Thomas Merton’s Poetry and Prayer

Sarah Law

Poetry and Prayer: The Power of the Word II / Edited by Francesca Bugliani Knox

and John Took. London: Routledge, 2016. Print.

Introduction

Thomas Merton (1915–68), the twentieth century American Trappist monk, was

widely known for his writing on contemplative life. His thinking developed

throughout his twenty-seven years of religious life, with issues of social justice and

interest in Eastern spirituality becoming prominent in his later work. He left a

considerable oeuvre of writing on the contemplative life by the time of his death in

1968. But Merton was also a poet, although he struggled with what he saw as this

extra vocation. Merton published four volumes of poetry in the 1940s but none

between 1949 and 1957. He returned to writing poetry, and writing about poetry, in

the last decade of his life when he was making many connections outside the

Kentucky monastery of Gethsemani, and developing his interests in Zen spirituality.

His Collected Poems is over a thousand pages, and numerous influences have been

cited as important, most convincingly William Blake and G.M. Hopkins.

Although unique in becoming a widely known twentieth-century Catholic

monk who was also a writer and poet, Merton was not alone among American mid-

twentieth century poets who were attracted to mysticism and contemplation in their

life and writing. Neo-pagan, Buddhist and Christian spiritualities were influential in

modern American poetics. Critic Stephen Fredman identifies a countercultural

impulse in each case: ‘Rather than speaking for the liberal mercantile values of the

society, poets have often taken a critical stance, addressing through mystical means

what they see as moral and political shortcomings of capitalism and consumerism.’

(Fredman 192). Furthermore, ‘in the works of the mystically inclined poets, self-

exploration is usually a route not to ego-inflation but to a kind of self-effacement that

opens onto the social virtues of love, compassion, and solidarity’ (192). Buddhism,

particularly Zen Buddhism, was arguably the most important influence on counter-

cultural American poetry, particularly through the teachings of D.T. Suzuki, whom

Merton met, as did other poets such as John Cage. Beat writers Jack Kerouac, Allen

Ginsberg, and Gary Snyder also drew on Buddhism in their poetics, exploring the

concept of the present moment as fluid and impermanent, and celebrating the precise

spiritual focus of the haiku. Christian mysticism too has had its clear impact on

American poetics: T.S. Eliot’s search for faith and his dialogue with the English

medieval mystics such as Julian of Norwich; Denise Levertov’s incarnational

mysticism and Levertov’s own writings on Julian of Norwich and Merton himself.

As Fredman concludes, ‘American poetry informed by mysticism offers moments of

attentive cross-cultural dialogue, something for which the contemporary world

evinces a glaring need’ (209).

Merton was not alone in his general poetic direction. Nor did he feel himself

outside the network of his poetic contemporaries: in a journal article of 1967 he

described himself as ‘in contact with groups of poets [and other artists and activists]

in all parts of the world’ (Lentfoehr 2). Robert Lax, poet and Catholic convert, was a

contact with obvious shared interests, and Merton also knew Dan Berrigan, San

Francisco poet Laurence Ferlinghetti and lyricist Joan Baez, among others.

Stylistically, while Merton’s poetry developed according to his own lights, it shares

features in common with developments in contemporary American poetics. Critic

George Woodcock’s assertion that Merton’s poetry ‘admitted only a few features of

modernity into itself’ (Woodcock 58) seems overly cautious. Merton generally wrote

in free verse, and utilised both the Whitmanic long-line form and the sparer lyric that

became popular in post-war American poetry among Black Mountain, Beat and other

groups. He was aware of the Confessional movement and his Eighteen Poems have a

clear affinity with the Confessional mode. The critic Walter Sutton claims that in his

last poems Merton was connecting to the American tradition of epic poetry (Eliot,

Pound, William Carlos Williams) in the ‘anti-poetry’ of Cables to the Ace and The

Geography of Lograire (55–6).

Merton’s poetry is an important part of his literary and spiritual oeuvre, and it

has many admirers. Kathleen Norris identifies a search for wholeness as its key

quality: ‘Thomas Merton’s most important gift to his readers was his prophetic

vocation to perceive and distinguish in his art the fundamental unity in the cosmos’

(xxiii). She contrasts his perspective to ‘the ironies of disintegration and

fragmentation currently associated with postmodern perspectives on art and language’

(xxiii). However, for much of his monastic and poetic careers, Merton was conflicted

as to the differences between poetry and prayer. This sense of division is detectable

not only in his poetic themes and techniques, but also his prose writings considering

the roles of poet and contemplative.

Poetry and Prayer: Similarities and Differences

Merton did not doubt the aesthetic and spiritual power of poetry. He had already

noted the special function of poetic language in ‘Poetry, Symbolism and Typology’

(1953):

a good poem induces an experience that could not be produced by any other

combination of words. It is therefore an entity that stands by itself…true poems

seem to live by a life entirely their own. (327)

Poetry, the essay suggests, can be an iconic (in the sense of icon-like) object of

contemplation for its readers, something both holy and untranslatable to other media.

However, although strongly drawn to each vocation, Merton did not always consider

the callings of poet and contemplative compatible. From New Seeds of Contemplation

(first published in1961), we have this succinct explanation of their difference: ‘The

poet enters into himself in order to create. The contemplative enters into God in order

to be created’ (111). So a similarity but a duality is indicated between the purity of

contemplative prayer, and the divergent call to artistry.

