The keen sense of origin in W.S. Merwin’s poetry, especially in the later work after his move to Hawaii, is and has always been linked to absence, that “paradise” where things continually vanish from human time. It is the notion of presence, however, closely linked with absence, which provides the all-at-onceness of the senses in Merwin’s work and thus creates paradox. The poet comments on this in an interview with Jonathan Weinert:

The more present you try to make the moment, the more absent it becomes, although it becomes something you can deal with. The present is something that you can’t get closer to, and yet that’s what you’re trying to do with speech— you’re trying to embody the present and pass it on at the same time. (1)

One hears this echo in the collection Present Company, especially in “To Absence,” the poet’s invocation to loss and the resurrection of the present through memory. Addressing concepts, persons, or things, all the poems in the collection employ personification. “To Absence” begins with the line “Raw shore of paradise” and asks “what good to you” are those things treasured beyond “words or number” that are held forever in an “unmapped imperium”? Creating a temporal boundary between the present and the past, and also a conceptual boundary between presence and absence, the poem addresses absence as a kind of treasure palace where people, things, places, and time are lost. Merwin’s obsession with the present as a place of identity and first recognition is very clear as the speaker continues to argue that only here 

in the present
which has lost them
only now
in the moment you
have not yet taken
does anyone know them
or how rare they are (2)  

The “unmapped imperium” or empire of loss that Merwin invokes is starkly juxtaposed with the present, that fleeting time in which we perceive and begin to know things. Reminding us that we often only experience the world through loss, the poem resounds with paradox and suggests that a great deal of human consciousness occurs in memory. In “Learning a Dead Language,” a poem from Merwin’s third book, the speaker says, “What you remember saves you. To remember / Is not to rehearse, but to hear what never / Has fallen silent.” This earlier poem also accentuates the paradox of all language, and especially of poetry: an attempt to capture the present through the antiquity of words and grammar. Words have a history, but when we write or speak we personalize that concept.

…To understand
The least thing fully you would have to perceive
The whole grammar in all its accidence
And all its system, in the perfect singleness
Of intention it has because it is dead. (3)

The palm forest in Hawaii that the poet restored from a ruined pineapple plantation in the 1980s, and still cultivates, provides a strong insight into the poet’s themes of origin and absence: all gardens are a metaphor for all that is continually dying and coming back to life. “On the Subject of Poetry,” a resonant poem from The Dancing Bears, locates (within a garden) a primary source in Merwin’s work, the art of listening, and further illumines his more recent poetry. Here, just as later, this poet’s uncanny ability to listen summons the present, and by doing so overrides the haunting world of indeterminacy that arises from expectation or memory. Here is the poem in its entirety.

On the Subject of Poetry

I do not understand the world, Father.
By the millpond at the end of the garden
There is a man who slouches listening
To the wheel revolving in the stream, only
There is no wheel there to revolve.

He sits in the end of March, but he sits also
In the end of the garden; his hands are in
His pockets. It is not expectation
On which he is intent, nor yesterday
To which he listens. It is a wheel turning.

When I speak, Father, it is the world
That I must mention. He does not move
His feet nor so much as raise his head
For fear he should disturb the sound he hears
Like a pain without a cry, where he listens.

I do not think I am fond, Father,
Of the way in which always before he listens
He prepares himself by listening. It is
Unequal, Father, like the reason
For which the wheel turns, though there is no wheel.

I speak of him, Father, because he is
There with his hands in his pockets, in the end
Of the garden listening to the turning
Wheel that is not there, but it is the world,
Father, that I do not understand. (4)

Once again origin is linked to absence. Poetry, which is born from perception, eschews knowledge because facts tend toward completion. Perception on the other hand, no matter how keen, finds only the partial, ghostly, and present. In a recent essay, “The House and Garden: The Emergence of a Dream,” Merwin writes, “No story, though, begins at the beginning. The beginning does not belong to knowledge.” (5)  The beginning, so present-ripe, is something torn, taking us unawares because it lies beyond perception and the power of language.

The mythic power of “On the Subject of Poetry” arises as the poet listens “To the wheel revolving in the stream, only / There is no wheel there to revolve.” The wheel becomes an axis of the unheard, of silence beyond time from which all poetry arises, and as in all of Merwin’s most profound poems, the paradox that arises is born from the words themselves: the poet’s attempt to capture the present through the age of language. Merwin comments on this in an interview from 1999:

“The moment you say paradox, you’re using language to express something that cannot be expressed, and that’s what poetry is: There is nothing but presence; on the other hand, there seems to be nothing but absence, and poetry is addressing this emerging presence, this speaking presence, but actually everything that we think of in the phenomenal world is absence. It’s the past and future. Very few things are actually present.” (6)

Similarly in “On the Subject of Poetry,” the man strives to invoke this difficult presence while attempting to reject both the future and past: “It is not expectation / On which he is intent, nor yesterday / To which he listens. It is a wheel turning.” This art of listening is sometimes painful and difficult to master—something we sense as the speaker gradually becomes his subject—the man, or poetry itself:

I do not think I am fond, Father,                   
Of the way in which always before he listens
He prepares himself by listening.

