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m [five] TheFireScreen errill’s fifth book reveals his natural gifts of characterization and narrative, skills sufficiently strong to justify his forays into fiction and drama elsewhere. Several of the poems in The Fire Screen are vivid portraits of friends and lovers, whose life stories are marvelously captured in mini-narratives of great appeal. Other poems in the book pick up on such motifs as fish, dolls, and the night-sea journey, leading into the realm of dream, love, and death—all basic units of the narrative structure of the nekyia. “The Friend of the Fourth Decade” is a dazzling sequence of eight sonnets , composed of seven two-line stanzas and sprinkled with couplets here and there. The nekyia that structures the poem is once again a journey beneath (and across) the water, associated with time, love, and death. The poem begins at sunset, after dinner when the aquatic imagery of the nightsea journey is evoked in a perfectly marvelous variation of the myth. In the third sonnet of the sequence, the poet’s friend tells him about dipping postcards he has received (“from my mother, my great-uncle, you!”) into a bowl of water to remove the stamp and watch the text dissolve. The immersion of the cards in the water dissolves the ink, which then “turns to exactly the slow formal swirls/Through which a phoenix flies on Chinese silk.” When the ritual is finished, the friend throws the “used waters” away, to “deepen the sea’s blue” (229).1 These aquatic motifs wonderfully refigure the necrotype of submersion that flows through much of Merrill’s early work. And the allusion to the phoenix evokes the rhythm of death and rebirth central to the myth of the nekyia. That theme is picked up in the next sonnet, which is devoted to the 80 The Fire Screen feeling of renewal the friend experiences when he dips the cards under the water to witness “scene upon scene’s immersion and emergence/Rinsed of the word.” The image on the front of the card, however, “survives the flood,” while the dissolution of the text cleanses the self of the burdensome emotional attachments of the past. With this loss of self comes a “lighter heart,” risen from the water like a phoenix from its ashes (229). The ritual of “immersion and emergence” reenacts the phases of descent and return by which the world, and the self, die to be reborn. The poet’s friend uses religious diction to evoke his experience of personal renewal: he feels “absolved [. . .] By water holy from the tap, by air that dries/Of having cared and having ceased to care” (230). The terminology here is of the baptismal nekyia. As Joseph Campbell writes, “To enter into the font is to plunge into the mythological realm; to break the surface is to cross the threshold into the night-sea,” where the old Adam dies so the new can be born (Hero 251). But when, after his “friend/had gone where he was going,” the poet tries the experiment himself, by dipping a card from his mother into the bowl of water, different results rather hilariously ensue. Because of the ink she uses, his mother’s “message” remains “legible,” and he in turn is not absolved of the “memories it stirred” (228). “Certain things,” he concludes, “die only with oneself” (230)—a moving tribute to the memory of his mother and a characteristic modulation of tone, typical of Merrill’s magic, from the sardonic to the elegiac. And yet the poet’s immersion of his mother’s postcard has brought him face to face with death too. When the ink blurs, a “wild iris” emerges from the “blue ornate brief plungings up,” as if to signify a renewal and transformation that follow upon the dissolution of her address, “Dearest Son” (230). Such a renewal would, one assumes, be predicated upon the death of that aspect of himself associated with the filial relationship and all its obligations . And indeed, watching her ink “unfurl,” the poet hears “oblivion’s thin siren singing,” as if to evoke the ultimate dissolution of both mother and son in the cosmic waters of the abyss. In this context, Merrill’s choice of metaphor is most apt: the oblivion of drowning is evoked by the “siren singing” of what we all both dread and yearn for—death, the ultimate return to the waters of the womb, from which all life comes. The allusion to the siren...

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