Merton studied Blake as a student, and felt Blake believed in an intuitive

connection between poetry and contemplation: ‘Blake believes the poet may see God

face to face … Blake saw that the artist and the mystic seemed to have the same kind

of intuitions, for he himself, as mystic and artist, certainly did: therefore he never

troubled to distinguish between aesthetic emotion and the mystic graces.’ (‘Nature

and Art in William Blake’ 445). There was not, however, such a confident expression

of this unity in Merton’s own thought or, arguably, his life. He experienced a sense of

division and duality. Although Merton was known in religious life as Brother (later

Father) Louis, his poetry and other writing in the public domain was published under

his former name. His first collection, Thirty Poems, published by New Directions in

1944, was ascribed to ‘Thomas Merton’, and the others followed suit. Merton

biographer Mark Shaw observes, ‘Merton admitted that a shadow, Merton the writer,

had followed him into the monastery. Merton felt as if the writer were beside him

“[riding his] shoulders, sometimes, like the old man of the sea. I cannot lose him”’

(50). This double naming of ‘Thomas Merton’ and ‘Father Louis’ itself seems to

indicate a split between the two vocations.

Even though much of Merton’s poetry explored religious themes or celebrated

the monastic life, Merton explicitly differentiated between the work of contemplation

and poetry-writing. In his essay ‘Poetry and the Contemplative Life’, first published

in Commonweal in 1947, Merton’s differentiation between the two paths is harsh:

‘Poetry can, indeed, help to bring us rapidly through that part of the journey to

contemplation that is called active: but when we are entering the realm of true

contemplation, where eternal happiness begins, it may turn around and bar our way.’

(web). He goes so far as to advocate, for the poet who seriously wishes to commit to

the contemplative life, ‘the ruthless and complete sacrifice of his art.’ (web). A

concluding paragraph considers the complications for those who deem it a moral

imperative to keep writing poetry nonetheless, perhaps on the orders of a religious

superior. Merton acknowledges the consolation of being able to communicate

something of the inexpressible through the particular power of poetry. However, even

writing under obedience ‘will not take away distractions, or make God abrogate the

laws of the spiritual life’. Considering his own years of poetic silence between 1949

and 1957, we can assume that Merton was facing a personal dilemma over his dual

callings and unable to satisfactorily integrate the two. Merton scholar David D.

Cooper sees the Commonweal essay as a public renouncing of his poetry-writing (30),

connecting it to Merton’s 1948 collection Figures for an Apocalypse, in which a

concluding poem convicts poetry-writing as a ‘thirsty traitor’. (‘The Poet, to his

Book’ l. 16).

Merton returned to the topic at the same time he returned to poetry-writing, in

‘Poetry and Contemplation: A Reappraisal’ (1958), a more nuanced and mature

consideration than the 1947 essay, of which it is a revised version. Nevertheless, in

this reappraisal Merton still declares a ‘radical difference between the artist and the

mystic’:

when the poet enters into himself, it is in order to reflect upon his inspiration and

to clothe it with a special and splendid form and then return to display it to those

outside … but the mystic enters into himself, not in order to work but to pass

through the centre of his own soul and lose himself in the mystery and secrecy

and infinite, transcendent reality of God living and working within him. (‘Poetry

and Contemplation: A Reappraisal’ 350)

It is as though, for Merton, the ‘work’ of poetry still requires a turning back from the

divine at a certain stage of spiritual development, whereas contemplative prayer

passes to another level. A dual vocation creates frustration:

Consequently, if the mystic happens to be, at the same time, an artist, when

prayer calls him within himself to the secrecy of God’s presence, his art will be

tempted to start working and producing and studying the ‘creative’ possibilities

of this experience. And therefore immediately the whole thing runs the risk of

being frustrated and destroyed. (350–51)

Merton goes on to imagine an artist, perhaps a version of himself, who

falls from contemplation and returns to himself as an artist. Instead of passing

through his own soul into the abyss of the infinite actuality of God Himself, he

will remain there a moment, only to emerge again into the exterior world of

multiple created things whose variety once more dissipates his energies until

they are lost in perplexity and dissatisfaction. (351)

It is as though Merton fears that this world of ‘multiple created things’ is fractured

and any calling to address it will result in fracture and division as well. Merton admits

that the artist not called to the higher reaches of contemplation can be blessed by his

‘lower’ vocation: ‘If he is called to be an artist, then his art will lead him to sanctity, if

he uses it as a Christian should’(353). However, the difficulties of a perceived double

calling remain for those such as Merton, who continues to consider them ultimately

incompatible. Interestingly though, Merton’s own inability to feel comfortable with a

dual vocation does not stop him supposing that God can in fact reconcile the two, as

he did, Merton observes, with St John of the Cross:

It remains true that at a certain point in the interior life, the instinct to create and

communicate enters into conflict with the call to mystical union with God. But

God himself can resolve the conflict. And He does. Nor does He need any advice

from us in order to do so. (353)

Perhaps this trust in the unknown but God-given integration of the two

callings was enough for Merton to continue with his poetry-writing. A few years later,

he hinted at a more settled perspective on poets and poetry: ‘at one time I thought I

ought to give up writing poetry because it might not be compatible with the life of a

monk, but I don’t think this anymore’, he comments in a letter (probably to an

enquiring student) of 1963 (Letter to ‘My Dear Friend’). Arguably then, there is a

sense of progression and partial resolution of the apparent conflict. Later Merton

seems more comfortable with the role of the poet-contemplative, although perhaps not

entirely so.

