Reading W.S.

Merwin in a New Century:

American and European Perspectives
Cheri Colby Langdell
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AMERICAN LITERATURE READINGS IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Reading W.S. Merwin

in a New Century
American and European
Perspectives

Edited by Cheri Colby Langdell

American Literature Readings in the 21st Century

Series Editor
Linda Wagner-Martin
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, NC, USA
American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century publishes
works by contemporary authors that help shape critical opinion regarding
American literature of the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-­
first centuries. The books treat fiction, poetry, memoir, drama and criti-
cism itself—ranging from William Dow’s Narrating Class in American
Fiction and Amy Strong’s Race and Identity in Hemingway’s Fiction, to
Maisha L. Wester’s African American Gothic and Guy Davidson’s Queer
Commodities: Contemporary U. S. Fiction, Consumer Culture, and Lesbian
Subcultures.
Beginning in 2004, the series is now well established and continues to
welcome new book proposals. Manuscripts run between 80,000 and
90,000 words, while the Pivot format accommodates shorter books of
25,000 to 50,000 words. This series also accepts essay collections; among
our bestsellers have been collections on David Foster Wallace, Norman
Mailer, Contemporary U.S. Latina/o Literary Criticism, Kurt Vonnegut,
Kate Chopin, Carson McCullers, George Saunders, and Arthur Miller
(written by members of the Miller Society).
All texts are designed to create valuable interactions globally as well as
within English-speaking countries.

Editorial Board:
Professor Derek Maus, SUNY Potsdam, USA
Professor Thomas Fahy, Long Island University, USA
Professor Deborah E. McDowell, University of Virginia and Director of
the Carter G. Woodson Institute, USA
Professor Laura Rattray, University of Glasgow, UK
 Cheri Colby Langdell
Editor

Reading W.S. Merwin

in a New Century
American and European Perspectives
Editor
Cheri Colby Langdell
Pasadena, CA, USA

ISSN 2634-579X     ISSN 2634-5803 (electronic)

American Literature Readings in the 21st Century
ISBN 978-3-031-13156-1    ISBN 978-3-031-13157-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13157-8

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 Be of this brightness dyed
Whose unrecking fever
Flings gold before it goes …
Islands are not forever,
Nor this light again,
Tide-set, brief summer,
Be of their secret
That fears no other.
—W.S. Merwin, “Summer” (CP I 170)
Rain through the morning
And in the long pool an old toad singing
Happiness old as water
—“By the Front Door” (2010, CP II 617)
 For
Athena, Monica, and Oliver
In Memory of W.S. Merwin
 Acknowledgments

I wish to acknowledge Professor Steve Axelrod, who said, “Merwin needs

a champion. You be his champion!” I also wish to thank Molly Beck, com-
missioning editor at Palgrave Macmillan, for her sustaining help and dedi-
cation to this book. She embodies graciousness and professionalism. I
thank Esther Rani for her professionalism and promptness in replying to
all of my inquiries and her helpfulness. And thanks to Springer Nature for
their interest in saving the earth and combating global warming. Merwin’s
life was dedicated to these efforts, too. I also gratefully acknowledge Sara
Tekula of the Merwin Conservancy for all her gracious help with the
chronology.
I also wish to thank poet and writer Susan Suntree for her editorial help
and inspiration. My thanks, too, to all the patient librarians at the Charles
Young Research Library at the University of California, Los Angeles, who
helped me acquire many materials and helped with research. I would also
like to acknowledge Jeff Gray of Seton Hall University, for his bright.
innovative ideas and unflagging interest in our project.
Thanks, too, to the Pacific Association of Ancient and Modern
Languages (PAMLA) without which this book would probably not exist.
At the 2019 San Diego meeting of PAMLA, I chaired a panel titled “A
Celebration of the Work of W.S. Merwin.” At that event, Thomas Festa,
Tim Langdell, Jeffrey Gray, and Daniel Lambert presented their papers on
the poetry of W.S. Merwin, and out of this session this book was born.
Nancy Goldfarb contacted me about this time; and although her paper
was too late to be included in 2019, in 2021 Nancy Goldfarb and I hosted
two panels on Ecopoetics at PAMLA, where Tom Festa read his “Epic of

ix
x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Dispossession” and Nancy Goldfarb read an early version of her chapter

for this book. Nancy Goldfarb’s dedication and interest in ecopoetics have
bring this book to completion. Thanks, too, to Craig Svonkin and Jeremiah
Axelrod for their sterling leadership and support of PAMLA, which helped
so much in our launching of this book.
Last, I gratefully acknowledge our daughter the Very Rev. Melissa
Campbell Langdell, who kindly read and commented on chapters, and the
unflagging help of my husband Tim Langdell, who helped in every con-
ceivable way. Without them, this book wouldn’t have been possible.
 Contents

1 Introduction  1
Cheri Colby Langdell

Part I Merwin and Other Poets  25

2 “High
 Company”: W.S. Merwin, John Berryman and the
Art of Poetry 27
Philip Coleman

3 The
 Value and Forms of Contact in the Work of William
Carlos Williams and W.S. Merwin 43
Ian D. Copestake

4 The
 Lost Steps: W. S. Merwin and the Journey Backward 61
Jeffrey Gray

Part II Nature, Zen and Ecopoetics  77

5 Bound
 to Reverence: Not Knowing, Emptiness, Time,
and Nature in W.S. Merwin’s Poetry 79
Cheri Colby Langdell

xi
xii Contents

6 Merwin’s Ecopoetic Conservancy111

Thomas Festa

7 Reverence
 for Nature: Trees in the Poetry of W.S. Merwin
and Others133
Nancy D. Goldfarb

8 The
 Fox Sleeps in Plain Sight: Zen in the Poetry of
W. S. Merwin159
Tim Langdell

Part III The Poet’s Craft 179

9 “A
 Sense of Being Linked with People”: Poetry,
Listening, Intonation181
Natalie Gerber

10 Lyric
 “Unpunctuation”: W. S. Merwin’s Early New Yorker
Correspondence201
Amanda Golden

11 W.S.
 Merwin’s Homecoming in the Heart of Europe211
Diederik Oostdijk

12 Resilience
 of the Oracular in W.S. Merwin’s “Forgotten
Language”229
Alan Soldofsky

Part IV The Sense of an Ending 259

13 W.S.
 Merwin’s “Retirement”: Late Style and Themes in
the 1990s and After261
Michael Thurston
 Contents  xiii

14 Merwin’s
 Epic of Dispossession279
Thomas Festa

15 Memory,
 Belatedness, and Paradise in W.S. Merwin’s
Later Poetry303
James McCorkle

16 “The
 Last Days of the World”: Apocalyptic Visions in
the Poetry of W.S. Merwin and William Butler Yeats331
Daniel Lambert

