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"For Proust" from Water Street (1962), Text and Notes

Link to a complete reproduction of Merrill's Water Street on the Internet Archive.

List of printings of "For Proust."

Over and over something would remain
Unbalanced in the painful sum of things.
Past midnight you arose, rang for your things.
You had to go into the world again.

You stop for breath1 outside the lit hotel2,
A thin spoon bitter stimulants3 will stir.
Jean takes your elbow, Jacques your coat. The stir
Spreads — you are known to all the personnel —

As through packed public rooms you press (impending
Palms, chandeliers, orchestras, more palms,
The fracas and the fragrance) until your palms
Are moist with fear that you will miss the friend

Conjured — but she is waiting: a child4 still
At first glance, hung with fringes, on the low
Ottoman. In a voice reproachful and low
She says she understands you have been ill.

And you, because your time is running out,
Laugh in denial and begin to phrase
Your questions. There had been a little phrase5
She hummed, you could not sleep tonight without

Hearing again. Then, of that day she had sworn
To come, and did not, was evasive later,
Would she not speak the truth two decades later,
From loving-kindness learned if not inborn ?

She treats you to a look you cherished, light,
Bold:"Mon ami, how did we get along
At all, those years?" But in her hair a long
White lock6 has made its truce with appetite.

And presently she rises. Though in pain
You let her leave — the loved one always leaves7.
What of the little phrase? Its notes, like leaves
In the strong tea you have contrived to drain,

Strangely intensify what you must do.
Back where you came from, up the strait stair8, past
All understanding, bearing the whole past,
Your eyes grown wide and dark, eyes of a Jew9,

You make for one dim room without contour
And station yourself there, beyond the pale
Of cough or of gardenia, erect, pale.
What happened is becoming literature.

Feverish in time, if you suspend the task,
An old, old woman shuffling in to draw
Curtains, will read a line or two, withdraw.
The world will have put on a thin gold mask10.
  1. Marcel Proust suffered from asthma as does his semi-biographical narrator of In Search of Lost Time.

  2. J. D. McClatchy summarizes this part of the poem: “Proust’s rendezvous at the Ritz is with a young girl who can remember and hum for him a tune that haunts him. Before we know it, it is two decades later; then—they are still conversing at the hotel table—she has a white lock in her hair. Proust returns home and sinks exhausted into bed, while ‘an old, old woman’ draws the curtains against the dawn." See the Criticism link on this site for more from McClatchy.

  3. Proust used stimulants such as caffeine and opium to relieve his asthma.

  4. A notable child figure in Proust is Gilberte, the young narrator’s first infatuation.

  5. The little phrase in Proust appears in the andante of Vinteuil’s sonata for piano and violin and obsesses Proust’s character, Swan.

  6. In the party in the final volume of In Search of Lost Time, the narrator becomes aware of the changes time has made upon his friends (particularly the white hair of the women) and receives a shock of inspiration. He then decides to set to work without delay upon the task of writing his book and the reconstruction of the past.

  7. In Merrill's poem “Days of 1971," he states:

    Proust’s Law (are you listening?) is twofold:
    (a) What least thing our self-love longs for most
    Others instinctively withhold;

    (b) Only when time has slain desire
    Is his wish granted to a smiling ghost
    Neither harmed nor warmed, now, by the fire.
    (Collected Poems 349)

  8. Stairs figure prominently in Proust. For the child Marcel, going upstairs marks the all-important nighttime ritual of a good night kiss from his mother. For the adult Marcel, a crucial revelation about time takes form at the top of a staircase leading into the library from the Guermentes drawing room. The spelling of "strait" may echo Matthew 7:14, "strait is the gate . . . which leadeth unto life."

  9. Proust was Jewish on his mother’s side. In his senior essay at Amherst College, Merrill writes that the "homosexual, [Proust] tells us, is like a centaur . . . . a member of a race that must live by falsehood and perjury, obliged like a Christian on the day of judgment to renounce and deny his strongest desires. He is a son who must betray his mother, a friend who cannot accept friendship, pardoned only as the Jew is pardoned for treason because of the destiny of his race” (Impressionism in Literature, 84).

  10. When Merrill first published the poem in the Quarterly Review of Literature 10.4 (September 1960): 224-25, he altered the phrase to "frail gold mask." He also makes this change in his reading of the poem. See this site's link to James Merrill's Masks for further discussion of the mask in this poem.
"For Proust"
"For Proust" from Water Street (1962), Text and Notes