To trace this development through the many poems that Merton wrote is

challenging. I will consider some of Merton’s poetry with relation to his awareness of

division: not only between poetry and prayer, but also, within the poetry itself, of

division between subject and simile, and more generally in Merton’s approach to the

feminine. Merton’s changing poetic presentations of women, from Marian poetry and

feminine aspects of divinity to individual human connections, illustrates his awareness

of divisions and his attempts to heal them. I will concentrate on some of Merton’s

earlier lyric poems and a couple of prose poetry extracts, and also look at the Eighteen

Poems (1985) which document his experiences with a more direct poetics that have

previously been little discussed.

Marian Poetry

The figure of the Virgin Mary, however idealized, is a highly significant female

presence in Catholic spirituality and iconography. She was a considerable inspiration

in Merton’s own poetry, especially his earlier work. Merton’s dedicating of poetic

imagination to the Virgin pre-dates his life as a monk. To look at a very early poem,

the ‘Song for Our Lady of Cobre’, published in Thirty Poems, was written while

Merton visited Cuba in 1940. Its inspiration was the shrine of the black Virgin La

Caridad del Cobre. The poem has a notable concision and patterning. Rather than a

direct evocation of the Virgin, it is a short lyric making use of parallelism, simile,

comparison and antithesis, and coming to rest in a sense of mysterious flight into the

heavens. Its structure is built on likeness and unlikeness: ‘The white girls sing as shrill

as water / The black girls talk as quiet as clay’ (ll. 4–5). White and black girls are

linked, by simile, to elements of air, water, and earth, and to each other. The similes

are both simple and puzzling: ‘The white girls open their arms like clouds, / The black

girls close their eyes like wings’ (ll. 6–7). The concluding stanza offers a poetic

resolution to the previous statements: the stars stand in a ring, indicative of unity and

the earthly images are no longer puzzles but ‘pieces of the mosaic’, finally lifted in

flight to a heavenly level (ll. 10–13). However, simile and comparison remain

preeminent in the poem. They each predicate a difference, a splitting, between the

subject and the image it is likened to, between gestures and their images, and of

course the black and white girls offer a visual difference between themselves. There

is, therefore, an awareness of duality and alternative throughout the poem, perhaps

reflective of Merton’s sense of duality and alternative perspective in both his

spirituality and his poetics, the uplift at the end of the poem providing some hoped-for

sense of transcending these alternatives.

Another early Marian poem, ‘The Blessed Virgin Mary Compared to a

Window’ (Thirty Poems) has an obvious indebtedness to Hopkins’s poem ‘The

Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air We Breathe’. Robert Lowell, an admirer of

Merton’s early poetry, made a connection between this poem and the Metaphysical

poets too, with Donne (‘Of My Name in the Window’) and Crashaw especially.1 The

sustained ‘conceit’ in Merton’s poem is one where Mary’s will is ‘simple as a

window’(l. 1) and her life is to ‘die, like glass, by light’ (l. 3). The Virgin is compared

(ingeniously) to a window; but the two must remain separate concepts for the poem to

work. A rather laboured attempt to provide a linguistic synthesis, calling on ‘the sun,

my son, my substance’ (ll. 39) at the end, is unconvincing, and the images stack up at

the poem’s conclusion in a fragmentary syntax which echoes a semantic failure to

achieve simplicity: ‘He’ll be their Brother, / My light – the Lamb of their Apocalypse’

(ll. 42–3). Merton seems to lack confidence in his poetics and his vision here.

‘Aubade: The Annunciation’ (A Man in the Divided Sea; 1946) is another

example of an early Merton poem, and a Marian poem, which relies heavily upon

simile to create a sense of heightened attention: ‘Prayers fly in the mind like larks, /

Thoughts hide in the height like hawks’ (ll. 3–4) ‘… Desires glitter in her mind / Like

morning stars’ (ll. 8–9). The inner movements of the Virgin’s soul are patterned

against the natural world. The moment of the annunciation is heralded by another

simile comparing a supernatural moment with one of natural impact: ‘Until her name

is suddenly spoken / Like a meteor falling’ (ll. 10–11). Although the poem is well

structured, with this central couplet providing a memorable turn in the narrative, the

reliance on simile continues throughout, once again indicating that spirituality and the

visible (‘created’) world have many parallels, but are fundamentally different. This

persistence of simile and thus of an intrinsic difference between spiritual and earthly

worlds in the early poems is prominent in Merton’s poetics. In 1949, however, Merton

published ‘To the Immaculate Virgin, on a Winter Night’ (The Tears of the Blind

Lions; 1949), which, perhaps bound by the urgency of global conflict (‘the whole

world is tumbling down’ l. 24), seems to offer a more synthesised image of sense,

nature, and spirituality: metaphor is the central device here rather than simile: ‘Words

turn to ice in my dry throat / Praying for a land without prayer’ (ll. 25–6). In a time of

external international crisis, perceptions of the inner life are less easily set forth, and

here there is a sense of transformation rather than comparison, albeit an uneasy,

violently forced one. For a more meditative sense of metaphorical elision we will

need to look at a different approach to the feminine in Merton’s subsequent poetry;

poetry written after his own ‘hiatus’ as a practising poet.