Chronology349

Index359
 Notes on Contributors

Philip Coleman is a professor in the School of English, Trinity College

Dublin, where he is also a fellow. He specializes in U.S. American litera-
ture, especially poetry, short fiction, and the essay. His most recent publica-
tions include The Selected Letters of John Berryman (coedited with Calista
McRae, Harvard UP, 2020), Robert Lowell in a New Century: European
and American Perspectives (Camden House 2019), and Robert Lowell and
Irish Poetry (coedited with Eve Cobain, Peter Lang, 2019). pmcolema@tcd.ie
Ian D. Copestake is an editor of the William Carlos Williams Review
and the academic journal Bishop-Lowell Studies both published by Penn
State UP. He has served three times as president of `the William Carlos
Williams Society and is the author of the book William Carlos Williams
and the Ethics of Poetry (NY: Camden House, 2010). Based in Frankfurt
am Main, he is an independent scholar and proofreader, editor, and trans-
lator from German to English. copers@gmail.com
Thomas Festa is Professor of English at the State University of New York
at New Paltz. He is the author of The End of Learning: Milton and
Education (2006; paperback: 2014) and coeditor of three anthologies
focused on early modern English literature. A lifelong poet and student of
lyric, his current scholarly project centers on W.S. Merwin and the history
of radical poetics. festat@newpaltz.edu
Natalie Gerber is Professor of English at State University of New York,
Fredonia, where she teaches courses in professional writing, editing,
­grammar, style, and twentieth-century American poetry and literature.

xv
xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

She also directs the Honors Program. She is passionate about helping stu-
dents write their professional futures and achieve more than they thought
possible. She has served on the executive boards of the Robert Frost
Society, the Wallace Stevens Society, and Poetry by the Sea: A Global
Conference. gerber@fredonia.edu
Amanda Golden is Associate Professor of English in the College of Arts
and Sciences at the New York Institute of Technology. She is the author of
Annotating Modernism: Marginalia and Pedagogy from Virginia Woolf to
the Confessional Poets (Routledge, 2020; 2021, paperback), editor of This
Business of Words: Reassessing Anne Sexton (UPF 2016; 2018, paperback),
coeditor of The Poems of Sylvia Plath (Faber & Faber, 2024), and coeditor,
The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sylvia Plath (2022). She is Vice President of
the International Virginia Woolf Society and the Book Review Editor of
the Woolf Studies Annual. agolde01@nyit.edu
Nancy Goldfarb is a teaching professor in the Department of English at
Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), where she
teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature. Her arti-
cles on Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and Steinbeck’s The Grapes of
Wrath were published in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Nonprofit
and Voluntary Sector Quarterly. She has also published articles and pre-
sented papers on the poetry of Adrienne Rich, Lewis Carroll, Mary Oliver,
T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, and W.S. Merwin. ngoldfar@
iupui.edu
Jeffrey Gray is the author of Mastery’s End: Travel and Postwar American
Poetry (U. Georgia) and of many articles on American and Latin American
literature. His poetry has appeared in The American Poetry Review, The
Atlantic, Yale Review, Lana Turner Review, and other journals. He is the
English translator of Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s The African Shore (Yale UP) and
Chaos, a Fable (Amazon Crossing), and editor or coeditor of several
anthologies, including The News from Poems: Essays on the New American
Poetry of Engagement (U. Michigan) and the Companion to American
Poetry (Wiley-Blackwell). He is professor emeritus at Seton Hall University
and lives in Ocean Grove, New Jersey, and Alghero, Sardinia. jeffrey.
gray@shu.edu
Daniel E. Lambert is an assistant professor of English at Colorado
Technical University; a Lecturer Faculty in English at California State
University, Los Angeles; and an adjunct associate professor of English at
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xvii

East Los Angeles College. Daniel writes fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
Daniel’s book publications include a poetry collection, Love Adventure
(with his wife, Anhthao Bui) and a short fiction collection, Mere Anarchy.
Daniel holds a master’s degree in English and a bachelor’s degree in
History from Loyola Marymount University. He lives in Los Angeles. You
can visit Daniel’s Website at http://dan_lambert.homestead.com/. lam-
berde@elac.edu
Cheri Colby Langdell has published in Nineteenth-Century Literature
and the Emily Dickinson Journal, along with other academic literary publi-
cations like Over Here. She has taught at the University of California,
Riverside, where she helped develop and taught the prelaw undergraduate
major, Law and Society. She has also taught comparative literature at the
University of Southern California, and in the UK, at University of
Nottingham, University of Leicester, and Birkbeck and St. Mary’s Colleges,
the University of London. Her previous books include W. S. Merwin
(Twayne 1981), Adrienne Rich: The Moment of Change (Praeger 2004),
Coping with Vision Loss (Praeger 2011), and “Aphra Behn and Sexual
Politics: A Dramatist’s Discourse with her Audience,” in Drama, Sex and
Politics, ed. James Redmond (Cambridge University Press 1985).​A newly
updated edition of her book W.S. Merwin will be published in 2023
(Oxbridge Publishing). She currently teaches at East Los Angeles College
and Los Angeles Valley College in California. langdecc@elac.edu
Tim Langdell is a professor of Psychology, Buddhist Studies and
Chaplaincy at Buddha Dharma University. He is the author of Beginner’s
Mind: An Introduction to Zen Buddhism (Oxbridge Publishing, 2020),
Christ Way, Buddha Way: Jesus as Wisdom Teacher and a Zen Perspective on
His Teachings (Oxbridge Publishing, 2020), Face Perception: An Approach
to the Study of Autism (Oxbridge Publishing, 2020), coauthor of Coping
with Vision Loss: Understanding the Psychological, Social, and Spiritual
Effects (Praeger, 2010), and a chapter author of “Being With Alzheimer’s”
in Dementia-Friendly Worship: A Multifaith Handbook for Chaplains,
Clergy, and Faith Communities (Jessica Kingsley, 2019). He holds a PhD
in psychology from University College, London. He is ordained as both a
Christian priest and a Zen priest; he is a Zen master teacher and abbot of
the Still Center Zen Order in Pasadena, California. tim.langdell@bdu.ac
James McCorkle is the author of three collections of poetry: Evidences
(APR/Copper Canyon, 2003), The Subtle Bodies (Etruscan Press, 2014),
xviii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

and In Time (Etruscan Press, 2020). He is also the author of The Still
Performance (a study of postmodern American poetry, from the University
Press of Virginia). He is the editor of Conversant Essays: Contemporary
Poets on Poetry (from Wayne State University Press), and coeditor with Jeff
Gray and Mary McAleer Balkun, Greenwood Encyclopedia of American
Poets and Poetry (2006) and American Poets and Poetry: From the Colonial
Era to the Present (2015). He also has collaborated with visual artists, most
recently with Gabriella D’Angelo, on a project on detention, migration,
and ecology. He received his MFA (poetry) and P.D (English) from the
University of Iowa and teaches in the Africana Studies program at Hobart
and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. For the past nine years,
he has served as the director of the African Literature Headquarters.
mccorkle@hws.edu
Diederik Oostdijk is Professor of English and American Literature at
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He has published widely on American
poetry and culture, and is the author of Among the Nightmare Fighters:
American Poets of World War II (2011). More recently, he published the
monograph Bells for America: The Cold War, Modernism, and the
Netherlands Carillon in Arlington (2019). d.m.oostdijk@vu.nl
Alan Soldofsky is a professor of English and Comparative Literature and
the director of Creative Writing at San Jose State University. His most
recent collection of poems is In the Buddha Factory (Truman State
University Press). With David Koehn, he is coeditor of Compendium: A
Collection of Thoughts About Prosody, by Donald Justice. His poems and
essays have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies including
recently in Catamaran, Fence, The Gettysburg Review, Gigantic Sequins,
The L.A. Review of Books, Poem-a-Day, Puerto del Sol, Vox Populi, California
Fire and Water: Climate Change Anthology, and The William Carlos
Williams Review. He directs the MFA Creative Writing program at San
Jose State University. alan.soldofsky@sjsu.edu
Michael Thurston is the Helen Means Professor of English Language
and Literature. Since his arrival at Smith in 2000, he has taught courses on
twentieth-century poetry in English, modernism, American literature, and
American studies. His primary research interest is modern and contempo-
rary poetry, on which he has published three books and ­numerous articles.
He publishes on the work of Henry David Thoreau and Ernest Hemingway,
and, with the support of a fellowship from the National Endowment for
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xix

