[Michael Cantor]

Grace
by James Merrill

“All this is very tiring,”
The old, old woman sighed:
“Another railroad station…”
Which one today? In her time
She’d traveled, seen the world
Forming its vast impression,
The Gare des Invalides,
The Termini in Rome—
A vault of groans and grime,
Triumphant engineering
Each dawn shone sicklier through.
Now clocks were striking, she’d be going home

—But with an artful smile
Lay back in her hospital bed:
“This one I designed
Myself, though. Glassed-in wings
Overlook the Nile,
So you can lie back and read
Or sleep if at the last
Moment you decide
To take tomorrow’s train instead.”

The girders of the mind
Were twisting. Pane by pane
Her spattered sense of things
All autumn had been caving
Inward to this bead
Full of its own dry light,
With just room for a river,
One plume of smoke, one bird…
Tinier locomotives
Each afternoon kept leaving
Without her for the Valley of the Kings.
Each night’s rain fell unheard.


(Grace, by James Merrill, from The Inner Room. Found on page 568 of the Collected Poems, edited by J.D.McClatchy and Stephen Yenser, published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2001.)


Comments:

Death was Merrill’s best subject. He wrote about his own approaching death the year he died (The Christmas Tree, and Days of 1994), many times about the deaths of friends, and perhaps most touchingly about the old age and death of his grandparents (The Water Hyacinth, The Smile, and Annie Hill’s Grave). This poem might be about his mother, Grace Merrill.

Other than a proper name, grace can be a granted delay, the state in which believers hope to die, gracefulness, graciousness, and ready willingness. Wordplay doesn’t figure prominently here, but pane by pane suggests pain by pain, while the stations Invalides and Termini are chosen for the aptness of their names. I might mention in passing that ‘a vault of groans and grime’ is neat concision for this earthly existence, and ‘triumphant engineering each done shone sicklier through’ could be taken as a metaphor for the aging body.

One of the attractions of this poem is its ‘triumphant engineering’. A delicate web of echoing sounds is constructed by overlapping pairs of similar rhymes, giving rise to additional combinations. The primary sequence tiring/engineering, sighed/Invalides, station/impression, time/grime, & home/Rome generates the pararhyme Rome/grime and the weave of consonance/assonance among tiring, sighed, time -- sighed finding true rhyme eighteen lines later after brief flirtations with smile/Nile and designed /mind. The series bed/instead, bead/read, bird/unheard breeds the pararhymes bed/bead/bird. The sparse distribution of full rhymes among the more populous and proximate partial ones leaves the reader with a definite impression of rhyme happening, but a diffuse sense of where they land. Indeed the poem rhymes more the more it is read, as the ear starts to pick up such distant, adventitious chimes as vast/last, rain/pane/train, or tiring/ triumphant.

The poem is brilliant and exquisite from start to finish, but allow me to select for the reader’s special delectation lines five to eleven of the first stanza and all of the third one.

[Michael Cantor]

Distinguished Guest Amit Majmudar's comments:

We are always deciding to take tomorrow's train, aren't we? Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, until there are no todays left us; until the train cars, which have kept getting "tinier," measure us like caskets from head to foot.

Trains, a symbol of progress in the 19th century, became symbols of death in the 20th, in the cattle cars of mid-20th-century concentration camps and death factories, and the corpse-filled trains exchanged by the newly formed India and Pakistan in 1947. Airplanes had an even shorter repurposing--the Wright Brother's invention was in dogfights within a decade.

I must confess to a general inability to gain much mind-traction with most poems by Merrill; I have a similar problem with Anthony Hecht's poems--heresy to some, I am sure! I have no idea why this is. Their musicality is usually very complex and rich, sometimes so subtle I actually miss specific effects and am left with a general impression of musicality rather than an actual experience of music. It's one of those disconnects where the deficiency is on the receiving end, my end. Much of the poetry world reveres John Ashbery, but I can't engage with that poet, either, for entirely different reasons; there, I suspect, the deficiency may be in the sender.

So I was very happy to find a poem by Merrill that I could get into. Many thanks to the submitter.

...As a side note, I always thought Invalides is pronounced AHN-vah-LEEDS, and hence connects with "bead" later on. I could be wrong.

[Christopher ONeill]

This is OK. It has the virtues, and most of the failings, I expect from mainstream US poetry since the 1950's. Very few disappointments, but also no surprises. It isn't attracting a lot of comment (so far) - so instead of being midly critical (my first thought), I think I might go for it with a trowel. I guess the harder I poke, the more likely Merrill's fans will come out in force.

