Criticism of the Poem: Langdon Hammer, Reena Sastri, Christopher Coffman

1. Langdon Hammer, "Living in Style: James Merrill with Elizabeth Bishop."  The Bannon McHenry James Merrill Collection: An Exhibition. Vassar College Libraries, 2020.  19-49.

            Like his friend Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill is typically introduced by reference to his childhood. In Bishop’s case, that means mention of the death of her father when she was eight months old, her mother’s permanent hospitalization for insanity five years later, and the child’s removal by her paternal grandparents to Massachusetts from her maternal grandparents in Nova Scotia, which supposedly saved her “from a life of poverty and provincialism, bare feet, suet puddings, unsanitary school slates, perhaps even from the inverted r's of my mother's family,” as Bishop recollected rather bitterly.

             Merrill’s childhood, on the surface, couldn’t be more different. If Bishop is a pitiable orphan, Merrill is the enviable princeling, born to bright glamour and easy privilege as the son of Charles E. Merrill, co-founder of the brokerage Merrill Lynch, and Hellen Plummer, a smart (in both senses) New Woman who rose from middle-class Florida origins to a place in New York society. The family, riding high on “Goodtime Charlie’s” industry, savvy, charm, and luck, lived in a brownstone just off Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village, a grand house and gardens called The Orchard on Long Island, and Merrill’s Landing, an estate stretching from Lake Worth to the Atlantic Ocean in Palm Beach. To sharpen the contrast with Bishop, picture one of these mighty properties set down beside her grandparents’ clapboard farmhouse in Great Village---which shows to the street just one window on either side of the front door and a narrow skylight in the roof, beneath which the child was tucked into bed.

             While Bishop effectively lost her parents by age 5, Merrill’s were outsized presences in his life. They may have been often absent from his daily routines at home, but their eyes were always on him, each one concerned with how what he did reflected on them. His first poem, “Looking at Mummy,” was a prodigious effort for the child of six: three rhymed ballad stanzas about the beauty of his mother. Hellen made the fair copy of the poem that survives, signed it for her son, and may have helped with a rhyme, or suggested that he write a poem to begin with. The famous American financier Merrill had for a father expected his son to develop a love of baseball and business, and grumbled when he didn’t. But Charlie had a taste for literature too, and he sponsored the boy’s literary efforts by quietly collecting his writings at boarding school and printing them in Jim’s Book, a handsome limited edition that surprised the junior author on his sixteenth birthday (and later, when he could publish books on his own, embarrassed him).

            So the differences in Bishop’s and Merrill’s biographies are striking. But they had more in common as children than this makes it seem, and their childhoods shaped their imaginations in similar ways. Bishop’s paternal grandfather was the president of the construction firm that built Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and Public Library. His business success provided sufficient support for Bishop to attend Vassar College and then to take the risk of becoming a writer. In short, Bishop also had social and financial advantages, not so dramatic as Merrill’s, but enough to give her a view inside the lives of people from markedly different classes and circumstances, which attuned her to the contingency of every perspective. For Bishop, the world needed to be seen in motion, shuttling between points of view, as she had shuttled between her mother’s and father’s families, Canada and the United States. “North’s as near as West,” she says in “The Map.” And with that relativity of perspective came a refusal to see the world as comic or tragic. The last line of her poem “The Bight,” “awful but cheerful,” expressing a sense of plus and minus tentatively balanced, is inscribed on her gravestone.

            Merrill too had a capacity for “seeing double,” as he called it, and like Bishop’s, that disposition was rooted in his early experience. His parents’ angry, tabloid-worthy divorce when he was twelve wounded him badly, while also teaching him the permanently valuable lesson that there is more than one side to any story. In “The Broken Home,” his best-known poem, he elevates that idea to a cosmic principle when he describes his parents’ drunken fighting as a mythic battle of the sexes: “Father Time and Mother Earth, / A marriage on the rocks.” Seeing daily life as symbolic, as he does here, is typical of Merrill. So is this combination of seriousness and joking. And let’s not overlook his punning: “the rocks” that this couple has foundered on are tinkling in their strong cocktails. Puns discover doubleness in words themselves.

