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m [eleven] LateSettingsandAScatteringofSalts errill saw two more books through the press, one before and one after The Inner Room—which, like nearly all of Merrill’s books, is consistently structured by the myth of the nekyia, which confers shape and significance upon individual poems and upon the book as a whole. By contrast, the myth surfaces only incidentally in Late Settings of 1985 and A Scattering of Salts of 1995, Merrill’s last book. Neither of these two books engages the nekyia to the extent that so many of the poet’s other books did. There are major, marvelous poems in both, but, in keeping with the rest of this book, I will conclude with two terrific poems from Late Settings in which the nekyia plays an important role. The diurnal nekyia is used to structure the second poem in the book, “Clearing the Title,” about a new house in the Florida Keys, apparently purchasedforMerrillasanunwelcomesurprisebyDavidJackson.Itbegins withthepoet’sarrivalfromthe“iceboundbookofwinter,”whichhewishes he hadn’t left “for this trip.” Deft allusions to various necrotypes wittily express his displeasure: there is a “black sun” drawn on the soap scum of a window at the “baggage claim” (a typically subtle touch, nicely expressing the poet’s feelings about reclaiming the burdens of an old relationship). The rays of the sun are “spokes in air/Like legs of a big bug flipped on its back” (406)—not a particularly “wellcoming” omen (to borrow the misspelled greeting the poet sees at the airport), but one that introduces the insectomorphic and cyclical necrotypes to be reiterated later in the poem (for the “spokes” are those of the wheel of life).1 Driving to the new house, the poet thinks of the “tough white coral skeleton/Beneath a crop of shanties built on blocks” that he sees while Late Settings and A Scattering of Salts 227 passing through town (406). As the couple goes by the “five-story skyscraper in which” the property title is being prepared, the poet realizes “the appalling truth” that David has “bought a house.” Walking through the “green-painted door” into the “fresh white hall” of the house, the poet is even more appalled when he sees “what the termites do, look! to these floors,” an exclamation that combines the insectomorphic with the threshold necrotype. The “bare rooms” down the hall are amusingly sinister, “having consumed whatever came before” the arrival of the new owners, one of whom fears that they will “bring/Their next meal” and “serve the ravenous interior” of the house—for it is a comic House of Usher (Poe is evoked by the “Gothic-lettered ‘title’” the “freckled county clerk” is preparing ) or a monstrous, gaping mouth of some medieval hell. However that may be, the prospect of “waiting companionably for kingdom come” inside such a hungry home hardly seems appealing (407). The word “kingdom” is resonant with the kind of religious connotations that will surface later in the poem. Subsequent octaves devoted to the new house sustain the insect and gustatory motifs. The poet finds another skeleton inside the house, a “large-winged but nameless insect excavated/By slaves; the abdomen’s deep strata/Primitive intricate, like macramé” (407–8). A scarred cat, the “color of good smoke blown through the years,” then crawls “from beneath the house, fee fi fo fum!” (408). Like the devouring giant of the fairy tale, the image sustains the metaphor of the “ravenous interior” of the house. The “see-through lizards, quick as a heartbeat” crawling above the “cracked pavement,” and the “faint sulphur smell” that permeates the air reinforce the imagery of the nekyia, as if the new home were a domestic inferno, however ludic. The excavation by slaves brings elements of the archaeological descent into the poem, prefiguring the major role digging will play in several of Merrill’s last poems. When the couple leaves the new house to take a walk, the threshold, diurnal, and aquatic necrotypes are combined to confer mythic resonance upon their journey to the pier. They turn a “loose knob onto betterlate -/Than-never light” and walk out into its “deepening stream/Along with others who’ve a date/With sunset.” The passage through the door into the deepening stream, along with the crowd of people who have a date with sunset (alas, don’t we all), is delicately Dantesque—but Dante filtered through the satirical lens of an Offenbach or Cocteau. The comparison of [3.140.242.165] Project MUSE (2024-04-23 12...

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