Star

By W. S. Merwin b. 1927

All the way north on the train the sun

followed me followed me without moving

still the sun of that other morning

when we had gone over Come on over

men at the screen door said to my father

You have to see this it’s an ape bring

the little boy bring the boy along

so he brought me along to the field

of dry grass hissing behind the houses

in the heat that morning and there was

nothing else back there but the empty day

above the grass waving as far away

as I could see and the sight burned my eyes

white birds were flying off beyond us

and a raised floor of boards like a house

with no house on it part way out there

was shining by itself a color

of shadow and the voices of the men

were smaller in the field as we walked on

something was standing out there on the floor

the men kept saying Come on over

it’s on a chain and my father said

to me Don’t get too close I saw it was

staring down at each of our faces

one after the other as though it might

catch sight of something in one of them

that it remembered I stood watching its eyes

as they turned away from each of us

Source: The Pupil (Alfred A. Knopf, 2001)

Biography

W.S. Merwin is a major American writer whose poetry, translations, and prose have won praise since W.H. Auden awarded his first book, A Mask for Janus (1952), the Yale Younger Poets Prize. Though that first book reflected the formalism of the period, Merwin eventually became known for an impersonal, open style that eschewed punctuation. Writing in the Guardian, Jay Parini described Merwin’s mature style as “his own kind of free . . .

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