Dreaming Back Through the Poetic Life: 
James Merrill's A Scattering of Salts

(This essay originally appeared in the Fall/Winter 1995 issue of the Asheville Poetry Review.)

I have always loved jigsaw puzzles. Often when I have a break from teaching, I find myself hunched over a card table late into the night, watching for images to form on its surface, fingering the shape of each puzzle piece, staring at its dash of color, wondering at the greater pattern each piece conceals.

It was the puzzle-solver in me that first drew me to James Merrill's poems, that led me to write a dissertation and then begin a book on his work. A Merrill poem always demands not just a second or third reading, but often a nineteenth and twentieth before I can begin to assemble the multilayered meanings he has veiled within it. Each poem offers up a rarified, secret world: Readers must come armed with passwords--with knowledge of opera, Noh theater, Persian literature--in order to slip past the cultural security guards into the arena where the game of meaning-making begins. I can remember more than one occasion when the appearance of a new Merrill poem in the New Yorker would send me into a frenzy of research. In the same way that family members sometimes gathered around the pile of strange shapes and colors on my card table, a new Merrill poem often became a group project, sending friends and colleagues tracking Greek and Latin etymologies or chasing down histories of the Elgin Marbles or the Aswan Dam. And, somewhere in the midst of that whorl, there was always the incredible moment when the beginning of intellectual understanding met the feeling of the poem--a moment when Merrill made me "feel" his "thought as immediately as the odor of a rose," as Eliot says of the metaphysical poets.

Merrill's death in February shocked me profoundly. I searched for ways to grieve for the poems that would stop coming and for the friend I had come to know through conversations and letters. I was already waiting for the arrival of my copy of A Scattering of Salts, the first book of his poems released in seven years, and Merrill's death made me even more anxious. These would be the last poems, at the least the last poems assembled into a volume that Merrill himself had shaped. (Merrill's editor at Knopf indicated to me in July that no plans for a collected poems are in the works.) 

In his poem "The Choice," Yeats speaks of how each poet "is forced to choose / Perfection of the life, or of the work." Throughout his career, Merrill, like Yeats, chose to pursue perfection of the work--that is to concentrate his creative energies on what James Olney calls "the Life of the Poet . . . played out in the poetry"--that is, the reshaping of "his lower-case, unitalicized, lived life into an upper-case, italicized, written Life." Merrill once noted in an interview that the "poet isn't always the hero of a movie who does this, does that. He is a man choosing the words he lives by." In his New Yorker obituary, J.D. McClatchy comments that Merrill "knew he was meant to end up as books on a shelf." As I finally began to read A Scattering of Salts, it dawned on me that Merrill knew that he was writing the last book on the shelf, that he was reshuffling the pieces of his Poetic Life for the last time. 

A Scattering of Salts is clearly a valedictory collection. Certain poems circle while others directly approach the subject of impending death. "The Great Emigration" describes a trip through the highlands of Scotland (retracing the steps of Bonnie Prince Charlie) as an allegory for another kind of journey "On the low road to Skye": "Naught remains but to rise in lonely mist above my old, contrary faults." The speaker in "Cosmo" faces the tenth year of his life with a lover "as terminal":

So parting lies ahead--oh, not this month
with snow whipping and howling round the block,
but "in the season of flowers" (La Boheme).

In "Family Week at Oracle Ranch," the speaker practices "grieving / At funerals--anybody's" and letting go of things--"Childhood, that unhappy haven," the "dead dog," "Those first ninety seconds missed, / Fifty three years ago, of a third-rate opera / Never revived since then." While Merrill the man practices letting go of the scraps of his life, Merrill the poet struggles in A Scattering of Salts to reshape and restructure the Self presented in the poems.

Olney claims that "poets of sufficient stature . . . have always shown themselves at every stage aware of the Life they were writing." At no time in his career was Merrill more aware of his Poetic Life than in his last volume of poems. Because he recognizes A Scattering of Salts as his last act of literary Autobiography, Merrill structures the volume as a poetic retrospective, as a "Dreaming Back" through his career.