            Merrill, who was fifteen years younger than her, approached Bishop as a model and a guide. He saw in her work a poetry of sensibility in which the self is present as an intelligence and a point of view, rather than a character. What was personal in Bishop was her style, which reflected her particular way of living, of being in the world. Shifting the weight of the poem from the story of an individual to the interest of an individual sensibility, Bishop invites readers into an intimacy in which metaphor is always operating and much goes without saying. It was a way of writing under the restrictions on speech by gay people that attracted and empowered Merrill, and it provided an alternative to the oracular, confessional, and political poetries dominating the period.

             Bishop’s writing is full of homes and houses, some remembered like her grandparents’ home in Great Village, and some fantasized about, like the “proto-crypto-dream house” in her late poem “The End of March.” The house in Bishop’s work is a recurrent motif that stands for a poetics of the interior and the everyday, concerned with the lives people create for themselves. It functions the same way, only more insistently so, for Merrill, who wrote about the homes he lived in with his partner David Jackson in Stonington, Connecticut, in Athens, Greece, and in Key West. The quirky, small houses Merrill chose were backdrops for poetry from successive phases of his career, beginning in the 1950s. Merrill was interested in how we interact with domestic spaces in daily life, shaping and shaped by them, filling them with experience and feeling, and recollecting them in memory. The house was for Merrill a sort of poem, and the poem a sort of house.

             He makes that analogy explicit in “An Urban Convalescence,” a poem from 1959, where he determines “to make some kind of house / out of the life lived, the love spent.” He begins the poem by describing himself on a city street, fearing that he is wasting his life and talent, and disgusted by that. The turn toward resolution and conviction comes when he moves “Indoors at last,” and at the same moment moves from free verse into rhymed pentameter quatrains. The switch connects his choice of privacy and interiority with the choice of traditional versification. Implicitly Merrill is punning on “stanza,” linking the formal unit of the poem with architectural space by way of the Italian word for “room.” The analogy is everywhere in Merrill’s work. The title “The Broken Home” refers to The Orchard and the family that once lived there. But the poem is itself a broken home, a collage-like series of sonnets that reconstruct in verse the rooms of childhood’s lost world. 

             Merrill was a virtuosic poet of meter and rhyme at a moment when American poetry turned away from those techniques. His lifelong commitment to them was not the ideology of a traditionalist, however. It expressed his continual preoccupation with the medium of the poem and his belief that language itself has something to say of more power and originality than the individual language-user. Meter and rhyme were consistent with his punning and other forms of wordplay---including controversially the Ouija board, which he used with Jackson throughout the four decades they lived together. That practice eventuated in the writing of an epic verse trilogy about the origins and fate of the world. The poem was based on transcripts from Merrill and Jackson’s conversations with spirits that range in nature from friends and family members to famous authors and figures from history to subatomic particles and a hornless unicorn named (in denial of Merrill’s usual preference for dualism) Uni. 

             This spiritualist, mythological poetry seems far distant from daily life and the wry lyric poems Merrill made of it. But The Changing Light at Sandover, as the trilogy is called, is really an extension, rather than a rejection, of Merrill’s personal mode. The Ouija Board was above all something that Merrill and Jackson did at home, and the personal is not renounced but rather elevated to an epic theme in Sandover. The continuity is clear enough in the fact that the name “Sandover” refers to the redbrick manor in the Other World where the various spirits gather to converse with Merrill and Jackson via the Ouija Board. So the trilogy produces another house, a virtual, imaginary structure this time, to add to the many homes Merrill wrote about, this one made of the letters of the alphabet, turned into words by the hands of the mediums and the tea cup (a nice, homey touch) that Merrill and Jackson used as a planchette. 

