POETRY
147
John Berryman and Adrienne Rich, all of whom have transformed their
already distinctive and mastered styles.
Nights and Days
contains poems as supple as those of
Water Street
and continues its surprising liberties. But it includes something further,
two important long poems, "From the Cupola" and "The Thousand and
Second Night," the latter of which seems to me Merrill's best work.
It
is
amusing and rapid, slips quite easily into prose interludes and a mocking
verse analysis of itself, all this without sacrificing formal intensity.
It
would be hard to represent accurately the tone of this poem: on one
hand the poet's surfacing memories and angular self-questioning (he is
sometimes "I," sometimes distantly "you") ; on the other, the rich settings
of Istanbul and Greece and the background allusions to the
Arabian
Nights.
They are there, these tempting frameworks, to remind us of the
expectations and demands of our fantasy lives-Yeats's Byzantium, Sche–
herazade's inexhaustible inventions. But they are also there as mocking
possibilities; the poem's sinewy movement forces us to see the connection
between our privileged, detached fantasies and harsh facts.
It
begins,
almost comically, in Istanbul with "an absurd complaint. The whole right
half / Of my face refuses to move." That sharp disorientation is one of
many in a poem whose traveler's extravagances are there finally to re–
mind him of time and change: "Three good friends in as many months
have complained, / 'You were nice. James, before your trip. Or so / I
thought. But you have changed.' " This sailing to Byzantium has led to
an unexpected goal:
Among the dancers on the pier
Glides one figure in a suit of bones,
Whose savage grace alerts the chaperones.
He picks you out from thousands. He intends
Perhaps no mischief. Yet the dog-brown eyes
In the chalk face that stiffens as it dries
Pierce you with the eyes of those three friends.
The mask begins to melt upon your face.
Inviting landscapes become landscapes of the mind, self-confrontation in
the
thousand and one nights of one's remembered past. The titles of the
poem's opening sections are in themselves revealing:
Rigor Vitae, The
Cure
and, particularly,
Carnivals,
used here to mean more than celebra–
tions--quite properly "sumptuous farewells to flesh," rich awakenings to
mortality.
Merrill's poems are some of the most convincing expressions we have
of the pressure of fantasy, and of the abiding, unavoidable connections
