By the time James Merrill was writing his last volume, A Scattering of Salts (1995), he had been ill for several years with AIDS. And although he died of a heart attack after treatment for an infection, death by one cause or another was not, as he knew, far off. A Scattering of Salts is suffused with forms of farewell in many lyric genres, including several last looks by the poet at himself. When we think of successive self-portraits in painting, Rembrandt is the model; but unlike a painter, a poet is not restricted in self-portraiture to depicting only the visible parts of the body, nor is he limited to one moment of expression. Merrill can give us microscopic views of his diseased cells, films of his flickering consciousness, witty life histories. The painfulness of drawing a self-portrait in age is exacerbated in Merrill’s case by an ill man’s graying flesh, gaunt body, and halting pace. The genre becomes especially difficult to one so susceptible to the beautiful as Merrill was, to one so handsome as Merrill had been. At the same time, since in age and illness (barring dementia) one is as much alive in consciousness as ever, the self-portrait must find a stylistic equivalent for the quickness of the senses and the spirit even as the deathly dissolution of the body becomes certain.
Drawing a self-portrait in verse is attended by three problems common to all verse: finding a symbolic mode, determining adequate external and internal verse forms, and achieving an appropriate tonality. What might be the symbolic, prosodic, and structural forms “matching” the state of the diseased body? And how might such forms be confronted in a single poem by counter-forms “matching” the continuation of vivacity in the undiseased mind? Are there forms in which failing body and witty mind—at this stage so self-contradictory—can be simultaneously contained? Self-elegy requires lament, but a volume full of laments would not sufficiently embody the extended range of tonalities, from the frivolous to the tragic, natural to Merrill. And elegy requires mourners; but who will mourn the childless poet? And finally, can the modern poet command the apotheosis—the joyful rebirth—that used to be called into play to conclude both the classical and the Christian elegy, in which a second immortal portrait can replace the mortal initial one as, in “Lycidas,” the drowned youth becomes both a saint in heaven and classical genius of the shore?
Merrill’s very last self-portrait, written too late for inclusion in A Scattering of Salts, invents a harrowingly graphic way, using the genre of the shaped poem, of dealing with the problems I have sketched. Called “Christmas Tree”1 and reproduced at the beginning of chapter 1, it is not Merrill’s only visually emblematic late self-portrait; we will here encounter two others, one called “Pearl” and the other “b o d y.” But the graphic tactic of “Christmas Tree” is a drastic one, as those of “Pearl” and “b o d y” are not: the entire left half of “Christmas Tree” is visibly missing on the page.2 The sliced-in-half shape declares the first truths of the poem: that the tree is already dead, having been cut down, and that the missing left half of the tree is its ghost. Yet by bestowing voice on the remaining half-shape, Merrill emphasizes a simultaneous counter-truth: that the tree, with its gleaming green needles, gives every appearance of being still alive. The dead-alive tree has watched with both grief and irony as it has been set up in the house and gaily trimmed; yet it is warmed beyond irony by the delight of the admiring children (who do not realize they, and their mother, are its mourners). The tree’s apotheosis—among ornaments, lights, tinsel, angels, trumpets, and suspended music box—glorifies it in a final radiance as Merrill takes his last look at his already-posthumous self. I will return to this final self-portrait, especially to its sadder moments, at the end of my glances at Merrill’s other ventures in the genre of elegiac self-representation.
The predicament of being to all appearances alive while having received a death sentence became widely visible in society with the advent of AIDS in its first, lethal form. In his last few years, while composing the poems of A Scattering of Salts, Merrill preferred to live his public life as a person who appeared healthy, if frail, while with private knowledge he expected death at any time. This double life awakened galvanizing metaphors within Merrill’s self-portraits, and we must remember that for poets metaphors are not “figures of speech” or rhetorical adornments; they are the precise and literal truth of feeling, voiced as closely as the poet can approximate it. Merrill’s many metaphors for his dead-alive state in his self-portraits carry him down through his own imagined death, and even past it, until, in “A Look Askance”—a poem written in tercets hinting at Dante’s terza rima of the afterlife—the poet’s poem is seen posthumously as a fossil.
