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.
In an unusual form of celebration, Merwin imagines the annual date of his demise in “For the Anniversary of My Death” (1967). To typify the opposite of life, he envisions silence traveling into space “like the beam of a lightless star.” In the second stanza, the experience of non-being allows him to flee the surprising qualities of earthly life, which drapes him like “a strange garment.” Among memorable experiences, he singles out “the love of one woman,” an unfinished statement that leaves questions in the reader’s mind about its obviously private significance. When the speaker is refined into spirit and no longer answers to life, he can truly know divinity—the source of “three days of rain,” a wren’s song, and clearing weather.
Grimly regretful of human waste, “For a Coming Extinction” (1967) expresses Merwin’s pessimism about the earth’s future. Line lengths vary from double beats in lines 1 and 4 to longer statements of four or five stresses. Addressed to the gray whale, an endangered species, the four-stanza poem honors the animal as an emblem of all endangered nature, including the “seas nodding on their stalks.” The absence of punctuation creates uncertainty, as with the ominous conclusion of stanza 3: “the future / Dead / And ours.” As though atoning for loss, the poet-speaker promises the whale that it will have company among long-extinct beings, “The sea cows the Great Auks the gorillas,” who predicted the eventual extinction of other living beings. He concludes with a repetition of “Tell him” and stresses that humanity has hastened nature’s death out of arrogance.
Similarly heavy with evanescence, “Losing a Language” (1988), one of Merwin’s most famous poems, responds to a fragility in human communication in the first line, which focuses on the single breath that transmits sentences. The loss of sensitive forms of expression precipitates misunderstanding. Language tethers slip away, leaving gaps between people. Dismissing the message of the old, the youngest members value fewer experiences. The fifth couplet mourns changes in children, whom the outside world urges to devalue their elders “so that they can be admired somewhere / farther and farther away.” At the poem’s climax, line 16, the poet-speaker states the terrible outcome: “we have little to say to each other.”
The remaining six couplets express the failed interactions of a language-dead society. The new find the old “wrong and dark.” Reflecting the warnings of H. G. Wells’s “1984,” the apprehensive poet-speaker warns that the collapse of language prefaces an atmosphere of lies. In an evolving Babel, “nobody has seen it happening / nobody remembers.” Lacking the means to prophesy mounting chaos, people can no longer discuss the elements of life that are slipping away.
