Merwin's "The Drunk in the Furnace" (1960) is a meditation on a sleeper in an abandoned smelting furnace in the Pennsylvania hills. The poet balances his narrative within four pentameter quatrains, each begun and ended with half-lines of two or three beats. In the first stanza, the setting of the hat-like "hulking black fossil" alongside a "poisonous creek" points to the locals' ignorance, implying both lack of education and the original Latin meaning of "don't know." By the second stanza, a wisp of smoke awakens the unidentified observers to an intruder capable of "a pale / Resurrection," a playful hint at the viewers' shortsighted Christianity.
Drawing on his youth in a Presbyterian rectory, Merwin prolongs the play on fundamentalism in the last two stanzas, noting that the source of the drunk's "spirits" is mysterious. Drunk on alcohol, he falls "like an iron pig" on car-seat springs, a contrast of dead weight against buoyancy. Again, the poet bolsters meaning with the implied image of pig iron, a product of Pennsylvania's smelters. The conclusion links hell with the furnace, an earthly damnation of those who pollute nature. Returning to the image of springs, Merwin concludes with the viewers' "witless offspring," the Pied Piper's rats who scurry to the source of singing. A witty play on words, "agape" describes their rapt faces as well as the Greek concept of love freely offered.