“A Look Askance” begins, however, at the onset of fatal illness: some day soon, a firestorm set going by an unseen hand at “the topmost outlet” of the sky will result in the destruction of Merrill’s body, here imagined as a city. At the moment of incinerating heat, filaments of the poet’s globe-shaped brain, like those of an enlarged electric bulb, will burn out, as a whole “citywide brainstorm” overwhelms all cognitive circuits and their codes, setting “loop, dot, dash, node, filament / Inside the vast gray-frosted bulb ablaze.” The poet’s sense of time’s acceleration with the approach of death provokes a demented creativity:
When the confetti
Punctuation, the tickertape neologisms begin to pour
From the mad speed-writer plugged into the topmost
outlet,Will it be heat of his—our—bright idea
Makes that whole citywide brainstorm incandesce,
Sets loop, dot, dash, node, filamentInside the vast gray-frosted bulb ablaze?—
The fire-fonts, the ash script descending
Through final drafts of a sentencePassed upon us even as we pass into this
Fossil state thought up, then idly
Jotted down on stone.
In this first cascade of metaphor (the death sentence, the crematorium, the ash descending through up-“drafts” of air), the unseen hand above ignites creativity, then revises the script into ash as the death sentence, one of incineration, is carried out. But in Merrill’s second fantasy, the hand revises us, after our burial underground, into a fossil replica in stone of our earlier organic form. Merrill himself is here reviving the Horatian prophecy of the poet’s script surviving in a form more lasting than bronze; but here not the power of verse, but the power of the grim natural pressure of aeons creates the buried surviving fossil script, “jotted down” posthumously by the unseen hand. The balance of form within the poem incarnates both fantasies: the rapid incandescence into ash is mimicked by the pell-mell cascade of verbs and nouns, while the devolution into fossil imprint is conveyed by the slowed pacing of the final sentence fragment, with its apposition, commas, and repetitions. The fire-fonts of the ash script descend through drafts of a written sentence, which becomes a judicial sentence passed upon us as we harden into buried fossilized form. An individual species has been “thought up,” by evolution, and then—by the whimsical choice of an indifferent nature—preserved by being “jotted down” on stone.
Such strikingly original self-portraits-while-dying as the Christmas tree or the fossil appear in many of the briefer poems of A Scattering of Salts. From them, I choose a few of Merrill’s more ambitious ones: “Alabaster,” “The Instilling,” “Pearl,” “b o d y,” “Self-Portrait in Tyvek™ Windbreaker,” “An Upward Look,” and, at the end, “Christmas Tree” again. In each case, I’ll consider the poem in the light of the predicament confronting an artist, simultaneously alive and dead, when he asks by what forms he can represent, in a single last look, the conditions and emotions of his final state.
In the most chilling of these self-portraits, “Alabaster,” the poet (as human being) has already died. Although at some earlier moment, a biopsied portion of his still healthy body had been put on a slide for histoscopic examination (“Defenseless, the patrician cells await / Invasion by barbaric viruses”), now his dead flesh, white as alabaster, has been sliced by a microtome into thin sections for a pathologist’s inspection that will reveal the life-disease of the corpse. (Needless to say, the poet imagines himself not only as the dead tissue but also as the coroner scrutinizing the slide through his microscope as he pursues his “pious autopsy.”) In the pitiless light affixing its beam, the poet can see, memorialized in the flesh, each crucial episode of his past life; it is as if
a tissue-thin
Section of self lay on a lighted slide,
And a voice breathed in your ear,
“Yes, ah yes. That red oxide
Stain is where your iron, Lady Hera,
Entered him.”
But is there any point, the poet asks himself, in contemplating a life wound, no matter how vivid, after death? Rather, the dying but living Merrill, his past still painfully sharp, forgoes leisurely inspection of memories in favor of a grim rendition of the moment at which the lucid molecules of the organic self will have been “decrystallized” by death fever into the now inorganic matter under microscopic inspection—no longer the titular “noble” alabaster but instead the more friable chalk:
Nor will the self resist,
Broken on terror like a rack,
When waves of nightmare heat decrystallize
Her lucid molecules to chalk.
Form is so important to Merrill that he cannot imagine becoming formless, cannot watch his orderly crystalline alabaster anima being tortured into decrystallization. (The fear of decrystallization is soothed, as we shall see, only in “An Upward Look,” the poem that closes A Scattering of Salts.) Yet the formless “chalk” that remains at the end of life is the material of the earliest school-writing instrument, and will enable, imaginatively, the reinscription of the poet’s work on the child’s first writing surface, a slate.
