Among the literary types I follow on Twitter, there is a current buzz about "Christmas Tree," by the American poet James Merrill, who in 1995 died of complications from AIDS. I suppose the interest is in part seasonal, as this is the time of year when everyone is putting up their trees. But the poem's real subject isn't seasonally jolly, for the speaker is dying, knows it, and this intricately arranged "pattern poem"--the lines are arranged on the page to look like a Christmas tree--amounts to a leave-taking, a last word. To me, there is a kind of tension between the picture the poem makes on the page, which seems like a clever or cute trick, and the uncute subject matter: one doesn't think of such intricate construction as an apt activity for a dying man, who is advised in a more famous poem to "Rage, rage, against the dying of the light!" None of that here, all is meticulous, "poised," and, while the grim physical realities are not denied--
. . . To have grown so thin
Needles and bone
--the stately conclusion speaks of acceptance, affirmation, and love. It makes me wonder about the man who wrote it, who, somewhat strange to say, was the homosexual son of the cofounder of the investment firm Merrill Lynch. He was brought up in great wealth, the kind that could make it unnecessary for generations to come to work, and he seems to have been more intimate with servants and governesses than with his own parents, who divorced when he was 13. He told an interviewer:
I found it difficult to believe in the way my parents lived. They seemed so utterly taken up with engagements, obligations, ceremonies. The excitement, the emotional quickening I felt in those years came usually through animals or nature, or through the servants in the house . . . whose lives seemed by contrast to make such perfect sense. The gardeners had their hands in the earth. The cook was dredging things with flour, making pies. My father was merely making money, while my mother wrote names on place-cards, planned menus, and did her needlepoint.
His biography seems a mix of what you'd expect and what you wouldn't, considering this background. Born in 1926, his college education, at Amherst, was interrupted by military service in Europe at the end of World War II. From a bilingual governess he had acquired his first interest in language and composition, and at the end of the war, he remained in Greece, finishing a book of poems, called The Black Swan, published in 1946. (His first book of poems had been privately published by his father while he was still in high school.) He returned to Amherst and graduated in 1947. His trust fund status allowed him to devote his adulthood to his art, and, on the whole, he seems to have lived rather modestly, though he and his partner, the writer David Jackson, had homes in Greece, Key West, and Connecticut. His poetry has been described as "autobiographical" but not "confessional." His father turns up pretty consistently:
Each thirteenth year he married. When he died
There were already several chilled wives
In sable orbit--rings, cars, permanent waves.
I will let someone else--an editor of the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry--describe his most famous work, The Changing Light at Sandover, which as you will discern seems almost too strange for words.
Nothing in his earlier poems had quite prepared his readers for what Merrill would be up to next. With the help of [euphemism alert!] his friend David Jackson, an accommodating Ouija board, friends (most of them dead), fellow poets, scientists, and a galaxy of guardians from the spirit world, Merrill would over a period of more than twenty years assemble an epic poem which from time to time resembles such different works as Yeats's A Vision and the epic poems of Dante, Blake, Wordsworth, and Whitman . . . . The completed poem . . . has to be read to be believed. It is a witty, gracious, genial poem, comforting in its assurance that our friends are never lost to us, and that, thanks to the transmigration of souls, human beings slip, rather comically, from one existence to another.
The headnote in which this appears is all I knew of Merrill before reading up on him lately on account of "The Christmas Tree." It's not for me a great advertisement, and I doubt I'd ever read The Changing Light at Sandover--Ouija boards and the occult have to get in line behind the complete novels of Dickens, et al. But notice the theme of friends and friendship, evidently another abiding interest, and treated with an earnestness that contrasts with whatever you'd call the "sable orbit" applied to his oft-married and extravagantly wealthy father. Before the elder Merrill died, his son and two siblings all accepted a hundred dollars ($100.00) "in full quittance" of any claim (above what they'd already received) on their father's estate, which was donated to charity. Merrill was known for his generosity, especially toward other writers and artists, and he established in the 1950s the Ingram Merrill Foundation, uniting in its name his divorced parents, which during his lifetime supported literature, the arts, and public television.
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