James Merrill 1

James Merrill (1926-1995)
If Lowell’s and Sexton’s lives were basically tragic except in their poetic influences on others, Merrill’s is
divinely comic: he’s the elfin queer changeling of American letters.
Here is a quick way for a reader to become acquainted with some of Merrill’s best work, all available in
print and on the Internet. Start with two brilliant early poems about turning to poetry to assuage family
trauma, “The Black Swan” and “The Broken Home.” Read “The Victor Dog” (inspired by the old
corporate logo for RCA phonograph records) and “Lost in Translation” from Merrill’s mature period.
Then turn to the late poems “The Ring Cycle,” a lovely tribute to Wagner and the Met, and “The
Christmas Tree,” a poem shaped like a tree written when its author was dying of AIDS—a heartbreaking
farewell to companionship, light, and life. Despite their dark shadows, these works are comic because in
the end they affirm hope and human connectedness.
Merrill rightly worried his writing was sometimes too affected, antiquarian, effete. At the climax of The
Changing Light at Sandover, his epic poem, he confessed his “worst fear—that, written for the dead,/
This poem leave a living reader cold” [559].) But consider the warmth and wit of the sonnet below,
which plays host to Maya Deren, Merrill’s friend and one of the most important independent women
filmmakers of the twentieth century. For readers who don’t know Deren, her surreal masterpiece
Meshes of the Afternoon is on YouTube. Here is a still:
Deren was also a Greenwich Village style-setter, religious mystic, feminist, world traveler, and
researcher of Haitian vodou. No single artistic form could contain her creativity.
How about Erzulie? BUT SHE IS THE QUEEN
OF HEAVEN. Oh, not Mary? Not Kuan Yin?
AMONG HER COUNTLESS FACES I HAVE BEEN
SMILED ON BY ONE THE SHADES SHE LOOKED WELL IN
ON EARTH MY FADED POPPYBLUSH & UMBER
ARE HERE RESTORED I AM HER LITTLEST FAUVE
The moment brought back Maya in a whiff
Of blissful grief—small figure boldly hued,
Never held in high enough esteem;
Touches of tart and maiden, muse and wife,
Glowing forth once more from an Etude
De Jeune Femme no longer dimmed by time. (Sandover 64)

First, some necessary annotations. Erzulie is an omnisex Afro-Haitian loa or god of love, beauty, jewelry,
dancing, luxury, and flowers, invoked here and elsewhere in Sandover to honor Deren’s book Divine
Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (1953) and sacred sexuality transcending either/or gender roles.
Mary would be the Virgin Mary; Kuan Yin (aka Guanyin) the Chinese bodhisattva of compassion and
mercy—all Queens revered by Deren and Merrill. Fauve references a notorious modernist painting style
stressing bold colors and design. And Chanel No. 5 is, well, Coco Chanel’s famous perfume brand: this
poem is styling.
More stunning still is Merrill’s handling of the Italian sonnet, the octave and sestet (8+6 line) structure
made famous by Petrarch. Merrill chose a sonnet because he’s writing a love poem—not in the sexual
sense, but because he understood Deren to be a bohemian avant-garde queen possessed by Erzulie. A
common rhyme scheme in an Italian sonnet is abba abba cde cde, but in this tribute Merrill daringly tries
a new variation: abcd abcd efg efg. Moreover, many rhymes are delightfully “off,” particularly
five/Fauve, whiff/wife, and esteem/time. A conventional sonnet to honor Deren would not be right.
Even more astonishing is this: we are asked to believe this sonnet is collectively authored. As readers of
Sandover know, the capitalized words came to Merrill and his lover David Jackson via a Ouija board; the
lower-case text is Merrill’s. As the context makes clear, Deren “contacted” Merrill via Ouija soon after
her death in 1961. Merrill combined her words with his thoughts, eventually in 1976 publishing a
sequence of five sonnets giving Deren’s blithe spirit an eternal form no longer “dimmed by time.” To
appreciate the poem we must suspend disbelief and understand it to be created by spirit-possession,
the infusion of Merrill’s artistry with Deren’s transmitted from beyond the grave.
This “Queen of Heaven” sonnet, like a boldly hued fractal, repeats in miniature the action of the 560-
page epic in which it became embedded. Sandover uses Ouija messages to chronicle the eternal
struggle between God Biology and Gabriel, the angel of dark matter and destruction. It plays host to
dozens of characters human and otherwise, including friends and lovers living and dead, a gay Roman
courtesan who is not what he appears, a black bat who loves multicolored drag, a unicorn, and four
Archangels. The epic mystically explores how creative people are shaped by mostly unknown influences
or “patrons”: “all of life imbued/ With the dead’s refining consciousness” (310).
Sandover and Merrill’s lyric poems show why he cannot be accurately called a “confessional” poet, even
though the trauma of a broken home jump-started his writing. Guilt and shame play only minor roles as
muses, but cross-dressing is often center stage. In Merrill’s work, bodily and poetic “identities” are
performative and transgressive. Similarly, this master of old and new poetic forms is no idolator. For
Merrill poetic forms are like costumes, pliant and ever evolving. Only by knowing the history of allegedly
old inventions can one discover how best to use them like a mirror to engage the Medusa-like present
without being destroyed. His epic deploys dozens of literary voices besides sonnets, including heroic
pentameter couplets, an astounding double sestina (369-70), “free” verse, scenes that read like plays,
and even meta-commentary.
Of his contemporaries Merrill as a lyric poet is sometimes comparable to Richard Howard and Richard
Wilbur, but his true inspiration and peers are Bishop, Auden, Stevens, Eliot, and Yeats—quite a stellar
crew. As for how to assess The Changing Light at Sandover, the truth is that no other twentieth-century
poet—only Merrill—created an epic poem whose vivid scenes, metrical invention, suspense, wit and
wisdom, majestic architecture, and moving climax bear comparison to Dante’s Divine Comedy.

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James Merrill (1926-1995)

How about Erzulie? BUT SHE IS THE QUEEN

OF HEAVEN. Oh, not Mary? Not Kuan Yin?

AMONG HER COUNTLESS FACES I HAVE BEEN

SMILED ON BY ONE THE SHADES SHE LOOKED WELL IN

ON EARTH MY FADED POPPYBLUSH & UMBER

ARE HERE RESTORED I AM HER LITTLEST FAUVE

The moment brought back Maya in a whiff

Of blissful grief—small figure boldly hued,

Never held in high enough esteem;

Touches of tart and maiden, muse and wife,

Glowing forth once more from an Etude

De Jeune Femme no longer dimmed by time. (Sandover 64)

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