the Humanities, he is writing a biography of the literary critic and Harvard

professor, F.O. Matthiessen. In 2010, he was awarded Smith’s Sherrerd
Prize for Distinguished Teaching. He currently services as Provost and
Dean of Faculty at Smith College. mthursto@smith.edu
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Cheri Colby Langdell

William Merwin was an American original. He is like a great pine

tree that has fallen. His work is going to live on, but I can’t get over
his loss.
Edward Hirsh
Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time.
W.S. Merwin, Pe’ahi

W.S. Merwin has been a defining poet in American literature since he

burst onto the national scene with the publication of A Mask for Janus,
which won the Yale Younger Poets’ Award, and he has been a towering
figure ever since. He has been called, by Fred Stern, “perhaps America’s
most widely celebrated American poet.” “During his six decade-long
career, W.S. Merwin has established himself as one of the poetic greats,
earning him the crowning achievement of 17th Poet Laureate of the
United States,” says Fred Stern, adding, “No one in our time has been

C. C. Langdell (*)
English Department, East Los Angeles College, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Los Angeles Valley College, Los Angeles, CA, USA
e-mail: langdecc@elac.edu

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
C. C. Langdell (ed.), Reading W.S. Merwin in a New Century,
American Literature Readings in the 21st Century,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13157-8_1
2 C. C. LANGDELL

more instrumental in structuring and affirming his own identity.”

W.B. Yeats … had once firmly defined the function of the poet, saying, “It
is myself that I make” (Gale). Over the years, his readers have watched as
his complex, yet intimate poetry evolved from an early mastery of com-
plex, almost baroque poetic forms to free verse and open forms. As he
matured poetically, he also shifted toward more global concerns—ecologi-
cal, even political. In this his career parallels writers slightly older than him
like Lowell, and Adrienne Rich, who was younger.
He has produced an enormous, ambitious body of work, publishing
over 40 books in 70 years. At the pinnacle of American poetry, he was
Poet Laureate of the United Sates twice, awarded the Pulitzer Prize twice,
and won the National Book Award along with nearly every other conceiv-
able poetry prize including at last two lifetime achievement awards. Yet
surprisingly very little has been written on his poetry recently, so here
we’ve assembled a collection of essays affording new insights into his
poetry and other work—his translations, his forewords to books and his
epic—offering new ways to read his poetry and exploring his ecopoetry, as
Nancy Goldfarb and Thomas Festa do, as well as comparing his poems
with those of other poets. Amanda Golden examines Merwin’s early inter-
changes with The New Yorker, presenting three unpublished letters he
wrote to Howard Moss, its poetry editor and showing what they reveal
about his decision to abandon punctuation. James McCorkle and Jeff
Gray explore his fulfillment of his poetic purpose, Michael Thurston dis-
cusses Merwin’s so-called retirement, Daniel Lambert compares his visions
of apocalypse with those of W.B. Yeats, while Philip Coleman and Tim
Langdell show parallels between his writing and other poets (Coleman)
and borrowings from Buddhism in his work (Tim Langdell). Cheri Colby
Langdell writes about the Buddhist concepts of “nothingness” and “emp-
tiness” in his poetry.
Although one of Merwin’s most famous poems is “For the Anniversary
of My Death,” the American poetry community was shocked by his death
in early 2019. He was fixed star of American poetry, a poet who had writ-
ten prolifically for over 75 years. Although he was already 91, it seemed to
us that he would never die. Even so, the poetry world was dismayed when
he passed away on the Ides of March. He would have appreciated the
irony of his departure on that day. He would have appreciated the humor
of passing away like Caesar on the Ides of March.1 Merwin resembled
Sirius, the star he celebrates in his Pulitzer Prize winning The Shadow of
Sirius, which Elizabeth Lund asserts, “explores loss, memory, and the
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

continuum of time, lingers with readers the way light from Sirius reaches
the earth—long after leaving its source” (CSM 4 June 2009). Like that
star, he was an abiding presence in American poetry, quietly shining in the
background, yet participating more actively as a judge of poetry competi-
tions, giving grants and awards into his eighties. He always wanted to give
new poets the recognition and acclaim they deserved, so instead of retir-
ing, he encouraged newcomers to the field and discovered excellent new
poets and writers among those aspiring to be read by the poetry commu-
nity. The Merwin Conservancy is now becoming a writers’ retreat where
poets at the start of their careers can go to write in the peaceful palm forest
he planted.
Despite having had many offers of professorships and residencies,
Merwin forfeited the relative comfort and security of an academic position
long ago since he’d realized that years of workshops and sitting discussing
poetry was not for him. Perhaps like the raven in his poem “Noah’s Raven”
(CP I 207) he simply wanted his freedom and may have thought it would
limit his creativity. The call of the wild and the unknown and unknowable
were too strong: indeed, he’d been restless for many years, living in
Chiapas, Mexico, Spain, France, London, and New York. Throughout his
career he remained peripatetic until in the mid-1970s, when he and his
wife Paula established their home in Pe’ahi, Haiku, Maui, championed
conservation and environmental activism, and began restoring an old
plantation where the prior owners had failed in their attempt to grow
pineapples and reviving its grounds by planting every possible variety of
palm tree. From the time he settled in Maui, his poetry became more
Buddhist and more focused on nature and creation. While he remains the
consummate international poet, “his whole approach is religious in the
root sense of being bound or bonded to reverence. Two major coherences
in the work, then, are its vocal fluidity and its concern for Nature” (Mason
584) and Creation, as David Mason asserts. His “concern for what is
beyond mere human making. Merwin’s obsessions with stories—biblical,
mythological, tribal—is of the same substance and has never abated. His
book-length narrative, The Folding Cliffs (1998), is a Hawaiian Genesis
and Exodus rolled into one” (Mason 585).
In this collection many authors—Nancy Goldfarb, Thomas Festa,
Jeffrey Gray, James McCorkle and others explore this dimension of
Merwin’s poetry, probing the ways Merwin’s poetry expresses these
coherences and complications. In later years he shifts his focus to human-
ity’s interconnectedness with nature and kinship with all life. He engages
4 C. C. LANGDELL

in what he could do to save as many lives as possible—animal, plant,

and human.
Our collection of essays offers a wide variety of approaches to Merwin’s
poetry and encourages the reader to see all his oeuvre from fresh original
perspectives. Like the light from Sirius, Merwin’s poetry continues and
will continue to travel on, interrogating our current age, shining light on
our efforts to be productive, insightful global citizens aware of the impact
we have on the natural world in the twenty-first century. Speaking in what
Alan Soldofsky calls an oracular voice, Merwin has taught us to see with
new eyes, feel with open hearts, and his light will continue to shine through
his poetry, continuing into the future, just as any great poet’s words con-
tinue to resonate and illuminate long after the poet’s death.