‘Hagia Sophia’

Merton’s poetry of the feminine was not restricted to images of the Virgin and it is

notable that he addressed new and more complex presentations in his later poetry. In

the lengthy prose poem ‘Hagia Sophia’ (Emblems of a Season of Fury, (1963)) it is

Holy Wisdom, a feminine aspect of divinity, who is the subject of the poetry. The

poem developed from a letter written to artist Victor Hammer who in the 1950s had

painted a triptych in which the centre panel shows the figure of a woman crowning a

young boy. In his letter of 1959 Merton wrote: ‘Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom) is God

Himself. God is not only a Father but a Mother. He is both at the same time, and it is

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this “feminine principle” in the divinity that is the Hagia Sophia’ (Lentfoehr 47). The

poem ‘Hagia Sophia’ continues this line of thought, beginning:

There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek

namelessness, a hidden wholeness. This mysterious Unity and Integrity is

Wisdom, the Mother of all, Natura naturans...This is at once my own being, my

own nature, and the Gift of my Creator’s Thought and Art within me, speaking

as Hagia Sophia, speaking as my sister, Wisdom. (The Collected Poems 363)

This opening section to ‘1. Dawn. The Hour of Lauds’ plays with statement

and paradox rather than the more precise divisions acknowledged by simile. Rather

than being likened to something separate from itself, the invisible is within the visible,

the Creator’s thought and art are within the being and nature of the narrator. This is a

more integrated use of poetic language, although it is not consistently sustained

throughout the poem, which is a long composition following the pattern of the

monastic Divine Office.

Merton meditates on what he calls ‘the voice of this my sister’. Awakened, he

says,

I am like all mankind awakening from all the dreams that ever were dreamed in

all the nights of the world … like all minds coming back together into awareness

from all distractions, cross-purposes and confusions, into unity of love. It is like

the first morning of the world … and like the Last Morning of the world when all

the fragments of Adam will return from death at the voice of Hagia Sophia, and

will know where they stand. (364)

Here the use of simile (like all minds, like the first morning) returns, as does a

differentiation between a generic mankind, and a mysterious feminine force, who,

while named as Holy Wisdom, is also identified at times as like Eve, like the Blessed

Virgin, like a mother and like a child. This feminine wisdom is also the healing hand

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of a nurse: ‘in the cool hand of the nurse there is the touch of all life, the touch of

spirit’, a potent force for ‘the helpless man who lies asleep in his bed without

awareness and without defense’ (364). However the poem takes an interesting turn

from this imagined contemporary scenario towards medieval mystical literature and

its reframing of the feminine within Christ and the divine.

Merton’s language goes on to offer, as a kind of creative fusion, the startling

blurring of gender in divinity found most strongly, although not exclusively, in the

medieval English mystic Julian of Norwich. Her phrase is here, of ‘Jesus our mother’

although she is not acknowledged by name. Note the parenthesis around this short

paragraph, as though this powerful linguistic and conceptual idea could so easily be

ignored, while in fact it is key:

(When the recluses of fourteenth-century England heard their Church Bells and

looked out upon the wolds and fens under a kind sky, they spoke in their hearts

to ‘Jesus our Mother’. It was Sophia that had awakened in their childlike hearts.)

(367)

Ross Labrie observes of this poem that Merton acknowledges ‘the imprint of the

divine intelligence within his own psyche as female’ (228). He identifies this as a

subversive concept: ‘Merton’s …goal was to restore wholeness to the image of God

by replacing the patriarchal image that had been passed down through the ages in the

West’ (Labrie 228). In fact Merton was recovering what the medieval mystics,

particularly Julian, had previously explored. But Merton does not simply suggest a

fusion of male and female aspects. It is in the child-Sophia, awakened in the human

heart, that Merton’s thinking on unity and creativity develops. Sophia in Merton’s

writing is purported to be many things, but this childlike manifestation of her is more

confident, and presented with childlike conviction: ‘Sophia, the feminine child, is

playing in the world, obvious and unseen, playing at all times before the Creator’

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(368). As a child, she still embodies paradox (she is both obvious and unseen) but her

creativity is a constant characteristic (‘playing at all times’; not ‘working’ or

‘studying’ as Merton had elsewhere described poetic practice). Her creativity is

looked over, looked after, by God, the primary Creator and her state of prayer is

simultaneously a state of creativity. We have in a complex and richly allusive poem

many aspects of Hagia Sophia, some of which present comparison and paradox and

some of which are incorporations of female imagery in the divine and the self,

echoing earlier mystics and visionaries. We also have an indication that creativity

need not be serious work or study but something more childlike and spontaneous, and

in alignment with the creative work of God.

Grace’s House’

Children frequently feature in Merton’s poems, sometimes asking questions or

learning from teachers. They are the focus of some searing poems of social and racial

conscience, such as ‘Picture of a Black Child with a White Doll’ (Sensation Time at

the Home (1968) published posthumously only in The Collected Poems (1977)) and

the lengthy Original Child Bomb (1962). Children are also, through their creative

play, instruments of peace, as in Merton’s poem ‘Paper Cranes’ (Appendix II,

Collected Poems) in which a child’s hands ends all wars by folding the wings of an

origami crane.