Merwin artfully gathers the ineffable through the repetition of five words (father / garden / wheel / listen / world) in five stanzas of five lines. The poem ends as absence and distance approach each other. Here the speaker becomes the poem’s protagonist in quest of the unutterable, the phenomenal world “in the end of the garden,” and the speaker is unable to understand since the world is most often conveyed in words. The paradox of one sitting “in the end of March” and “ in the end of the garden” suggests that pre-nascent time before germination, filled with an absence foreboding presence. He sits in a new time beginning where place, or a seed for example, becomes time in motion.

Through the creation of an illusory wheel and an intangible garden, Merwin reminds us of what Aristotle demanded from poetry of the highest order: “the poet’s function is to describe, not the thing that has happened, but a kind of thing that might happen, i.e., what is possible as being probable or necessary.” (7)

Furthermore, the poet’s treatment of words like “Father,” “wheel,” and “garden” raise language to a higher power and echo Emmanuel Levinas’ notion of illeity, one of the highest expectations of language. He suggests that the true function of a word is not its finite ability to convey information but its reach for infinity: “for it bears witness to the glory of the infinite.” (8) One senses this in the repetition of the word “Father,” which not only suggests the child-like aspect of the imagination, but also the notion of mentor, or unknown deity of inspiration—something farther, unreachable.

Merwin has said, “Poetry always begins and ends with listening,” and again listening becomes the topic of “The Nomad Flute,” a poem from The Shadow of Sirius (2008), written over fifty years later than “On the Subject of Poetry.”Perhaps inspired by Eighteen Songs of a Nomad Flute, a suite of poems about the Han Dynasty poet Cai Wenji, who was captured as a young wife by Xiongnu nomads, Merwin’s poem haunts absence in both an historic and present sense. The poem seems not only a subtle lament for Cai Wenji, who lost her husband and children, but also an invocation to the Muse as the poet ages:

You that sang to me once sing to me now
let me hear your long lifted note
survive with me (9)

“The Nomad Flute” initiates the collection The Shadow of Sirius, and here the Dog Star, the brightest in the night sky, assumes a mythic status grounded deeply in the personal, since several of the poems in this collection are elegies for the author’s beloved chows. Additionally, this shadow of the brightest star echoes a number of paradoxes in Merwin’s work. Personal loss is the “Raw shore of paradise,” something we strive to resurrect in memory, yet loss also takes the form of things we do not know or haven’t done; we just aren’t aware of them. Midway through “The Nomad Flute” the speaker says “I have with me / all I do not know / I have lost none of it” thus suggesting again that poetry is rife with the mystery of presence and absence, an absence that also refers to the future. The poem ends with a direct invocation to the flute and then a final couplet that defies age through the timeless and regenerative quality of poetry, joining the new with the ancient through the mediums of listening and light:

but I know better now
than to ask you           
where you learned that music
where any of it came from
once here were lions in China

I will listen until the flute stops
and the light is old again (10)

Many of the lines through alliteration and assonance actually mimic a flute’s sound. In the opening line (“You that sang to me once sing to me now”), the “o” sounds hollow a vessel through which the “n” sounds progress, and Aaron Moe mentions that the line (“once there were lions in China”) “epitomizes a musical flute with the complex constellation of n’s, and the n and an s (once, lions, in, China), long I’s (lions, China), and internal rhyme of lion and in.” (11)

Merwin’s work, whose subject over the course of sixty years seems to move from place to displacement then to all encompassing place, might finally be seen as The Georgics of a kind of dispossessed Virgil, one whose hero might be viewed as the diasporic voice looking for a place in the natural world not maimed by industry, greed, and the commodification of desire, perhaps the most devastating crisis of this past and present century. Many readers will rightly find Merwin’s mythic voice as some originary guardian of earth and animal spirits, and by “originary” I also mean the uncanny power of genesis or swift-coming-into-existence that his poems engender.

