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"Syrinx" Text & Notes

SYRINX

Bug, flower, bird of slipware fired and fluted,
The summer day breaks everywhere at once.

Worn is the green of things that have known dawns
Before this, and the darkness before them.

Among the wreckage, bent in Christian weeds,
Illiterate­—X my mark—I tremble, still

A thinking reed. Who puts his mouth to me
Draws out the scale of love and dread−

O ramify, sole antidote! Foxglove
Each year, cloud, hornet, fatal growths 

Proliferating by metastasis
Rooted their total in the gliding stream.

Some formula not relevant any more
To flower children might express it yet

 Like equation
—Or equals zero, one forgets—

The y standing for you, dear friend, at least
Until that hour he reaches for me, then

Leaves me cold, the great god Pain,
Letting me slide back in my scarred case

Whose silvery breath-tarnished tones
No longer rivet bone and star in place

Or keep from shriveling, leather round a stone,
The sunbather's precocious apricot

Or stop the four winds racing overhead

                        Nought

            Waste                         Eased

                        Sought

 

Published in

Harper's Magazine, 242:1444 (September 1970): 93.
Braving the Elements (NY: Atheneum, 1972).
Collected Poems. J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser. (NY: Knopf, 2001).

Notes (from Langdon Hammer, James Merrill: Life and Art (NY: Knopf, 2015) and Stephen Yenser, The Consuming Myth (Cambridge: Harvard U. Pr., 1987.)

Title: From Hammer, 470: “In his 'Memorial Tribute to Irma Brandeis,' Merrill claims that he began 'Syrinx' as a 'windy and rambling' letter to Brandeis that connected the extreme back pain she was then experiencing to his own emotional pain. She gently chided him by letter for writing a poem that was too 'intimate.' 'A few weeks later, when I’d recovered from the rebuke, I reworked my lines, cutting away its perishable tissue of narrative, and leaving only a skeletal trellis of images and feelings. Thinking of Irma’s flute, and of the nymph who turned into the reeds from which Pan made his pipes, I called it ‘Syrinx,’ and Irma’s next letter gave out the fragrant balm of her full approval. This is what it is like to have a muse in one’s life' (Prose, 370). The worksheet drafts of 'Syrinx,' beginning with notes made in Stonington in June 1969, do not include the draft of the poem Merrill describes (worksheets for “Syrinx,” WUSTL)" (Hammer 470).

slipware fired and fluted: Yenser suggests an allusion to Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and a reminder of Debussy's music for solo flute, "Syrinx." (183). (Link to Emmanuel Pahud performing Claude Debussy's Syrinx.)

X my mark . . . ramify, sole antidote: From Hammer, 464-65: “the poem is a retelling of Greek myth. It is a love story in which the poet, writing from the point of view of a female lover transformed by passion, speaks as the nymph Syrinx. Driven by lustful Pan to hide in the reeds beside a river, Syrinx was changed into a reed— and then cut down by the god and made into a pipe for him to play. The poem is a fable about the origins of love poetry. Syrinx is 'Illiterate— X my mark,' but the nymph is capable of wild word games, as in these lines: 'Who puts his mouth to me / Draws out the scale of love and dread— // O ramify, sole antidote!' Let the final 'd' in 'dread' merge with the 'O' that follows, and the ascending notes of the musical scale (do-re-me-fa-sol-la-ti-do) suddenly become audible in that otherwise obscure exclamation, 'O ramify, sole antidote!'” (Hammer 464-65).

a thinking reed: "A reed, but still a 'thinking reed,' or 'un roseau pensant,' as Pascal defined humanity" (Yenser 185). French philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-62): Pensèes (348, 348).

precocious apricot: "[T]he shriveling of the 'precocious apricot' suggests the final shrinking of flesh . . . . The apricot tree is precisely precocious in the botanical sense, because its blossoms begin to appear before its leaves" (Yenser 187).

Foxglove . . . fatal growths: "As the ramification produces the 'Foxglove,' so its leaves provided digitalis, a drug used in heart stimulants and therefore connected with music and love. But music and love are passionate strains in the same experience that kills" (Yenser 185).

flower children: A term from the mid-60s for members of the counterculture movement advocating love, peace and nonviolence. 

= I: In the Washington U. manuscripts, the number "1" is used throughout but is replaced by the Roman numeral "I" in the published text. Hammer explains that "Merrill’s equation tells a very old truth: love tends to add up either merely to 'I' (the roman numeral, rather than the Arabic, suggesting the first person, the self, the lover’s own “I”) or to nothing at all, zero" (466).

Or equals zero: To Merrill’s delight, Yenser noticed that he’d placed the “y” for “you” and the “x” for Syrinx herself (“ X my mark,” she says) in the square root equation, and that the fraction that the “you” and “I” make, one on top of the other, was multiplied by “n”— using four of the letters in Syrinx’s name. But Yenser had missed, Merrill pointed out, that the “s” and “r,” the remaining letters, were implied by the square root sign itself (466-65).

The y standing for you: "This is intensely clever poetry, but it’s not mere cleverness for its own sake: the cleverness is a means to master pain, which it expresses while keeping 'pain' (in this case a play on Pan’s name) partly hidden, as in the encodings of that provocative though baffling formula. . . . Merrill is reasoning much the same way as when he wrote in his notebook about his failed struggle to possess 'DMc' [David McIntosh] and 'S.' [Strato Mouflouzélis]. Those stories are not so much kept out of the poem as buried in it, like encoded information too important to trust to regular mail" (Hammer 466). Hammer tells the story of Merrill's relationship with David McIntosh in Chapter 11, "DMc," of his biography.

great god Pain: The Greek historian Plutarch (ca. 46-120) recounts the story of sailors who hear a mysterious voice call out, "the great god Pan is dead," which has been interpreted as marking the end of the classical age. (See Plutarch's Moralia).

Nought Sought Eased Waste: "[T]he most likely order in which to read the words, and the order Merrill adopts when reading to an audience, is 'Nought Sought Eased Waste.' Nothing sought has eased the waste" (Yenser 187-88). The phrase indicates the directions on a compass and is an ironic version of the proverb "Nothing ventured, nothing gained."