***

Toward the end of his life Merwin was often a judge for poetry prizes,
choosing the winners of awards. He seemed omnipresent, publishing a
book every two years or so and serving as a Chancellor of the Academy of
American Poetry. Thus, his departure from the contemporary poetry
community opened a void or silence in the international community which
we writers on his poetry seek to fill by offering original reflections on his
poetry and his narrative The Folding Cliffs. Joining the many who read and
loved all Merwin’s work, we have assembled a volume of essays clarifying
and advancing the understanding of his work to keep his star burning and
shedding light. His later ecological poetry reflects the optimism of many
who are now trying to save the earth, stop global warming, and address
the climate crisis today. With 50,000 species of plants and animals disap-
pearing every year, including the vaquita porpoise in Baja California or the
Kauaian ‘oo bird, and many birds who lived in the rainforests of Maui and
the other islands, whose names Merwin knew, poets and environmental
activists are currently urgently addressing the crisis; Merwin was active
both in the Sierra Club locally and worked with a number of international
groups. If alive today, he probably would have supported Greta Thunberg’s
Youth4Climate and other similar organizations, with its millions of youth
members worldwide, seeking to arrest climate change and reverse global
warming. He was an active and popular member of his local Sierra Club
for decades. His poetry speaks candidly to the same cause and
consciousness.
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

Some Background on Merwin

As a graduate student writing a PhD dissertation on comparative litera-
ture, I chose to write on Merwin’s poetry and translations. A year after
completing my PhD, I was hired to teach English and Law and Society at
the University of California, Riverside. During the fall quarter of the aca-
demic year 1974–75, when through a stroke of fate, the English
Department at the University of California, Riverside, discovered it had a
sum of money which could either spend or lose: we chose to invite all the
poets we wanted to hear to read to our campus. Among others we invited
W.S. Merwin, who stayed at my home for his sojourn at the campus. I got
to know this charming, genial, cordial, very well-read gentleman who
loved life, poetry, and good food; he was a deep and charming conversa-
tionalist who became a friend, with whom I corresponded, whether he was
in Chiapas, in Europe, or Maui. I would then go on to write one of the
first texts on Merwin for the Twayne’s United States Author Series.2 In
1976, Merwin moved to Haiku, Maui, settling, as Harrison Smith puts it,
“atop a dormant volcano in Maui, near the poetically named town of
Haiku, and set to work transforming a failed 18.8-acre plantation into a
nearly pristine plot of rain forest. For the rest of his life, he divided his time
between gardening, meditation, translating and writing poetry, compos-
ing works that were increasingly concerned with conservation” (C7).
Beginning in 1977, he built his home and garden in Pe’ahi, Maui, med-
itated, wrote books of poetry, and translated the Buddhist poet Dogen
among others, while rescuing exotic palm species and restoring the land
he and his wife Paula had bought. They couldn’t restore its original flora,
but they covered it with every possible variety of palm, creating a kind of
Garden of Eden there in Pe’ahi, restoring their land’s vitality, making a
home for many native birds and animals. Whenever he was not journeying
to read his poetry, he moved about the conservancy, daily planting and
tending his palm trees or chatting with friends, Paula, or visitors or meet-
ing and doing Zen practices with the local Buddhist community.

Evangelist of Nature
Edward Hirsch writes in “Crashing W.S. Merwin’s Wedding” that Merwin
“was an evangelist of nature. He believed that plants and trees had their
own personalities, and he held this belief matter-of-factly … he couldn’t
stand what we were doing to the planet—and found consolation in his
6 C. C. LANGDELL

dogs, whom he adored.” This love of nature, we’ll show, has persisted
from Merwin’s early childhood and manifests itself even more abundantly
in his poetry written in Hawaii from the 1980s onward. Having begun his
poetic career with A Mask for Janus, chosen by W. H. Auden to win the
Yale Younger Poets Award in 1951, he followed that successful volume
with The Dancing Bears and Green with Beasts. Even though animals are
more objectified and symbolic here than in his later poetry, the fact that
his books have animals in the titles reveals his keen focus on the entire
natural world. While myth and classical topoi reign supreme in the earlier
books, one of Merwin’s goals was to make each book different. The laser-­
like focus on nature remains throughout his oeuvre, however. Many of his
most important books’ titles refer to nature: nature and his multidimen-
sional relationship with it inform and illuminate all his poetry. Many of our
authors show how this relationship and with the paradisaical garden
evolves throughout his life.
As David Mason asserts in his exceptional review of the Library of
America’s comprehensive edition of W.S. Merwin: Collected Poems,
“W.S. Merwin, American Proteus,” Merwin is a “poet of passionate intel-
ligence,” whose stellar accomplishment “beggars the accomplishment of
most other American poets of the last sixty years” (584). His output is
prodigious. “He is international. You can compare him to visionaries like
Neruda, Lawrence and Jeffers” (584), and his imagination is protean.
Mason calls Merwin a prodigy, “really the child of language,” and notes
that his vison is biblical:

For the young man discovering his vocation [and voice], the Bible was not
only a model of sound. Merwin’s vision is biblical. His subject is Creation,
and even if he has stepped aside from religious orthodoxy (later studying
Zen Buddhism), his whole approach is religious in the root sense of being
bound or bonded to reverence. Two major coherences in the work, then,
are its vocal fluidity and its concern for Nature, for what is beyond human
making. Merwin’s obsession with stories—biblical, mythological, tribal—is
of the same substance and has never abated. (584–585)

I’d add that his ecological conservancy and this quality of being bonded
to reverence and an oracular voice are also major components in his oeuvre.
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