--- 

            “Home-made, home-made! But aren’t we all?” Bishop asks in her late poem “Crusoe in England.”  She didn’t live to see The Changing Light at Sandover published in 1983, and just as well, since she was skeptical about the Ouija Board and the poetry Merrill was writing with its help. Merrill’s visionary spiritualism was too far removed from the material facts Bishop took as the basis for her poetry of description. Against his better instincts, Merrill had created a long work of extraordinary complexity and ambition that flew past the “human scale” that inspired him in Bishop’s writing.

            They met in 1948, and began a correspondence that lasted until Bishop’s death in 1979. Always cordial friends, they became close when Merrill visited Bishop at her home in Brazil in 1970 (Merrill was one of the few American colleagues to make the trip to see her during the roughly twenty years she lived in Brazil). Then, when Bishop returned to live in Boston, she and Merrill saw each other regularly. After her death, he worked hard to promote her reputation. He wrote separate remembrances, commentaries, meditations, and a poem centering on her and her work, far more than he wrote about any other friend or writer. He was on hand when Vassar College celebrated the purchase of Bishop’s papers in 1982. Then one day he appeared unannounced at the college library with three decades of his and Bishop’s correspondence, which he presented as a gift. 

            It is fitting therefore that, thanks to Bannon McHenry, Merrill’s work will now be well represented at Vassar.  McHenry and Merrill became friends as fellow residents of (one more house for Merrill!) an apartment building on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and McHenry’s gift illuminates the origins of a poem Merrill wrote with the building’s address for title, “164 East 72^nd Street.” The poem was prompted by a memo from the management to apartment owners in the building, including McHenry and Merrill. Dated September 1, 1988, it begins: “Your board of directors is currently considering the options available for dealing with the deteriorating condition of the widows in our building.” Merrill was not one to overlook such a slip. The humor of it was deepened for Merrill by the fact that he had inherited his apartment from a widow, his grandmother. But the resonance was still deeper, in view of his deteriorating physical condition as an AIDS patient. Merrill never publicly acknowledged his diagnosis, although this poem, like all of his late poetry, were written in the shadow of it. 

            Merrill would no doubt have noticed that the building was erected in the year of his birth, 1926. He is defending the world he grew up in and his perspective on life when he speaks wistfully about the eccentricities of the panes now scheduled to be replaced by standardized views. “It’s noon,” he writes in a draft of the poem that is housed in Vassar’s Archives and Special Collections.

                                    I’m playing hide-and-seek with a sylphlike

                        Quirk in the old glass, making the brickwork 

                        Opposite ripple minutely. Soon that distortion

                        Which may well have warped my grandmother’s views---                    herself

                        An easy-to-see-through widow by the end---

                        Won’t be available.

Merrill signed a typed copy of the draft to McHenry: “for 8C from 9A with more than neighborly affection.” But he was far from done with the poem. He turned the original sonnet-length draft into eight eight-line stanzas, each starting and finishing with a rhymed couplet. Think of those old-fashioned rhymed, rectangular stanzas as so many rippling panes. 

            After Merrill’s grandmother died in 1961, he used the apartment irregularly until 1983, when he renovated it, and he lived there frequently until his death. With a nook for his study, he found for the first time that he could work in the city “instead of running to Bloomingdale’s with the other lemmings.” In that same year, 1983, he fell in love with Peter Hooten, an actor. Hooten constitutes the “we” in “164 East 72^nd Street” when Merrill writes about the healthy life he is leading in the apartment: 

                        Juices, blue cornbread, afternoons at the gym---

                        Imagine who remembers how to swim!

                        Evenings of study, or intensive care

                        For one another.

This is a poem about living with AIDS in an era when there was no effective treatment for the disease, and people suffering from it were brutally stigmatized and shamed, with an early and difficult death all but assured.  In this context, provided to Merrill by a widow with good sense, the apartment is a retreat, a shelter of bland civility “Far from those parts of town / Given to high finance, or the smash hit and steak house, / Macy’s or crack, Saks or quick sex.” 