In A Vision, Yeats describes a state between the death and rebirth of each soul, when the spirit engages in a process of "Dreaming Back." During this process, "the Spirit is compelled to live over and over again the events that had most moved it; there can be nothing new, but the old events stand forth in a light which is dim or bright according to the intensity of the passion that accompanied them." In A Scattering of Salts, Merrill embarks upon such a process as he relives the passionate moments of the Life in his poems. 

In Yeats's "A Circus Animals' Desertion," the poet in his waning years is left to "enumerate old themes," to parade the old characters of his poems--Oisin, the Fool, Cuchulain. In A Scattering of Salts, Merrill returns to old characters, old themes, old forms, old images, like a ghost haunting the terrain of his poems. Certain images and motifs, so central to earlier poems--shelters, mirrors, sounding the depths--recur. The most intense themes of his poetry traipse across the pages of the volume. The issue of childlessness--so much the focus of poems from Water Street and Nights and Days--reappears in "The Ring Cycle." The "old event" of encroaching senility (presented as the gradual dropping of the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon in "Losing the marbles") resurfaces as a computer's loss of memory in "Scrapping the Computer": "As I watched, the paragraph / Then under way deconstructed itself into / Mathematical symbols, musical notation."

Old characters also parade like circus animals through A Scattering of Salt. In "The Ring Cycle," the poet creates what he calls an "Our Town cemetery scene," in which he discovers childhood friends and classmates surrounding him in the audience at the Metropolitan Opera: "once familiar faces / Transfigured by hi-tech rainbows and mist." Even Michael, the Irish setter from "The Broken Home," long dead, is dreamed back into existence through the language of "My Father's Irish Setters": 

Dead lo! these forty winters?
Not so. Tonight in perfect
Lamplit stillness begin
With updraft from the worksheet,
Leaping and tongues, far-shining
Hearths of our hinterland.

Merrill's Dreaming Back is most dramatic in A Scattering of Salts in the poem "Nine Lives," in which the poet returns to the house in Athens that dominates much of his earlier poetry. The familiar scene causes old characters and "A dozen habits" to "Spring back to life." "DJ" or David Jackson, Merrill's life-long companion, appears, and he and "JM" return to the "habit" that produced Merrill's monumental work, The Changing Light at Sandover: the use of a "makeshift" Ouija Board to converse with the spirits of the "great dead." Their renewed activity calls up old incarnations of Merrill himself, as well as their old friend Maria Mitsotaki, the Greek lover Strato, their spiritual guide Ephraim, T.S. Eliot, and an assortment of other "troupers . . . from oblivion's verge," each cast in the new light of reexamined passion. 

According to Yeats in A Vision, as part of the Dreaming Back the spirit looks at the consequences of the events he relives. In A Scattering of Salts, Merrill examines all the old events--the poems, the characters, the themes of his Poetic Life--and asks what they add up to. In particular, in creating his final volume of poems, Merrill wonders if he has created a poetic self strong enough to transcend death. 

In "Nine Lives," Merrill sets out to test the central premise or theory of The Changing Light at Sandover--that the creativity or "LIGHT" of certain spirits is intense enough to allow them to continue after death through conversations with the living and new incarnations. In communicating through the Ouija Board in "Nine Lives," spiritual guide Ephraim offers JM and DJ "the proof we've never had / Or asked for." Ephraim claims that Maria Mitsotaki, their "adored, black-clad mentor," has returned in a new incarnation--as an eight-year-old Hindu boy, who will arrive at their favorite cafe in Kolonaki Square on a late afternoon in September. Ephraim promises, as a sign, that the boy's hat will blow off and land near their table. After hours of waiting at the appointed time and conjuring the "absent faces" of other friends, JM and DJ are forced to accept that the child will not come, that there will be no proof, no "word made flesh." Instead, the two characters are left with the consolation that the square was filled with light--"THE PLAY OF HEAVEN'S MIND," as Ephraim calls it. 