Merwin and Other Poets

In our initial chapter, “‘High Company’: W.S. Merwin, John Berryman
and the Art of Poetry” Philip Coleman takes as his point of departure the
moment where Merwin recalls in his poem “Lament for the Makers” how
Berryman “quoted to [him] / the passage where a jest wrote Crane //
falls from the speechless caravan.” Coleman thinks that “Merwin’s memory
of Berryman quoting Crane posits a genealogy in miniature that extends
across twentieth-century American poetic modernism’s engagements with
language from the exuberant richness of The Bridge to The Dream Songs
and beyond to what James Merrill described as “‘the wonderful stream-
lined diction’ in Merwin’s poetry.” Delving into Merwin’s resonations
with works by Berryman and Hart Crane, Coleman reads Merwin’s poetry
in relation to their poetry. Drawing on examples from the range of
Merwin’s work, the essay argues that the term “speechless” in Crane’s line
should be understood less in terms of silence than as a gesture toward the
wonder that always attended all three of these poets’ reformations of world
and self in the language of their poems, which is a major focus in this book.
Coleman discusses how “Reading a Dysfunctional World: Why
Merwin’s The Lice is needed now more than ever”—[an essay] published
in 2017 as part of a Poetry Foundation celebration of Merwin’s life and
work, Adrienne Raphael quite rightly describes the way the poet’s work
changed in the 1960s. Mentioning that while his first four books “politely
hearken back to earlier masters, Merwin’s poetry” is transformed:
While the formal procedures of Merwin’s poems change in visible ways,
however, in poems like “Berryman” and “Lament for the Makers,”
Merwin reveals an abiding sense of connection and deep respect for those
“earlier masters” that complicate our understanding of his work’s develop-
ment. All this “is complicated not just in relation to Berryman, whose
significance to Merwin is clear, but also with regard to the lessons he
learned and carried throughout his life from other writers and poets” too,
from R.P. Blackmur to James Merrill. Coleman argues, “Reading
‘Berryman’ and ‘Lament for the Makers,’ we can see that the question of
poetic influence was not a matter of conflict quarrelling for Merwin.
Rather, these poems reveal a poet for whom the examples of the past serve
an abiding and enabling function, their words constantly inspiring him to
continue on his own poetic journey.” Indeed, one of the most remarkable
things about Merwin is the way that he is willing to credit and acknowl-
edge the importance of those who went before him. Coleman observes:
8 C. C. LANGDELL

But, at the same time, Merwin’s “Lament for the Makers” does not pro-
pound a single-source theory of poetic inspiration or influence. Rather, it
affirms a more expansive and, indeed, magnanimous view that allows a poet
to declare and acknowledge a wide range of informing figures, poets and
writers who have affirmed his sense of the art of poetry’s value even if he
recalls them for a single phrase. Berryman acknowledges the “high com-
pany” with whom he travelled at different times in his career in his “Lament
for the Makers” and, in poems and prose recollections.

In his “Lament for the Makers” and “Berryman” especially, Merwin envi-
sions himself as a part of this “high company,” a long continuum of poets.
He “harkens back” to the caravan of poets and contemporary and “earlier
masters” with deep respect. These poems express his sometimes compli-
cated relationships with Blackmur, James Merrill, John Berryman, Robert
Lowell, and other major poets of his generation. His retrospective is origi-
nal in that he’s one of the only—if not the only—major poets to acknowl-
edge those who traveled with him on their poetic journeys and how their
words resonated and stayed with him.
That Merwin has a “magnanimous view” of inspiration from “a wide
range of informing figures, poets, writers,” and sources is a point Tim
Langdell too makes in his essay on Zen Buddhism in Merwin’s poetry. His
Buddhist beliefs and practices are yet another informing source for
his poetry.
In the next chapter, also reading Merwin in connection with another
poet, this time William Carlos Williams, Ian D. Copestake, Editor of The
William Carlos Williams Review considers “issues of distance” and com-
pares William Carlos Williams’ engagement with things, both outside lan-
guage in the world and inside the poem as words, with the centrality of
things in Merwin’s work. The role of thingness in the latter’s short prose
and poetry helps him dramatize speakers’ and readers’ sense of how value
is attached to the concrete, perceived, and felt world. “In the tension
between imposition of value by human agency and the space in his work
given to the value of objects through modes of listening and seeing,”
Copestake explores how Merwin offers “a body of expression that builds
on forms of ‘contact’ that Williams brought to the fore in his own move-
ment away from accepting inherited, conventional poetic modes of speak-
ing. This in turn helped Williams bridge the perceived gaps between the
imagination and the value of contemporary experience that drove experi-
mental works like Spring and All.”
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

Pointing out that both poets came from religious backgrounds—

Merwin from Presbyterianism and Williams from Unitarianism, and ana-
lyzing the thingness in both Williams’ and Merwin’s work, Copestake
quotes Merwin in an Ed Folsom interview:

It has seemed to me that fact has two faces, too. Fact is in the world of rela-
tion—one is always looking at the outside of facts. One sees all the facts
from the outside. One is never going to be on the inside until one is caught
up in the relation, then of course you don’t see the inside, there is no separa-
tion between the inside of you and the inside of what you’re looking at.
They’re the same thing (63).

Clearly this aligns with the notion of interconnectedness in my essay,

which follows it, except here the connectedness between things interfaces
with human connectedness with nature. One sees the connection if one
substitutes “nature” for “facts.” Our lives are caught in the relation on the
one hand with facts and on the other hand with nature, and in both cases
“there is no separation between the inside of you and the inside of what
you’re looking at. They’re the same thing.”
Focusing chiefly on Merwin’s later poetry and, like Alan Soldofsky,
dwelling on Merwin’s search for the “forgotten language,” in his chapter,
Jeffrey Gray traces Merwin’s lifelong romantic search in and through his
poetry —“the drive to recover a lost world is directed—as it was for the
Romantics, and for a number of Merwin’s contemporaries—toward the
question of recovering a truer, deeper self, or—beyond the self—a lost
connectedness to primal, trans-human realities.” Gray sees this progress as
a “journey backward and downward plays out in many Merwin poems and
animates several of his books, from The Lice right through to his later col-
lections, including The Shadow of Sirius (2008), Migration (2005), and
The Moon Before Morning (2014).” He adds, “Almost every poem in The
Vixen (1996) traces this process” and most later books of poetry manifest
this progress, too.

Nature, Zen, and Ecopoetics

Viewing W.S. Merwin as a protean poet, endlessly evolving, and following
the process Jeffrey Gray traces, in my essay on Zen Buddhism in Merwin’s
poetry, “‘Bonded to Reverence’: Not Knowing, Emptiness, Time, and
Nature,” I connect Merwin’s illuminations and poetic representations of
10 C. C. LANGDELL

nature with concepts of emptiness, time, and not knowing in his poetry. I
show how he moves poetically through emptiness and not knowing
exploring the apophatic tradition while adopting and incorporating bibli-
cal and psalmic resonances and anaphora into his poetry. As he is influ-
enced by his practice of Buddhism, the “I” in his poems become more
authentic, peaceful, and grounded, and he moves into ecopoetry and envi-
ronmental activism; his inner spiritual life expands and poetry blossoms as
dynamically as the palm conservancy he cultivates. He achieves something
akin to a vision of a Garden of Eden in his late poems, having traveled the
via negativa through not knowing, emptiness, and an ongoing obsession
with time.
Next, Thomas Festa takes a global approach in his “Merwin’s Ecopoetic
Conservancy,” cleverly paralleling Merwin’s personal palm conservancy
with the ecopoetic conservancy in his poetry. Drawing on Merwin’s eco-
poetry—and all his poetry in fact—and many of his translations, Festa
asserts, “For Merwin, making a garden is a conscious, revisionary act of
imaginative resistance to the endangerment of species that preserves living
forms of great antiquity.” Having built, like Robinson Jeffers, “a house of
poetry” around which to restore an ecosystem ruined by agribusiness,
Merwin insists on “the primacy of poetry and the natural world”
(McDowell 190). Turning to the role of his translations in the poetic pro-
cess, Festa then enlarges on this concept, explaining, “Merwin’s special
contribution to eco-poetics lies in translation’s hybrid activity of conserva-
tion: the relationship between the palm garden and the wild forest he
originally hoped to restore is comparable to the relationship between an
original text and a translator’s rendition by means of what Merwin calls
‘the impossible, unfinishable art,’” clarifying these ideas:

In the Conservancy, Merwin translates from the impossible “original” of

forest into the living idiom of garden; in his poetic “translations,” Merwin
plants endangered palms to stand in place of an original forest that cannot
be recovered, a connection going back as far in Merwin’s autobiographical
lore as the postcard he received early on from Ezra Pound: “Read seeds not
twigs EP” (The Mays 10). In this perspective, tradition becomes translation.
We read seeds to transplant them into original verse, thereby preserving them.

