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t [two] TheCountryofaThousandYearsof Peace he Country of a Thousand Years of Peace comes nearly ten years after First Poems. A new power of emotion in Merrill’s voice suggests the savage muses of Plath and Berryman, Lowell and Sexton, albeit in a less directly confessional manner.1 Perhaps all the poets of the fifties fell under the spell of the plays of Williams and O’Neill, which explore the explosive turmoil of domestic tensions in the Cold War era. However that may be, there is a great depth of feeling in Merrill’s second book—a tempest in the test tube of the verse forms, which contain the outpouring of some secret torment in the poet’s life during this decade. The lava flow threatens to break the vessels made to receive or to divert it. Yet there is also a new strength in the voice, paradoxically generated by an increased vulnerability. It’s very odd for the word “hysteria” to occur in connection with a poet so urbane and sophisticated as Merrill; nevertheless , some of the same demons that ultimately led to the suicides of Plath, Sexton, and Berryman seem to be behind the scenes of several of the poems in this volume. If The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace is the underworld , as some have suggested, the title is ironic: this underworld is more purgatorial than paradisal. The central conceit of several poems in this second volume is one of Merrill’s (and Postmodernism’s) favorite necrotypes: that of mirror reflections and opposite worlds, a theme that informs the prosody and imagery throughout Merrill’s work. The six quintets of “Some Negatives: X at the Château” are beautifully rhymed and combine trimeter, tetrameter, and pentameter lines. As usual, the scheme is flexible and includes rhymes that link the stanzas together, so that an unrhymed word in one, like “or” in The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace 39 the first, will be picked up in the second, with the word “tour” in the first line. The pattern is consistent: “keep” in the second quintet is reflected by “sheep” in the third; “heir” in the third by “care” and “bear” in the fourth; “them” in the fourth by “whim” in the fifth; and “gossamer” in the fifth by “her” in the concluding sixth quintet. The scheme therefore figures the central trope, since the stanzas mirror and refract each other in the same way that a negative is related to the developed photograph and to the world it pictures. The stanzas are also configured by the narrative and archetypal imagery of the nekyia, the progress of which leads us from one stanza to the next. The negatives form a ghostly underworld; they are pictures of the beloved “by a cypress walk,/Copied in snow,” and beside a “water-jet that here/Is jet.” The reversal of dark and light on the negative rather hilariously pre­ sents the beloved as “an Ethiop with hair/Powdered white as chalk.” These negatives must in turn undergo their own descent and be “immersed/In a mild Lethe” before the developed photograph may emerge. Merrill associates the negatives with the rivers of the underworld (the acid bath of the lab) and calls them the “first/Images of images” (65)2—language that recalls a central concept of the Modernist nekyia, which always catalyzes a revelation of those fundamental forms that confer shape and significance upon life and art. The Yeatsian nekyia, for example, in “Byzantium,” evokes “those images that yet/Fresh images beget” (Poems 249).3 The nekyia informs the diction, the imagery, and the narrative of Merrill ’s “Some Negatives,” in which the beloved, amusingly called “X,” has a “charming face not lit/But charred” as he is led by “dark beams” into the netherworld of “lake lawn, urn and maze/Plotted by your dead rivals,” as the protagonist of the poem puts it.4The diction and imagery here combine the mortuary motifs of the nekyia (the “urn” and the “dead rivals”) with thoseofthelabyrinthtoformacomplexfigurecharacteristicofMerrilland of Modernist literature as a whole. Merrill’s hybrid yields a myth about the complexities of erotic relationship. The imagery of the nekyia is sustained in the subsequent stanzas, which evoke the “grotto” in the fourth stanza, where the lover has “grieved” for the “dead rivals” of the past; the “estates no deed can alter,” the “water-wraith,” and the “black sun” of the fifth. The cave and the wraith (a ghost or spectral person supposedly...

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