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                                    III

For all the revelatory peekaboos into the poet’s soul lyric verse is said to provide, we remain almost totally ignorant as to how the vie intérieure (or in Sandover’s realm, the vie antérieure) is impacted by the countless interventions of fortuity which compound rather than clarify its eruptible privacies. This in turn impacts upon the local assurances of criticism. We could never have predicted with certainty what Philip Larkin might have uttered over a pint of bitters in a pub, even with a secure reading knowledge of 500 pages or more of his prose and verse. Nor can we know in advance what a much different writer like Mei-mei Berssenbrugge specializing in cat-scans of language immersion might sound like in a similar tête-à-tête over cocktails or lattes. For even in garden variety moments poetry speaks its own mind, not the poet’s. Having hijacked his vocabulary and articulative DNA in order to cast its reeled-in catch of life in suitable bronze, it abandons him or her to the adulation (or oblivion) accruing to a triumph of ventriloquism—not as voice-throwing mastermind but as dummy. 
      Which is perhaps why Merrill’s Collected Poems, though very much the ship’s log of a privateer, seems with almost every line to pull up its gangways and serve notice that boarders without exception will be repelled. It is no exaggeration that far more of Merrill the man (not to mention Merrill-the-Inigo Jones-behind-the-masque) comes through in A Different Person than in any representative assortment of his poems. (With the single exception perhaps of The Changing Light at Sandover, in whose 550-plus pages of verse the Ouija Board collaboration involving his long-time companion David Jackson resulted in a curtain being lifted on Merrill’s private life that before 1982 had been only slightly more penetrable than the Veil of Isis.) Throughout that memoir’s coverage of the years 1950-1952, which Merrill spent in Europe (mostly in and around Rome), we watch the sentimental education of a young, impressionable and unbelievably wealthy American ephebe, who, though only in his mid-20s, feels precociously at home in his homosexuality. He senses he is on the threshold of something that will forever shatter the mummery of his sheltered life and provide him with an entrée to the world of poets and poetry. He continues to have lingering doubts about the staying power of his own talent, but they diminish as his rivalry with his close friend and aspiring fellow writer, Frederick Buechner, loses intensity. (Buechner, perhaps best known as the author of the novel A Long Day’s Dying, was the dedicatee of Merrill’s initial volume of verse, First Poems, published in 1951.)
     Also contributing forcefully to the stimulation of his nerve-ends at this time were the professional ministrations of one Dr. Detre, a cutting-edge psychoanalyst not much older than himself whom the poet consulted in Rome. Not one to miss a trick, Merrill soon enlisted the good doctor as a “collaborator” adept at busying his analysand with soundings of the New Sexuality from depths ongoingly plumbed in various scuba dives-à deux plumbing the triangulated affairs of Merrill, his lovers, and his rivals. These, then, would be deep-dished for later savoring in the consulting room, where confidentiality protected teller and tail with professional equanimity.   
      All of this makes for fascinating reading, which is made even more intriguing by Merrill’s account of how strategies of secrecy got honed on the strop of his identity crisis nursed through those years. Seizing upon a friend’s discovery of photography, the poet finds himself musing on the notion of “I am a camera” in ways reminiscent of Christopher Isherwood’s narrational/notational double at the onset of the Berlin Stories (1935):

. . . To anyone with an identity problem the camera is a godsend, each shot proving (if nothing else) that the photographer has composed himself for the split second needed to press the shutter. It is also a way to make quick raids on life while keeping it at arm’s length; you look at things no longer quietly, for their own sake, but greedily, for the images they yield.

Studied later, if the rainy day ever comes, their historical present inspires an emotion not always felt at the time.

Such musings are of the sort that are as likely to deepen into aesthetic speculation as to generate wallfuls of prints and studies, which can be useful to a poet accustomed to writing with shadows words cast on a brightening glance, rather than with light as a photographer does. He reports having “bought my camera on the spot and before driving to France photographed my father,” who was over on a visit. Eagerness, unhampered by inexperience, managed in this case to produce some interesting results, their inadvertence only adding spice to their flavor:

. . . As I haven’t learned to coordinate the lens opening with the light meter, these beginner’s images suffer from melodrama. My father looks ancient, ravaged by shadows, deprived of natural light or a flash of humor from me. One picture, though, by accident, is of professional quality: a half-full goblet of water set on the window ledge between open shutters. Bleached and sunstruck, the city blurs off into background—the glass, a lens within a lens, contains it: a tiny topsy-turvy Florence, there alone in magical focus, its values true. . . .

