In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

t [eight] TheBookof Ephraim he Book of Ephraim, the last poem of Divine Comedies, would eventually come to play two roles in Merrill’s work: the first, as a concluding poem to this, his seventh book; and the second, as the first poem of the grand trilogy, The Changing Light at Sandover. The situation reminds one of the difficulties Joyce faced in writing “The Dead,” a story that Richard Ellmann pointed out needed an ending that would serve two purposes: to conclude the story itself and to function as a conclusion to Dubliners as a whole (252–63). Given the dual purpose of Merrill’s poem, I propose to examine its use of the myth of the nekyia in this chapter in relation to the earlier poems in the book discussed above and then in the next chapter to explore the myth in the context of The Changing Light. As the story of a “Thousand and One Evenings Spent/With David Jackson at the Ouija Board/In Touch with Ephraim Our Familiar Spirit” (4),1 The Book of Ephraim is a poem richly informed by the myth of the nekyia. As such, its “dramatis personae” are composed largely of the spirits of the dead: W. H. Auden, John Clay, Maya Deren, Rufus Farmetton, Hans Lodeizen, Charles Merrill, Maria Mitsotáki (11–14), and other illustrious shades not listed in the cast of characters, such as Wallace Stevens, who, “with that dislocated/Perspective of the newly dead” amusingly mistakes Merrill’s “dining room at Stonington” for “an alcove in the Baptist church next door” (5). Indeed, the first sentence of the poem (which will recur at the end of The Changing Light) uses a pun to allude to the myth of the nekyia: “Admittedly I err,” Merrill writes, “by undertaking/This in its The Book of Ephraim 141 present form” (3)—a pun that links the energies of poiesis with the nekyia, for the poet becomes a kind of undertaker. I believe that we should take Merrill’s allusion to Northrop Frye seriously in the lines that follow in section A. By telling us that Frye’s formulation of “the incarnation and withdrawal of/A god” is The Book of Ephraim’s central “theme/Whose steady light shone back, it seemed, from every/Least detail exposed to it” (3), Merrill comes as close as he ever did to making it perfectly clear that the nekyia is the fundamental metaphor of the entire poem and, as I argue, the single most important myth in his work as a whole. Frye’s formulation puts the nekyia in a nutshell, having to do as it does with the descent of the god into and return of the god from the underworld of mortal life. Within this overarching rubric of the myth, numerous variations of the nekyia are to be found throughout The Book of Ephraim, such as Maya’s dream vision and death, David’s hypnotic nekyia, JM’s reliving of his death in a previous incarnation, Leo’s hike to the waterfall , and the poet’s trip to Venice. By the time we reach the end of Ephraim, therefore, we begin to realize that Merrill has kept his promise, consistently using the nekyia to give shape and significance to the poem by uniting its various episodes in a manner that recalls Frye’s “manic-depressive chart” of biblical narrative, in which the “sequence of U’s” indicates the reiteration of the myth of descent and return throughout the course of the Old Testament and on into the New (Frye 171, 176). Indeed, the letter “U” itself figures the basic rhythm of the myth, with its “manic-depressive” downward and upward strokes. After announcing the theme in the overture of section A, Merrill proceeds to an evocative scene in section B that employs several of the nec­ rotypes affiliated with the myth—catoptric, threshold, aquatic, occult, and equestrian metaphors traditionally associated with the nekyia. First, a mirror propped up in a chair opposite DJ and JM (who sit together at the Ouija board) serves both as a doorway to the realm of the dead and as a metaphor for the powers of poetic reflection catalyzed by the nekyia (6). The willowware cup used to indicate the letters on the board is a variation on the Grail necrotype. It is a sacred vessel with necromantic powers : “Glazed zombie of itself,” it will be “possessed” by “one or another of the myriads” of spirits “who hardly...

Share