            Yet the apartment’s peace and quiet are fragile, its insulation delicate. East 72^nd Street is a crosstown thoroughfare close to hospital emergency rooms, and the deteriorating windows let in too much street noise: “Sirens at present like intergalactic gay / Bars in full swing whoop past us day and night.” The screaming sirens prompt a question from the poet’s companion: “’Do you ever wonder where you’ll---‘” With typical discretion, Merrill doesn’t fill out the thought by bluntly specifying the future he is facing. Instead he suavely interrupts:

                                                                         Oh my dear,

                        Asleep somewhere, or at the wheel. Not here.

                        Within months of the bathroom ceiling’s cave-in,

                        Which missed my grandmother by a white hair,

                        She moved back South. The point’s to live in style,

                        Not to drop dead in it.

 It’s a funny line, and a touching one. It averts a potentially restrictive stance Merrill easily might have been susceptible to: fetishizing a certain style, or even stylishness itself, as ultimate good. Instead, living in style is presented as a pragmatic matter. When your dwelling starts to cave in, it’s time to renovate, or get out. Merrill might have said as much about his rhyme and meter. If you let a particular style define your life, like a brand name, you are bound to “drop dead” in it, since every style is passing. Such is the fate of style as fashion. But style as distinctive literary self-expression made out of one’s way of living, which is by definition a process and therefore subject to change and open to re-location: that is something else again, something no less historical, but personal and individual, “home-made” in Bishop’s phrase. 

            “164 East 72^nd Street” ends by savoring the way that the security of the apartment and the simplicity of Merrill’s routines in it take him back in time: “it’s impossible not / To feel how adult life, with its storms and follies, / Is letting up, leaving me ten years old,”---that would be just prior to his parents’ divorce---“Trustful, inventive, once more good as gold.” He counts on this feeling 

                                                            to help, should a new spasm

                        Wake the gray sleeper, or to improve his chances

                        When ceilings flush with unheard ambulances.

Merrill says “when” not “if.” Imagining what it will be like to lose consciousness on the verge of death, he speaks of himself here in the third person. It makes for another doubling: Merrill is at once the poet and a character, that body on the floor. By the complex temporality involved in lyric poetry, he goes on speaking to us of the prospect of his certain death long after it has come to pass.

            Notice also his rhyming of “chances” and “ambulances.” The most conventional sort of rhyme is the matching of so-called masculine, strongly stressed final syllables, as for instance in the earlier couplet “Oh my dear”/ “not here.” But at the end of the poem Merrill rhymes a two- with a three-syllable word, each ending in feminine or weakly stressed final syllables. This is just the sort of clever rhyming that was Bishop’s trademark, and an important feature of her “awful but cheerful” tone. It makes a heavy moment here just a little lighter. It also introduces a small element of surprise into what is inevitable: that one day Merrill will leave home in one of those ambulances. The subtle management of rhyme, tone, metaphor, and more---this is what style comes down to. It was what Merrill lived for, and hoped to live on in.

2. Reena Sastri, James Merrill: Knowing Innocence. New York: Routledge, 2007. pp. 161-66.

3. Christopher K. Coffman, “Swann’s Way. Basic Training”: Interpretation in James Merrill’s Late Collections and la recherche du temps perdu." Comparative Literature 61:4: 409-11. 

 2.           In “164 East 72nd Street,” Merrill achieves a double vision that sees simultaneously with the eyes of the child and those of the adult. He recognizes the innocence of the child’s perspective as a fiction, but also recognizes the fiction as enabling. The poem alludes to Keats’s Grecian Urn and Nightingale Odes, challenging their evocations of art’s opposition to mortality. Instead of “unheard melodies” piped to the spirit (“Grecian Urn” line 11), Merrill’s poem gives us “unheard ambulances.” Unlike the nightingale song, art does not provide an escape from a world “Where Youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies” (“Nightingale” line 26) – AIDS makes Keats’s line sound uncomfortably contemporary. Rather than following an escape into art’s timeless realm with a return to the world of mortality, Merrill presents the power of art to heal and to transform not as permanent, but as ongoing, continually constructing and self-destructing.[i] At the poem’s conclusion the poet-speaker momentarily achieves a renewed innocence, a perfection both moral and aesthetic: he becomes “once more good as gold.” As soon as it appears, that gold undergoes a reverse alchemical transformation: he is again an elderly “gray sleeper” awoken by ambulance sirens. Yet the “invent[ed]” moment of childhood regained, without shielding him from pain and death, helps him to face them more courageously.

