James Merrill, Postmodern Magus: Myth and Poetics

3. Water Street

i [three] WaterStreet mages of the nekyia and the labyrinth, of mirrors and reflections, reoccur in several of the poems in Merrill’s third book. The volume is framed by two poems on houses, “An Urban Convalescence ” and “A Tenancy,” placed like entrance and exit doors at the beginning and the end of the collection. In between are the many chambers of the domicile, reminding us that the word “stanza” also means room. There are poems about dying and aging people (Proust, a soldier, and apparently a grandfather and grandmother); poems about parents and children, couples , brothers and sisters; and beautiful poems about angels, butterflies, and fish. Water Street is a very accessible and personal book, moving toward (but shying away from) an emotional directness of presentation (for the first time, for example, we see Merrill and his mother together in the same poem, although his father appears only as a shadow in a family film). As usual, there is a marvelous variety of meters and verse forms: blank and free verse; quatrains, quintets, sestets, and octaves; sonnets and villanelles; and longer, experimental poems that incorporate all of these. “Scenes of Childhood” is a marvelous example of Merrill’s revisionary approach to the nekyia and of his masterful fusion of form and content. It recounts an evening spent watching some movies taken when the poet was a child. The first frames show three people (Merrill’s “mother and two aunts”) emerging from a “door” in “a late sun.” The three sisters are a manifestation of what Robert Graves called the Triple Goddess, to be “taken for stars,/For fates.” The images emerge from the past like the dead from the underworld, summoned by the magic of the movies: “the buried day” 56 Water Street rises “like a moon,/Shining, unwinding/Its taut white sheet” (141).1 This description of the three “fates” recalls the souls of the dead in Yeats’s “By­ zantium,” who are compared to shades “bound in mummy cloth” and who “mayunwindthewindingpath”ofincarnation(Poems248).Inacharacteristic maneuver, Merrill refigures Yeats in quotidian, contemporary terms: the “unwinding” sheet is the shroud, the blank screen, and the winding spool of film that projects the images. Also characteristic is Merrill’s finely observed addition of precisely rendered details that reinforce the references to the nekyia: “Two or three bugs that lit/Earlier upon the blank/Sheen” of the movie screen are now dead, “all peaceable/Insensibility” (141). The “door from which the primal/Figures” emerge nicely evokes the threshold passage between the two worlds (of the past and the present, of the living and the dead), while the comparison of the weird sisters to “lightning bugs” (141) recasts the insectomorphic necrotypes found in “Voices from the Other World.” Here, the movement from the dead bugs of stanza 3 to the resurrected fireflies of stanzas 4 and 9 follows the dynamic of descent and return. The “ashen lips” of the three sisters in the “final light” of day are distinctly funereal and underscore the mythological context in which they are presented—as the three “fates” of the classical underworld. But there is also a Lord of the Underworld, one who, by remaining invisible , lives up to his name (Hades Aidoneus, meaning the unseen or invisible one). This is Merrill’s father. We see him only as a “man’s shadow” in the film (the phrase is repeated twice), which “mount[s]” the mother’s dress in stanza 6 and which “afflicts” both the mother and the child in stanza 7 (142). The poet himself (seen as a child in the film) plays the role of the four-year-old “fury” who raises his fist to “strike” after the father’s shadow mounts his mother’s dress. Hence, these stanzas recast the characters of the nuclear family in mythological terms: they become the Furies, Fates, and shadows of a “buried day” (141). The nekyia therefore enables a symbolic dramatization of the Family Romance. The oedipal implications of the scene are explicit: when the shadow of the father mounts the mother, the son strikes out in fury; and when the mother asks the son to slow the film down, the spool jams in the sprockets and “catches fire.” A miniature apocalypse and patricide ensues, as the mother and child watch themselves “turn red and black” (like devils) and go “up/In a puff of smoke” (142). The poet has figuratively Water Street...