“Alabaster” is the harshest of the “posthumous” poems, and the one with the least time given to the living self. Among the self-portraits depicting the poet as still alive, the sonnet “The Instilling” is the most mysteriously beautiful. It is an “inside view,” a cinematic portrait of an illuminated spirit descending through a vertical human body that is conceived partly as architecture, partly as organic nature. The trepanned skull of the poet’s body resembles the dome of the Pantheon, with a roof oculus allowing rays of light to penetrate; there is a vertebral stair down from the brain through the body, but on that stair the light may be sometimes blurred by the red fog of disturbing emotion emitted by the heart. Within the interior space of the body, “tendoned glades” are visible, the haunt of former lovers “who came and went.” Agitated now, the light that is being instilled into the body becomes a cone-shaped spotlight, a “manic duncecap”; the spirit, rebelling against the new philosophic knowledge being insistently instilled, becomes a whirling “danseuse” eluding the searching spotlight. Finally, in grief, the spirit becomes frail, grasping the newel bone of the spine in its tense tight-lipped descent. We move in concert with Merrill’s light-of-new-knowledge as it enters by way of the brain and, proceeding in its vertical downward journey through flesh and bone, instills itself into the inmost parts of the self. But suddenly there comes a terrifying blackout when the light becomes “invisible,” when illumination not only ceases but seems to have departed for good. The poet’s pen halts at that point, when the agitated pangs of the spirit and the increasing frailty of the body produce a muting effect even on consciousness. The creative light that “should” remain unimpeded even in the sick body seems, dangerously, to fail. Here is “The Instilling,” its interwoven rhymes mimicking the wayward motion of its inner light:
All day from high within the skull
Dome of a Pantheon, trepanned—light shines
Into the body. Down that stair
Sometimes there’s fog: opaque red droplets check
The beam. Sometimes tall redwood-tendoned glades
Come and go, whose dwellers came and went.
Now darting feverishly anywhere,
Manic duncecap its danseuse eludes,Now slowed by grief, white-lipped,
Grasping the newel bone of its descent,This light can even be invisible.
The sonnet needs three more lines. In its descent down the page, it has been reticent about the violent means by which the instilling of light was made possible—a surgical trepanning of the closed skull, exposing the naked brain. Just as the abyss of despair opens, with the body violated and the light invisible, just as this self-portrait of brain consciousness “dies,” “a deep sparkle” in the heart, as carefully articulated as script, as revelatory of heartbeat as an EKG, awakens once again the poet’s sexual longing for the sleeping body next to him. The sparkle defines a field of emotion revealed by a virtual scan of the heart within the inner space:
This light can even be invisible
Till a deep sparkle, regular as script,
As wavelets of an EKG, defines
The dreamless gulf between two shoulder blades.
In constructing self-portraits, Merrill has determined that the investigative light beam of death-awakened consciousness, checked and driven by dread and love, has as much right to be portrayed, in its final days, as the visible body. The sonnet, as unpredictable as consciousness itself, is elusive, divided into irregular stanzas (though the final three-line grouping mirrors the three-line opening one), and unforeseeable in its rhyming (it includes two unrhymed lines and separates the other rhymes, often widely, from each other). The end of the poem at first resists interpretation as it announces, with palpable relief, the unexpected return of the light in a “deep sparkle” of unknown origin; but by comparing the sparkle to the EKG that registers the heart’s fluctuations, Merrill prepares us for the sonnet’s final gaze at the dreamlessly material body of the beloved. In part because it is a sonnet—that paradigmatic form of love poetry—this transgressive sonnet resolves itself traditionally in reawakened passion, as a new light, emblem of the living heart, coexists with the fever and hopelessness of dying.
Like “The Instilling,” “Pearl” represents mind at the end of life. The mind here has perfected itself not as an alabaster crystal lattice, nor as an insistent beam of light, but as a pearl, gradually accumulating concentric layers over a lifetime. Merrill begins the poem in his boyhood when he sees, with wonder, on an almost invisible slender chain around his mother’s neck, the “real, deepwater” pearl that he has now, after her death, inherited. Just as the oyster, difficult of access in its deepwater hiding place, gradually surrounds its original irritant with a secretion, covering a piece of “grit” with layer upon nacreous layer, so the mind accretes material around an original site of trauma and becomes in its turn the “Pearl” of Merrill’s title. I said earlier that “Pearl,” like “Christmas Tree,” resorts to graphic means to form its self-portrait. But whereas “Christmas Tree” (since it is a self-portrait as fatally ill body) must show itself to be half ghost, markedly less than whole, “Pearl,” the poem of the ultimate attainment of the undiseased mind, is beautiful and complete, brought to utter rondure. In “Pearl,” Merrill signifies this concentration of layers, and this perfection of a sphere, by his symmetrically concentric rhyme scheme:
Well, I admit
A small boy’s eyes grew rounder and lips moister
To find it invisibly chained, at home in the hollow
Of his mother’s throat: the real, deepwater thing.Far from the mind at six to plumb
X-raywise those glimmering lamplit
Asymmetries to self-immolating miteOr angry grain of sand
Not yet proverbial. Yet his would be the handMottled with survival—
She having slipped (how? when?) past reach—
That one day grasped it. Sign of whatBut wisdom’s trophy. Time to mediate,
Skin upon skin, so cunningly they accrete,The input. For its early mote
Of grit
Reborn as orient moon to gloatIn verdict over the shucked, outsmarted meat . . .