            Older and in fragile health, the speaker resists second childhood’s pull at this genteel address “Far from those parts of town / Given to high finance, or the smash hit and steak house, / Macy’s or crack, Saks or quick sex.” Yet even when the windows have been replaced, reducing “street noise,” ambulance “flares” continue to bring mortality inside. The poet does not erase knowledge and experience, including that of his own HIV infection, first hinted at in a comparison between hedonistic “intergalactic gay / Bars in full swing” and ambulance sirens. Instead, he places them side by side with the fiction of innocence. Narrowly avoided at times (“‘Do you ever wonder where you’ll –’”; “Not here”), made light of at others (“The point’s to live in style, / Not to drop dead in it”), death is never far from the poem’s surface. When Merrill’s grandmother dies, she leaves him the apartment at the address of the poem’s title, in which he seems to regain “Childhood’s view,” but, the opening lines tell us, “These city apartment windows – my grandmother’s once – / Must be replaced come Fall at great expense.” The regaining of “Childhood’s view” is framed by the knowledge that it, too, will end in a Fall; the poet will “fall back” into “adult life, with its storms and follies.” Yet the poem does not rest with the pattern of escape and return but challenges it with a dynamic balance and alternation of past and present.

            In addition to destabilizing “Childhood’s view” by placing it in a context of impermanence, Merrill fruitfully complicates what it might mean to see from childhood’s perspective and the relationship between the self that is and the child that was. The phrase “Childhood’s view” emerges from elongated and broken syntax and disquieting images that make us question its seeming simplicity. Having described his healthy, sober, monogamous life with his lover as emerging kaleidoscopically from a less ideal, perhaps lonelier, near past (“Our life is turning into a whole new story: / Juices, blue cornbread, afternoons at the gym / […] / […] Early to bed”), Merrill interrupts the “story” with the following lines:

                                                And later,

If the mirror’s drowsy eye perceives a slight

But brilliant altercation between curtains 

Healed by the leaden hand of – one of us?

A white-haired ghost? or the homunculus

 

A gentle alchemist behind them trains

To put in order these nocturnal scenes – 

Two heads already featureless in gloom

Have fallen back to sleep. Tomorrow finds me

Contentedly playing peekaboo with a sylphlike 

Quirk in the old glass, making the brickwork

On the street’s far (bright) side ripple. Childhood’s view.

 

Although the image of the aged poet “Contentedly playing peekaboo” seems at first to suggest regression, the details of these lines present something more engaging.[ii] “Childhood’s view” is evoked primarily in physical (or literal) form as the view from a window, and only implicitly as childhood’s metaphysical or psychological perspective. Far from simple, this view involves mirrors (“the old glass”) and the doubling of the self in the “sylphlike quirk.” The optical illusion suggests the way in which a “Quirk” of perception, a projection of the present self, its knowledge and desires, comes between the present and past selves. This intrusion makes it impossible to see childhood, however “bright” it seems to have been, directly. Further, “Childhood’s view” is linked explicitly to “Tomorrow”: as with “The Ring Cycle”’s rising youth, the reinvention of the past is forward-looking.

            Merrill’s window shows that, as against Wordsworth, the (old) man is father to the child he invents; Merrill is bound to his past self less by natural piety than by (figuratively supernatural) art, as the end of the poem reveals. Not only is the self not “bound” continuously or consistently to the past of childhood, but the present self is also unstable, shifting and multiplying. The poet sees himself in many forms: the “frantic adolescen[t]” he remembers and the “good as gold” child he imagines; the operatic character Lakmé, “not yet broken-hearted”; the grandmother whose apartment he inherits; the “white-haired ghost”; the “gray sleeper” of the closing stanza; the “gentle alchemist”; the homunculus; the sylph; the lover (“Two Upper East Side// Boys again!”). In varying degrees, Merrill celebrates all of these versions of the self. By revealing them in succession while maintaining a conversational voice that seems to speak to us, telling a personal story, the poem unites the disparate selves through its tone. 