The death of an elderly relative is something we can all map our own experience onto. But I don't see anything here which makes Merrill's gran any more fascinating than one of my own. Merrill's gran draws blueprints for railway stations as she dies. Mine knitted. I don't think either of them could have held an audience on Oprah with those activities.

And does this poem really describe a railway station as 'triumphant engineering' and suggest that a dying lady has an 'artful smile'? When I find journalese in a poem I want to know where the irony is, I want to think twice about those slack and formulaic expressions - and understand that they are not slack and formulaic at all.

It isn't working for me here. 'Triumphant' and 'artful' look slack and formulaic. If someone can throw me a line, I'll be grateful.

The pun of the title:- which might be a virtue or the old girl's name - led me to expect rather more than I am getting. The prospective defunct has been about a bit:

In her time
She’d traveled, seen the world

Precisely: she has been in Paris, Rome, and Cairo (I don't think it is clear whether she ever actually made it to the Valley of the Kings of not). It isn't much to show for a lifetime: not even a Grand Tour. I suppose the Thomson destinations might be a joke: but not a very funny one, and rather cruel in the circumstances.

From where I stand the poem says not very much, though it says it elegantly.

My real problem is those opening lines:

“All this is very tiring,”
The old, old woman sighed:
“Another railroad station…”
Which one today? In her time

This is within a breath of being the jaunty trimeters which introduce Robert Southey' After Blenheim or Milton Hayes' Green Eye of the Little Yellow God:

http://poetrymoment.blogspot.co.uk/2...t-southey.html

The words may seem serious, but the tune is pure music hall.

Perhaps this is a very subtle poem indeed, snared with double takes and pits of sardonic entrapment - all of which I am missing. Or else it has serious problems with lexis, with tone, and with metre.

The essay supplied hasn't convinced me yet.

[Maryann Corbett]

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.

[Michael Cantor]

This event has had another positive impact on me, in that it has made me resolve to read more Merrill. I have the large Collected, but have never been able to get involved. Like Amit, I've had trouble connecting. And I suspect that a good deal of that is due to my weakness for poems that grab the reader by the neck, as opposed to those that ask more initial investment from the reader.

I've seen more in this poem and been more drawn to it, and to the careful artistry, with each rereading; and will have another look at more of Merrill as a result. I do wish, though - and I know this is my own problem - that the dammed initial caps weren't there. They always seem to get in the way of the poem.

[Jean L. Kreiling]

Kudos to our interpreter; his/her critique did a good job of directing my attention to this poem's virtues.

I've read little Merrill--but would recommend to others one called "The Ring Cycle," a skillful conflation of opera and real life. Having admired that one, I was a bit disappointed by this one--right from what seemed to me like an extraneous second "old" in L2 and the vague "forming its vast impression" a few lines later. And I agree with Christopher's comment about the misleading meter in the first several lines.

But the central conceit of the poem works well, and it's teased out graciously and sympathetically; I'm drawn in more each time I take another look. That is indeed "triumphant engineering."

[Bill Carpenter]

I certainly have enjoyed readers' testimony to what they like in this, and Merrill. However, I feel confirmed in my indifference to his poems other than Sandover. Instead, I see an opportunity to proselytize for it. If you like Merrill, you will love his mighty Ouija board trilogy!

[David Danoff]

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!)

[Lance Levens]

My problem with this piece is the gap between that which is the poignant and poetic--the toy has trapped the old woman--and the language, meter, slant rhymes. Could the woman's situation could be described as well in prose? I wonder.

[R. Nemo Hill]

Here's a prose style version of the same theme, Lance. Neither better nor worse, merely different, in effect, if not intent.

My mother was on a train one day when I came to visit her in the nursing home. When I gave her the ice cream cone I'd brought her, she abruptly warned me that the train was about to start up at any time. "What train?" I asked, caught off guard. "The one I'm on," she declared, with her usual inability to suffer fools... "Where are you going on that train?" I asked, intrigued by the travel imagery that so often marked her dreams. I knew that I should feel sorry for her, lamenting the sad loneliness of an old woman's mind in a deserted nursing home. But frankly I felt more fascination than sadness. There was nothing pathetic about this woman before me. She was riding the rails that afternoon, "on the road," as footloose as Jack Kerouac. Tooling through the high desert toward Santa Fe in an open box car, her hair in the wind, sucking up the miles - I didn't feel an ounce of pity for her. "I don't know," she answered my question with half a smile. "They don't tell you much here."

(Beldon C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes)

I think that final stanza is a really remarkable riff on the nature of reverie: how the world we are cast into becomes a world we re-cast within ourselves, "caving / Inward to this bead / Full of its own dry light". I've always been intrigued by Merrill, and now like Michael I have been given a solid introduction of great promise. I love the poem.

Nemo