W.S. Merwin Flashcards
“Still Morning” poem
“It appears now that ther is only one / age and it knows / nothing of age………as I watch one patch of sunlight moving / across the green carpet / in a building / gone long ago”
WW, spots of time
“By Dark” (Merwin)
Six stanzas. The middle divides it into two sections: now, as he follows the black dog, trusting it; and then, when the black dog trusted him. “The child is the father of the man.” Sirius is the great hunter Orion’s hound. It’s also the brightest star in the night sky and is one of our solar system’s nearest neighbors.
“Forgotten Fountain”
The fountain and its slow-dripping water have two chief characteristics: vast age (extends beyond the narrator’s life before and almost certainly after), and its colorlessness. The narrator mourned there when his brother was called “to the colors,” i.e. WWI, Verdun. It thus represents the colorless clarity and inchoate innocence of the time from which the traumatic event is called forth. At the same time, his brother’s departure is a moment with no color of its own–as if to suggest the coexistence of the fountain with the trauma it is now associated with. Trauma as an eternal present, symbolized by the very thing that once symbolized its innocence. Blake.
“After the Voices”
He occupies the same space he did as a child but the voices and their lingering echoes have all died out. Finally, even the words that describe those echoes have disintegrated and are beyond recall. What remains is not language but a palpable absence of adequate language. Presence is suggested by the missing of it. The poem is about what is absent and how the speaker can no longer tell what it was. One of my all time favorites.
“Antique Sound”
Looking for a needle that won’t wear down his records, the narrator collects a thorn from a bramble near Kingston Pike. The place was forest before it was cleared–and in fact it goes through several rounds of natural and human reclamation. When the thorn was gathered, the place hummed with its own polyphony–“when that discord was in tune”–and now the thorn plays Beethoven’s Rassoumoffsky. Cf. WW, “Hart-leap Well.”
“The Artisan World”
“It arrives knowing without knowledge”–never asks or seeks to answer; it is just itself and is special for being inaccessible to the locust-swarm of modern noise, science, technology, and industry.