Though in no way originative of the famous John Ashbery poem “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” the lens within a lens aligns in proleptic retrospect one New York School trope within another and throws into bas relief the tactic of homosexual encryption which John Shoptaw, for one, finds everywhere embedded in Ashbery’s verse, from the earliest collections to the most recent. With or without the legitimation conferred by Parmigianino’s art, the ensnaring of inversion within a medium as self-canceling as photography brings the “reality of things” home to the viewer already attuned to truth as something inversional yet somehow transparently real. As though it were the sign of signification itself: Isn’t that what much New York School poetry shouts from the rooftops, what so much of what an O’Hara’s, a Schuyler’s, or an Ashbery’s reclamation of life’s detritus is about? Recognition as sexual come-on, as totem of complicity and of secret assignation—when poetry adopts In hoc signo vinces as its motto, the eye contact it maintains with the passing scene is indistinguishable from the glance that scours a hotspot for the live prospects cruising seeks out. Shoptaw finds this all-reinscribing gaze best accounted for in that “Self-Portrait” by Ashbery, in which, as this critic puts it, “The private room with its distended bare protruberance is also a homosexual closet with the pointed gaze as its key: ‘But the look / Some wear as a sign makes one want to / Push forward’ toward communication and engagement ‘since the light / Has been lit once and for all in their eyes / And is present, unimpaired, a permanent anomaly.’”
      By now we are familiar with Merrill’s favorite and at times obsessional themes and motifs; his personal fixations; his rote recyclings of color and nuance; his rhyme as reason and when slumming, its diminishment to mere scheme. Irvin Ehrenpreis catalogued them years ago, in a review of the first three segments of The Changing Light at Sandover:

Certain motifs, familiar from earlier works, begin to seem peculiar marks of Merrill’s genius: fire and water, light playing on glass; houses, rooms, and their furnishings, especially mirrors and windows. Certain themes go with them: the poet’s family, erotic adventures and disillusionments, foreign travel, death. Certain devices keep challenging us: personifications that create riddles (e.g., the five senses as demanding children in “From the Cupola”), metaphors that expand into scenes, perceptions that dissolve into symbols; pairs of juxtaposed images which reflect or become each other.

There’s enough listed here to propel even an Eliot out beyond the Hebrides of thematic overload; but what remains odd and even distressing to some is that Merrill’s verse seems to relish hunkering down in these topoi, to narrow its horizons when contemplating them rather than expanding them in proportion to their fungibility. Often we get the feeling that decorum was a refuge for Merrill, not an opportunity whereby the resources of some strict poetic form could be stretched to accommodate a really new turn of emotional phrase. The occasion of a poem might be used to surprise, give a turn to, even almost floor the reader, but this was done not by overtaxing the prim and proper to the point of grotesqueness, but by enlivening the sexually demotic to tongues of fire so intellectually intense they join the laser-beam sublimities of Donne’s Anniversaries and Crashaw’s “Hymn to Sainte Teresa” as triumphs of truly bizarre mannerism.
     Yet, when Merrill does shock he does so with a calculation made so matter-of-fact that what would otherwise seem ghastly and de trop is drenched in a familiarity so louche it no longer appears threatening. What it appears instead is enticing, gripping, intriguing, riveting, even, yes, seductive. Granted, there’s more than a trace of épater le heterosexuel in much of this; but in some poems, Merrill’s poems of transgression where shibboleths unpronounceable to the multitudes (but cherished by the pretentious cultural elite) are made synonymous with equally unpronounceable homosexual practices, the effect can be electrifying. Consider, for example, the 1981 poem titled “Garonce”:

                                    Think small. My scene no sooner lit
                                    Than animation flows
                                    Simply from candy-apple cheek
                                    And bodkin nose.
 
                                    The operator’s hand, you see,
                                    That wears me like a glove
                                    Makes me lurch upright, arms outspread,
                                    Inviting love
 
                                    —But feeling it? A headshake. Ah,
                                    too much to ask? A nod.
                                    Both of us moved in one breath by
                                    The hidden god.

