There’s the Merrill poem; and there’s the amazing photographs.

In “Island in the Works,” James Merrill has the emergent volcanic island speak for itself, describing its desire to exist.

From air seen fathom-deep
But rising to a head –
Abscess of the abyss
Any old night letting rip
Its fires, yearlong,
As roundabout waves hiss.

Already you can sense that he’ll play with a comparison between the birth of a poem and the birth of an island – both express depths rising into a head. This head, inspired, has let rip the fire of creation… Abscess of the abyss – Merrill’s love of wordplay is there, as is the theme, sounded throughout the poem, of ambivalence in regard to things coming to a head, coming into being, things being given language, location, lore. Isn’t nothing, or a thing without names (the island before we name it, map it), better than an ugly routine humanized protuberance?

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

It was wild and free in its original expulsion of itself from nothingness, but in time the island becomes “jaded,” watered down by history, usage.

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

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

How to generate a new poem, a new creation, a fruitful dialogue with the world? How to get back, each time you try as a poet to create, to that original generative intensity?

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.

Dimwit because they have no sense of the underlying agonizing forces out of which the poet writes, out of which the creation construes itself. All they see is the calm height of a formal construction (natural, aesthetic); to them poetry is a shrimpy “small craft” whose clarity has seemingly surmounted any “vapors” of artistic torment.

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?

Thoughtless youth, in love with novelty and amusement, will enjoy the new Key West; older observers will understand how language waters down, trivializes, the thrilling mystery of all things being simply existent. A world of words drowns essential fires and puts in their place schooling flames – makes a tepid world of meaning and moral instruction. Worst of all, this subverting diminishes the island itself by giving it a name.

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

The island announces its moment of creation, its victorious struggle with the waves’ depth (death) wish in regard to it. The poem, in spite of everything, emerges into being, finds the surface of the page.

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

My head full of vaporous stars has done it, has finished the poem and securely dotted every i. You can find it here, in the atlas known as my Selected Poems.

(Unlike this page – no sooner
Brought to the pool than wafted
Out of reach, laid flat
Face-up on cool glares, ever
So lightly swayed, or swaying…
Now who did that?)

But that atlas, that physical book tricked out with rhetoric, is the cooled-to-calmness post-poem… the posthumous poem, if you like… It is the poem detached from the fire of the living Merrill, the poem subject to mapping, criticism, vulnerable to cool glares in the same way the molten proto-island is subject to the cool of the water and the glare of the sun as it is forced to make something of itself, as the world insists on making something of it. Once written, the poem falls out of the poet’s fervent grasp, and all of the private intensity that produced it wafts away.

Still, some mystery clings even to this watered-down, public document. It “sways,” moved by some unknown force (Now who did that?) – and this must be the force of inspiration itself, the massive seismic fires that rip through the poet’s head and ultimately generate one more wordblack wordscape.