Song

By Thomas James Merton 1915–1968

(From Crossportion’s Pastoral)

The bottom of the sea has come

And builded in my noiseless room

The fishes’ and the mermaids’ home,

Whose it is most, most hell to be

Out of the heavy-hanging sea

And in the thin, thin changeable air

Or unroom sleep some other where;

But play their coral violins

Where waters most lock music in:

The bottom of my room, the sea.

Full of voiceless curtaindeep

There mermaid somnambules come sleep

Where fluted half-lights show the way,

And there, there lost orchestras play

And down the many quarterlights come

To the dim mirth of my aquadrome:

The bottom of my sea, the room.

Thomas Merton, “Song” (“The bottom of the sea has come ...”) from The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton. Copyright 1946 by New Directions Publishing Corporation. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Source: The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1977)

Biography

A monk who lived in isolation for several years, and one of the most well-known Catholic writers of the twentieth century, Thomas Merton was a prolific poet, religious writer, and essayist whose diversity of work has rendered a precise definition of his life and an estimation of the significance of his career difficult. Merton was a Trappist, a member of a Roman Catholic brotherhood known for its austere lifestyle and vow of . . .

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