A favourite poem of his own was ‘Grace’s House’ (Emblems of a Season of

Fury, 1963), where Merton describes a child’s drawing of a house on a hill. The

drawing was in fact a real one made by the daughter of one of his correspondents and

so like the artwork which inspired ‘Hagia Sophia’, the inspiration for an ekphrastic

poem, complete with windows and door and surrounded by grass, flowers, trees and

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animals too, but with no route up to the house through the landscape of the paper:

‘Alas, there is no road to Grace’s House!’ (l. 50)

The tone of this poem is more conversational than ‘Hagia Sophia’ and the

earlier Marian poems (‘I must not omit to mention a rabbit / And two birds …’ ll. 47–

8). Yet its generally simple voice still captures a sense of the marvellous (‘this

archetypal, cosmic hill / This womb of mysteries’ (ll. 45–6)) as well as suggesting that

Grace’s House, with, of course, ‘Grace’ representing a state of spiritual enlightenment

as well as a child, cannot be accessed by any linear route. There is a significant white

space between the enjambed ‘because’ of its penultimate line and the final line of the

poem, echoing the white space on the original drawing between the house and the

river. The house is a ‘paradise’ as well as a ‘child’s world’ (‘O paradise, O child’s

world!’ (l. 37)).

The image of the window is one connection between ‘Grace’s House’ and

‘The Blessed Virgin Mary Compared to a Window’, although it is the ‘crystal /

Water’ (ll. 35–6) which seems the more spiritually potent image in the later poem,

depicting, as it does, a stream infused with light until it has the qualities of radiant

glass. Grace’s childlike ‘playing’ before her Creator has created the house and the

stream that surrounds it. The element of spontaneity symbolized by the playing child

offers a possible resolution to the divided nature of poetry and prayer. Grace’s

playing produces a spontaneous creativity that does not primarily seek to

communicate or instruct.

This spontaneity is identified as genuine creativity in some of Merton’s later

writing. In ‘Message to Poets’ from February 1964, Merton writes: ‘We who are poets

know that the reason for a poem is not discovered until the poem itself exists’ (The

Literary Essays 371). Nor is this spontaneity restricted to the educated elite. Rather

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‘poetry is the flowering of ordinary possibilities. It is the fruit of ordinary and natural

choice’ (373). In fact in this essay Merton depicts poetry as a gift, one that leads

directly towards, rather than away from, contemplation and silence: ‘Let us be proud

of the words that are given to us for nothing, not to teach anyone, not to confute

anyone, not to prove anyone absurd, but to point beyond all objects into the silence

where nothing can be said’ (374).

Interestingly, Merton also offers the image of river in this message: ‘the

Heraclitean river which is never crossed twice’ (374) as the resource to which poets

should go, and ‘when the poet puts his foot in that ever-moving river, poetry itself is

born out of the flashing water’ (374). This water is, to use a favourite Merton phrase:

‘the water of life. Dance in it’ (374). Perhaps, too, this is the same water as the crystal

stream in ‘Grace’s House’. However Merton’s poetry developed from this graceful

but de-sexualised child’s play to engage with a more adult female figure and a

concomitantly more problematized poetics.

Eighteen Poems

Merton had wide-ranging interests not only in poetry and prayer, but also psychology

and the symbolism of dreams. He recorded striking dreams, sometimes attempting a

Jungian analysis of them. In 1958 he dreamt about meeting and embracing a beautiful

Jewish woman named Proverb: ‘On a porch at Douglaston I am embraced with

determined and virginal passion by a young, Jewish girl. She clings to me and will not

let me go, and I get to like the idea’ (Learning to Love 176). Merton was fascinated by

her, drawn to the simplicity of her name, and wrote letters to her in his journal,.

Critics have debated the meaning of this dream. Was it a manifestation of Jungian

unity – animus and anima – or simply an expression of physical longing? Robert

Waldron identifies Merton’s dream and his subsequent engagement with it as an

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important development towards psychological wholeness: ‘It symbolically portrays

Merton’s willingness to accept the feminine’ (The Wounded Heart of Thomas Merton

73). Waldron also points out that Merton’s anima, represented as a young woman, is

an undeveloped aspect of himself, demanding attention. Ross Labrie observes that as

an adjunct to conceiving the divine as both masculine and feminine, ‘Merton had

more than once noted the “absurdity” of his incompleteness as a celibate monk, cut

off from intimacy with women’ (Labrie 229). There is no reason why Merton’s

dream should be restricted to one interpretation although clearly it points towards

wanting to address a sense of incompleteness through an expression of the feminine.

In real life Merton experienced a close, romantically charged relationship with

a young nurse (Margie Smith, ‘M.’ in Merton’s writings, specifically the journal

Learning to Love) in 1966. Biographers such as Shaw have sensationalized the event.2

According to Shaw the romance is critical to an understanding not just of Merton but

of modern humanity: ‘Merton’s saga reflects a confusion in all of us, (Shaw iv). For

Labrie, on the other hand, Merton understood that ‘it was important for him, caught

up in his own feelings as he was, to see himself as she, through her notes and letters,

had come to see him and so thereby fill out the picture of his own reality’ (Labrie