For the uninitiated—and I presume that’s not far removed from including almost everybody—what is being described from the inside, that is, from the standpoint of the act’s recipient—is fist fucking, a practice which requires no glossing because its cognomen is, well, self-explanatory. Now, Merrill was more than aware of the inaccessibility of this act within the non-gay community, even up to its most airless reaches where the phrase “hidden god” was recognized as an allusion to Blaise Pascal, the 17^th Century philosopher and mathematician who coined it, and to Lucien Goldmann, the 20^th Century philosopher and genetic structuralist who restruck it as a post-Marxist commemorative. He was equally cognizant of the awe in which it was held by a sizeable portion of the gay community, who were likely as not to giggle about it nervously and label those who dabbled in it the Crisco Brigade or the Buns of Navarone. All of this is played on in “Garonce” with the skill and bow-arm restraint of an Oistrakh performing Tartini’s “The Devil’s Trill” on a Guarneri violin. Relishing what is on every reader’s mind but almost never posed in person, “You do that?”, he succeeds in unsettling the “woman taken in adultery,” as well as the outraged of every sexual persuasion, all with the lobbing of a single, judiciously chosen stone.         
      While such frissons may galvanize this Merrill poem or that, they don’t seize center stage as they so often do when the New York School poets are doing their thing. In Merrill’s universe, grass becomes a thing of splendor only when a transformative occurrence, large or small, has graced it; no splendor in the grass is to be distinguished as such which does not make of the grass itself a thing reconstituted by order of being, and therefore a thing apart from other, now undeniably lesser things. That a poem cannot incorporate into its own form a record of how form disposes its details makes of detailing itself a disposition unto itself. “Strong measures” have lost much of their raison d’ être in contemporary poetry because today’s poets do not so much write in them as resort to them, which causes their wit to be dissolved in craft rather than vice versa.
     But not in Merrill’s bailiwick. In a brief but highly revealing excursus called “Condemned to Write About Real Things” (submitted to The New York Times’s “The Making of a Writer” series in 1982 and reprinted, differently titled as “Acoustical Chambers,” four years later in the miscellany Recitative), he attributes his own towering preference for “strong measures” to a fascination with those structures within whose confines life’s habituations are enclosed.  “Interior spaces, the shapes and correlation of rooms in a house,” Merrill writes,

have always appealed to me. Trying for a blank mind, I catch myself instead revisiting a childhood bedroom on Long Island. Recently, on giving up the house in Greece where I’d lived for much of the previous fifteen years, it wasn’t so much the fine view it commanded or the human comedies it had witnessed that I felt deprived of; rather, I missed the hairpin turn of the staircase underfoot, the height of our kitchen ceiling, the low door ducked through in order to enter a rooftop laundry room that had become my study. This fondness for given arrangements might explain how instinctively I took to quatrains, to octaves and sestets, when I began to write poems. “Stanza” is after all the Italian word for “room.”

Yes, and rooms are also places where, to quote one of Merrill’s favorite poets, Elizabeth Bishop,

                                    As we lie down to sleep the world turns half away
                                       through ninety dark degrees;
                                           the bureau lies on the wall
                                    and thoughts that were recumbent in the day                                            rise as the others fall,
                                       stand up and make a forest of thick-set trees. 

     Rooms—which is to say, stanzas of all shapes—shape us as we surrender ourselves to their myriad forms, dimensions, and architectonics of fate; and as we shape the constructs of our febrile dreams within their space, a prehensile exchange occurs, in which the core life of the first is subtly altered by the affective energies—the feng shui, as it were, of the second. 
     Merrill’s predilection for the grandeur deferred, the half-lit epiphany of a mask falling (or some other breakaway moment when the congruence of human life made multiplicitous by passion to the nine lives of feline mortality is decreased by a factor of one), bears upon this intermodulation of structures in instructive ways. “Morning Exercise,” like various other pieces in Late Settings (1985), does double duty as both chaconne of reconciliation and passacaglia of regret, the musical terms serving to fix, if only in illusorily stalled smoke, the favored modalities of Merrill’s sexual kermess—his Lancers-rosé, as it were. (Not surprisingly, his later poetry battens fewer hatches against conjurable squalls than the earlier, though in many instances the difference is temperately split.) In any case this poem is about rooms in quotation marks, or spaces marked out by bodies occupying them as zones of privacy with factitious rather than real dimensions, thematized in this particular instance by a fitness center’s propensity for partitioning self-awareness into sweaty arondissements of narcissism and trance. The poet has this day entered upon his stint at the gym minus his usual companion who, unannounced and likewise bent on working out comme habitude, has also gone on alone to the same place.

