302 PART THREE
Not standing outside, the poet takes the naturalist ’s part in earth’s oldest story,
life we can’t really know but whose truth takes us by surprise, “all awake in
the darkness.”
Through many decades, William Merwin has become a wondering presence,
not so much knowing and naming as trusting the world, while questioning his
language for it. Moving away early from rhyme and orderly stanzas, he begins
“The Bones,”
It takes a long time to hear what the sands
Seem to be saying, with the wind nudging them,
And then you cannot put it in words nor tell
Why these things should have a voice.Likewise the blind seer of Ambon admits, “I continue to arrive at words,”
but the leaves
and the shells were already here
and my fingers finding them echo
the untold light and depthUntold. “Language is well after the fact,” Merwin says, but poetry “reconnects
us” to the natural world. Like blind Rumphius, the poet taps a sixth sense, the
“motion of his own mind” toward depth and openness. Merwin also moved this
way in translating Pablo Neruda, Osip Mandelstam, Provençal and other poetry.
Born to a pacifist mother and a severe Presbyterian minister, “I tried to write
hymns when I was four or five,” but they didn’t get used in church. Merwin’s
father, “a bully,” made his childhood “very, very restricted.” Going for moun-
tain hikes near his Pennsylvania home was “one of the things I could do,” he
recalls. “I suppose those places came to represent freedom, beauty, and some
sort of exhilaration.” Sixty years later he calls up “The Wild.”
First sight of water through trees
glimpsed as a child
and the smell of the lake then
on the mountain
how long it has lasted
whole and unmoved and without words
the sound native to a great bell
never leaving it—that childhood sense like a Buddhist monastery bell still resonating in air.
Without words: Merwin’s gesture toward “untold light and depth” as in his
twenty books of poetry, plus translations, essays, fables, plays, fiction, travel
and history writing. In his early book, Green with Beasts, “Leviathan” seethes
with words.