One layer, so to speak, of calcium carbonateThat formed in me is the last shot
—I took the seminar I teach
In Loss to a revival—
Of Sacha Guitry’s classic Perles de la Couronne.
The hero has tracked down
His prize. He’s holding forth, that summer night,
At the ship’s rail, all suavity and wit,Gem swaying like a pendulum
From his fing—oops! To soft bubble-blurred harpstring
Arpeggios regaining depths (man the camera, follow)
Where an unconscious world, my yawning oyster,Shuts on it.
Around the central word for trauma, “grit” (which rhymes not only with the first line’s “admit” and the last line’s “it,” but also with the inner rhymes “lamplit” and “wit”), Merrill builds up a series of mirroring end rhymes. Flanking “grit” at the very center are “mote” and “gloat”; the next inner layer rhymes “accrete” and “meat,” and so on, until the almost-perfect pearl is built up through fifteen layers of often gifted rhyme (“moister” and “oyster”; “meat” and “accrete”; “Couronne” and “down”). I say that the pearl of the poem is “almost perfect” because the concentric single-line rhyme scheme is broken by the appearance of the adjacent double rhymes “sand” and “hand” in the first half, matching the adjacent double rhymes “Couronne” and “down” in the second. But since these couplets match each other, fore and aft, concentricity has not, after all, been abandoned. By this departure from a perfect concentricity, Merrill has included, in his pearl, a verbal version of the “asymmetries” visible in his mother’s jewel.
Just as his mother “slipped . . . past reach” in death, so the poet sees his own consciousness awaiting its disappearance. “Pearl” borrows for its death scene (as Merrill tells us) the closing frame of Sacha Guitry’s film Les Perles de la Couronne, in which the hero (whose “suavity and wit,” ironically mentioned, cannot prevent failure) loses a pearl when it slips from his fingers into the ocean. The occasional asymmetries of the real pearl’s layers are imitated in Merrill’s poem not only in the matched doubled rhymes early and late, but also in the asymmetries of line length: the lines range in length from one beat to five, with lines of two, three, and four beats scattered throughout the poem in an imitation of spontaneous and unpredictable recollection and accretion over time. Although, as I have said, the life-theme of Merrill’s self-portrait in “Pearl” is the gem-like perfecting of the inner consciousness by the accretion of “skins” of response over a lifetime, the dying body resists this consoling thought, just as the opaque red of anger or love could fog the persistent light in “The Instilling.” The mortal body of the poet—the death-theme of the self-portrait—is evoked at the very center of the poem in the form of the dying oyster’s flesh, from which the pearl has been plucked. The original “mote / Of grit” is “reborn” as a pearl, “as orient moon to gloat / In verdict over the shucked, outsmarted meat. . . .” The lunar immortality of art (and the fascination of the precious bequest from mother to son) remains, but the beauty of the inner pearl of consciousness is shadowed by the poet’s anger on behalf of the lifeless body, seen coarsely as “meat” once it has been “shucked” and “outsmarted” by death, or art. A perfected consciousness does not preclude the poet’s “seminar . . . / In Loss,” the death-theme being taught to others through his art. His hand—that inscribing instrument of mind—is “mottled,” not only by age and perhaps illness, but also by survival through successive painfully maculate “asymmetries” of inner identity. By preserving the presence of the insulted body in his self-portraits—however full of light or glimmering gems those poems may be—Merrill makes them credible performances of a being intensely alive yet aware of ghastly dissolution.
The most “literary” of the self-portraits of dissolution is the gentle two-stanza account in “b o d y” of how “body shines / no longer.” Using graphic means once again, as in “Christmas Tree” and “Pearl,” Merrill imagines the “o” of the word “body” as a lunar eye/I, “a little kohl-rimmed moon” (the kohl being the thickened part of the letter “o”), which rises from the right-rounded base of “b,” makes its way to its apogee in “o,” and sets in the left-rounded base of “d.” That is the little moon’s total alphabetic life journey—a three-letter span. Merrill, feeling the pang of the body’s brevity, asks the universal question: “Why?” He lets the first stanza spill over into the second to pose that protesting question:
Look closely at the letters. Can you see,
entering (stage right), then floating full,
then heading off—so soon—
how like a little kohl-rimmed moon
o plots her course from b to d
—as y, unanswered, knocks at the stage door?
