At the Brink of Infinity: Poetic Humility in Boundless American Space

7. Merrill’s Expansiveness

7 Merrill’sExpansiveness Poetry of knowledge is often a solitary endeavor. For the Emersonian poet, the detachment of the poem’s object, which “sits for its portrait”1 as the mind finds the forms to represent it, has tended to coincide with detachment of the poetic speaker from society. Reproachful of conversational forms, the epistemological poet often stands apart; her work is on a promontory between two realms, and she can neither be contained by society nor absorbed by sublimity. Though a member of this tradition, and an especial admirer of Bishop, James Merrill sought a poetics that respected his own contained gregariousness. In all his writings, he kept in mind the materiality of his forms, and the difficulty of finding words in a void. In his poem “Marsyas,” the elements of formal rigidity and creative choice are reflected in the “stiff rhythms” and “gorgeous rhymes” of the poem of the Apollo figure, a strong rival poet whose power pulls the poem’s protagonist out of himself. The first element of that dyad imposes formal control; the second offers beauty and plenitude. The tension between these two poetic challenges—order and submissive awe—would culminate in Merrill’s extended poem of education, The Changing Light at Sandover. Even in that prosiest of American poems, it would find resolution in the same lyric instantaneity that, in the stories of Marsyas, Semele, and other annihilated singers of ancient Greece, merges pride with abjection. The vulnerability of human flesh is one message of the Marsyas myth: at the end of that story, the god of poetry flays the (intrinsically) inadequate human singer. The obvious response for a formalist writer is to center anxieties about pride and weakness on objects rather than on innate capacities. In Merrill ’s most autobiographical poem, “The Broken Home,” the title object—the house, rather than the people involved—absorbs the poet’s attention in the poem’s final lines. Redemptive power emerges not just from a reckoning with 172 | merrill’s expansiveness events but also from the opening of an actual window in the house that leads to “the unstiflement of the entire story.” It is the house, not the storyteller, that lacks breath. The poet needs only to expose inner space to outer in order to clear away the stultifying mythic overlay of this poem about his parents, whom he calls “Father Time and Mother Earth,/A marriage on the rocks.” In his gloss on this passage, Merrill pointed away from the autobiographical: “That bit in ‘The Broken Home’ . . . isn’t meant as a joke. History in our time has cut loose, has broken faith with Nature” (Recitative 177). This claim has ecological resonance, to be sure, but it is at the same time a commentary on a failure of contemporary philosophy. Considering experience as a set of events in which relationships evolve, history-obsessed Hegelian philosophy neglects experience’s instantaneous power, its meanings in a moment of encounter with space and objects. This passage anticipates an important feature of Merrill’s magnum opus, Sandover: the engine of the text is the Emersonian double question of language in nature and nature in language. Though he is often treated as a poet of life stories, Merrill is, more importantly, a poet of houses and sensation, and his art of conversation and relationship should be understood in that context. This chapter will turn to Sandover to find out how that oxymoron, a sociable Emersonian voice, is possible, but first it will examine how Merrill defines himself in the lyric tradition, as a nature poet. Before he turned to developing systems of collective reincarnation and striving, Merrill was a pastoral poet: a solitary shepherd developing a Congregationalism of one. Merrill’s metaphor for himself in the poem “Syrinx” is the reed—isolated in a natural setting, shaped for the piper’s woodsy music with little need of an audience, and above all else grounded in sensory experiences: . . . foxglove Each year, cloud, hornet, fatal growths, Proliferating by metastasis Rooted their total in the gliding stream. The strength of the reed—poetry’s strength—is in its delving roots, which give it the anchorage to sum up a world of uncomfortable facts in a single structure. It totals up an array of transient objects to ground them firmly in the flow of a Jamesian stream. Its stiffness makes it a reed to be read, some- merrill’s expansiveness | 173 thing...