229). Merton’s encountering of this young woman triggered a series of poems

(Eighteen Poems). Although unpublished as a sequence in his lifetime, Merton had

agreed to a small number of finely printed and produced booklets of these poems by

his friends Victor and Carolyn Hammer. New Directions Press published 250 copies

of Eighteen Poems in 1985. The entire sequence was not available in a widely

published volume until the New Selected Poems in 2005. In them, various divisions

including those of contemplation and human connection, male and female, and poetry

and prayer were once more raised. Whatever the ethics and ‘sin’ involved in the

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relationship, the poems seek to embody and memorialise Merton’s desire. Waldron

sees the poem as a quasi-sacramental act,

he attempted to enflesh [M.] in his poems … As a priest he is endowed with the

power of transubstantiation. As an artist, he is gifted with the talent to capture

M.’s beauty, her love? for him and his love for her; in a poetic transubstantiation,

he creates his holy book of poems. (The Exquisite Risk of Love 4–5)

The poems signify a distinct moment in Merton’s life and poetics, and although he

never explicitly allied himself with contemporary confessional poets such as Lowell,

their poetic exploration of personal trauma surely had some influence on Merton’s

own approach.

The first of these‘confessional’ poems, ‘With the World in my Bloodstream’,

was published in The Collected Poems as part of the posthumous Sensation Time at

the Home and Other New Poems. In this poem, the image of the stream changed to

that of an internal flow of being and experience. Merton, unwell, is emotionally

unsettled by his meeting with M., who, as a real-life nurse, is literally the figure

Merton had envisaged as an embodiment of Hagia Sophia, as we have seen in the

poem of that name: ‘in the cool hand of the nurse there is the touch of all life, the

touch of spirit’. Merton is once again literally ‘the helpless man who lies asleep in his

bed without awareness and without defense.’ (The Collected Poems 364).

The dislocation presented in the poem is more than just physical. Merton had

been in hospital with spinal problems. His blood is full of ‘questions’ despite the

assertion that it also runs ‘With Christ and with the stars’ plasm’ (l. 34). It is a

disquieting poem, its speaker lamenting even his ‘lost Zen breathing’ (l. 56). There is

no lucent window or child’s light-heartedness. Merton’s emphasis is on question and

fracture: ‘I wonder who the hell I am’ (l. 14). There is perhaps an echo here of

Lowell’s despairing Miltonic appropriation, ‘I myself am Hell, in his seminal

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confessional poem, ‘Skunk Hour’ (Life Studies, 1959). There is little punctuation in

the poem and less enjambment, so the dislocation is reinforced stylistically. In his

reading of the poem, Waldron detects the echo of Eliot’s Prufrock in its uncertainty,

self-questioning and the image of the prone patient which starts both poems. I would

suggest that Auden’s influence is present too: the plain language, and the

interweaving of setting with biographical moment may reflect this major poet’s

presence in Merton’s writing. Eliot’s metrical engagements were various but

frequently used free blank verse, a loose version of iambic pentameter. Auden, and

here, Merton, frequently uses a line which utilises three and four beat stresses in its

pared down pulse: ‘Lends to the universal tone / A flat impersonal pulse’ (ll. 7–8) are

Audenesque tetrameter and trimeter lines. Interestingly, ‘the hermit’s sensual ecstasy’

from Auden’s ‘Lullaby’ (Another Time, 1940) is essentially the paradoxical subject of

Merton’s sequence3. There is a connection of image as well as form between the two

poets.

Another poem in this sequence evokes the image of nurse and broken patient:

‘Because I am always broken / I obey my nurse. (‘I Always Obey My Nurse’ ll. 1–5).

This poem, with its simple lines and use of refrain, is typical of Merton’s poetry in

this series and Merton’s nurse here, who ‘in her grey eyes and her mortal breast /

Holds an immortal love the wise have fractured’ (ll. 19–20) does offer some hope of

redemption from the brokenness, in a spark that ‘leaps from one wound into another /

knitting the broken bones’ (ll. 8–9).

There is the influence of Dylan Thomas, a known favourite poet of Merton, in

this poem, not in the linguistic richness of Thomas’s lines, but in Thomas’s use of

emphatic refrain lines. Merton’s phrase ‘And God did not make death’; l. 6, repeated

with permutations at ll. 14, 22, 26, 34, 41 echoes Thomas’s refrain ‘And Death Shall

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Have No Dominion’ in his poem of that name (Twenty-Five Poems, 1936).

Thematically, Merton’s exploration of the ‘little spark / that flies from fracture to

fracture’ (ll. 23–4) echoes Thomas’s interest in the ‘life force’ that drives both bloom

and decay in, for example, ‘The Force that through the Green Fuse drives the Flower’

(18 Poems, 1934).

As Waldron observes, obedience for Merton would normally be a monastic

commitment to follow the directions of the Abbot. Here, his obedience is to a

feminine figure, who may still represent the Divine will, but certainly shifts Merton’s

allegiance from the exclusively masculine structure of a Trappist monastery: ‘Merton

rejects not only his abbot specifically but also in general the masculine-dominated

world, in which he has for so long lived, by turning towards the anima, represented by

M’ (The Exquisite Risk of Love 26).4 According to Waldron, M. is the embodiment of

Merton’s anima in the same way that Proverb had been in his dream eight years

previously.

Merton’s infatuation did not last. Its dwindling led to a number of poems

expressing the agony of

bitter

division

…………

We are two half-people wandering

In two lost worlds. (‘Evening: Long Distance Call’, ll. 29–30; 32–3).

