James Merrill, Postmodern Magus: Myth and Poetics

4. Nights and Days

i [four] NightsandDays n the ambitious second poem of Nights and Days, “The Thousand and Second Night,” the poet is once again a voyager, traveling on, and by the craft of, poetry to the yonder shore. The ghost of Yeats commingles with the ghost of Scheherazade to produce a marvelous refiguration of the “Byzantium” poems and the Arabian Nights. The five sections of the poem recount a journey to Istanbul and Greece and incorporate explicit and implied allusions to the nekyia. The first section, entitled “Rigor Vitae,” begins with a variation of the Shakespearian sonnet (three quatrains rhymed in the Petrarchan mode) followedbyalovelytwistontheconcludingcouplet(abba,cddc,effe,fe).The protagonist is suffering from facial paralysis, “an absurd complaint” that recalls the emotional ennui and spiritual dessication of Eliot’s Waste Land and Joyce’s Dubliners. The rehearsal of the history of the Hagia Sophia, in the subsequent free verse lines of section 1, recalls the grand cultural phases of the Yeatsian gyres, although they are presented with the casual, offhand grace characteristic of Merrill’s Postmodern aesthetics. We watch the “house of Heavenly Wisdom” of the Christian era become first “a mosque” of the Ottoman Turks, a tourist destination for the “last 18th-century visitor ,” a museum in the twentieth century, and finally “a flame-/less void” (176).1 Its long, slow degeneration reflects the collapse of spiritual values in the modern world, the “wrecked” sensibility of the emotionally paralyzed poet, and the departure from Yeats, for whom Byzantium represented an ideal of aesthetic perfection no longer attainable in the Modernist period and persistently deconstructed in the Postmodernist. The sophisticated free verse of the travelogue then yields to an amusing 62 Nights and Days sonnet called “The Hamam,” the title of which is cleverly incorporated (by the rhyme scheme) into the concluding quatrain of the previous lines. This sonnet is Petrarchan in form, the octave broken into two quatrains and the sestet into two tercets (abba, cdcd, efe, gfg) in a manner that recalls “Leda and the Swan.” Merrill’s scheme is typically more playful than Yeats’s and considerably less portentous. The scheme uses both Shakespearean and Petrarchan rhymes for the quatrains; it links the sestet to the octave with a partial rhyme (“gloom” and “loukoum”); and it employs a mischievous partial rhyme in the final tercets (“thief” and “life”). Although fundamentally a playful poem about a Turkish bath, the sonnet nevertheless touches on motifs central to all five sections. The trip to the bath is a ludic nekyia, for the poet is ritually “wrapped in towels and a sheet” before being “led upstairs to this lean tomb/Made all of panes (red, amber, green)/With a glass star hung in the gloom” (177). The investiture and the ascent necrotypes suggest that the bath is a kind of temenos, a sacred space of healing and of revelation. Here, the revelation is illuminated by a star, and it is of the fundamental elements of the creation, symbolized by the three colors, themselves subsequently to be associated with “mind, body, and soul” (184). As the quiet revelations of the bath ensue, an “attendant ” enters the scene, like an “archaeologist or thief” raiding an Egyptian tomb. And, like a royally invested mummy, the poet “gravely” lifts his head, wearing a “mask of platinum” (177) that amusingly recalls the golden masks of the Pharaohs. These playful touches, mixing the quotidian and the mythical, distinguish Merrill from Yeats and Postmodernist from Modernist aesthetics. Returning from the hamam to his hotel, the poet pauses “midway across the bridge” to record “an infantile/Memory” of “his grandmother,” a recollection that promises to “uncramp” his style, if not his face. The crossing of the bridge evokes the aquatic imagery of the journey to the underworld, which typically catalyzes an encounter with the ancestral domain (as in Homer and Virgil). And the recorded memory itself modulates slowly back to the central motif of the night-sea journey, when the poet remembers “a wen” on his grandmother’s wrist, “a hard mauve bubble up from which bristled three or four white hairs,” by which he was fascinated as child lying in her loving lap (178). The return to the mother is provocative here in the context of the soul’s journey, for it recalls both Wallace Stevens, for whom “death is the mother of beauty” (55), and Goethe, whose underworld was Nights and Days 63 presidedoverbytheMothers.WhatisdazzlingaboutMerrill’srefiguration...