Under Pisces: Three Poems

Jimmy Merrill at Atlantic Beach FL, 1932. Special Collections, Washington U.

          "Another poem about fish--why?" James Merrill asked himself In Manuscript 4 of “The Pier: Under Pisces.” One answer appears in his memoir A Different Person, where he described a dream he had in 1947 of being a fish in an aquarium. When he caught the eye of a visitor, "I tried to signal to this person: Look! I'm not what I seem, I'm a man like you!" But the visitor only ridiculed a "fish who imagined he was human." (James Merrill, Collected Prose, 555-56). In an early poem about another aquatic species, "The Octopus" (1951), the speaker describes the creature as a "monster" enclosed in a tank that is nevertheless threatening when its suckers freeze on the "rigid glass." 

          In two poems on this site, "The Pier" and "Palm Beach," the sea creatures are threats because they are not contained but "rove . . . far and wide and deep," as in "The Pier"; and in "Palm Beach" they swim or float with "razor labia" and poisonous "ganglia." In the site's third poem, "Key West Aquarium," the sawfish is monstrous but restricted like the octopus and also sympathetic, like the fish in Merrill's dream, because it is identified with the poet. 

          The poems for this website reveal many sides of Merrill's character and poetic genius. Equally important for this site, the manuscripts are heavily revised and clearly reveal Merrill's creativity at work. Relatively few of the manuscripts have important revisions, and once Merrill began using a word processor, there are still fewer.   

          Both "Palm Beach" and "Key West Aquarium" contain manuscripts that are so different from the final version that they seem like different poems in form if not in theme. All three groups contain marginal notes that can increase our understanding of the poems: in "The Pier" the note on his obsession with fish, in "Palm Beach" his reference to Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class, and in "Key West" the identity of the man to whom it is addressed. The links to this enlightening material are on the left.

December 2019