Good thought about the poking, Chris. Endlessly amazing, how differently poems come across to different readers.
I almost always enjoy Merrill, and the experience of having enjoyed him does create for me a bias in this poem's favor.
Why do I like his poems so much? They're inventive and surprising in their use of rhyme and measure and form. They're perceptive, sensitive, and amusing in their observations of human nature ("The Summer People"). They're wise ("The Victor Dog") and they can be intensely moving ("A Renewal"). I think the biggest thing is that they convey a whole life, and that life is complex and rich and full of the Old World stuff I enjoy. He drops classical allusions. He describes decorated interiors and city exteriors and architecture that deserves to be looked at.
So when I bring the knowledge of other Merrill poems to this poem, I see more in it than one probably sees coming to it cold. That's especially true if I'm told that this may be about his mother, Grace. By the time of her death, how many wives had her former husband gone through? (Merrill wrote of his father, "We could feel him warming up for a green bride"--preparing for another divorce and remarriage.) Knowing that she had lived in great wealth, I can easily believe that she had traveled a great deal, which makes it especially poignant that this poem restricts those travel experiences to the interiors of stations. Such a restriction speaks volumes: it presents in a few words her inability to engage with the world. The glassed-in wings, the tiny locomotives, all those details build the sense of that constricted view. I admire the build-up of the elements that let us realize the woman's dementia. Considering that the dementia of aging has become so common a subject that one tires of it, I admire it particularly.
Is it a fault or a virtue that the essay writer invites us to look at S3 rather than leading us through it? For me, it's a virtue because the act of working through that stanza was a pleasure, one that let me share the writer's own pleasure.
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