Inhabiting the Moment in Time: W.S. Merwin's The Shadow of Sirius
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 July 2022
Summary
William Stanley Merwin's The Shadow of Sirius won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for poetry and was widely recognized as a notable achievement in the poet's career, confirming his status as an “indispensable poet and ecopoet” (Dunning 2013: 94). The poet, whose first volume was published in 1952, was already 82 years old at that time, and he seemed inclined, more than ever before, to reflect on the passing of time. As Elizabeth Lund writes, ”… the collection, which explores loss, memory, and the continuum of time, lingers with readers the way light from Sirius reaches the earth – long after leaving its source.” It seems that memory, a recollection of the past which becomes the present, plays a special role in the poems in this collection. Before I discuss the eleven poems in Section II of The Shadow of Sirius, I would like to quote what Merwin has said on the topic of memory:
I think memory is essential to what we are. We would not be able to talk to each other without memory, and what we think of as the present really is the past. It is made out of the past. The present is an absolutely transparent moment that only great saints ever see occasionally. But the present that we think of as the present is made up of the past, and the past is always one moment. It is what happened three minutes ago, and one minute, it is what happened thirty years ago. And they flow into each other in waves that we cannot predict and that we keep discovering in dreams, which keep bringing up feelings and moments, some of which we never actually saw.
(Merwin, Interview)Merwin's perception of time, the idea that we cannot really touch the emotional present which is comprised of the continuous flow of past events, determines the shape of his poems in this volume. In his vision, the past covers a spectrum of emotional experience that accumulated over a long period of time, and blends into an emotional reality that we may never have experienced in actuality, but only in our dreams and imagination.
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- Information
- New Perspectives in English and American StudiesVolume One: Literature, pp. 307 - 322Publisher: Jagiellonian University PressPrint publication year: 2022