Jaded by untold blue
Subversions, watered-down
Moray and Spaniard…
Now to construe
In the original
Those at first arid, hard,

Soon rootfast, ramifying,
Always more fruitful
Dialogues with light.
Various dimwit under-
graduate types will wonder
At my calm height

Vapors by then surmounted
(Merely another phase?)
And how in time I trick
Out my new “shores” and “bays”
With small craft, shrimpers
Bars and rhetoric.

Darkly the Old Ones grumble
I’ll hate all that. Hate words,
Their schooling flame?
The spice grove chatted up
By small gray knowing birds?
Myself given a name?

Waves, as your besetting
Depth-wish recedes,
I’m surfacing, I’m home!
Open the atlas. Here:
This dot, securely netted
Under the starry dome.

[The poet describes the look of an early, still-turbulent volcanic island from a satellite or plane. Suggestive of profound depth, it nevertheless shoots up – rises to a head – and we can already begin to think of this suddenly emergent creative fire as poetic inspiration, rising to the poet’s head. Out of who knows what depths, poetic inspiration surfaces –

Abscess of the abyss is very Merrill, an almost silly, almost lame assonance, consonance, alliteration all at once. He wrote it because it’s fun.]

Jaded by untold blue
Subversions, watered-down
Moray and Spaniard…

What’s left is, to be sure, the natural world re-created, aestheticized (Moray and Spaniard); but watered-down… In another poem, about the cooling of sexual passion, (“In Nine Sleep Valley”) Merrill writes of “the molten start and glacial sleep.” ]

Now to construe
In the original
Those at first arid, hard,

Soon rootfast, ramifying,
Always more fruitful
Dialogues with light.

[The poet sets to work writing, trying to capture the brilliance of his original conception, trying to burn with Pater’s gem-like flame: “To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.” His inner light wants to maintain a poetically ramifying, fruitful dialogue with the light of the world.]

Various dimwit under-
graduate types will wonder
At my calm height,

Vapors by then surmounted
(Merely another phase?)
And how in time I trick
Out my new “shores” and “bays”
With small craft, shrimpers
Bars and rhetoric.

Darkly the Old Ones grumble
I’ll hate all that. Hate words,
Their schooling flame?
The spice grove chatted up
By small gray knowing birds?
Myself given a name?

[Old and young – jaded and immature – both look skeptically upon the poetic project. Why muck up the world with words? It’s all been said already. Or silent and pristine is better than loud and ‘knowing.’ Why use your ‘small craft’ as a poet to add useless arbitrary labels to things (‘bays,’ ‘shores.’)?

Of course this is the poet himself, grappling with his own contempt for language, its schooling flame – the way, once hardened into words, into naming, the original gem-like expressive inspiration risks becoming merely pedantic.]

Waves, as your besetting
Depth-wish recedes,
I’m surfacing, I’m home!

[Depth-wish — what a wonderful twist on death-wish. The waves want to drown the hot volcanic elements struggling to establish a living island; but the poet struggles free and, with his poetic fire intact, surfaces.]

Open the atlas. Here:
This dot, securely netted
Under the starry dome.

[The atlas, the book of poetry, the poet’s period (‘dot’), proves that he prevailed, that he created, against immense counterforces, his poem. This poem.]