Throughout his essay, Festa shows how this process plays out in many of
Merwin poems, even tangentially examining resonances in meter and sub-
ject between Merwin’s poetry and the poetry of John Donne. He
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

illustrates how Merwin locates “the idea of a forest in actual garden time.”
(Note that Merwin’s posthumously published book is called Garden
Time.) In this seminal essay, Festa accounts for the way Merwin embodies
conservation, ecopoetry, Zen Buddhism, and the echoes of the koans
Merwin translated in his poetry. This essay provides some of the central
critical and theoretical underpinnings for our book.
Continuing the focus on nature, Nancy Goldfarb, heeding the United
Nations’ wakeup call—its grave concern over global warming and climate
change—investigates “the poetry of W.S. Merwin [and other poets] within
an entire ecosystem of poets who were exploring the relationship between
words and trees.” Ecopoets awaken our senses and call on us to experience
our surroundings sensuously, she argues. Her study “takes as its point of
departure the causal link made by David Abram between the preservation
of wild nature and respect for sensory experience.” The senses, Abram
reminds us, connect us most deeply to the natural world. “If humankind
seems to have forgotten its thorough dependence upon the earthly com-
munity of beings,” Abram declares, “It can only be because we’ve forgot-
ten (or dismissed as irrelevant) the sensory dimension of our lives” (6).
Exploring the relationship between words and trees in the light of
Abram’s ecopoetic theory, Nancy Goldfarb astutely interrogates and ana-
lyzes the representations and manifestations of trees in the poetry of
W.S. Merwin, Dante Alighieri, Wendell Berry, Giacomo Leopardi, and
Mary Oliver. “Poets’ capacity for wonder, attunement to their senses, will-
ingness to listen, and openness to surprise enable them to give voice to the
trees in a respectful, mutual way. In many cases, representations of trees in
the poems [treated here] are not just trees; they offer a path, by way of the
senses, to transcendence.” The essay concludes rapturously, ecstatically:

The trees that populate Berry’s woodland are not merely “great trees”; they
are “apostles of the living light.” A source of divine illumination, they build
in air “a timbered choir” that make music – “weightless grace/ Of song”
-- when the wind blows; the sound of wind rustling through the trees is “a
blessing on this place.” As receivers of divine energy from both the earth and
the heavens, trees are the ultimate divine mediator; in the fall, when their
leaves are released, they generate in us an opportunity “to walk on radiance”
and be “amazed.” Trees in the poetry of Merwin, Oliver and Berry are
manifestations of natural grace and are thus occasions for gratitude: “O light
come down to earth, be praised!”
12 C. C. LANGDELL

While many essays on ecopoetry are highly abstract, in her essay, Goldfarb
enables readers to see the value of trees as divine mediators between
heaven and earth as well as manifestations of natural grace, thereby con-
necting poems and disparate poets who do not usually appear together in
the same essay. This admirable essay enables all readers to understand and
better appreciate how trees have figured concretely and metaphorically in
poetry throughout the world and the ages.
In Tim Langdell’s chapter, “The Fox Sleeps in Plain Sight: Zen in the
Poetry of W.S. Merwin,” a title with a double meaning, he explores the
influence of Zen Buddhism on Merwin’s writings. Merwin either outright
rejected the idea that his passion for Zen had any influence on his poetry,
or would sidestep any discussion of Buddhism in relation to his writings.
Yet as Tim Langdell points out, in “Fox Sleep,” the first poem in The
Vixen, the poem that gives its name to the chapter title, embodies a famous
Zen koan. The details are unmistakable. Not only is this the clearest evi-
dence of how intertwined Merwin’s love of Zen was with his writing, but
when it came to select the order of the poems in Collected Poems 1996-2011,
it was “Fox Sleep” that Merwin chose to be the first poem in Volume 2.
In his chapter, Tim Langdell analyzes the pervasive influence of Zen on
Merwin’s writing from his almost word for word quoting of a thirteenth-­
century Chinese Zen koan (without attribution, he notes), to his use of
Buddhist concepts such as the contrast between form and void, and what
it means to become “awakened” in Zen teachings.
Like Ian D. Copestake, but in a different way, Langdell focuses on
thingness in his poetry. A flower for Merwin is not symbolic,

It just is. I often give the example when teaching Zen students that it is one
thing to become aware that perceiving reality just as it is means you perceive
a shape with no defined color or features, that gets larger and larger
(although even ‘larger’ is conceptual mind working). But you had better
also be fully grounded in the relative world, too, the world of continuous
mistakes, the world of chaos in which you have ‘thinged’ every-thing, that
enables you to also perceive this is a Mack truck hurtling toward you on the
road, and you had better move out of the way—fast.

In Zen, the concreteness of the thing named manifests its reality and
potentially its value and beauty.
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

The Poet’s Craft

In the first chapter in “The Poet’s Craft,” using linguistic analysis Natalie
Gerber explores intonational patterns and inflections in Merwin’s poem
“Yesterday” along with comparable intonational patterns in “Blessing” by
James Wright, “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child” by Gerald Manley
Hopkins, “Tract” by William Carlos Williams, and T.S. Eliot, also touch-
ing on “Death of a Hired Man” and “Home Burial” by Robert Frost, and
other poems. Basing her analysis on the work of Peter Elbow and some
writings of Robert Frost and W.B. Yeats, Gerber shows how understand-
ing and focusing on intonation helps the reader understand how the
poems make meaning. Natalie Gerber introduces the reader to “theticals,”
which she summarizes thus:

First, they are syntactically independent, meaning that they are not a neces-
sary component of the larger syntactic structure. Second, they are set off
prosodically from the rest of an utterance, meaning that they typically phrase
separately, which means they often are separated by pausal factors on either
side. Third, their meaning is nonrestrictive, meaning that the thetical may
be omitted without changing the underlying sentence meaning. Fourth,
theticals tend to be positionally mobile, meaning their position in the sen-
tence may be moved without affecting the larger utterance. Fifth and finally,
their internal structure is built on principles of Sentence Grammar but can
be elliptic.