In his memorable poem “Place,” W.S. Merwin recreates a sense of origin and timelessness, one so brutally destroyed by industry, greed, and capitalism in recent decades. The poem’s first couplet (each line with seven monosyllabic words) seems to compose a miniature poem within, a kind of fourteen-word sonnet complete with volta, or turn of thought, after the first line:

On the last day of the world
I would want to plant a tree

Written in eight couplets and collapsing temporal and spatial boundaries, the poem creates a memory in the future, a kind of jarring paradox that recalls Merwin’s “The Last One,” a poem from The Lice in which the shadow of the last tree becomes a dark monument for our future. Here, however, the speaker conjures hope through a voice washed of ego, a voice whose powers of transformation are linked to stance, vision, and a conscience that protects the natural world and its creatures, a voice whose praxis is first-hand experience, a voice that speaks from the earth and beyond. The speaker would plant the tree “not for the fruit” but instead says, “I want the tree that stands / in the earth for the first time.” We hear the echo of lines from the Bhagavad Gita that remind us that gratification lies in action, not reward. The speaker plants a tree while the sun is “going down” and water is “touching its roots”

in the earth full of the dead
and the clouds passing

one by one
over its leaves

In his “Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger argues that in enduring art there is often a continual exchange and communion between earth and sky. Merwin’s poem ends as the tree joins earth—through distortion— (roots / dead) with the sky (leaves / clouds), engendering a moment of eternity. Thus, the tree becomes an axis mundi, a cosmic axis that links creation with destruction, beginning with end, and transcends that end through the act of giving. Merwin has created myth of the highest order: a tree that teaches us how to live in the world.

David Brower, the renowned environmentalist, talks about wilderness “as that original place in the imagination,” and throughout Merwin’s later work there’s a pervasive sense of the wild that manifests itself both in content and through stylistic devices such as the poet’s unpunctuated lines. “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” Thoreau says, and it is Merwin’s deep respect for origins in the vegetal and animal world that finally leads to his ability to expand place from root to star and to capture the dissolving sense of the present, also filled with absence, in which all time abides in its expansiveness. One first glimpses this expansiveness in an earlier poem, “Finding a Teacher,” from Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment. The poem begins “In the woods I came on an old friend fishing / and I asked him a question.” Later, however, we realize this is no regular question but one of metaphysical urgency that leaps from the cosmic toward the personal (“about the sun // about my two eyes”) and then telescopes all personal time for it is also a question about

my ears my mouth
my heart the earth with its four seasons
my feet where I was standing
where I was going

The poem ends with a signature note of absence hinting at a Zen koan:

I know longer knew what to ask
I could tell that his line had no hook
I understood that I was to stay and eat with him (12)

Merwin’s poems are nothing less than transformative as they question the ineffable with uncanny gestures of negative capability. “Du muss dein leben andern,” they sometimes suggest in whispers. “You must change your life,” in the words of Rilke who believed that “singing is being.”

Beginning with his fifth and sixth books, The Moving Target (1963) and The Lice (1967), but especially in the latter, Merwin began experimenting with unpunctuated lines, an experiment that uses the physical weight of language to replace punctuation. What is fascinating is that Merwin continues to grow more and more adept with the subtleties of this process and the way that they affect both the literal and imaginary time of the poems. Here is Merwin commenting on the process in a 1981 interview with Ed Folsom and Cary Nelson:

“Punctuation is there as a kind of manners in prose, articulating prose meaning, but it doesn’t necessarily articulate the meaning of this kind of verse. I saw that if I could use the movement of the verse itself and the movement of the line—the actual weight of the language as it moved—to do the punctuation, I would both strengthen the texture of the experience of the poem and also make clear its distinction from other kinds of writing. One would be paying attention to it in those terms.” (13)

A further orchestration of origin, presence, and time can be seen in Merwin’s capacious “Just This” from The Shadow of Sirius (2008). Here a personal pre-existence merges with other forms of existence and the multiplicity of place, from origin of the universe to bodily cell and back to cosmos. Engendering different forms of time and space, this ongoing creation, its presentness, is “read by lightning” as we read it on the page:

Just This

When I think of the patience I have had
back in the dark before I remember               
or knew it was night until the light came       
all at once at the speed it was born to
with all the time in the world to fly through
not concerned about ever arriving
and then the gathering of the first stars
unhurried in their flowering spaces
and far into the story the planets
cooling slowly and the ages of rain
then the seas starting to bear memory            
the gaze of the first cell at its waking
how did this haste begin this little time
at any time this reading by lightning
scarcely a word this nothing this heaven (14)

In 1999, Merwin commented (in an interview that I conducted with him) on this notion of the expansive present, a notion that seems clearly linked to his ability to dilate the present until it contains all time.

