James Merrill, Postmodern Magus: Myth and Poetics

10. The Inner Room

w [ten] TheInnerRoom hat then will follow the baroque complexities toward which Postmodernism seems inclined, exemplified by The Changing Light? May we perhaps expect a return to simpler forms, a development analogous to the emergence of Neoclassicism from its Rococo predecessors?Ifso,Merrill’smarvelousbook, TheInnerRoom,publishedin 1988, may be a vision of things to come. For it too uses the nekyia to confer shape and significance upon the work, providing coherence to the whole by bringing individual poems and the five separate sections into relationship with each other. It does so, however, with an elegant simplicity that compensates for the ornate sophistication of The Changing Light. The Inner Room is composed of five sections: three groups of lyric poems (sections 1, 3, and 5) and two long narrative poems (sections 2 and 4). Several of the poems in the lyrical sequences and others of the two long narrative sections of The Inner Roomare structured by, or incorporate the images of, the nekyia. “The Image Maker” (section 2) is a short play that begins and ends in the morning in a santero’s workshop, with the descent into the demonic darkness of the night in between. “Prose of Departure” (section 4) is a sequence of prose poems with haiku (after Basho) about a journey to Japan, during which the poet and his friend visit two cemeteries and confront their own mortality, and the death of a friend back home. In between these longer, narrative sections of the book are sequences of lyrics that often employ the iconography of the nekyia. “Declaration Day,” the second poem in The Inner Room, picks up on motifs from the first poem in the book (“Little Fallacy”) and announces others central to the volume as a whole. It is composed of nine quatrains, The Inner Room 189 all rhymed in one of Merrill’s favorite schemes (abba) and in a meter based on the ballad: three tetrameter lines and one trimeter in each stanza, with the exception of the fifth central stanza, which has four tetrameter lines and no trimeter. This stanza divides the poem neatly in half: in the first four quatrains, which move from “daybreak” to “noon bells,” the shorter line is the third; in the concluding four quatrains, which take the lovers from late afternoon “to evening” and “night” time, the shorter line is always the second. This narrative framework, based on the diurnal nekyia (a long day’s journey into night), recurs in several poems and sections of poems throughout the course of the book. In “Declaration Day,” the nekyia is erotic, a myth of relationship, in which important images of descent are evoked that will reoccur in subsequent poems. The first such leit-motif occurs in the second stanza, in a room Where after daybreak, as a gust Of radiance unsealed its doom, An entire fresco’d gloom Crumbled gratefully to dust. (494)1 The image suggests that the day will declare a new relationship and assert an independence from the “gloom” of some former love. Hence, the fresco of the previous days crumbles “gratefully to dust,” as if one is gladdened by its decomposition, for one is now free to pursue the new life ahead. Merrill will return to the dissolving fresco motif in “Walks in Rome” in section 5, where the painting is also associated with love. The imagery of the pool and of drowning that follows in the next stanza also anticipates a central conceit returned to in “Losing the Marbles,” also insection5,inwhichwordsonthepagewilldescendintothedepths(asdid those on the postcards in “The Friend of the Fourth Decade”) to be rescued by the poet’s restoration of a damaged manuscript. Here, the “drowned leaves [that] beset the drain” of the pool are also associated with poetry and death, since the leaves crown a “poor laureate” apparently buried in the “pale cement” on the bottom. This descent to the bottom of the pool yields to an image of rebirth—the ascent from the depths is as important as the descent in the myth of the nekyia—as “two figures” swim up from under the water, “surfacing” to the conjugal tune of “noon bells” (494). These bells suggest that for Merrill the nekyia is a myth of marriage and relation- 190 The Inner Room ship (as it was also for his great Modernist precursors, Eliot, Lawrence, and Mann). In the next stanza, we move from the “ring” to the “rose...