Merrill, the poet, searches for greater consolation in "Nine Lives." With no evidence that the spirit outlasts the body, he grapples with another question: whether, even if the spirit does not survive the body, the Life created in the poems might outlive the poet. The subplot of "Nine Lives" concerns continued attempts by JM and DJ to rescue a kitten from a drainpipe, while an old white tom cat and the mother cat watch. Using the theme-and-variation form favored in so many earlier poems, Merrill creates nine variations in which he describes the search for Maria and the attempted rescue of the kitten. At the end of the ninth variation when all hope for a reincarnation of Maria is abandoned (and presumably the kitten's ninth life is up), Merrill projects himself, the cats, and T.S. Eliot beyond the grave and into a tenth variation. In the tenth section, not only is the kitten rescued but Merrill manages through a sleight-of-hand to transform "old tom" into Eliot, who continues to live beyond death through his poetry: "we smile down through the slats /

As our flyblown road company of Cats / Concludes its run. (Did T.S. Eliot / Devise the whole show from his sepulcher?)"

When Merrill concludes the poem with the benediction "To all, sweet dreams" and renews his vows "To letters, to the lives that letters house," he seems to rest on the hope that the Life housed in his poems will also somehow transcend the sepulchre.

Certainly, Merrill finds some consolation in the fact that Eliot's poetry outlives him. Yet self-doubt lingers. Merrill's struggle with the permanence of his own poetry is evident in the way he structures A Scattering of Salts, framing it with "An Upward Look" and "A Downward Look"--bookend poems that scrutinize the nature of the "salts" that are his poems. 

In "A Downward Look," the poet peers down on the sky--on the "long, luxurious bath" of his poetic career. From this vantage point, his poems become bath salts scattered to heal, to restore, to preserve. With the confidence that these preservatives give him, the poet announces that he "hardly registers" that the "plug" is about to be pulled on the bath of his mortal life. Instead, he "Still radiates new projects old as day."

In the final poem, "An Upward Look," the speaker observes, from a subterranean position, crystals of salt being scattering on the earth, an allusion to the Roman treatment of the fields of defeated Carthage. The poem begins with apparent despair about the effects of art: The crystals of salt sown in the earth dissolve the grass, the ground, the "spears of wheat." Yet a closer reading reveals the set of antinomies at work in the poem--spirit and body, life and afterlife, permanence and impermanence, art and reality. Through the twin movements of the poem, the opposing gyres in Yeats's "Byzantium," each antinomy is transmuted into its opposite: Not only do the world's "toys triumphs toxins" dissolve into the "vast facility" of the earthen grave; matter evaporates into spirit, "the grave dissolving into dawn." "An Upward Look" ends in transcendence. The earth opens to the sky, and the poet, from the vantage point of the grave, sees the salts of his poems transfigured, recrystallized into the morning and evening stars, into the ever-shifting constellations of his words.

The day Merrill died, my friend Norman Austin (who visited him during his final days in Tucson, Arizona) read me the last lines of the poem Merrill was working on when he died--"Christmas Tree." In the New Yorker, McClatchy speaks of other unpublished poems gathered up from Merrill's desk after his death. Presumably these and other poems from Merrill's final weeks will some day appear in print. I'm not sorry that I will have to wait. In fact, I have consciously left a few poems from a Scattering of Salts unread. In the last few years, I have found myself buying jigsaw puzzles with more and more pieces so that I can delay the terrible emptiness that comes when the jumble of pieces becomes a fixed, glossy image. In a poem from Divine Comedies "Lost in Translation," a boy much like the young Merrill and his governess work together to complete a puzzle "containing a thousand hand-sawn / Sandal-scented pieces" only to discover at the end that a single piece is missing. Finally, through the help of a psychic, the reader discovers that the lost piece of the puzzle has "contrived / To stay in the boy's pocket" so that he can sustain the experience for as long as possible. For now, the hollowness of ending must wait. I am tucking the final puzzle piece in my pocket for another day.