The word “body,” like all words, becomes, as death approaches, a lifeless thing, disintegrating into its mere component letters until it becomes meaningless. “Looked at too long, words fail, / phase out.” But in the failure of semantic meaning (the “plotting” of its course from word to word by the little moon), a new alphabetic code arises, as the word “body” separates itself into an assemblage of distinct graphic signs:
Looked at too long, words fail,
phase out. Ask, now that body shines
no longer, by what light you learn these lines
and what the b
and d stood for.
The light of sense goes out, says Wordsworth, “with a flash that [reveals] / The invisible world” (The Prelude [1850] VI, lines 601–2). That unprecedented flash of new light gives access to a revelatory knowledge, and by the light of that philosophical lesson, one learns the ultimate question: what did the b and d—one’s birth and death—stand for?
The disposition of rhymes in “b o d y”—abcca in each stanza—makes its beautiful effect only when one sees that the b-rhyme “full” of the floating moon in stanza one matches the extinguishing b-rhyme “fail” of stanza two. Something, Merrill implies, connects fullness and failing: in each case, a light shines, first the light of sense and then the light of wisdom. The initial pathos of the poem—the sweetness of the little kohl-rimmed eye-moon and her eclipse as she utters her plaintive “Why?”—turns bracing as the poet commands himself (and ourselves with him, by his second-person address) to elucidate, by a more philosophical light, what his span of life stood for. Once read, this little poem is impossible to forget, its graphic drama so visibly, but unobtrusively, carried out, its linking slant rhyme of “full” and “fail” so touching, its little moon of sense so prematurely eclipsed—“so soon”—as it bestows by its disappearance the enlightenment of self-understanding.
But pathos is by no means the tone of all the self-portraits in A Scattering of Salts. The poem that drew me to Merrill’s dying self-representations—his “Self-Portrait in Tyvek™ Windbreaker”—poses its self-portrait before a panorama of absurd and dangerous contemporary items against which Merrill’s sardonic wit and self-irony are allowed full play. We are charmed by what the poet has substituted for the traditional white shroud—a white windbreaker (printed with a multicolored world map) that serves to hide the “blood-red T-shirt” underneath, representing the flayed body of the dying poet as écorché. Merrill bought his Tyvek™ windbreaker in an eco-friendly shop, its New Age wares summed up in one of the poet’s many comic lists:
I found it in one of those vaguely imbecile
Emporia catering to the collective unconscious
Of our time and place. This one featured crystals,
Cassettes of whalesong and rain-forest whistles,
Barometers, herbal cosmetics, pillows like puffins,
Recycled notebooks, mechanized Lucite coffins
For sapphire waves that crest, break, and recede,
As they presumably do in nature still.
The context for this self-portrait is the America of the poet’s last days, especially its absurdities of matter and manner, which, though alien to the discriminating sensibility of the poet, are in “the collective unconscious” entirely familiar to him, as they are to all Americans. Wearing his worldly (and ridiculously trademarked) windbreaker and his headphoned Walkman, Merrill goes to the gym playing a CD of a Neapolitan singer of the 1940s, Roberto Murolo. Yet the singing voice cannot shut out the external world, and Merrill continues to be preoccupied by America, now by the contemporary ruining of the environment—a parallel to the illness of his own body. Even the cannibals of the past, he thinks, “honored the gods of Air and Land and Sea,” but we,
We though . . . Cut to dead forests, filthy beaches,
The can of hairspray, oil-benighted creatures,
A star-scarred x-ray of the North Wind’s lungs.
Although the blighted landscape, set against the New Age store, is a further backdrop for this self-portrait-at-the-end-of-days, it is not the final one: the lurid apocalypse of an afflicted, even dying, earth brings on, in reaction, Merrill’s comic sense. Aware that a poem displaying only America’s science boutiques and eco-sins would not represent his country broadly enough, Merrill begins a far-ranging comic scan of the clichés (journalistic, political, and linguistic) of the current scene, from mall bookstores to phone sex to ketchup as food to TV to Capitol Hill to identity groups:
Still, not to paint a picture wholly black,
Some social highlights: Dead white males in malls.
Prayer breakfasts. Pay-phone sex. “Ring up as meat.”
Oprah. The GNP. The contour sheet.
The painless death of History. The stick
Figures on Capitol Hill. Their rhetoric,
Gladly—no, rapturously (on Prozac) suffered!
Gay studies. Right to Lifers. The laugh track.
Even the presence of death cannot suspend Merrill’s customary mockery. Nor does it alter his impatience: the informality of the democracy surrounding him temporarily annoys the poet, as passersby from street workers to foreigners feel free to comment on his conspicuous jacket; one girl, wearing an identical jacket, even gives him a conspiratorial wave. For all his irritation, he returns her wave “like an accomplice,” with a philosophical reflection:
For while all humans aren’t
Countable as equals, we must behave
As if they were, or the spirit dies (Pascal).
