Good Night

(In Front of Mestre’s, Paris, 1947, by Willy
Ronis, 1910-2009, French photographer)

One form of poetry is the pantoum, or pantum, composed of quatrains with internal rhyming and the repetition of lines according to an established pattern. The poet here has created a variation of that, involving the repetition of lines that he first rearranges. Read the poem out loud and you’ll note that this double-repetition begins to resemble an incantation.

GOOD NIGHT

Sleep softly my old love
my beauty in the dark
night is a dream we have
as you know as you know

night is a dream you know
an old love in the dark
around you as you go
without end as you know

in the night where you go
sleep softly my old love
without end in the dark
in the love that you know

~ W. S. Merwin, born in 1927, American poet, essayist, and translator

Separation

(Delta Theta 1961 by Morris Louis, 1912-1962, American
Abstract Expressionist painter)

A simple metaphor is often sufficient to express profound grief.

SEPARATION

Your absence has gone through me
Like a thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

~ W. S. Merwin, born in 1927, American poet, essayist, and translator

For the Anniversary of My Death

(W. S. Merwin, current poet laureate, appointed 2010;
and special bicentennial consultant, 1999-2000, with
Rita Dove and Louise Glűck)

FOR THE ANNIVERSARY OF MY DEATH

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what

~ W. S. Merwin, born 1927, American poet, essayist, and translator

To This May

(Spring Landscape by Erich Heckel, 1883-1970,
German printmaker and painter)

TO THIS MAY

They know so much more now about
the heart we are told but the world
still seems to come one at a time
one day one year one season and here
it is spring once more with its birds
nesting in the holes in the walls
its morning finding the first time
its light pretending not to move
always beginning as it goes

~ W. S. Merwin, b. 1927, American poet