Devoid of any punctuation marks, WS Merwin’s poetry is an unstoppable force that condemns war, champions the environment and speaks of vivid memory. WS Merwin, one of the US’s most celebrated poet laureates and winner of two Pulitzer prizes, passed away at the age of 91 on March 15.
Merwin’s early poems were, in fact, hymns written for a Presbyterian church he grew up around. He had a rather difficult relationship with his father, who was the minister of the church. Neither of his parents in particular had any appetite for words. Yet, unlike his parents, young Merwin was captivated by the sound of language. After graduating from Princeton in 1948, he traveled through Europe and stood mesmerized before a rundown farmhouse in Southern France. The vast emptiness of the broad valley, the Dordogne river and the sense of solitude went on to influence his writing.
The poet’s search for peace and tranquility took him to Hawaii in the mid-1970s. He built himself a home at Haiku, a remote island in Maui. He transformed the nineteen acres of deforested land into a sprawling conservatory of more than 2,700 palm trees of 500 species. Among his many works influenced by Hawaii, his narrative poem “The Folding Cliffs” is notable.
His many poetry volumes such as Green with Beasts (Knopf, 1956), Travels: Poems (Knopf, 1993), The River Sound (Knopf, 1999), Migration: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2005) have influenced poets from all over the world, including his Pulitzer winning titles The Carrier of Ladders (Atheneum, 1971) and The Shadow of Sirius (Copper Canyon Press, 2008). He became the United States Poet Laureate in 2010.
The esteemed poet has also translated poets as celebrated as Pablo Neruda, Roberto Juarroz, Muso Soseki, Osip Mandelstam and Dante. He received the PEN Translation Prize for his Selected Translations (Antheneum, 1969).
Immediately after the news of his death spread all over the world, award-winning Bangladeshi poet Abu Hasan Shahriar posted a tribute on Facebook, saying Merwin's love for trees and river always worked as a source of inspiration for him. In India, Arunava Sinha posted a Bangla translation of one of his poems while many other poets (such as Nabina Das) shared stanzas from his much-loved poems. The tributes pouring in on FB demonstrate the warm reception his poetry was given and will continue to enjoy in this part of the world.
Two poems by WS Merwin
For the anniversary of my death
Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star
Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what
The river of bees
In a dream I returned to the river of bees
Five orange trees by the bridge and
Beside two mills my house
Into whose courtyard a blindman followed
The goats and stood singing
Of what was older
Soon it will be fifteen years
He was old he will have fallen into his eyes
I took my eyes
A long way to the calendars
Room after room asking how shall I live
One of the ends is made of streets
One man processions carry through it
Empty bottles their
Image of hope
It was offered to me by name
Once once and once
In the same city I was born
Asking what shall I say
He will have fallen into his mouth
Men think they are better than grass
I return to his voice rising like a forkful of hay
He was old he is not real nothing is real
Nor the noise of death drawing water
We are the echo of the future
On the door it says what to do to survive
But we were not born to survive
Only to live
(Source: Poemhunter.com)