She then proves that “theticals’ properties contribute as much to the mel-
ody of spoken language and intonation as to the enrichment of informa-
tion or metacognitive or awareness or context or metacommunication.”
Having read and savored Natalie Gerber’s analysis, I shall never think of
Merwin’s poem “Yesterday” or any dialogic or multivocal poem in the
same way again. Her essay awakens all readers of poetry to the role
sequences of sound and intonation units in vital sentences, where “sen-
tences speak to each other” in what Frost calls “self-repartee” and she
shows various linguistic patterns and even what Elbow calls “unplanned
syntax” repeating themselves in the poetry of a range of familiar dialogic
English and American poems of the twentieth century. Peter Elbow’s
essay called “Intonation: A Virtue for Writing Found at the Root of
Everyday Speech” and Gerber’s article illustrate these qualities or elements
in “Yesterday” and in dialogic poems by other major poets.
14 C. C. LANGDELL

We move now to Amanda Golden’s chapter on Merwin practicing his

craft at The New Yorker in 1955–56, having received a “first-reading agree-
ment,” with that magazine, an agreement that had previously been
accorded only to Elizabeth Bishop, Theodore Roethke, and Adrienne
Rich. Here Amanda Golden shows how this agreement “gave poets like
Merwin the ability to shape the contours of the lyric” that The New Yorker
published. Later Merwin invited Sylvia Plath to join the ranks of those
already possessing a “first-reading agreement,” which required these poets
with this agreement to give The New Yorker a first-reading of any new
poem they wrote. Amanda Golden states, “Knowing that these writers had
such an agreement alters our sense of their poetic production. The editors
became their audience, even if it was only a formality. Their position
changed in The New Yorker network” and the agreement gave each poet
“an opportunity to become an arbiter of poetic taste” nationally and inter-
nationally. It placed each in a powerful position and practically assured
them publication of at least some the poems they submitted.
Treating a pivotal early moment in Merwin’s early career and present-
ing two hitherto unpublished letters by Merwin, Amanda Golden in
“Lyric Unpunctuation: W.S. Merwin’s Early The New Yorker
Correspondence” treats the early period when Merwin opted to get rid of
punctuation: he felt some punctuation “stapled the poem to the page.”3
The poet engaged in a lively interchange of letters with Howard Moss, the
poetry editor, about his submitted poems. At this point he gradually began
getting rid of punctuation—some commas, end punctuation, and espe-
cially semicolons. Of course, this trend would gradually intensify until he
got rid of all punctuation, beginning with The Moving Target (1963).
In her chapter, Golden presents three letters Merwin wrote to Howard
Moss at The New Yorker in 1955 and 1956 about punctuation and editing
his poems: the letters reveal his interchanges with Moss that reveal a con-
fidence, even arrogance.4 Though Merwin would make some concessions
to the omission of a word like “the,” he often remained firm on the issue
of end punctuation. Meticulously analyzing the poem “Birds Waking”
(CP I 141–142), Golden discusses its punctuation changes and meaning
in depth. Merwin enjoyed a lifelong close connection with The New Yorker,
a magazine whose poetic style he helped change and make more contem-
porary. Together with Howard Moss and later editors, Merwin unobtru-
sively helped transform the magazine’s poetic style more resonant with
changing times as the nation moved into the turbulent 1960s. Partially
due to his influence, The New Yorker became and remains to this day one
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

of the most prestigious and widely read magazines for readers of American
poetry. In this way, Merwin helped shape American taste in contemporary
poetry and contributed hundreds of poems to The New Yorker over the
course of his career.
While at first Merwin’s poetry written in this era conforms to the pub-
lic’s expectations for poetry, “demonstrating clear techniques and struc-
tural devices (anaphora, rhyme, stanza breaks), and content that gesture
do the sophisticated image of the city,” in time his poetry gradually shed
its punctuation when Merwin decided this was necessary, given the evolu-
tion of sensibility: Merwin wrote, “But this unpunctuation seems impor-
tant to the poems.” In helping the magazine continue its shift from light
verse to more serious poetry, he “redefined the magazine’s expectations
for the lyric and its presence at mid-century.” By submitting and publish-
ing consistently superior poetry in his unique new style unpunctuated in
this widely read, highly respected magazine, he influenced the national
taste in the direction of open forms, freer verse, expanding the range of
subjects deemed appropriate for poetry. Along with the absence of punc-
tuation, so often discussed, there was less rhyme. His newer poetry had
fewer elaborate images or symbols and more intimate lyrics. As the nation
moved into the 1960s and toward the convolutions of that and subse-
quent decades, Merwin’s choices had a strong effect on the national taste,
as other poets followed suit. As readers of his poetry know, he continued
to publish his poetry in The New Yorker and The Nation throughout at
least seven decades of his 93 years, and at his death The New Yorker and
The Nation, along with The New York Times, published poignant tributes
to the poet and his work, acknowledging his lifelong contribution to
American poetry.
Next, viewing Merwin’s poetry from a European perspective, Dutch
professor, Diederik Oostdijk, Chair of the Department of Language,
Literature, and Communication, Vrije Universiteit (Free University),
Amsterdam, the Netherlands, examines Merwin’s early fascination with
Europe: from the time he graduated from Princeton, he set out for Europe,
with the eventual thought of settling there for life. I believe he felt a cer-
tain rootlessness in the Pennsylvania community he was raised in and
found roots in the traditional culture he discovered while living in Europe.
This author illustrates that connectedness to community, Merwin’s sense
of historic continuity, and his deeper connection with cultural traditions
that Europeans naturally enjoyed and took for granted. He finds Merwin
exploring the ancestral stability of Western European cultural legacy in “A
16 C. C. LANGDELL

Sparrow Sheltering Under a Column of the British Museum” and

“Learning a Dead Language” in Green with Beasts (1956). This sense of
historic tradition and cultural continuity is what some Americans and
other travelers are attracted to and relate to. I believe, along with Oostdijk,
that an inherent respect for traditional structures drew Merwin to want to
reside in Europe for the first part of his life—before his career and life drew
him back to the United States.
At the time, not only did Merwin feel alienated from his own family, as
he says in Unframed Originals. His original home had been in the coal
country of Pennsylvania and later Union City, New Jersey. Merwin later
realized that his father’s main goal in life had been to transcend his hum-
ble, agrarian roots and become a professional, a minister. His father was
the first in their family to become a professional, but he wanted to eradi-
cate his roots: he made sure the child William didn’t get to know his
grandfather, whom the young William only met once. In their family
there’d been incidents of violence, too, when William thought his father
was threatening his mother, so his sojourn in Europe was both his “good-­
bye to all that”—to the restrictive home life he’d known in his youth and
joy in a search for a better place to live, thrive, and write. Throughout his
life, though, he felt a loyalty to his surviving family—his mother and sister.
His younger sister has survived him and is a partner in the Merwin
Conservancy.
In his engaging, comprehensive essay, Diederik Oostdijk notes that the
critic “Robert Von Hallberg [writing in American Poetry and Culture:
1945-1980] grouped together Merwin’s literary production written in
Europe as ‘tourist poems’” (66). Such poems “about the cobblestones or
pigeons of Rome or Provence” were also called “Fulbright poems,” as
Brad Gooch has noted, as they were “poems written by an elite of subsi-
dized young Americans abroad” (309). Oostdijk examines the question of
whether Merwin is like some American poets, his contemporaries, who
wrote “tourist poems.” But Merwin departed for Europe so quickly and
with such exhilaration, more with the goal of living there permanently
than simply visiting. For Merwin, Europe was a life saver, a new home, as
it was for Sylvia Plath.5 He determines that it would be unfair and untrue
to call Merwin a tourist. After all, the poet immediately began to work for
Robert Graves tutoring his children, and he later buys an old, dilapidated
farmhouse filled with furniture dating from the nineteenth century. These
are not the actions of a tourist. From his time living on his farm in Lot,
France, Merwin reveled in “The profound continuity of the peasant world,
 1 INTRODUCTION 17