This Pascalian conviction—that his fellow human beings are, after all, his moral equals—rules Merrill’s culture-scanning self-portrait, written from the acute vantage point of the disease that at last allies the wealthy and fastidious poet with everyone mortal. As a sign of approaching death, the trendy white shroud-jacket now seems inadequate, and reflecting on the rapidity with which styles fall out of fashion, Merrill decides to pack it away—“Not throwing out [the] motley once reveled in” of his more carefree past, but “just learning to live down the wrinkled friend” (his old and ill physical self) that had inhabited the white world-map windbreaker. As Merrill wonders what possible verbal garment can suit him for the obliterating moment to come, he knows it cannot resemble his former favorite styles of prophetic wisdom and mock naïveté:
Remember the figleaf’s lesson. Styles betray
Some guilty knowledge. What to dress ours in—
A seer’s blind gaze, an infant’s tender skin?
All that’s been seen through. The eloquence to come
Will be precisely what we cannot say
Until it parts the lips.
“The eloquence to come” will be the later self-portrait as Christmas tree, half-real, half-ghost, though Merrill cannot yet envisage or enact that final denuded and yet ornamental style. When the poet (resigning his white cover-up) cannot imagine the style that will better serve as a shroud, what does he see on a passing youth (headphoned like himself) but a black celestial twin of his jacket, this one reproducing not a map of the world but a map of the night sky and the signs of the zodiac:
What then to wear
When—hush, it’s no dream! It’s my windbreaker
In black, with starry longitudes, Archer, Goat,
Clothing an earphoned archangel of Space,
Who hasn’t read Pascal, and doesn’t wave. . . .
Reassured by having had revealed to him, by the black-jacketed archangel, a garment for death not only appropriate but beautiful, the poet can resume listening, on his own headphones, to the voice of Roberto Murolo. He addresses his fellow singer directly—“Sing our final air”—and then lets that aria follow as his closing stanza. This plangent coda issues from a voice already failing, able to utter only broken deathbed words; and yet we know, since the poem is written in pentameters, that every line of this stanza must retain the same rhythmic measure, must have five beats. After gasping out brief phrases, the dying voice regains, with a final effort, its living powers and is able to sing its last three lines complete:
Love, grief etc. * * * * for good reason.
Now only * * * * * * * STOP signs.
Meanwhile * * * * * if you or I’ve exceeded
our [?] * * * more than time was needed
To fit a text airless and * * as Tyvek
With breathing spaces and between the lines
Days brilliantly recurring, as once we did,
To keep the blue wave dancing in its prison.
Because we can guess how the lines should go thematically, and because Merrill has provided all the rhymes, we of course feel compelled to imagine words that might fill the gaps. Love and grief, in the poet’s final aria, are failing because the body is dying; but although all signs point to death and waning creative power, those old emotions of love and grief still supply Merrill’s last words to his lover. Here’s one metrical reconstruction—not so clever as Merrill would have made it:
Love, grief etc. failing for good reason,
Now only does the body wince at STOP signs.
Meanwhile, dear heart, recall, if you or I’ve exceeded
our powers, more than time was needed
To fit a text airless and taut as Tyvek
With breathing spaces and between the lines
Days brilliantly recurring, as once we did,
To keep the blue wave dancing in its prison.
The eco-boutique’s blue wave, encased in its Lucite coffin, was moved mechanically, but the motion of spirit in the measure of the poem is aesthetically metrical rather than industrially mechanized. “Wavelets” of the failing heart still dance, coffined in the transparent container of the stanza. Because Merrill, always an introspective poet, had become, by his middle years, a poet of greater world awareness (writing not only of Europe and Greece but also of the Weathermen, terrorism, and the depletion of the earth’s resources), he poses himself, in this most densely allusive of his self-portraits, before the landscape of technological American popular culture rather as Caspar David Friedrich, in a sublime mode, would pose one of his solitary figures before a mountain range or a wilderness.
The “final air” in “Self-Portrait in a Tyvek(™) Windbreaker” subsides to a wistful farewell, easing the reader’s passage to the last poem—and the last self-portrait—of A Scattering of Salts. By analogy to the opening poem of the volume, called “A Downward Look,” Merrill entitles the last poem “An Upward Look.” In the course of its nineteen lines, a crystal of salt becomes transformed into the morning star and then the evening star. Apotheosis as stellification is not new (Pope stellified Belinda’s hair in The Rape of the Lock), but it had never chosen as its vehicle a crystal of salt—the salt of bodily fluids, of tears, of savor. In “An Upward Look”—the poem as lachrymal—the salt goes through several mutations before it attains its final sidereal height. The poet’s heart is a field that has been sown with salt (a substance preventing further organic growth) by its “departing occupier,” a lover who is already turning away from his dying companion. The salt then metamorphoses into human worth, “salt of the earth,” which the poet in defiance has thrown backward for luck but which now resumes its exacerbating sting. How has the whole world metamorphosed into salt, tears, bad luck? The poet’s universe has become something like a hospital for the terminally ill, “this vast facility the living come / dearest to die in How did it happen.”
