W. S. Merwin’s new book is so dreary, I had to recite Henry V’s battle speeches just to get through it. Merwin gave up the burdens of punctuation so long ago it’s hard to remember he began as a perfectly conventional poet of the Fifties, one of those sons of Auden who lost their way. But who would have thought that the later master of tense, crippling surrealism, who could make a phrase about stars or bones or stones (those Dutch still lifes of the late Sixties) shimmer with numinous life, who could tease a nerve out of the dull flesh of prose, would end as a village explainer, as Stein said of Pound? The Vixen[1] doesn’t want to be read; it wants to prose its readers to death:
and now I have come to ask you to say what
will
free me from the body of a fox please
tell me
when someone has wakened to what is really
thereis that person free of the chain of
consequences
and this time the answer was That person sees
it as it isthen the old man said Thank you for
waking me
you have set me free of the body of the fox
Mnemosyne is the evil goddess of these poems: the onslaught of syntax renders the life of a lost world. Merwin lived for years in a village in
