W. S. Merwin's Essays

W. S. Merwin, who died March 15, 2019, published over two hundred works of poetry and prose in The New Yorker: see Hannah Aizenman’s “W. S. Merwin in The New Yorker” (newyorker.com, March 18, 2019). As a long-time reader of the magazine, I skimmed many of these pieces. They didn’t resonate with me. I found them toneless, colorless abstractions. 

But a few years ago I looked into a book of essays by Merwin called The Ends of the Earth (2004), and I was hooked. His essays are warm, vivid, companionable – the exact opposite of his poetry. 

Take for example his wonderful “The Tree on One Tree Hill,” a profile of Captain Cook’s young shipboard artist Sydney Parkinson. It starts in the British Museum (“While passing the sarcophagi and the glass cases, the sense of human knowledge may seem neither definite nor near at hand”), and ends in Matavai Bay, Tahiti, where Parkinson makes his famous sketch of a “huge, dark, ancient tree” – the One Tree on One Tree Hill. In between, Merwin puts us directly in the Great Cabin of Cook’s Endeavour as it sails the South Pacific:

Most of his work was done at sea in the Great Cabin, with the other “gentlemen” and, no doubt, officers of the Endeavour present at the same table, often in bad weather, with the bark pitching and rolling (“seldom was there a storm,” Banks wrote, “strong enough to break up our normal study time”); in the midst of almost continuous motion, he was portraying an illusory stillness.

My favorite piece in The Ends of the Earth is “The Wake of the Blackfish: A Memoir of George Kirstein.” Kirstein was the wealthy publisher of the magazine The Nation, and a paternal figure in Merwin’s life. In a memorable passage, Merwin describes a harrowing trip through a hurricane that he and Kirstein took on Kirstein’s thirty-eight-foot yawl, Skylark:

We hurtled forward as though falling down stairs, and struck the troughs between waves as though they were floors. When I was at the wheel there were sickening instants when I thought that the compass card had spun ninety degrees and more, and that we were out of control and about to be swamped broadside.

The essays in Merwin’s The Ends of the Earth are completely different from his cold, surreal poetry. They have the breath of life. I highly recommend them.