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"headlong emigrations out of life" (as he once referred to death) that
fill
his pages, Merrill will go down as one of the great connoisseurs of
happiness. Not just because the mythology of his Dantean epic restores
all losses through the cockeyed processes of rebirth and restoration
cranked out in a vast universal laboratory, but more importantly because,
among all the intergalactic harmonies he creates and hears, he remains
perpetually hopeful even when he has every reason not to be. He says in
a sweetly nostalgic poem entitled "Radio" that somewhere out there,
on some frequency or other: "This long/ Ghastly morning, one station/
Has never stopped playing our song."
Hope in the face of death, or comedy in the presence of dissolution
was one of the many things Merrill learned from Elizabeth Bishop (to
whom he pays overdue homage in "Overdue Pilgrimage to Nova
Scotia"), the poet who could claim with equal doses of certainty and
grimness: "All the untidy activity continues,! awful but cheerful" ("The
Bight") . Merrill knew that he wore a mask of boredom, and then he
often made fun of himself for doing it, defending himself against his own
defensiveness, so to speak. Likewise, his poetic persona became happy by
first feigning light-heartiness. That he thus earned his cheerfulness increases
its force. But in this volume, along with maturity, resignation, a
recycling of old feelings and poetic forms, comes also a grappling with
final fears. He bids farewell to the childhood which he now fully
acknowledges as no Proustian paradise at all: "Goodbye to childhood,
than unhappy haven.! It's over, weep your fill. Let go/ Of the dead dog,
the lost toy. Practice grieving / At funerals - anybody's." Bishop taught
us that the art of losing isn't hard to master, even, or especially, if it
looks like disaster. Having now lost Clampitt and Merrill, both masters
of that art as well as Art itself, who encouraged us to share their own
wonder at the things of this world, we can call both of them - each in
a separate way - the world's, or "anybody's," pal.
WILLARD SPIEGELMAN
