W.S. Merwin, whose poems about the fragility of the natural world and the horrors of the Vietnam War earned him two Pulitzer Prizes and made him one of the preeminent English-language poets of the past five decades, died March 15 at his home in (appropriately) Haiku, Hawaii. He was 91 and one of my favorite poets.
In one of its three obituaries, the New York Times quoted fellow poet Edward Hirsch who once said of Merwin: “He is an artist with a very clear spiritual profile, and intellectual and moral consistency, which encompasses both his work and his life.”
My favorite Merwin poem is “Thanks” from his volume, Migration:New and Selected Poems. I honor the life of Merwin with the last lines of the poem,”We are saying thank you/thank you we are saying and waving/dark though it is.” Rest in peace.
Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directions
back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you
with the animals dying around us
taking our feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
thank you we are saying and waving
dark though it is
Post featured image: Snow geese migrating from Migration cover.
Hopefully you all got the notification for this post in your regular and/or spam/junk email. If it went to spam/junk, make certain that you move it to your regular email box.
The plugin developers released a mea culpa to all of their subscribers apologizing for the catastrophe that was their 4.0 update. Regrettably (and I read the following with fear), the developers plan to release a 5.0 update. In a report/letter sent to subscribers, the developers in part issued a “confession”: “We made serious mistakes” and then explained why they made a (their words) “stupid change”: “Honestly, we didn’t expect such a big pushback,” but then went on to explain WHY they made the changes and WHY subscribers are going to have to get used to them. Blah, blah, blah.
Sorry, W.S. Merwin, but I am not, at the moment, saying thanks to these guys.
EVERY time, I typed the name “Merwin” when I was writing this post, it auto-corrected to “Merlin.” AC noticed one which I corrected. Sorry if I missed any others.
Thanks for the poem Sharon. In fact it speaks to us in the midst of today’s turmoil. Such a stunning beautiful reminder to say thank you rather than focus on complaining endlessly.
Thanks for your comment, Charlotte. It is such a beautiful poem — so timeless, thankfully.
Here’s another one of my favorite poems by W.S. Merwin, but I need to set it up for you. In his later years, Merwin embraced Buddhism and one of his favorite poets became Su Tung Po, a Chinese poet who wrote simple poems based on Buddhist philosophy. Here is one of those poems:
REMEMBRANCE
To what can our life on earth be likened?
To a flock of geese,
alighting on the snow.
Sometimes leaving a trace of their passage.
Merwin’s poem in response:
A LETTER TO SU TUNG PO
Almost a thousand years later
I am asking the same questions
you did the ones you kept finding
yourself returning to as though
nothing had changed except the tone
of their echo growing deeper
and what you knew of the coming
of age before you had grown old
I do not know any more now
than you did then about what you
were asking as I sit at night
above the hushed valley thinking
of you on your river that one
bright sheet of moonlight in the dream
of the water birds and I hear
the silence after your questions
how old are the questions tonight
For those of us who are writers and poets — artists of any kind, really — here is yet another of my favorite poems: Merwin’s tribute to his fellow poet, John Berryman:
BERRYMAN
I will tell you what he told me
in the years just after the war
as we then called
the second world war
don’t lose your arrogance yet he said
you can do that when you’re older
lose it too soon and you may
merely replace it with vanity
just one time he suggested
changing the usual order
of the same words in a line of verse
why point out a thing twice
he suggested I pray to the Muse
get down on my knees and pray
right there in the corner and he
said he meant it literally
it was in the days before the beard
and the drink but he was deep
in tides of his own through which he sailed
chin sideways and head tilted like a tacking sloop
he was far older than the dates allowed for
much older than I was he was in his thirties
he snapped down his nose with an accent
I think he had affected in England
as for publishing he advised me
to paper my wall with rejection slips
his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled
with the vehemence of his views about poetry
he said the great presence
that permitted everything and transmuted it
in poetry was passion
passion was genius and he praised movement and invention
I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can’t
you can’t you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don’t write
Thank you for honoring Merwin and us by regifting his words in your beautiful post and comments. Merwin and Oliver gone in the same year. How do we continue without them? There are new (and other older) poetic voices out there. Sharon, which living poets are carrying us beautifully into the future?
You are welcome, Beth. I’ll ponder the living poets, but here are the poets we’ve lost in the last 9 months, beginning with Donald Hall on June 23, 2018 (I own at least one volume of poetry by the following poets):
Tony Hoagland
Ursula K. Le Guin
Elizabeth Ebert
Lucie Brock-Broido
Ntozake Shange
Mary Oliver
W.S. Merwin
Now to the living poets. Back in a few.
Beth — I love how you worded your question in your comment: “Which living poets are carrying us beautifully into the future?”
In no particular order — just looking at my poetry collection — I would look to Louise Gluck, Edward Hirsch, Sharon Olds, Jane Hirshfield, Kevin Young, Elizabeth Alexander, Billy Collins, Ted Kooser, Charles Simic, Tracy K. Smith, Rita Dove and Charles Wright.
Of these, I would choose Sharon Olds, Jane Hirshfeld and Tracy K. Smith as my top three, but it’s all so subjective. A poet I recently discovered is Ada Limon — look out for her.
How you have enriched this day with all of this beautiful poetry! Thank you. I think Merwin would be so very pleased–maybe IS so very pleased. My favorite line in all of these was the closing line of Merwin’s response to Su Tung Po: “how old are the questions tonight.” Amidst all the thanks-giving and celebration of life and lives, the questions remain with us, and some poets a thousand years from now will doubtless be asking about the same things that concern us today. Such a stream of quiet thoughtfulness running through our lives and through the history of our world. And through all the poetry books on your shelves!
Gosh, after reading your comment, Carol, I want to stand before my shelves of poetry and take a deep bow.
Thank you for your comment, my poet friend.