Laurels Abound

Back in September 2017, I posted a short piece about W.S. Merwin on his birthday and how his words and poetry inspired me.

He died on Friday, March 15, 2019 at his home in Hawaii, according to The New York Times obituary: W.S. Merwin, Poet of Life’s Damnable Evanescence, Dies at 91.

No, Evanescence is not referring to the overwrought band of the early 2000s. According to vocabulary.com: “After you lose a loved one, often you're gripped with a fear of evanescence, or the rapid fading from sight or memory of that person. Evanescence comes from the Latin evanescere meaning "disappear, vanish." Something that possesses qualities of evanescence, has a quality of disappearing or vanishing.”

I am keenly aware of this feeling of evanescence. I think W.S. Merwin was too.

I know we’re sitting here on the cusp of spring, ready for the buds to pop out and the sun to warm the earth. But just imagine here with me that we’re already at the end of May. In “To Paula in Late Spring,” a poem from his 2009 Pulitzer Prize winning collection “The Shadow of Sirius,” W.S. Merwin wrote:

Let me imagine that we will come again 
when we want to and it will be spring 
we will be no older than we ever were 
the worn griefs will have eased like the early cloud 
through which the morning slowly comes to itself 
and the ancient defenses against the dead 
will be done with and left to the dead at last 
the light will be as it is now in the garden 
that we have made here these years together 
of our long evenings and astonishment

Let that just sit with you for a minute.

I was startled at the use of the word “astonishment” at the end of the poem; were you?

Merwin published this poem ten years before he died.

Now I’m sitting here, hoping that my worn griefs will ease like morning clouds. Here’s one cloud. Her name is Caroline. She died on March 15, 2003 at age 22. I had a vivid dream about her and all my high school friends last night. It was a silly dream, but what I remember most about it was the laughter. I wrote a piece about Caroline in May 2013 that you can read here.

Here’s another cloud. Shelane. She died on June 12, 2015 at age 35.

Merwin’s is a long obit; he was 91 after all. As Margalit Fox of the New York Times put it, “Laurels Abound.” National Book Awards, two Pulitzer Prizes, the Poet Laureate of the United States, and many more. But did you know that laurels, the plants, can be poisonous? They contain hydrogen cyanide, and if ingested in large amounts, can even kill you. It’s apparent that Merwin loved nature. He cultivated his land in Hawaii until the end. I wonder how he felt about all the awards and accolades, but I did read that he became somewhat of a recluse and stopped answering his phone sometime in the 1970s.

The New York Times article cites Peter Davison: “The intentions of Merwin’s poetry are as broad as the biosphere yet as intimate as a whisper,” Peter Davison, the longtime poetry editor of The Atlantic, wrote there in 1997. “He conveys in the sweet simplicity of grounded language a sense of the self where it belongs, floating between heaven, earth and underground.”

I go to my bookshelf of poetry and dust off my copy of The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry to see if I can physically touch Merwin’s words. He’s right there on page 269, in between James Merrill and A. R. Ammons.

I find this poem:

For the Anniversary of My Death

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

I read the poem, and then I reread it, this time in an audible whisper, as if to not awaken the dead.