Garden Time

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PG was pleased with the emails and comments he received referring to the poem from W.S. Merwin he posted yesterday.

PG thinks Merwin is not as well known today as some of the other poets of the late 1950’s and Vietnam eras who he numbered among his friends, including Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Allen Ginsberg and Robert Lowell. Merwin did receive the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1971 and 2009 and was named U.S. poet laureate twice.

In the late 1970’s Merwin moved to an old pineapple plantation in Hawaii which he painstakingly restored to its original rainforest state. A reader will perceive the presence of a tropical rain forest in some of Merwin’s later poetry.

Here is a poem from The Lice, a book of poetry published in 1967, which, along with The Carrier of Ladders, published in 1970, contributed to his selection for his first Pulitzer.  As visitors to TPV of a certain age will note, Caesar carries a classic emotional tone common during the Vietnam period:

Caesar

My shoes are almost dead
And as I wait at the doors of ice
I hear the cry go up for him Caesar Caesar

But when I look out the window I see only the flatlands
And the slow vanishing of the windmills
The centuries draining the deep fields

Yet this is still my country
The thug on duty says What would you change
He looks at his watch he lifts
Emptiness out of the vases
And holds it up to examine

So it is evening
With the rain starting to fall forever
One by one he calls night out of the teeth
And at last I take up
My duty

Wheeling the president past banks of flowers
Past the feet of empty stairs
Hoping he’s dead

The last book published before Merwin’s death was  Garden Time.

Merwin’s eyesight was very poor at the end of his life and most of the poems contained in Garden Time were dictated to his wife, Paula.

Here’s a poem from Garden Time which, for PG, reflects an old soul:

Voices Over Water 

There are spirits that come back to us
when we have grown into another age
we recognize them just as they leave us
we remember them when we cannot hear them
some of them come from the bodies of birds
some arrive unnoticed like forgetting
they do not recall earlier lives
and there are distant voices still hoping to find us