Poetry Monday: After the Voice

After the Voices

 Youth is gone from the place where I was young

 even the language that I heard here once

 its cadences that went on echoing

 a youth forgotten and the great singing

 of the beginning have fallen silent

 with the voices that were the spirit of them

 and their absences were no more noticed

 than were those of the unreturning birds

 each spring until there were no words at all

 for what was gone but it was always so

 I have no way of telling what I miss

 I am only the one who misses it 

 W.S. Merwin

Young Merwin, probably at Deer Park 1948

 I’ve recently read Summer Doorways, Merwin’s prose memoir centered on the summer of his 21st year, in 1948. Fresh out of university, he is employed as a tutor by wealthy patrons, first on a huge estate in New Jersey, then on the French Riviera and in rural Portugal. Deer Park, the New Jersey estate, had buildings that dated back to before the American revolution, and remnants of the ancient forest that had elsewhere been cut down. The Europe he visited was only slightly changed from what it had been for centuries.

 But 20 years later, he writes, everything at Deer Park was gone, buried by freeways and suburban developments. By then the horse carts and bicycles of Europe were replaced by motorized vehicles, and the cityscapes and landscapes transformed for automobiles.

 As I read the book I saw this subterranean theme, but in its final pages the theme became explicit. The last sentence reads: “The move away from the valley of the Ceria [Portugal] would lead through years in which, again and again, I would have the luck to discover, to glimpse, to touch for a moment, some ancient, measureless way of living, of being in the world, some fabric long taken for granted, never finished yet complete, and evanescent as a work of art, an entire age just before it was gone, like a summer.” 

 There seems something of this situation in this short poem, though there is more. The poem comes from Merwin’s 2015 collection The Moon Before Morning, and other poems in this volume touch upon related aspects—not only about the voices and landscapes that are gone, but one’s own youth and youthful ambitions.  There is also a sense in the haunting line of "the unreturning birds" of the ultimate conclusion of our ecological crisis, never far from Merwin's thoughts or poems in his later years.

 The first few times I read this poem, I mistakenly read the final line as saying “I am the only one who misses it,” quite a different resonance than the accurate “I am only the one who misses it.” And yet, they do seem related. Merwin was 88 when he published these poems, so his perspective is more advanced than mine. But I too am beginning to feel not only the losses of the past—the places in their fullness, the voices-- but the loneliness, and yet the identity I find in memory.