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t [seven] DivineComedies his Pulitzer Prize–winning seventh book begins with the symbolism of divestiture and investiture, as if in preparation for the grand procession into the world of the dead, which it initiates—since its concluding long poem, The Book of Ephraim, would become the first book of the great trilogy to follow, about communicating with the angels and the dead. Several of the poems in Divine Comedies use the same narrative device frequently found in Braving the Elements: that of the journey, both spatial and memorial. The journeys often involve the imagery of the nekyia, and several develop ideas relevant to Merrill’s general conception of the myth. Of these poems, four may be considered masterpieces: “Chimes for Yahya,” “Yánnina,” “Verse for Urania,” and “The Will.” In “Chimes for Yahya” the journey is temporal and spatial with biblical overtones. The journey begins at Christmas in Athens when the poet hears church bells that remind him of two train trips taken earlier in his life: one in America when he was a boy on a “Pullman going South for Christmas” and the second when he was a young man on a trip to Isfahan. The temenos of the poem is the beautifully carpeted home of Yahya, the prince of his tribe, and, more particularly, the shabby room outside by a “cold courtyard black with goats” (376).1 The revelations that proceed there, however, are divinely comic and involve an amusing parody of the Nativity scene. Both journeys, along with the contemporary setting, revolve around the rituals of the Christmas season in three different parts of the world (Athens, America, and Isfahan), and all three occasions enact versions of the divine comedies of the book’s title. Divine Comedies 115 Neither of the two train trips explicitly evokes the imagery of the nekyia, except for the fact that Mademoiselle in section 2 and Prince Yahya of sections 3–6 are both dead, brought briefly back to life by the sacred power of memory and poetry. Both memoria and poiesis, therefore, share an intimate relationship with the nekyia. Mademoiselle is remembered in section 2 when the Pullman stops at a dark station and the boy looks through the blinds at a Nativity scene: “some blanketed/Black figures from a crèche, part king/Part shepherd and part donkey, stamp and steam/Gliding from sight as rapturous bells ring” (371). The sight prefigures the parodic Nativity to come in Isfahan, as does the bemused disappointment of the boy on Christmas morning when he must mime “astonishment” when he sees presents he already knows about spread beneath the tree. The playful parody of the Nativity occurs in section 7, when Yahya, the Turkish prince, takes the poet and another guest to see a woman giving birth. The guest is Gloria, a “tall blonde from Berkeley,” who is “doing fieldwork on the tribe” (374). Her name aptly recalls the angels of section 1 and the crèche scene of section 2. But the birth she greedily begs the prince to let her see (she needs it for her “thesis”) is a setup. After the trio walks through the cold courtyard full of goats to enter a “small room’s dissolving shabbiness,” they see a “veiled figure writhing on [the] carpet,” hear her scream, and smell the heavy scent of opium in the air. While Prince Yahya chuckles “back against the wall,” Gloria and the poet sit “staring like solemn oxen from a stall/Upon the mystery” (377). These lines (and the three people come to witness the birth) recall both Yeats’s “uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor” in “The Magi” (Poems 126) and Thomas Hardy’s marvelous Christmas poem, “The Oxen” (403). But Merrill’s denouement is unique, as unimaginable as it would be for Yeats or Eliot as it is characteristic of the ludic syncretism of Postmodern aesthetics. The poet detects “an element of play” in the childbirth scene, which he has come to see and Gloria to record for her thesis. Gloria must trulyhavebeenastonished(incontrasttothe“mimed”delightoftheboyin section 2) when the woman turns out to be Hussein, Yahya’s “old retainer,” and the baby (which emerges from “underneath dark swathings” like the Christ child in the manger) turns out to be “a wriggling white/Puppy!” (377). Part of the irony of this scene—which it would be a mistake to interpret as heathen blasphemy or existential atheism—is that the mock Nativity actually does capture something of the central mystery...

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