The Moon Before Morning by WS Merwin review – beautiful
William Merwin is curiously under-read in Britain. Not so in his native US, where he was until recently poet laureate, and where his distinguished roster of awards includes two Pulitzer prizes. Now 86, he still lives in the house he built in the rainforest of Hawaii, and which is the setting for much of his later work.
The Moon Before Morning
by W. S. Merwin
Merwin’s signature refusal to use punctuation, and the way his push-me-pull-you lines capture the connectedness of time, space and the natural world, are unique in Anglo-American verse. So his new collection would be an event even if it consisted of nothing but fragments. But The Moon Before Morning is a book of drive, finesse and astonishing beauty. Far from fragmentary, it is also substantial, its more than 120 pages divided into four sections. Among its themes are remembering and forgetting, the natural world and love of place.
Unusually, though, listing Merwin’s themes gives no sense of what the poems actually do. They don’t explore topics so much as enact a kind of close attention to them that is indistinguishable from rapture. In ‘Weinrich’s Hand’, “The wind lifts the whole branch of the poplar / carries it up and out and holds it there / while each leaf is the whole tree reaching / from its roots in the dark earth out through all / the rings of memory”. This is exactly observed: that “whole branch” lifted “up and out” records the awkward motion of top-heavy trees in wind. It is technically exact: in Merwin’s highly developed individual technique, line-breaks serve as a kind of syntax, and it’s possible to read each line both as a discrete unit and as a part of an overarching, poem-length meaning.
The image also feels uncannily inhabited. It’s this faintly shamanic quality of “inhabiting” that makes most sense of Merwin’s rejection of punctuation. The technique, which he adopted in the 1970s, never becomes gimmicky because of the new music it releases in his verse. He has claimed that full-stops and commas “staple the poem to the page”, and his single-sentence poems force the reader take long, song-like breaths.
‘Long Afternoon Light’ opens: “Small roads written in sleep in the foothills / how long ago and I believed you were lost”. The characteristic “and” changes the angle of the grammatical and poetic trajectory unexpectedly, yet without interrupting the music, making the poem more plangent. But this opening is just one snatch of a sentence that is by definition – since there’s no punctuation to interrupt it – poem-length. That, in turn, produces another effect: a sounding-together that isn’t simultaneous, but which means a Merwin poem accumulates in a way that’s different from how other verse works. By its end, the poem is being borne in mind all at once, as the elements of a sentence always have to be.
Unlike an overextended sentence by Henry James, say, this doesn’t clot meaning, but generates directness and clarity. ‘Long Afternoon Light’ ends, “the moment flows away out of reach / and lengthening shadows merge in the valley / and one window kindles there like a first star / what we see again will come to us in secret / and without even knowing that we are here”. Again, that unexpected change of trajectory, this time at “knowing”, where the things we see becomes active and our watching selves passive. For The Moon Before Morning makes no separation between the observing self and the natural world that self observes. Their roles are transposed repeatedly. ‘Summer Sky’ is a six-line poem about watching “this morning light” “since the day I was born”. “I saw its childhood” the poem goes on, and then two lines later uncrosses the very same transposition: “it is the same child now who watches the clouds change”.
This is a profoundly ecological move, one that dethrones the human meaning-maker. Yet it also has deeply humanist potential. There is also no separation between the self and others, or between remembered and present versions of the self. ‘Young Man Picking Flowers’ makes time numinous: “All at once he is no longer /young with his handful of flowers / in the bright morning their fragrance / rising from them as though they were / still on the stalk where they opened / only this morning”. ‘Forgotten Fountain’ contemplates “Édouard and the village / as it had been when he was young / and […] / what it felt like in those last days / to be leaving for Verdun with no words”.
The movement and music of these poems is so involving that it’s easy to miss their underlying world view. Everything is connected, and everything is also always in motion. If Merwin were a philosopher, we would call him a pre-Socratic and place him alongside Heraclitus: “Even if I were to return it would not be / the place we came to one evening down a narrow lane / […] leading down to the edge of a small river” as his poem ‘Still’ says. If Merwin were a physicist he would belong with Robert Brown of Brownian motion.
Other poets have tried to capture this perpetual motion. Fredrich Hölderlin wrote about the “on-rushing word”; Percy Bysshe Shelley‘s rapturous wordiness attempted to act out revolutionary motion. But Merwin shows us that the discipline of attention, “a time of waiting / hoping to hear”, is enough. There are few great poets alive at any one time, and WS Merwin is one of them. Read him while he is still contemporary.
• Fiona Sampson’s latest book is Coleshill (Chatto).
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/22/moon-before-morning-ws-merwin-beautiful
The Guardian – www.theguardian.com