                                                                        . . .
                        So neither would have guessed
                        His missing half was there
 
                        Except that someone sane
                        (Between “my” room and “yours”
                        Respective temperatures)
                        Had set a small, fogged pane
 
                        Through which—quick to bemuse
                        Wits for a change wiped clear—
                        Our eyes met. . .
 

This would have remained just another postmodern exercise in vision doubling to a self-canceling obsession with parallax, were it not for the poem’s easily dropped stitch looping the “choler stored of late” by the poet’s companion to the breach of togetherness suggested by their having arrived separately at the gym. Reading Merrill’s verse for keys rather than just à clef, it becomes hard not to notice such details repeatedly popping up like epiphanies in the motivally drenched—dare it be said? Wagnerian—rotogravure that constitutes his poetic world. To wit: the single dropped shoe that finds its proleptic echo in a gift of closure later on; the Sandover-like knowingness that confers upon a sexual glance exchanged with a perfect stranger a weightlessness reminiscent of an out-of-body experience (Merrill claimed to have had some); and finally—perhaps most tellingly—the sense (one which has haunted homosexual writing since at least Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice) that life is as much a tryst with erotic fatality as it is a toot with the subpedal blooms of Firbankian fame—which is to say, titillation squeezed from the thought of flaming youth meeting its doom under a bootheel. Merrill’s tower of song (his Bishopric?) remained a well-tempered one, and so cleared the extremities of the either/or imposed on gay writers during that time: deeply closeted camp, or elaborately disguised transposition of genders, whenever the necessity of pronouns reared accusingly. A relaxed quality suffuses much of Merrill’s early verse, that at times comes close to being langorous, even lackadaisical; its figures and tropes of sojourn seem utterly unabashed by the tenor of aristocratic dalliance with whim and complaisance they convey. If it were assigned an imago it would likely be a speculum of empowerment buffed to a blinding polish by the chamois of entitlement.
     But other things than just flies hide themselves in such ointment. Not unlike Euripides’s Bacchae, in which Penteus baits the very Maenadocracy that will eventually tear his heart out, Merrill’s blasé and oddly disembodied “voice-over” seems to invite its own hubristic undoing, too. The poet, never content (à la McLuhan) to just let the medium massage its messenger, his reader, reduced to a bargaining chip in an entente with the incantatory, is left to imagine wood on the evidence (albeit duly laminated) of grain alone. For Merrill a poem, if it is to succeed, has to be a complex fitness machine by which distantly separated muscles are toned, as though by direct action, by one another. Or, to shift ground somewhat, we might imagine a cloud chamber in which particles colliding with each other release matter contingent upon Elysian field theories unanticipated by even the wildest instaurations of Mallarmean azur.
     What remains when all such obscuring emulsions lie dispersed are sage truffles of the sort of “Grass,” a blithely post-H. D.-ean reductio from the Ariel-works of the autumnal Late Settings of 1985:

                        The river irises
                        Draw themselves in.
                        Enough to have seen
                        Their day. The arras
 
                        Also of evening drawn,
                        We light up between
                        Earth and Venus
                        On the courthouse lawn,
 
                        Kept by this cheerful
                        Inch of green
                        And ten more years—fifteen?—
                        From disappearing.

     Now, Ulysses had his moly, and the resourceful of today have, if not its precise equivalent, then a congenial substitute in the form of a length of hemp from whose end voyagers, delivered of swinishness but without in any way losing their hunger for magic (the mien of pigs policing Circe’s dingle being altogether a different matter), can suck the very stuff of dreams, the gods being not at all averse to numbers being used to embrace forgetfulness while leaving togetherness behind. This Ariel, condemned never to look back upon Caliban on pain of losing him for ever, is nonetheless enjoined to fashion a body able to attract another which, natura abscondita, it can but incline after like a heliotrope. For on that Prospero’s Isle, whose extremities are the Logos and Nous of uncincturable wealth, the curse of Sycorax must needs loom adamantine even where Eve’s face is nowhere in evidence. And, as always at such times, God plays his hand close to the vest, vetting his purpose among spear carriers with the utmost discretion. Only to the remotest enclaves is his intent leaked, wind of His determinations never being allowed to waft the least distance toward any figure important to the drama. (This is the same divinity whose voluble abstinence from being causes the tone—not to mention the diction and demeanor—of any Prologue in Heaven a contemporary poet might be moved to write to be markedly lowered; and Who can claim no authority whatever for the literary vintages from whose magnum of language Goethe-imbued poets like Merrill decant the wines of earth.) With nary a nod of approval towards religion (beyond those telegraphed in Sandover’s remorse code), Merrill seems everywhere to be acknowledging the backing—indispensable to his enterprise—of what André Gide eponymized, in the last fin de siècle but one, as la nourriture terrestre.  None of which Merrill is chary about scattering over an expanse of poems that like “Domino” (also from Late Settings), make a point of softening dispositio with confessio:

                                    Delicious, white, refined
                                    Is all that I was raised to be,
                                    Whom feeling for the word
                                    Plus crystal rudiments of mind
                                    Still keep—however stirred—
                                    From wholly melting in the tea.

     The near-lockstep rhythm of the poem’s self-regarding heptameters (each is composed of a line in trimeter followed by one in tetrameter) seems ideally suited to the sort of sibylline stocktaking the poet is engaging in here. In the initial line a scansion of qualities is forcefully iambicated, while in the second a circlet of conditionals is made fast by a predication absolving the subject of whatever might sully the intractableness of what the poem’s presiding voice is disclaiming. As usual in Merrill, the personal is not pinched and poked into Mercator projections of Existenz, but is allowed to bulge provocatively as a relief map of sensitivities whose baring prevents the proceedings from going slack with introversion. The allusion to Doña Pilar in its second stanza saves “Domino” from consignment to that circular file in which poems revelatory of their own self-revelation and little beside tend to end up—which if nothing else testifies to Merrill’s gift for keeping a poem’s field of vision from shrinking to a notice board.

                        Far, far away, men cut
                        The sea-wide, sea-green fields of cane.
                        Often a child’s lament
                        Filled the infested hut.
                        Doña Pilar flew back for Lent
                        —Had she been inhumane?
 
                        The better to appraise his mess,
                        History’s health freak begs
                        That such as we be given up.
                        Outpouring bitterness
                        Rewards the drainer of the cup . . .
                        He’ll miss those sparkling dregs.

    The passing salute to Auden (he had been, we should recall, a key soliciting angel in the Ouija colloquies transcribed in Sandover) discernible in “History’s health freak begs . . .” should not distract us from perceiving which grounds are adduced at the conclusion of the poem.  It is important for us to know just who it is that will miss the “sparkling dregs,” whose right it is to criticize Doña Pilar, and whose ox will be gored by confronting the mess History leaves for its “health freaks” to coax into manageability. But Merrill hardly seems in a rush to “I” the dots of the ellipsis with which the poem’s penultimate line trails off. If Auden’s stint as the self-appointed conscience of the Anglo-American world did not lack its finer moments, they were most assuredly not those in which he allowed the moral high ground (synonymous with Dante’s diritta via) to be allegorized by such capitalized (and dubiously capitalized upon) abstractions as History, Failure, Law, and others even more devoid of substance. Merrill, his malice finely ground, would appear to be aerating his homily—as savory and exquisite as a prize soufflé—with the glib disreputableness of His Master’s Voice mocking its own earlier incarnation, when “September 1st, 1939’ was on everyone’s lips and on almost no one’s mind.
       Games, games, and still more games: now and then moving beyond the impulse to move to make a move—gambits annihilating gambits in a regressus ad infinitum—but more often, a tedious surrendering to archness, to literary inbreeding and eyebrow tweaking that is always but a stone’s throw (or a snigger) away from such breaches of life a la mode as Greek sex in a Turkish bath. In poems where the Merrill magic works less than stunningly, the metaphoric enactment of I Ching throws using gall stones rather than yarrow stalks can seem as pointless and dull as a solsticial rite executed by matchstick Druids. But when clicking on all cylinders this poet’s formalistic acumen, his elegance and sharpness of wit, are as fine as none but a very few of his contemporaries can match. If in scanning their works most poets of the first rank can point to only a handful of undisputed miracles, Merrill, having Sandover in one hand and the Collected Poems in the other, could claim in all humility no less than a handful of handfuls of such prodigies. In other words, no one can fault the awesome perfectionism of the “Days of . . .” poems, in particular, the unforgettable “Days of 1941 and ’44,” in which the poet recalls the pain and suffering he endured at the hands of a prep school bully, whose gift for coolly ministrated evil, viewed in retrospect, makes not exulting in his death in combat in World War II a difficult feat to bring off. Spread out over a sequence of six sonnet-length sequences, each consisting of two quatrains followed by a pair of tercets, the poem memorably concludes:

                                    The nothing you’d become took on a weight
                                    No style I knew could lighten. The latrine
                                    Mirrors that night observed what once had been
                                    Your mortal enemy disintegrate
 
                                    To multi-absent and bone-tired hoplite,
                                    Tamed more than told apart by his dog-tags.
                                    Up the flagpole with those rank fatigues
                                    Bunched round his boots! Another night
 
                                    Beneath unsimulated fire he’d crawl
                                    With full pack, rifle, helmeted, weak-kneed,
                                    And peeking upward see the tracers scrawl
 
                                    Their letter of atonement, then the flare
                                    Quote its entire red minefield from midair—
                                    Between whose lines it has been life to read.

    But then, there is a whole other side to Merrill’s facility with form, his translations—from the French, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, and Greek—of Guillaume Apollinaire, Hans Lodeizen, Cecília Meireles, Eugenio Montale, and C. P. Cavafy—in which fussing with logopoeia is kept to a minimum and laser-intense non-English idiom is dispensed in sachets, not dollops, of Americanese. Space being limited, only the briefest sampling from the section of the Collected Poems headed “Translations” can be offered here. First off, we have Merrill’s Apollinaire—“Les Collines”—admirably swatched and rendered with true calligrammic flair:

                                    The ball revolves in the depths of time
                                    I have killed the handsome orchestra leader
                                    And I peel for my friends
                                    The orange whose flavor is
                                    A marvelous fireworks . . .

And Merrill is even better—“saltier” probably being the mot juste here—curing Montalean filets in the cold sun of a prurience born of a more inquisitorial turn and clime. As a translator it’s not easy tackling the verse of the only Italian to reduce The Waste Land’s lipidities to the ethereal limpidities of the Dantescan. As will be seen below, Merrill’s muse had an addict’s own difficulty in forswearing a literalism’s siren call. That aside, what follows is the initial octastich of “New Stanzas” (“Nuove stanze”), first in Montale’s Italian, then in the recent Jonathan Galassi version of 1998, and finally in Merrill’s contoured vernacular.

                                    Poi che gli ultimi fili di tobacco
                                    al tuo gesto si spengono nel piatto
                                    di cristallo, al soffitto lenta sale
                                    la spirale del fumo
                                    che gli alfieri e  i  cavalli degli scacchi
                                    guardano stupefatti; e nuovi anelli
                                    la seguono, più mobili di quelli
                                    delle tua dita.
 
                                    Now that with a flourish you’ve stubbed out
                                    the last shreds of tobacco
                                    in the crystal ashtray, a slow spiral
                                    rises to the ceiling.
                                    The knights and bishops of the chess set stare
                                    amazed; and new rings follow,
                                    more alive
                                    than those you wear.
 
                                    Now that the last shreds of tobacco
                                    die at your gesture in the crystal bowl,  
                                            to the ceiling slowly  
                                    rises a spiral of smoke
                                    which the chess knights and chess bishops
                                    regard bemused; which new rings follow,
                                    more mobile than those
                                    upon your fingers.