‘Six Night Letters’ comprises the longest of Eighteen Poems, although it can itself be

read as a sequence of six. Merton’s voice remains personal rather than philosophical

or fictionalised. However his figurative language is both Biblical and earthly (‘O my

divided rib’, ‘Six Night Letters’ ii, l. 10). Merton struggles with the duality and

separation he likens to Adam’s rib, removed from the being – and the body – it was

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once a part of, in order to be reunited in a relationship of love between two beings (‘to

be taken apart / to be together’, ll. 11–12). The implication is that being separated

from a loved one requires acquiescence to a painful dividing, but that a different sort

of union will ultimately occur. Merton may have been thinking about a specific

human relationship, but the concept of painful divisions within the self is a wider

theme, tallying with the concerns of Merton’s work overall. The resolution offered by

this poem is a hoped for one, of wish-fulfilment rather than a realistic outcome, with

Merton nonetheless searching for a sense of wholeness.

In his difficult emotional situation, Merton finds solace in writing: ‘if I write

for you / I can write something,’ he admits in ‘Aubade on a Cloudy Morning’ (ll. 39–

40). But this writing is neither spontaneity nor play. Instead, conflict and division are

to the fore. The fourth poem in Merton’s ‘Six Night Letters’ brings the act of writing

into a clear physicality. Although the nature of letter-writing signals a physical

separation from the poem-letter’s recipient, the poem is in itself a focused poetic text,

eschewing similes for the more sensual reality of pouring ‘a little gold rum / over two

blocks of ice’ (ll. 1–2) and wondering whether the poem’s recipient will be able to

smell the twist of lemon scenting the paper. When more figurative language is used,

in the second stanza, it acknowledges the underlying search to find one’s home and

centre (‘my lost house’, l. 18), a place of focus and grace which is associated with

wholenes. This is an echo of ‘Grace’s House’ in Merton’s earlier poem. And a desire

for wholeness is, as Waldron asserts, very much behind Merton’s intensity of feeling

for M. Identifying the relationship as signifying a Jungian mid-life crisis, he observes

that the trajectory of the affair and also of Eighteen Poems show how he ‘is trying to

become a complete and whole man, a “discovery” he needs more than anything else in

his life’ (The Exquisite Risk of Love 125). In Waldron’s opinion this discovery

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corresponds to an innate self-knowledge that, though hard won, is the embodiment of

holistic wisdom: ‘There is an authority higher than the Church’s authority, and it is

the self that resides within us all’ (125). In Merton’s poetry, the romantic split and

religious disobedience has paradoxically forced a direct and authentic poetic voice.

Light

Merton’s relationship with M. did not continue, but his quest for wholeness of self

and purpose did. However, it is rather unclear as to whether his poetry provides any

resolution of this late complication and its aftermath, a pervading sense of loneliness

and division. The Eighteen Poems end with ‘For M. on a cold grey morning’, an

ambivalent title rather than a hopeful one. The New Selected Poems which made the

sequence widely available for the first time is In the Dark before Dawn, a title that

does not promise a resolution to night-time anguish. ‘Six Night Letters: iv’ identifies

‘the dark woods’ of self-division, but other Merton poems return with renewed

emphasis to imagery which invokes not dark, but light. In the long sequence of lyric

and prose poetry Cables to the Ace (1968), a work Merton was writing around the

same time as Eighteen Poems, section 75 indicates a continuation of Merton’s quest.

The section reads:

I seek you in the hospital where you work. Will you be a patch of white moving

rapidly across the end of the next hall? I begin again in every shadow,

surrounded by the sound of scandal and the buzzer calling all doctors to the

presence of alarm. (The Collected Poems 445)

The ‘patch of white’ is probably a nurse, as indicated by the hospital location.

But this ‘patch of white’ could also signify pure light, moving as it does through a

window-frame along the walls of a building. Such light offers an intangible insight, a

touch of grace in the home of the broken (‘the hospital where you work’), though such

grace will not necessarily adhere to structures and hierarchies. This light moves

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rapidly, and is not a permanent fixture. The subsequent section, also in the form of a

prose poem, seems to refer even more explicitly to Merton’s relationship, as he writes,

‘surely a big bird with all the shades of light will beat against our windows. We will

then gladly consent to the kindness of rays and recover the warm knowledge of each

other we once had under those young trees in another May’ (446).

Hypothesising the future, Merton’s text still returns to the past. The text

attempts a synthesis of memory and desire in its verbal tableau and also a

synaesthestic fusion of light and bodily sensation, as though its participants could

bask in the bird-borne rays. The section returns to the big bird: ‘It is a big bird flies

right out of the center of the sun’ (446). Cloaked in parentheses, the bird lingers in the

memory as an important vehicle of light. It is perhaps the Holy Spirit, perhaps an

angelic presence, perhaps the holistic self longed for by Merton, the poet, monk and

human being.

Light moves swiftly across the hospital walls, but a subsequent entry in Cables

to the Ace (no. 80) offers by contrast how Christ-borne light in a natural setting is a

calm and benign event: ‘Their branches bear his light / Without harm’ (ll. 4–5).

