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  • Legacies of Reading in the Late Poetry of Thomas Merton
  • Dustin D. Stewart

Before his tragic death in 1968, Thomas Merton established his peculiar legacy as a cosmopolitan monk. Merton construed the contemplative life as a mode of conscientious engagement with, rather than as a safe haven from, the world. That engagement took the forms of ecumenism (in, say, his engagement with Zen Buddhism); of activism (notably, in his reactions to American military involvement in Vietnam); of correspondence (with clergy, poets, theologians, editors); and of receptivity to intellectual developments (in, for instance, psychoanalysis and evolutionary thought).1 Of the world, Merton could thus write in a posthumously published book, “It is a living and self-creating mystery of which I am myself a part, to which I am myself my own unique door.”2 If the self is the door opening upon but also within the world, then contemplation for Merton is its hinge.

Thomas Merton’s poetry likewise needs its hinge—a way of opening itself to the world forty years after the poet’s death. Much of the late poetry, in particular, warrants fresh attention, for in it Merton attempts to encounter that wide, increasingly fractured world, and his innovative choices of form and material often reflect the radical reassessments of meaning that we have come to associate with the year 1968. So I begin with the suggestion that two competing views of reading, drawn from two glances at Merton the reader, can illuminate those late poems by revealing how they imply and address interpretive questions. Such matters pertain to the role or, more precisely, the location of the interpretive reader. Does the reader have access to the heart of the text, or must one remain at its impenetrable boundary? Merton’s late poetry traces, though it cannot bridge, the distance between these two perspectives, which I will proceed to examine.

Reading Merton Reading: Rilke to Barthes

A useful starting point is a 1953 essay on the Psalms as poetry, in which Merton correlates interpretation with experience. “What the poem actually ‘means,’” the writer claims in the essay, “can only be summed up in the [End Page 115] whole content of poetic experience which it is capable of producing in the reader. This total poetic experience is what the poet is trying to communicate to the rest of the world.”3 Merton defines the “soul” of a poem as its embodiment in readerly experience.4 With this definition one can usefully juxtapose a passage from another 1953 text, the journal The Sign of Jonas, in which Merton translates several lines from Rainer Maria Rilke’s novel, The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge. The passage envisions a sublime moment when the writer becomes the written. To adopt Merton’s language, such a transformation withdraws from the writer the soul of, and authority over, written meaning:

For a while yet I can write all this down and express it. But there will come a day when my hand will be far from me and when I bid it write it will write words I do not mean. The time of that other interpretation will dawn when not one word will remain upon another and all meaning will dissolve like clouds and fall down like rain. Despite my fear I am yet like one standing before something great . . . This time I shall be written. I am the impression that will change.5

Probably translating it from the German, Merton the reader thereby enacts what the excerpt itself envisions.6 Rilke “shall be written,” for reading Rilke entails rewriting Rilke. Merton translates part of Rilke’s fictional notebook, grafting it into his own journal and reorienting, restating, and resituating the language of the passage. His reading of Rilke becomes a signal that Merton’s Sign, too, must subject itself to the reorientations of reading. If his translating hand changes the “impression” of Rilke, it acknowledges in so doing the similar impressionability of Merton’s own text.7 A touchstone for this essay, Merton’s translation registers the tension, but also the glory, of the diarist before the book: to begin with reading is to end with “being written” and thus being read...

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