The Beam of a Lightless Star ~ Merwin

Another Pulitzer winner... this one - a two-timer

Winning one Pulitzer is amazing.. two is very rare

His book - The Shadow of Sirius was written without punctuation and in free verse, and its poems are among the most autobiographical of his career. They touch on themes of memory, wisdom and childhood.

He described the collection as having a first section about childhood and remembering childhood, “not from a distance, but from inside.” The middle section is a collection of elegies to dogs, and the final section is about later life.

For The Anniversary Of My Death by W. S. Merwin

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 traveller

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

Just in case you sometimes wonder... what the heck is he talking about... here is my take..
The central idea of this poem is simple: each year contains the date on which the poet will finally die.

But the implications of this premise are complex. They involve nothing less than the total breakdown of conventional modes of understanding time. Viewing time sub specie aeteritatis... Merwin labels the linear sense of time as illusory.

The beam of a lightless star is in one sense a metaphor of his own language of silence, the silence of death, the silence on meaningless. A beam emanating from a lightless star also suggests that from a detached perspective a dead star can appear alive.

This is indeed a fine symbol of the eternal longing of all of us. It is a great symbol of time as relative in a world of absolute being.

Merwin perceives his death has already taken place in the precisely the same sense that the present exists externally.The temporal distinction is false.

In the second stanza, he sets up a new distinction to replace the old. He will no longer find himself in life as in a strange garment. He will lose his divisive perception that isolate him. He will no longer be surprised at the earth and the love of one woman.

It is finally to this human universe that Merwin must return.