"Looking at Mummy" (childhood poem)

Merrill poem as transcribed by his mother.

From "An Interview with J. D. McClatchy":

"I had written at least one poem when I was seven or eight. It was a poem about going with the Irish setter into my mother's room--an episode that ended up in 'The Broken Home.' The Irish Setter was named Michael, and I think the poem began: 'One day while she lay sleeping, / Michael and I went peeping'" (115). From James Merrill, Collected Prose, ed. McClatchy and Yenser (New York: Knopf, 2004).

McClatchy published a facsimile of the poem in his article "The Inner Room," Raritan (Summer 1999), 19.1: 1-22. He wrote that "Because he was a devoted mother's only child or because he was the pampered son of a wealthy man, every scrap of his childhood seems to have been preserved--drawings, report cards, letters, and cards. And among all this I found a little verse, copied out in his mother's hand, and dated 29 October 1932. Its author was six years old" (12). 

Merrill refers to this poem in Manuscript 3 (see Manuscripts link in left margin): "A muse / Copied it down, my earliest verse."