Merrill's Ascent

...In "The Higher Keys" this boy with the figure of a Greek god drops his mask to reveal a veritable deity...

...Dreams About Clothes," for example, begins with the difficult act of clearing a closet of suits too closely associated with some upsetting event to be worn again...

...The poet, however, comforts her: Psyche, hush...

...From the Cupola" expresses Merrill's conviction that Eros is a deus absconditus, whom we nonetheless believe in more strongly than in the contradictory and imperfect world around us...

...This is the folly of youth still ignorant of the difference between suffering and playacting...

...Seeing there's no end to wear and tear Upon the lawless heart, Won't you as well forgive Whoever settles for the immaterial...

...Merrill persistently confronts the basic paradox that it is hardest to express our strongest feelings while they still have a grip on us without falling into sentimentality or ironic objectivity...

...This 1980 move marks a change of scene from the homes that figure in previous works: in Stonington, Connecticut (introduced in Water Street, 1962) and Athens, Greece (The Fire Screen, 1969...

...Won't you help us brave the elements Once more of terror, anger, love...

...This is the god of his inspiration:" I have received from whom I don't know/These letters...

...This shifting light show conceivably marks Merrill's own progression from the pastels of his "chronicles of love and loss" to the rich tints of The Changing Light At Sandover...

...These epigrams correctly suggest that much of the action in a Merrill poem takes place, in the fashion of an ancient Greek play, off-stage, or even before the curtain rises...

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

...In "Matinees," he is flippant about the spell cast over him by Grand Opera as a child: "The point thereafter was to arrange for one's / Own chills and fever, passions and betrayals, / Chiefly in order to make song of them...

...Although he does not by any means avoid the unpleasant, he is the poet of optimistic endings because his outlook is gracious...

...May others be at home in it...

...You must not...

...Here Merrill recognizes the majestic hall for the ballroom from "The Broken Home" (described in Water Street)—where he spent his childhood before his parents' divorce...

...Nostalgia is courted by Merrill's very titles—"Scenes From Childhood," "Days of 1935," "Pieces of History...

...Shades of Emily Dickinson...

...A remembered artifact, a snatch of song, the taste of a madeleine brings it to life again, like one of those " Japanese Gardens" of flowers and flags that burst out of a tiny clamshell when placed in a glass of water...

...From my phosphorescent ink Trickle faint unworldly lights Down your face...

...Here you are, surrounded by loving kin, in a house crammed with lovely old things, and what do you do but crave the unfamiliar, the "transcendental...

...Now the poet can reaffirm his faith that Psyche's Eros is divine, and not a prank to delude the lovelorn with crank letters...

...Thus From The First Nine: Poems 1946-1976 (Athen-eum, 362 pp., $20.00), allows the reader to become reac-quainted with Merrill's bygone haunts, and to take to heart the poet's assurance that "If I am host at last / It is to little more than my own past...

...No matter what doors shut, the past is never damaged...

...Transferred to a "Greek Revival" New England village (and his own house in Stonington), the heroine lives for love letters she receives from an unseen admirer...

...Writers & Writing MERRILL'S ASCENT BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL In "Clearing the Title," the poem that serves as a postscript to his latest volume of shorter pieces, James Merrill describes his retirement to Florida, where his lifelong companion David Jackson buys a house...

...At the same time, in the triptych Merrill finally finds a way to convey an emotional intimacy that eluded him before...

...You know what it's like A wake in your dry hell Of volatile synthetic solvents...

...These were first detailed by Ephraim—that Greek youth from the court of Tiberius who acted as Merrill and Jackson's control when they were taking dictation from the Other World through the Ouija board...

...In "Flying from Byzantium" (77ie Fire Screen) the poet dreaded that he would come to believe his own cry, "God save me from more living...

...All our pyrotechnic flights Miss the sleeper in the pitch-dark breast...

...Without having read Nights and Days (1966), The Fire Screen, and Braving The Elements (1972), a reader of the trilogy will fail to catch many of the references, especially those concerning Strato, Merrill's great love...