At moments, however, the tension between the seemingly stable lyric “I” and the instability of the selves it represents is heightened. At these moments, the seeming transparency of the narrative becomes opaque; the window is revealed as also a mirror; there is a “Quirk in the old glass.” The lines quoted above, in which “the mirror’s drowsy eye” watches unsettling versions of the self proliferate and “Two heads already featureless in gloom” seem “already” dead, reveal the character of this transformation. The moment resembles a scene in Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Briggewhen the child Malte’s celebration of the “free and infinitely varied […] possibilities” of costumes turns “terrifying” as he no longer recognizes his disguised form in the mirror.[iii] At the heart of the matter is the “altercation.” It might take place between selves (poet and lover). The context of window as mirror, however, suggests that this quarrel is also within the self, a way of invoking the sudden sense of the self’s otherness (evoked by “alter”) captured by Rilke’s mirror scene and John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”: “This otherness, this / ‘Not-being-us’ is all there is to look at / In the mirror, though no one can say / How it came to be this way” (202). Merrill usually celebrates the freedom granted by art not to be oneself, but this “otherness” is more troubling. The white-haired ghost returns from beyond the grave to haunt the poem; the homunculus is a diminished, enfeebled version of the self, “trained” to do the bidding of the controlling alchemist; the sylph in the glass, a punning version of the self, is, in the context of the alchemist, a mortal being without a soul in the system of Paracelsus. That otherness confronts the self with its limits, chief among which is mortality.[iv]

Earlier, mortality slips in between the blinds when the poet, “shocked wide awake” by ambulance sirens, imagines the lives of New Yorkers “being shortened by that din of crosstown / Ruby flares, wherever blinds don’t quite …”. In the lines quoted above, the gap between curtains through which we recognize mortality, the gap within the self that represents its otherness and its limits, is “Healed.” But what heals is the “leaden hand” whose ambiguous status is precisely what generates, syntactically, the troubling proliferation of selves. The moment incorporates mortality in a manner similar to the way that Keats’s “This living hand” does, according to William Waters: Keats “relied on his own death” in writing the poem, which “at every point counts on being turned inside out by time” (“Poetic” 196); “Keats is dead and gone, but his poem knows that, and this is the source of its unquiet power,” its ability to haunt its readers (197). Although Merrill’s poem does not address its reader as Keats’s poem does, it performs a similar “infolding of temporality” (196) in its conversion of living hand to leaden hand, a term that evokes the pencil lead of longhand writing and printer’s leaden type set by hand. The poet and his lover “sleep” while the “leaden hand” of a ghost or alchemist performs its work, as it will continue to do after the poet has died. 

Merrill raises the possibility that this healing is merely drawing the curtain, shutting out those ruby flares, retreating into a private, regressive domestic space or into art as escapism. But by incorporating mortality and art’s outliving its maker into the evocation of healing, he presents art differently. Further, the poem’s ending achieves not regression or escapism, but a more difficult balance between the fiction of innocence and knowledge of a reality that includes illness and death. Keats’s “magic casements” open onto “faery lands forlorn” (“Nightingale” lines 69-70); Merrill’s window reveals “brickwork / On the street’s far (bright) side.” Keats’s speaker imagines escape as he listens to the nightingale’s song; he longs “to leave the world unseen” and “quite forget” its “sorrow” (lines 19, 21, 27). Merrill’s speaker hears not an “immortal Bird” (line 61) but ambulance sirens, and when these are “unheard” the window still transmits their accompanying lights. Yet Merrill’s window also makes imaginatively possible a connection with innocence, with a “bright” new version of “Childhood’s view.” 

