For the Anniversary of My Death
BY W. S. MERWIN
Every year without knowing it I
have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to
me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star
Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a
strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days
of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the
falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what
The Final Prophecy of W. S.
Merwin
By Dan Chiasson
The New Yorker Magazine, March 2019
Abbreviated
Now we know the date. The
anniversary of W. S. Merwin’s death was, all along, March 15th. He’d passed it
ninety-one times and stopped on the ninety-second. But what did it matter,
really, which of the three hundred and sixty-five notches on the roulette wheel
would turn up as the winner? Here is “For the Anniversary of My Death,” among
Merwin’s most famous poems
This little anticipatory poem has
its way with time: it describes what Merwin imagines will have happened on
March 15, 2019, but it is dedicated to, and reserved for, every March 15th
thereafter. It’s a script for a commemorative ceremony, a eulogy banked years
before its occasion. It also feels like a prank that Merwin played on us, the
most chilling and ingenious trick that an American poet has played on his
survivors since Walt Whitman challenged the rest of us to look for him,
whenever we missed him, under our boot soles.
“For the Anniversary of My Death”
is about the problem of being outlived. “Elegy,” Merwin’s great single-line
poem—not the greatest short poem, but perhaps the shortest great poem, ever
written—is about the converse problem, that of outliving. This is the poem in
its entirety:
Poets write elegies, often, for
other poets, but there is a paradox: the very figure whose sympathetic
attention to their work allowed the work to flourish is now gone. An elegy
can’t exist when its sponsor has become its subject. And yet the poem seems to
answer, by a somewhat piqued rhetorical question, its subject’s request: Why
haven’t you written my elegy?
Merwin was born in 1927, and grew
up in Union City, New Jersey, and Scranton, Pennsylvania, where his father was
a Presbyterian minister. The young Merwin composed hymns for his father’s
church.
A scholarship student at Princeton, he remembered working in the horse
stables and apprenticing himself to R. P. Blackmur, the brilliant, gnomic
critic, and to Blackmur’s friend, the poet John Berryman. His early poems were
ominous, high-pitched, and starchy; when he broke with them, he broke for good.
The poems of his mature career were often Delphic, haunted, and bleak. They
seemed to have been delivered unto Merwin, who transcribed them by lightning
flash: this effect of transcribed prophecy is achieved by their almost total
lack of punctuation. This is how the jet stream must speak—or how a cleft in
the bedrock might introduce itself. We have come very far from hardscrabble
Pennsylvania or Merwin’s work-study job at Princeton. His several volumes of
memoirs are extraordinarily warm, an interesting supplement to the stony verse.
He lived, since the mid-seventies, on an abandoned pineapple plantation, in
Hawaii, which he bought barren and turned, row upon row, into a lush forest of
palm trees. Friends who have visited have come back changed.
Merwin published an excellent
selected volume in 2017, which I reviewed in this magazine. I was finishing it
up when I heard of the death of John Ashbery, who was born in the same year as
Merwin.
I remember thinking that Ashbery, in his bland, white high-rise in
Chelsea, and Merwin, in his palm garden in Hawaii, were like the gates of the
rising and the setting sun. American sentries: Ashbery faced east (his actual
apartment faced slightly west; just go with it), and kept an eye on reality as
it approached, always monitoring its fresh and new and bewildering
presentations; Merwin looked west, and saw the moments as they bent toward
obliteration, casting their long shadows backward. We’ll be in his shadow for
some time yet.
Dan Chiasson, a contributor to The
New Yorker since 2007, teaches English at Wellesley College. His latest book of
poems is “Bicentennial.”
