Eric Ormsby on "The Sawfish"

Eric Ormsby’s essay on Merrill in Fine Incisions: Essays on Poetry and Place (2011) is available in part at Google Books.  

The essay includes a fine (and incisive) appreciation of Merrill’s entire poetic career, including “The Sawfish.” The knowledge that the poem is addressed to someone whom the speaker feels has rejuvenated him would have strengthened Ormsy's understanding of the last line, "love's but a dream and only death is kind."

The last line, a deliberately hackneyed assertion, is undercut before it begins. Merrill means to say the opposite: Love is no dream and death is not kind. But he does so, perversely, by negating the statement in advance and then proffering it in all it apodictic falsehood. It is a “saw," but a saw  that cuts both ways. And it sinks out of mind the way the poet’s fellow captive the sawfish sinks back into the gloom of the aquarium, and “almost ghost" too, waiting for death but still capable of love. Here Merrill’s extraordinary wit serves a deeper purpose, enhancing his empathy not only with the fish but with the person he himself had become (74).