Poetry News

Theater & W.S. Merwin's Mythology

Originally Published: January 26, 2018

Humanities contributor Steve Moyer writes on W.S. Merwin's critically-lauded career and the artful ways he blended a variety of forms with concerns about description and tone. Moyer tracks Merwin's career from his childhood in New Jersey to his elder years in Hawaii, illuminating a particularly notable chapter when Merwin became playwright-in-residence at Poets’ Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1956. There, alongside his wife, Dido, he met Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Ted Hughes. "Merwin’s work in progress at the time was The Drunk in the Furnace (1960), which included poems that Lowell read and admired," Moyer writes. From there:

During the residency at Poets’ Theatre, Merwin wrote a play, Favor Island, about shipwrecked sailors, which was later produced at the theater, and after he completed his residency there he returned to England with Dido.

Along with themes of myth and legend, themes of family and society anchored an increasing number of Merwin’s poems by the late fifties and early sixties. One is the title poem, “The Drunk in the Furnace,” which powerfully depicts the milieu of Merwin’s childhood though focused on a most particular setting, the town dump:
For a good decade
The furnace stood in the naked gully, fireless
And vacant as any hat. Then when it was
No more to them than a hulking black fossil
To erode with the rest of the junk-hill
By the poisonous creek, and rapidly to be added
To their ignorance,

They were afterwards astonished
To confirm, one morning, a twist of smoke, like a pale
Resurrection, staggering out of its chewed hole,
And to remark then other tokens that someone,
Cosily bolted behind the eyeholed iron
Door of the drafty burner, had there established
His bad castle.

Where he gets his spirits
It’s a mystery. But the stuff keeps him musical:
Hammer-and-anviling with poker and bottle
To his jugged bellowings, till the last groaning clang
As he collapses onto the rioting
Springs of a litter of car seats ranged on the grates,
   To sleep like an iron pig.

In their tar-paper church
On a text about stoke holes that are sated never
Their Reverend lingers. They nod and hate trespassers.
When the furnace wakes, though, all afternoon
Their witless offspring flock like piped rats to its siren
Crescendo, and agape on the crumbling ridge
Stand in a row and learn.

The poem—one that holds significance not only for its powerful evocation of a sense of place, but also for the transition it represents in Merwin’s work—suggests both the personal experience expressed by the confessional poets and the objectivity so admired by the formalists. Town dumps in small-town, early- to mid-twentieth-century America had mythic power all their own.