     The fact notwithstanding that Galassi is more at ease  with the Nabokovian preciosities on offer here (which is to say, less a tourist ogling deracinations from the safety of a bus), it does seem that Merrill draws a closer bead on, say, guardano stupefatti (“regard bemused”) because he reads the allegorical out of Montale’s selva oscura rather than back into it. Galassi, with the whole of Montale’s corpus under his belt, seems content to call a spade a spade but only if it looks spotless and not used. Also, “which new rings follow, / more mobile than those / upon your fingers” gathers rather less moss than the clattering lapidary of “and new rings follow, / more alive / than those you wear.” Clearly, one of Merrill’s virtues as a translator (his failure to exercise his multilingual talents more frequently has to be regretted) is his ability to go beyond mere rhythmic simulation and what for lack of a better term can best be called “idiom equivalentizing.” If “Now that the last shreds of tobacco / die at your gesture in the crystal bowl” gilds a lily already sufficiently bronzed with decadence, the inversion of “to the ceiling slowly / rises a spiral of smoke” properly out-origami’s Galassi’s straight and even prosaic version of hunt-and-find.
      But sidestreet operations pale when the really important stuff is going on in downtown Merrilliana, its Tenderloin district, as it were. It is that carefully tended precinct, the one closest to Merrill’s heart, where one finds banked the foreign and domestic poems in which he and his lover David Jackson are the human subjects not just of the examined life’s passing EEG, but of that much more profound life, for the sake of which materia poetica thrown up by mortality offers itself to be consumed and recycled over the whole of what is prosaically pigeonholed as a “lifetime.” There are almost too many such poems to list separately—even if not all of these can be confidently lodged in a time capsule to be dug up at the conclusion of the millennium just inaugurated—but here, out of chronological order, is a pocket constellation of the best and the brightest: “The Charioteer of Delphi,” “The Formal Lovers” (for, among other things, its amazingly inventive rhyme scheme), “From the Cupola” (a tagbuch to end tagbucher), “Days of 1964,” “The Opera Company,” “Days of 1935,” “Under Mars,” “Electra: A Translation,” “Days of 1971”—you see, this citing could go on and on without ever any due regard being accorded to the occasions lying behind, under, or just above what these poems fathom and commemorate.
      Not that there isn’t a dissensus—and a live one—out there on the question of how highly Merrill’s work as a poet should be valued. Twenty years ago, when mystique trailed from his burgeoning canon like crepe from a newlywed’s car, critics like Irvin Ehrenpreis were insisting in journals like The New York Review of Books that in Merrill’s recent work

the burden of the author’s ambition does not rest comfortably on the foundation of his genius. [His] early mature verse, collected in First Poems (1951), reveals a fascination with stanzaic design and with the extraction of subtle implications from a focused image or situation. The language is refined and musical; the meanings are obscure. The poet habitually works out his song in some form of aria da capo; and sometimes the observer and the image trade places.

Ehrenpreis also charges that in too many poems congruence pinchhits for continuity and mazy temporizing for anything resembling axiological firmness:

With no moral argument and no narrative line, the poems become static and regressive. Although autobiography underlies them, the poet blurs and masks the original experiences: we learn what they are like, what they connote, but not what they are. At last in Water Street (1962), Merrill animates his stanzas by giving us anecdotes of the poet’s life. The old refinement of language remains, but it slips into and out of colloquial slackness. Although the hero of the work is memory, the present keeps springing from the past and peering into the future.

But his is still a minority view. Though posterity has yet to vote on Merrill’s inclusion in the House of Fame—the verdict, I suspect, will be close but negative—there is more than enough genius in the best of his work to outlast the mere cleverness blighting the rest of it. This essay might just as well end with what this reviewer at least proposes as the archetypal James Merrill poem, if such a nonesuch indeed exists. It is “The Parrot Fish”—also from Water Street—and is a piece that touches all the bases of Merrill’s meticulously tonsured diamond, the energic center of his game as both player and strategist in the Escher–sketch world bequeathed to the contemporary poem by mainstream modernism. As in the vast majority of his poems, the bolus of representation opens out onto a scena devoid of past or future. The depth of field is wholly present-fixated, set for open-shuttered swallowing of a cynosure the natural world has thrown up in its profligacy and genome-corruscation, as though God in fact morphologized like Elizabeth Bishop. “The Parrot Fish,” then, in its entirety, beyond which, I think, respectful silence should have its say:

                                    The shadow of the little fishing launch
                                    Discreetly, inch by inch,
                                    Crept after us on its belly over
                                    The reef’s uneven floor.
 
                                    The motor gasped out drowsy vapor.
                                    Seconds went by before
                                    Anyone thought to interpret
                                    The jingling of Inez’s bracelet.
 
                                    Chalk-violet, olive, all veils and sequins, a
                                    Priestess out of the next Old Testament extravaganza,
                                    With round gold eyes and miniscule buckteeth,
                                    Up flaunted into death
 
                                    The parrot fish. And for a full hour beat
                                    Irregular, passionate
                                    Tattoos from its casket lined with zinc.
                                    Finally we understood, I think.
 
                                    Ashore, the warm waves licked our feet.
                                    One or two heavy chords the heat
                                    Struck, set the white beach vibrating.
                                    And throwing back its head the sea began to sing.

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