In the last stanza, as the leaden hand turns to gold, then turns back to gray, the relationship between art’s transforming power and “Childhood’s view” is brought into focus. Exclaiming that he and his lover are “Two Upper East Side // Boys again!,” the poet tells us that

                        Rereading Sir Walter Scott

Or Through the Looking Glass, it’s impossible not

To feel how adult life, with its storms and follies, 

Is letting up, leaving me ten years old,

Trustful, inventive, once more good as gold 

– And counting on this to help, should a new spasm

Wake the gray sleeper, or to improve his chances

When ceilings flush with unheard ambulances. 

To what extent do these lines describe the poet as a child, as he was six decades ago in this apartment, and to what extent do they describe an invention of the adult self? The poem’s opening suggests that the innocence of this “good as gold” self is not remembered but newly achieved. In the first stanza, the speaker’s memories of the apartment are of “frantic adolescence” as he hurried his grandmother out each Saturday to a matinee at the Met; elsewhere too Merrill indicates that he first went to the opera when he was eleven or twelve, at about the time of his parents’ separation (CPR 550). At the end of “164 East 72nd Street,” he feels “ten years old,” back in the golden age before the parents’ divorce. It is no accident that what he seems to regain at the poem’s end is a time and a self earlier, and more innocent, than the one he remembers in the poem: that ten-year-old child is a fictional self, rendered “gold” by the alchemy of memory and art. Merrill’s “gentle alchemist,” a less sinister version of Rilke’s sorcerer, transmutes the lead of childhood (the lead soldiers of “The Broken Home” come to mind) through the “silvery” phase of “frantic adolescence” to the “gold” of a second childhood, perfected only in art. The poem’s form reflects the imperfection of the lived childhood made perfect only retrospectively and aesthetically: the opening couplets of each stanza are near or off rhymes (once-expense, reckon-thousand, trains-scenes, own-town) as often as they are perfect rhymes, while the stanzas’ closing couplets are always full.

Even this perfection is unstable. In “Farewell Performance” (from the previous volume, The Inner Room), which shares with “164 East 72nd Street” the presence of AIDS and the question of art’s ability to heal, art’s “alembics once more / make of the common // lot a pure, brief gold” (581). These lines admit that the alchemical gold is impermanent; in Frost’s words, “Nothing gold can stay” (Frost 206). The moment of contact with the past in the final stanza’s central couplet – the only place in the poem where the fourth and fifth lines, in addition to the first and second and seventh and eighth lines, are rhymed – is embedded in syntax that reminds us of the motion that has given rise to it. The double negative of “impossible not / To feel” attests to the irresistible forward motion that, paradoxically, leads the poet to connect with an aspect of the past. The present participles “letting up” and “leaving” lead to that moment, but “leaving” suggests its fleetingness, and “counting” leads away from it again, as the poet counts the true number of his years and hopes for a reprieve from death. Distancing that gray sleeper by referring to him in the third person does not hide that he is a version of the poet. It is with this version, rather than the ten-year-old child, that the poem ends. 

            At the same time, the “Two Upper East Side// Boys” are not only the poet and his lover, but also the poet’s childhood self and his present reinvention within “the gray sleeper” himself. In “Farewell Performance,” art “once more” turns “the common lot” to golden perfection; in “Processional,” the last poem of The Inner Room, “lead / Once again turns ... To gold” (583); in “164 East 72nd Street,” the poet is “once more good as gold.” These “once more”s attest to the possibility for renewal inherent in impermanence itself.[v] Although nothing gold can stay, the speaker “count[s]” on his gold, not to allow him to quite forget mortality, but “to help” him to face it. By looking both forward and back, the poem ends in motion: letting, leaving, counting, helping, improving. The ominous “unheard ambulances” are balanced by this sense of motion and hope.

3. Christopher K. Coffman, “Swann’s Way. Basic Training”: Interpretation in James Merrill’s Late Collections and la recherche du temps perdu." Comparative Literature 61:4: 409-11. 

