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Helen Vendler As a historian of the phases of sensuality, Merrill is unequaled in our century. His best poetry (a prism of the opalescent spectrum of the sensual) describes moments so elusive to specification that his founding a music for them is a genuinely startling act. Episodes of intense sensations are extinguished as passion but sustained as art. Flashing with ironies and inventions, rapid in movement, intricate in language, these poems dazzle before they convince, and convince, subsequently, because of their dazzle (the right way for a poem to work). In " Willowware Cup, " for instance, love undergone becomes a tattoo: " like ink in flesh, blue anchor // Needled upon drunkenness while its destroyer / Full steam departs, the stigma throbbing, intricate / Only to blend into a crazing texture. " from Helen Vendler, " James Merrill, " in The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics (Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1988). 35 Vernon Shetley Symbolism turns on an ambiguity between literal and metaphoric, or if ambiguity is too strong a word, on an extension and elaboration of metaphor to the point where it threatens to gain priority over the objects it modifies. Merrill does not often push to the boundaries of metaphor but often enough a simple construct of likeness exfoliates into a richly imagined (or described) scene of its own, moving far from its metaphorical function. [Shetley cites the lines that begin " Soon, of these May mornings" and end " into a crazing texture. " ] This extraordinarily condensed passage seems to encapsulate an entire narrative through a rapid series of substitutions.
The fading of the cups colors is likened to the spread of tattooers ink through skin, but the metaphorical function of the image quickly moves to the background as it is elaborated into a richly detailed vignette: a drunken sailor receiving a tattoo in the shape of a blue anchor, meanwhile missing the sailing of the warship to whose crew he belongs. Richard See, in his brilliant unpacking of this passage, suggests that the tattoo that comes to the poets mind here belongs to a former lover. {T]he critics temptation to provide an autobiographical referent is an index of the powerful " reality effect" generated by this passage; indeed, this narrative moment seems vastly more real than what it ostensibly modifies, which after all is only a tattooed representation. Ordinarily, the modified object in a metaphor holds a kind of ontological priority over the modifying vehicle; when a poet describes his lover as like a flower, the lover is concrete and specific, the flower generic and, in a fashion, abstract. Merrill's metaphors frequently reverse this priority, a reversal that corresponds to the elevation, in his poetry, of aesthetic constructs over observed facts, his sense that " life [is] fiction in disguise. " from Vernon Shetley, " Public and Private in James Merrill's Work" in After the Death of Poetry (Durham: Duke U P, 1993), 68 - 69.
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