I believe his mother's name was "Hellen," not "Grace," and she survived the poet by several years (dying in 2000, at age 102!). So it must be someone else he's writing about here (c. 1987).
I'll say, for myself...James Merrill was one of the first contemporary poets I really loved and really wanted to emulate. But the farther I've gone, and the more widely I've read, the harder it is to recapture what I first loved in him. He can seem so cold, so muted. It can seem like not very much is at stake in the work--like it's just so much decoration.
But then, every so often, I go back and look really deeply into one of his pieces, and it's astonishing just how much is there. It's almost too much--too rich, too complex, too much going on. And the thing to realize is: he's writing about tremendously high stakes subjects. Life and death, family traumas, romantic turmoil, misery, rage, despair, as well as more general themes like history, world cultures, and art. But he speaks in such a quiet voice, with so much decorum, such a muted tone, the intensity of the feeling is easy to miss.
I do think he's better served by the Selected volume than the Collected, or even most of the individual volumes. In all his books, there's a certain amount of work that just seems...wallpapery. (But then it's always hard to know if one is completely missing the point--so much going on!)
This poem doesn't strike me as enormously exciting, although it does seem characteristically skillful and graceful (sorry). The dispersed rhymes are delicately managed, the character and the scene are depicted with a light touch and a nicely judged amount of emotion. The real-world details take on mythic/symbolic overtones, very lightly. It links up with issues of time passing, the old European history and culture he loved, his own biography (his own travels) as well as the woman's, their shared experience as "artists" who have tried to shape the world around them, and their shared mortality--which so brutally reduces the space in which such shaping may still be possible.
I'd wager whoever he's writing about, if we knew more of the biographical details, it would deepen our experience of the poem--and probably reveal an extra layer of symbolism or allusion that we're missing.
I'm intrigued by the variable meter, where those pentameter lines in particular seem to be reaching out at critical points in the poem. That has to be somehow underlying what he's up to--some sense of stretching, yearning, reaching. Pulling away from the other lines' simpler, more sing-song rhythms, maybe, just as mortality pulls us inexorably away from the distractions with which we filled our lives?
And the final line is puzzling, but intriguing. It seems like a strong echo of the end of his well known "Days of 1964," where his description of himself "falling...into a pool of each night's rain" has a delirious sexual meaning. But that doesn't seem to apply here. Or does it, somehow?
(PS: The "old, old woman" seems like a deliberate echo of his poem "For Proust"--not sure what it's doing here, but I bet it's doing something!)
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