Light and illumination, in the sense of understanding and transformation, is an

important image for Merton, and here some kind of healing is again offered. Light,

sunlight or white light especially, is a blend of all colours, a unitive fusion of refracted

rays or fractured psyches. Merton’s late poetry shows great complexity and linguistic

experimentation and I would hesitate to locate a single dominant strand or image

within it. However, in the slightly earlier collection Emblems of a Season of Fury

(1963) the poem ‘O Sweet Irrational Worship’ – the title recalls the poem of the same

title by the American poet E.E. Cummings – suggests that this light-enabled merging

can take place within the poet, who remains distinctly genderless in this lyric: ‘By

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ceasing to question the sun / I have become light’ (ll. 3–4). There is a unitive

perspective in the poem and also a Keatsian negative capability. Merton the poet and

Merton the contemplative have transcended the normal boundaries of individual

identity to become light. This use of light is the appropriate point on which to end an

investigation into divisions and differences in Merton’s poetics. It is also an example

of the ‘self-effacement that opens onto the social virtues of love, compassion, and

solidarity’ (Fredman 192).5 Beyond names or gender, beyond questions, the speaker,

rooted in nature and the elements, has become light and spontaneously generates

‘lighted things’ (l. 8) and acts of ‘foolish worship’ (l. 31). These ‘lighted things’ could

be poems, or prayers, or acts of compassion, perhaps transcending them all.

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Works Cited

Auden, W.H. Another Time. London: Random House, 1940.

Cooper, David D. Thomas Merton's Art of Denial: The Evolution of a Radical

Humanist. Athens: University of Georgia, 1989.

Fredman, Stephen. 'Neo-Paganism, Buddhism and Christianity'. In A Concise

Companion to Twentieth-century American Poetry. Ed. Stephen Fredman.

Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. 191–211.

Labrie, Ross. Thomas Merton and the Inclusive Imagination. Columbia: University of

Missouri, 2001.

Lentfoehr, Therese. Words and Silence: On the Poetry of Thomas Merton. New York:

New Directions,1979.

Lowell, Robert. Life Studies. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1959.

Lowell, Robert. ‘The Verses of Thomas Merton.’ In Commonweal 42 (22 June 1945).

240–42.

The Marian Library / International Marian Research Institute. ‘Index of Thomas

Merton’s Marian Poetry.’ In Thomas Merton’s Marian Poetry. 4 April 2011.

Web. 27 Aug. 2013.

<http://campus.udayton.edu/mary/resources/poetry/merton.html#toc>

Merton, Thomas. Cables to the Ace, or Familiar Liturgies of Misunderstanding. New

York: New Directions, 1968.

---. The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton. New York: New Directions, 1977.

---. In the Dark before Dawn: New Selected Poems of Thomas Merton. Ed. Lynn R.

Szabo. New York: New Directions, 2005.

---. Emblems of a Season of Fury. Norfolk, Connecticut: James Laughlin, 1963.

---. Figures for an Apocalypse. New York: New Directions, 1948.

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---. The Geography of Lograire. New York: New Directions, 1969.

---. Learning to Love: The Journals of Thomas Merton, Volume Six: 1966–1967. Ed.

Bochen, Christine M. San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997. Print.

---. Letter to ‘My Dear Friend’ (1963). In The Road to Joy: The Letters of Thomas

Merton to New and Old Friends. Ed. Robert E. Daggy. New York: Farrar,

Strauss & Giroux, 1989. 90.

---. A Man in the Divided Sea. New York : New Directions, 1946.

---. ‘Message to Poets’ (1964). The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton. Ed. Patrick

Hart. New York: New Directions, 1981. 371–4.

---. ‘Nature and Art in William Blake: An Essay in Interpretation’ (1939). In The

Literary Essays of Thomas Merton. 387–453.

---. New Seeds of Contemplation. New York, NY: New Directions, 1972.

---. Original Child Bomb: Points for Meditation to Be Scratched on the Walls of a

Cave. New York: New Directions, 1962.

---. ‘Poetry and Contemplation: A Reappraisal’ (1958). In The Literary Essays of

Thomas Merton. 338–54.

---. ‘Poetry and the Contemplative Life’. In Commonweal (July 4 1947). Web.

September 2014. <https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/poetry-and-

contemplative-life>.

---. ‘Poetry, Symbolism and Typology’ (1953). In The Literary Essays of Thomas

Merton. 327–37.

---. The Tears of the Blind Lions. New York : New Directions, 1949.

---. Thirty Poems. New York: New Directions, 1944.

---. Turning Toward the World: The Journals of Thomas Merton, Volume Four:

1960–1963. Ed. Victor A. Kramer. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997.

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Norris, Kathleen, In the Dark Before Dawn: New Selected Poems of Thomas Merton

[complete]

Shaw, Mark. Beneath the Mask of Holiness: Thomas Merton and the Forbidden Love

Affair That Set Him Free. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Sutton, Walter. ‘Thomas Merton and the American Epic Tradition: The Last Poems’.

In Contemporary Literature 14 (1), Winter 1973. 55–6.

Thomas, Dylan. Twenty-Five Poems. London : J. M. Dent & Sons, 1936

---. 18 Poems. London: Sunday Referee and Parton Bookshop 1934.

Waldron, Robert G. Thomas Merton: The Exquisite Risk of Love: The Chronicle of a

Monastic Romance. London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2012.

Waldron, Robert G. The Wounded Heart of Thomas Merton. New York: Paulist,

2011.

Woodcock, George. Thomas Merton, Monk and Poet: A Critical Study. New York:

Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1978.

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