“How did it happen”—the poem’s central outcry, its protest at how unexpectedly and strangely living turns to dying—ends the single anomalous stanza of the poem—not a couplet but a tercet—enlarged precisely to make room for that dying question (“How” this time, rather than “Why,” as in “b o d y”). This anomaly in stanza-length makes us ask why Merrill had decided in the first place to cast “An Upward Look” in couplets, and why he allowed his symmetry to be broken.3 Couplet stanzas are the most “primitive” stanza form, suiting the aboriginal and universal events of birth and death. The “extra” line of the lone tercet is there to make room for the poem’s sole direct address to another—“dearest”—as well as its harrowing outcry. The form of “An Upward Look” attracts attention not only because of the strange invariant white space separating each line into two half-lines, but also because of the presence of alliterative gestures that recall the half-lines in the accentual meter of Anglo-Saxon poetry. Although Merrill does not entirely obey the rules governing alliteration in Anglo-Saxon poetics, he lets us hear comparable effects (I capitalize the alliterating words or phonemes):
[the lover] finds the world Turning
Toys Triumphs |
Toxins into |
Why might Merrill have recalled the alliterative Anglo-Saxon half-line for his upward-looking farewell to terrestrial life? Perhaps he inserts visual pauses of equal typographical length (not present in Anglo-Saxon poetry) between the two halves of each line to make it seem as though the faltering speaking voice had to restrict itself to short phrases, could not “do” a whole line at once, had to pause for breath. And yet the prominent alliterative links tell us that the infirm speaker wants to defeat those pauses in the middle of each line by emphasizing the aural connections of his half-lines to each other, the sounds that link the halves over the midline break. We can see, too, that Merrill’s half-lines anticipate the about-to-appear answer to the baffled question “How did it happen?” “Halves of a clue” approach, half-line by half-line, explaining Merrill’s choice of form. But before they can appear and be named, Merrill joyously characterizes the halves of his clue as universal, “bright,” and mirrored in every mortal creature’s thinking:
In bright alternation minutely mirrored
within the thinking of each and everymortal creature halves of a clue
approach the earthlights Morning starevening star salt of the sky.
“Bright” evokes “light” as its usual twin, and light is here multiplied into “earthlights,” denoting our sun and moon. The halves of a clue are the morning star (heralding the sun) and evening star (heralding the moon). In the light of their “bright alternation,” Merrill can turn away from the anger and perplexity of “How did it happen” and find equanimity.
Merrill would have known Sappho’s poem to the evening star, and Byron’s adaptation of it in the third canto of Don Juan (stanza 107),4 but he depends more intimately here on Tennyson’s In Memoriam (CXXI), which turns on the fact that the evening star and the morning star are one and the same. Sappho had called the star by its “evening” name, Hesperus, but Tennyson extends the evening star, Hesper, into dawn so that he can address it by its bright “morning” name, Phosphor. In the last stanza of his poem, as his halves come together, Tennyson (like Merrill) unites the star’s two alternating self-manifestations in a “double name”:
Sad Hesper o’er the buried sun
And ready, thou, to die with him,
Thou watchest all things ever dimAnd dimmer, and a glory done:
The team is loosen’d from the wain,
The boat is drawn upon the shore;
Thou listenest to the closing door,And life is darken’d in the brain.
Bright Phosphor, fresher for the night,
By thee the world’s great work is heard
Beginning, and the wakeful bird;Behind thee comes the greater light:
The market boat is on the stream,
And voices hail it from the brink;
Thou hear’st the village hammer clink,And see’st the moving of the team.
Sweet Hesper-Phosphor, double name
For what is one, the first, the last,
Thou, like my present and my past,Thy place is changed; thou art the same.
For Tennyson, the star preserves its past as it ushers in the greater light of the sun, just as for Merrill, the star keeps to its reassuring cycle, appearing morning and evening in its two equally exquisite manifestations. But although Tennyson’s cycle ends with the resurrective dawn, Merrill ends with the appearance of the evening star, heralding night. Merrill’s presiding deity is, as ever, Venus, goddess of the passions and of the evening star. As day ends, the evening star materializes, the first salt crystal in a sky that will eventually be scattered with salt stars:
Morning star
evening star salt of the sky
First the grave dissolving into dawn
then the crucial recrystallizing
from inmost depths of clear dark blue.
