that Vendler calls “suspended between past and present, with neither environment providing a true native tongue.” Through the linear and/or recursive nature of his poems, Merwin simultaneously depicts the effects of time—the aging of a hand, the changing of the seasons—with the overall feeling of timelessness—“the river still seems not to move / as though it were the same river” (96). However in other poems, Merwin seems to comment on inconstancy of time, testing the notion that it creeps by unnoticeably—“it has come upon us again taking us once more by surprise” (85). In this poem, Merwin seems to suggest the sudden change of seasons, as if the grass were suddenly ready for reaping and the change of the season happens in an instant. Perhaps Merwin is testing the notion of poetry in memory, the ability to recall one instant in time, one moment in which everything changed or became illuminated?

In “The Long and the Short of It,” I see Merwin exploring the idea of memory and how it can be expressed in poetry. He explored the idea of measurement and the distance between the memories he recalls, how he experiences the memory now with the distance of time and age and how the memory is never truly captured as it was originally experienced. It is by words that we measure, and it is in the words that we find meaning, reflectively examining the moments of our lives that led us to where we are and attempting to contain them in neat little rows, “the verse turning with its breath.” Although he doesn’t use specific rhyme and meter, this particular line evokes the meter and measure of song. Something, again, that is measured. However, the idea of measurement is problematic in that there is something here that is beyond measure. When words are not enough and one must use rely on a recreated image, the nameless emotions cannot be measured, yet we believe it, we feel it.

As Merwin states in “My Hand,” “it is what I remember / but it never seems quite the same.” While in this particular poem Merwin ponders the living presence of the past as it consumes the present, he tests the idea of memory and how it is not the same as the original experience. He demonstrates the quick transition of past to present, of experience (perhaps event would be a more apt word?) to memory in the words he chooses to describe the images: flutter, vanished, flash.

In each poem, I felt this sense of beyondness. If I read this poem just one more time, I will be able to grasp it. I will have the answer to the question; I will know what he wants me to know. The feeling, the words, the moment is right there is I could just stretch a little further, if I just dig a little deeper for the gold. Perhaps this is what Merwin wanted, to create for the reader individual moments of exploration and contemplation, to ask the reader to ponder those same questions and to hear the silence.