James Merrill's “Self-Portrait in Tyvek™ Windbreaker”

James Merrill (Photo by Jill Krementz)

Great poets make poetry out of the damnedest things. Prime example: James Merrill’s “Self-Portrait in Tyvek™ Windbreaker.” I first read it when it appeared in the February 24, 1992, New Yorker. I remember it for the white windbreaker imprinted with a world map delightfully described in the first stanza:

The windbreaker is white with a world map.

DuPont contributed the seeming-frail,

Unrippable stuff first used for Priority Mail.

Weightless as shores reflected in deep water,

The countries are violet, orange, yellow, green;

Names of the principal towns and rivers, black.

A zipper’s hiss, and the Atlantic Ocean closes

Over my blood-red T-shirt from the Gap.

But, as Stephen Burt points out in his marvelous new book, The Poem Is You, Merrill’s poem contains two windbreakers – a white one and a black one. The black one briefly materializes in the second-last stanza (“It’s my windbreaker / In black, with starry longitudes, Archer, Goat”). Burt comments,

Merrill learned in 1986 that he had HIV, for which in the early 1990s there were no effective treatments; “Self-Portrait” has also been read as his plan for his funeral, a self-elegy complete with choice of coffin. As Helen Vendler explains, by the penultimate stanzas Merrill has decided that the original windbreaker, “white with a world map,” cannot be his shroud: the “black celestial twin of his jacket,” however, strikes him as a “garment for death not only appropriate but beautiful.”

The reference is to Helen Vendler’s “Self-Portraits While Dying: James Merrill and A Scattering of Salts” (Last Looks, Last Books, 2010), a brilliant study of Merrill’s dying self-portraits, in which “Self-Portrait in Tyvek™ Windbreaker” is described as an “organic living portrait, the poet’s last walk wearing his absurd and surreal Tyvek shroud.”

Merrill’s world-map-imprinted white Tyvek windbreaker may be absurd and surreal, but I like it. I suspect Merrill secretly did, too. After all, as Burt points out, he wore it. And wearing it is what inspired this beautifully flowing, chiming poem.