...Merrill's earlier poems have been woven into the fabric of Sandover, even his first books contained lyrics about "The Peacock," "Angel," and "Voices from the Other World...

...Clearing the Title" concludes on a seedy pier thronged with "entertainers," from the Iguana Man to a clown juggling firebrands, a dancing girl and the ubiquitous Salvation Army Trombone Band...

...Weeping...

...The title From The First Nine refers to the number of Merrill's books of verse before the trilogy, as well as to the Nine stages of Enlightenment that figure in the three long works...

...1978), and Scripts For The Pageant (1980...

...The title to be cleared, then, refers both to real estate and to the supernatural triptych—finally completed with a "Coda: The Higher Keys," and brought together here for the first time...

...Also love...

...These grotesques represent art in the same way that Yeats' "Circus Animals" did...

...Show me, light, if they make sense...

...We see according to our lights...

...The poem ends bemusedly wondering how to waterproof our fragile emotions so that we may both live and tell the tale: Tell me something, Art...

...Syrinx," by contrast, pays ironic homage to the power of "the great god Pain" to change us utterly...

...This is me, James, Writing lest he think Of the reasons why he writes— Boredom, fear, mixed vanities and shames...

...His writing only grazes tragedy like a stone skipping across a lake, sending up a spray of water as it touches but never coming to rest until it is safely on the farther shore...

...Come, we'll both rest...

...As for the sun he sent to bed in the ocean in his postscript, I eagerly wait for James Merrill's fresh aubade as it rises on a day as unexpectedly lovely as those he has already shown us...

...Upon their desertion, you may recall, the Irish poet lay down "in the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart...

...Yet reading through From The First Nine, where his work has been arranged chronologically, one appreciates the effort he has made to tackle the immediate, to overcome a tendency that might otherwise have degenerated into superficiality...

...Until the "Coda," scenes at Sandover had always taken place on the grounds or in the schoolroom...

...Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that in the postscript he portrays himself as simply another spectator, watching the sunset of this episode in his career...

...Merrill keeps his eyes fixed on the tropical sunset, whose gaudy splendor makes the troupe on the pier pale: Whereupon on high, where all is bright Day still, blue turning to key lime, to steel A clear flame-dusted crimson bars, Sky puts on the face of the young clown As the balloons, mere hueless dots now, stars Or periods—although tonight we trust no real Conclusions will be reached—float higher yet, Juggled slowly by the changing light...

...He is love: He is everyone's blind spot...

...One time-honored American way to escape the demands of the immanent is to become an idealist...

...and by his subjects—memories of growing up, of friends, of travel, and, most powerfully, of Eros...

...Merrill's most effective poems have usually consisted of bittersweet ruminations on Proust's Law, which he defined in "Days of 1971" as twofold: "(a) What least thing our self-love longs for most / others instinctively withhold...

...These simultaneously published books conclusively sum up Merrill's poetry to date...

...I declare, you're turning into the classic New England old maid...

...In a prose section, her family reproaches her for wasting time in dreams: '"Oh Psyche!' her sister burst out at length...

...Don't you care how we live...

...Auden as a metaphor for the English literary tradition...

...Merrill made this the theme of a retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth, "From The Cupola...

...The Higher Keys" concludes with Merrill beginning to read his completed trilogy aloud to an audience of immortal poets assembled in the great hall at Sandover—the name given to a redbrick manor chosen by the spirit of W.H...

...In what might be called his Book of the Dead, he has proclaimed that "this life takes precedence...

...Speaking for her, Merrill writes, "Who puts his mouth to me / Draws out the scale of love and dread...

...In a companion volume, The Changing Light At Sandover (Athen-eum, 560 pp., $25.00), Merrill also shuts the door on his ambitious trilogy: "The Book of Ephraim" (1976), Mirabel...

...The eponymous heroine was a nymph beloved by Pan, who changed into a reed to escape his advances and was cut down to make his pipes...

...Merrill's title to these things has truly been cleared...