"Cupid Complaining to Venus"
"St. Pauli's clock" and District, 1925
1) "One has to laugh." Ink, pencil.
2) "The nude from Cranach." Ink, pencil. Verso of 2.
3) "Moral: M Dusk fell." Ink, pencil, draft paper. One sketch.
4) "It is the same pine desk." Ink, draft paper. One sketch.
5) "No matter. They have long unlearned their trick." Ink, pencil, draft paper.
6) "The ocelot's yawn, a sepia-dim." Ink, draft paper. Handwritten in ink (upside down), an early draft of "Nightgown," the first poem in Nights and Days. Ink, draft paper.
7) "Ourselves. Besides, I can understand." Ink, pencil, draft paper. Three sketches. Verso of 6. Merrill's note: "What makes 'The 1002nd Night' beautiful is that it respects the emotions . . . ."
8) "The nude [naked], a Cranach sepia-pale." Ink, pencil, draft paper.
9) "POSTCARDS FROM BERLIN, (ca. 1912)." Ink, pencil, draft paper.
10) "POSTCARDS FROM BERLIN (ca. 1912)." Ink, pencil, draft paper. Two sketches.
11) "What can it mean? And who are they?" Ink, pencil, draft paper
12) "Dodged by their worshippers." Ink, pencil.
13) "In resurrection from his underwear." Ink.
"The story of the cards came from Irma Brandeis, to whom the poem is dedicated: she’d told Merrill about finding a cache of them, which she destroyed" (Hammer, p. 325). Hammer explains in a footnote that there were 300 postcards.
In manuscript 2, Merrill alludes to a painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553), "Cupid Complaining to Venus," which Merrill describes in Scripts for the Pageant: "Now think of that anemic / High-rise Cranach Venus . . . With Cupid at her heel— . . . . Goings-on kept under / Her nodding ostrich hat." (The Changing Light at Sandover, NY: Knopf, 2006: 434.)
Merrill noted on Manuscript 7 of "Postcards from Hamburg": "What makes 'The 1002nd Night'* beautiful is that it respects the emotions - respects both the 'low' and the 'high' as imbued with poetry, courtesy, sadness. How grateful I am for it. *last 16 lines." Manuscript 7 in "Carnivals" also contains a draft of the final poem about Scherherazade and the Sultan.