The “grave dissolving” into dawn is the melancholy dissolution of the body that parallels the morning star’s vanishing with the coming of the sun, but it is also the tomb-grave of a life disappearing in the light of a new order. The verb “recrystallizing” reminds us that the evening star is one of Merrill’s crystalline symbols of perfection, which always possess the crucial ability to recrystallize as another symbol. We might expect that the last line would praise the renewed presence of the star as evening comes, and so it does, but in an evolutionary way; what is wonderful is the gradual visual materializing, as the last blue of the day begins to darken, of the reconstituted evening star. For Shakespeare, a star was “a jewel hung in ghastly night,” but Merrill’s star is a glowing presence evolving out of the inmost dark blue depths of its earthly matrix, day.
“Self-Portrait as Star” (as “An Upward Look” might be called) renders without flinching the loss of crystalline form through dissolution, but then predicts a reappearance, from the “inmost depths” of the poet’s closing day, of an analogous crystal lattice in the future. The two halves of the clue are named without adornment at first, then grouped under a single name—“salt of the sky”—and only then permitted their two eloquent present participles, the grave dissolving and the crucial recrystallizing. Merrill’s belief in crystalline form is such that he could imagine himself only temporarily without it: when his poems become the historical oeuvre we call “Merrill,” their form will recrystallize him.
The difficulty of creating believable self-portraits while dying prompted Merrill’s imagination to a series of imaginative self-symbols: a piece of dead human tissue under the microscope of an autopsy; a domed and wounded architectural space into which light is painfully instilled over time; an exploding lightbulb; a fossil; a pearl of many glimmering experiential layers; a little I/eye-moon on its journey from birth to death; a poet life-jacketed and death-jacketed; a morning star and an evening star. Aside from the satiric self-portrait of the jacket-wearing poet posed against his era, the other portraits are of things either dead or inorganic. Perhaps an inorganic self-portrait—of himself in fossilized, concentric, or crystallized form, archaic relic, pearl, or star—seemed to Merrill the most precise way to depict himself enduring, in Keats’s words, a “posthumous life.” Or perhaps a miniaturized form of self-portrait—thinking of oneself as a tiny eye rising and setting, letter to letter, in a single word—seemed accurate to one observing his life from the vast distance imposed by a death sentence. Perhaps redefining living consciousness as a light instilled through a wound, drop by drop, seemed fundamentally more truthful, to the dying poet, than rendering a portrait solely of a ruined body.
Each of these imaginings of self brings stylistic consequences. A slicing in two will be correct for the already-dead Christmas tree; a concentric rhyme scheme will suit the pearl; a poem in half-lines will suit halves of a clue. A waywardly rhymed sonnet will suit the wayward descending light of philosophic consciousness; a playlet showing the word “body” detaching itself into separate fragments as the body decays will suit the assumption of cosmic distance from one’s own fate; as “full” and “fail” are beginning to rhyme, an accelerating and then slowing pace will re-create crematorium incandescence followed by a death sentence written on stone; and finally a version of that ceremonious processional stanza, ottava rima (but with only four of the eight lines bearing rhyme), will suit the organic living portrait, the poet’s last walk wearing his absurd and surreal Tyvek shroud.
I return, as promised, to Merrill’s final self-portrait and his last self-symbol—the paradoxically alive/dead, organic/inorganic Christmas tree, retaining only half of its body, but still possessing a voice. We hear from that voice a song of the mixed emotions suiting the interface of life and death: a sadness (“it would be only a matter of weeks”); a flinching from the wasting of its physical form (“To have grown so thin. / Needles and bone”); a wincing at its artificial life support by the electric cord (“a primitive IV / To keep the show going”); and yet a sustained gratitude for the warmth of those attending its last appearance.5
In Merrill’s montage of self-portraits while dying, an array of unforgettable dying and living selves is produced; a gaunt face, a wasting frame, tissue subjected to medical ministrations, a trepanned skull, a beam of light descending throughout a column of flesh, a motley-wearing jester posed against a ruined earth, a pearl of wisdom accreting in the mind, a self posthumously fossilized, a miniature moon setting out and setting. As Merrill takes his last look at himself, body and soul, he leaves it to his penetrating symbols, enacting his state in their wonderfully individual binocular styles, to carry his agony and his alertness, his decrystallization in nightmare heat and the crucial recrystallizing of self in the lasting art that shines only “from inmost depths” of an imaginative life.