“164 East 72nd Street” provides an especially instructive example of such a crystallization. The poem begins with the introduction of both varieties of hermeneutic experience. The speaker considers windows in his apartment — once his grandmother’s — and, after referring to the “Pre-war sun” light, the poem’s present is suffused by means ofinvoluntary memory with a moment from the past:

 . . . a Saturday

Lunch unconsumed while frantic adolescence

Wheedled an old lady into hat and lipstick,

Into her mink, the taxi, the packed lobby,

Into our seats. (Merrill, Poems 661)

 

The reader is taken back into the space for reminiscence provided by the opera house of “The Ring Cycle,” which, despite having replaced Wagner with Delibes,is still offering its “Version of things as they were” (Poems 661). The poem’s rhymescheme echoes the process, each eight-line stanza beginning and closing with a  rhymed couplet, with the two couplets separated by four unrhymed lines — a form that highlights the similarity between beginnings and endings.

 Yet the speaker’s recollection is accompanied by suspicion, as he inquires, “what remains / Exactly as it was except those panes?” The light itself is taken to task, uncertainty cast on its revelations. Police sirens and whirling lights, the “crosstown / Ruby flares” seem to promote death — “How many lives . . . / Are being shortened by that crosstown din?” (661)— a consideration that leads to what appear to be the speaker’s thoughts of his own death (“‘Do you ever wonder where you’ll —’”), yet the concern is never made fully explicit, for the question is never completed. As much as it drives the poem, death remains unspeakable. The initial burst of extratemporal recognition — access to the space of memory outside oftime, the realm of time recaptured — denies death’s entrance, as it does for Proust’s hero, with his

“ joie pareille à une certitude et suffisante sans autres preuves à merendre le mort indifférente” (Recherche  4:446; “ joy which was like a certainty and which sufficed, without any other proof, to make death a matter of indifference,” (Search  6:257).

It also prompts a return to present concerns: the reformulation of the superficialities of the past time in favor of a preservation in art. Life itself is transformed, as in Proust, to narrative: “Our  life is turning into a whole new story”(Poems  661). The windows, which formerly prompted confrontation with the unavoidable, now become the means of creating through writing a new continuity with lost youth, a possibility projected even into the poem’s future:

. . . Tomorrow finds me

Contentedly playing peekaboo with a sylphlike

Quirk in the old glass, making the brickwork

On the street’s far (bright) side ripple. Childhood’s view. (662)

 

Light is again present, but different frames of time are conflated. Although, as Materer points out, this poem and others from the collection demonstrate an aging poet’s attempt to reclaim childhood’s perception (145; cf. Moffett 64), the situation does not simply involve regression. Seen in light of the poem’s pervasive Proustian allusions, this is a revelation of a perspective that resembles a child’s, but is gained through experience. Nor is this perspective provided simply by resuscitating the past in the present; it involves the past being carried into the future and the recognition of a continuity of character employed in the service of “the whole new story” of life. If the unending circular process of historical being looks to the past, it also — and at least equally — pushes into the future. Thus, the past is material for investigation, but not the house of meaning. When “thought about,” signs understood in the “purple light” of the past, a deceptiveunderstanding not subjected to the hermeneutics of suspicion, “fade like dreams” (Poems  662).

The final stanzas of the poem, effectively an epode to the respectively elegiac and interrogatory tones of the opening and middle stanzas, bring time past fully into the present, but also take a step that is absent from some of the poems previously examined. The time recollected, after having been tested by suspicion, is internalized and fixed in art: “counting on this [the poem] to help, should a new spasm / Wake the gray sleeper, or to improve his chances / When ceilings flush with unheard ambulances” (662).

Not only is the composition of the poem itself incorporated into the stanza, but the return to the light flashing from the ambulance brings a reminder of death, which is still left unstated, but acknowledged in the very effort to ward it off with art. The conclusion of the piece thus incorporates that final stage of Proust’s hero’s development: the contemplation and subsequent recording in art of revelations of essence as revealed in impressions. As a result, the poem not only documents a moment of the past recollected, butactually meets Ricoeur’s definition of Proust’s time regained.