Landscape

By Thomas James Merton 1915–1968

A Personage is seen

Leaning upon a cushion

Printed with cornflowers.

A Child appears

Holding up a pencil.

“This is a picture

(Says the Child to the Personage)

Of the vortex.”

“Draw it your own way,”

Says the Personage.

(Music is heard

Pure in the island windows,

Sea-music on the Child’s

Interminable shore, his coral home.)

Behind a blue mountain

Covered with chickenfoot trees,

The molten sun appears,

A heavy, painted flower.

A Personage is seen

Leaning upon the mountain

With the sun in one hand

And a pencil in the other.

“This is a picture

(Says the Personage to the Child)

Of the beginning of the world.”

“Or of its end!” cries the Child

Hiding himself in the cushions.

A Woman appears

Leaning upon the Child’s shoulder.

He looks up again.

“This is my Mother

(Says the Child to the Personage)

Older than the moon.”

(Grecian horses are heard

Returning from the foam

Of the pure island’s windows,

And the Child’s horizons.)

“My Mother is a world

(Says the Child to the Personage)

Printed with gillyflowers.”

“Paint her your own way”

(Says the Personage to the Child).

And, lifting up his pencil,

He crosses out the sun.

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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