The present is the primary thing. The absolute primary thing, but everything else is secondary and relative as you try to deal with it. Our relation to it is dissolving. The present in a sense doesn’t exist in time. I really believe that the beginning of the universe is still there. The universe in a sense has not begun, and that beginning is there in every moment of the present. (15)

The notion that “the beginning of the universe is there in every moment of the present” is fascinating and provides a key insight into the poet’s imagination. In a sense “the present” allows possibility, and it is through our art of attention that we find poetry within it. In “Just This” Merwin’s art presences itself with the perception of the entire universe in its evolution, but only as the speaker recalls his own genetic memory melding with the more distant geological and cosmic time:

When I think of the patience I have had
back in the dark before I remember               
or knew it was night until the light came       
all at once at the speed it was born to

Moving from darkness and pre-memory toward light, the poet captures the ephemeral notion of time as it is unfolding: “the light came / all at once at the speed it was born to / with all the time in the world to fly through.” One can hear the physical movement and weight of time accentuated with the verb “came” and the prepositions “to” and “through” as they end consecutive lines. Merwin is able to capture these ephemerae in part through the complex, yet unadorned decasyllabic lines that are both unpunctuated and enjambed. Moreover, the use of words ending in “ing,”— functioning as gerunds, participles, and adjectives—suspends and further dilates the moment: 

not concerned about ever arriving
and then the gathering of the first stars
unhurried in their flowering spaces (16)

Narrative is remarkably unconventional here due to phrasing, unpunctuated lines,
and an art of transition that creates a kind of map that is all one fabric. The “ages of rain” become “the seas starting to bear memory” that give rise to the “first cell” waking.

and far into the story the planets
cooling slowly and the ages of rain
then the seas starting to bear memory            
the gaze of the first cell at its waking

Finally, the poet is able to meld the origin of personal memory from the poem’s beginning (“back in the dark before I remember”) with biological memory, and while the roving present expands through creation, the speaker marvels at how evolutionary time is made of moments:

how did this haste begin this little time
at any time this reading by lightning
scarcely a word this nothing this heaven

The poem seems christened and made whole through “this reading by lightning.” Lightning can momentarily freeze a vast landscape, and as we read it on the page, the words are deeply illumined by five repetitions of “this” in the last three lines.

Finally, it’s important to mention something about Merwin’s work that I believe distinguishes it from most other poetry. There is an aura about this poem and many others akin to the light in Vermeer or Rembrandt paintings, and there is an original music that comes from very high and far away, something this poet once hinted at forty years ago when he said poetry might be likened “to an unduplicatable resonance, something that would be like an echo except that it is repeating no sound.” (17)

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Mark Irwin (www.markirwinauthor.com) is the author of thirteen collections of poetry, including Once When Green (2025), Joyful Orphan (2023), Shimmer (2020), American Urn: Selected Poems (1987-2014), Tall If (2008), and Bright Hunger (2004). Recognition for his work includes The Nation/Discovery Award, two Colorado Book Awards, four Pushcart Prizes, the James Wright Poetry Award, the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, The Juniper Prize for Poetry, and fellowships from the Fulbright, Lilly, and NEA. He has also translated three collections of poetry and lives in Colorado and Los Angeles, where he teaches at the University of Southern California. His poetry has been translated into several languages. *** This essay originally appeared in: Until Everything is Continuous Again: American Poets on the Work of W. S. Merwin, edited by Kevin Prufer and Jonathan Weinert. Edited by Kevin Prufer and Jonathan Weinert. Chicago: Wordfarm Press, 2012. Monster: Distortion, Abstraction, and Originality in Contemporary American Poetry. NY: Peter Lang, 2017.

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Works Cited

1. Weinert, Jonathan & Thompson, Jeanie. Raw Shore of Paradise: A Conversation with W.S. Merwin. Spalding University, November 17, 2006.

2. Merwin, W.S. Present Company. (Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2005), 34.

3. Merwin, WS. Migration: New & Selected Poems. (Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2005), 41.

4. Merwin, 25.

5. Merwin, W.S. “The House and Garden: The Emergence of a Dream.” Kenyon Review, Fall
2010. Volume 32.4. p 14.

6. Irwin, Mark ed. A Tribute to W.S. Merwin. (Boulder: Many Mountains Moving, 2000), p. 47.

7. Aristotle. Poetics, Ingram Bywater trans. (New York: Random House, 1954), p. 234.

8. Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise Than Being, trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 2006), 150.

9. Merwin,W.S. The Shadow of Sirius. (Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2008), p. 5.

10. Merwin, 5. 

11. Moe, Aaron. ZooPoetics: Animals and the Making of Poetry. (London: Rowan & Littlefield, 2014), p. 109.

12. Merwin, WS. Migration: New & Selected Poems. (Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2005), p. 206.

13. Merwin, W.S. “Fact Has Two Faces’: Interview,” Ed Folsom and Cary Nelson. In Regions of Memory: Uncollected Prose, 1949-82. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), p. 357.

14.  Merwin, The Shadow of Sirius, p. 112.

15.  Irwin, Mark ed. A Tribute to W.S. Merwin. (Boulder: Many Mountains Moving, 2000), p. 52.

16.   Merwin, The Shadow of Sirius, 112.

17.  Berg, Stephen and Mezey, Robert. Naked Poetry. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), p. 271.

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