[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.