which I caught sight of chiefly in the structure that had been evolved by
it, for its physical purposes, by hands and lives that had long since van-
ished” (SD 197). Oostdijk astutely analyzes his reflections on culture and
the legacy of the Western tradition Merwin’s poetry of this era in depth,
and Merwin’s desire to preserve the depth of cultural traditions and wealth
of historical and literary knowledge that he encountered in Europe. This
was Merwin’s life, even as Joseph McCarthy was interrogating American
citizens about their possible membership in the Communist Party in
Congress and a wave of anti-Communism was sweeping the United States.
Whether consciously or unconsciously, Merwin was escaping the bleakness
of post-Protestant life in the United States: his sojourn in Europe was a
search for real traditional family life fired or inspired by a love of tradition.
As Oostdijk says, “global vision became his true home.” And we are all
connected as citizens of the earth, human beings, and animals alike. This
is one of the central themes of this book and of Merwin’s ecopoetry. He
also comments on the way Merwin’s poem “Catullus XI” appears in his
poetry collection not as a translation, but as one of his own poems: “Rather
than indicate that it is a translation, Merwin presents it [‘Catullus XI’]
among his own poems, showing how the line between authorship, appro-
priation, and translation was blurred for him.” Tim Langdell further dis-
cusses this blurring, enlarging on later in his chapter in this collection, “A
Fox Sleeps in Plain Sight: Zen in the Poetry of W.S. Merwin.”
In his article on the oracular tradition in Merwin’s poetry, “Resilience
of the Oracular in W.S. Merwin’s ‘Forgotten Language,’” Alan Soldofsky
traces “the trajectory of Merwin’s oracular style, offering close readings of
lines from many poems written at different points in his career, poems that
range from the prophetic to the personal.” I will trace elements of
Merwin’s evolving style, including his poems’ characteristic lack of punc-
tuation, the variability of line length, syntax, and caesura, audible music as
well as the poems’ use of aphorism, litany, parable, paradox, oxymoron,
and non sequitur.
Like Golden, Soldofsky points out that the removal of punctuation and
other effects of lineation and figurative language lead these poems to pro-
duce their often-startling orality and feel of transformative amazement.
Merwin’s style has continuously altered over the decades in larger and
smaller ways to enact in both lyric and narrative modes, loss in individual
and collective human lives as well as the loss of creatures/species with
whom we share the planet—including the loss of an ancient, ineffable
knowledge that allows the survival of a diversity of cultures and species. As
18 C. C. LANGDELL

Merwin concludes in one of his bleakest and most apocalyptic poems,

“The River of Bees,” from The Lice (1967): “We are the echo of the future
// On the door it says what to do to survive / But we were not born to
survive / Only to live.” This essay also resonates with Gray’s and Lambert’s
in that it’s filled with Merwin’s sense of the coming apocalypse, and for
Soldofsky this apocalypse is best rendered in the oracular style.
He states, “For Merwin’s poems to work in their constructing a history
for a future mythos, the oracular voice is needed, given its ineffable author-
ity. Oracular lines and aphorisms appear regularly in Merwin’s poems from
the start of his middle period beginning when he published The Moving
Target (1963).”

The Sense of an Ending

In his ironically titled chapter “W.S. Merwin’s ‘Retirement’: Late Style
and Themes in the 1990s and After,” Michael Thurston surveys Merwin’s
so-called retirement and reveals that it didn’t exist. Thurston uses the
word ironically. Merwin published Travels at age 65 and a host of other
books after that. Instead of settling down and taking it easy, astoundingly
Merwin escalated his poetic output, finally accepted the post of Poet
Laureate—twice—and writes even better poetry, winning a staggering
array of prizes, now moving into ecopoetry. Before this, he’d turned down
offers to be Poet Laureate, but at last he realizes toward the end of his life
that it might be a way to make a difference. What’s original about Merwin’s
so-called retirement is that during this period, he pushed himself to new
modes of achievement, writing an epic, which Thomas Festa discusses in
his chapter “Merwin’s Epic of Dispossession.” He also published mem-
oirs, more books of poetry, more very long poems, more books of essays,
and translations. This prodigious output probably makes him one of the
poets in recent times in the most productive period of his entire life.
“Testimony” is the long poem at the heart of his 1999 volume, The River
Sound. The poem begins with the situation of one about to turn 70, medi-
tating on what his lived life has taught him, with the question of “how to
look back.” Finally, at home in the natural beauty of Maui, he writes daily
in his palm conservancy near Haiku. His desire to understand history is
gratified by his research and investigation into Hawaiian history in The
Folding Cliffs, a remarkable contemporary narrative, a first in contempo-
rary Hawaiian literature. Michael Thurston writes, “At the same time,
however, Merwin continued during these later volumes, to deepen and
 1 INTRODUCTION 19

enrich his treatment of some themes and forms that had characterized his
work since the 1960s.” He concludes his essay with “a brief discussion of
The Vixen, the volume that most powerfully carries into this ‘retirement’
period these continuities with Merwin’s earlier career.” Throughout,
Thurston marvels at Merwin’s prodigious productivity that the finally
happy Merwin marshals at the end of his life of writing. Of course,
Thurston’s point is that Merwin truly never retired. If his earlier years
were years of searching, his last years writing ecopoetry are years of ulti-
mate fulfillment.
In his essay on The Folding Cliffs, “Merwin’s Epic of Dispossession,”
Thomas Festa begins his analysis thus: “this essay reads W.S. Merwin’s
achievement in The Folding Cliffs against two related interpretive back-
grounds. First, the immediate literary context of the twentieth century’s
final decade suggests the persistence of a vestigial, or at best etiolated, epic
tradition.” The traditional epic presupposes a monolithic world view,
which in postmodern times, we no longer have. “Modernity, to say noth-
ing of postmodernity or what may be said to follow it, presents a challenge
to the genre’s intrinsic conception of narrative totality, not least because
epic’s reception has become global and decentered if not utterly frac-
tured.” He continues, “As a secondary context, contemporary epic poetry
must eventually come to grips with modern literary-historical accounts of
the genre, which threatens potentially deforming self-consciousness in any
endeavor to write.” Moreover, “To enter the genre at all was again to
evoke ideological categories and patterns of thought that had proved sur-
prisingly tenacious across two millennia: like the ‘fine prince,’ epic could
not die.” Aware of this, Merwin writes an epic anyway, an epic of dispos-
session and loss, drawing attention to the essential dignity and nobility of
the Hawaiian warriors who fought and died in their battle to save their
people in Kauai and the virtue of their cause.
Festa continues, “Merwin’s narrative, as H. L. Hix has argued, occu-
pies an ethical space of reflection in which most readers ‘stand accused by
the poem.’ That is, the poem’s standards, according to which Europeans
and Americans are the villains and Hawaiians the victims and heroes of
the poem, conflict with standards that, even if neither of us would nomi-
nally accept them, created living conditions that privilege Merwin and me
both.” Moreover, Merwin and to some extent Festa question whether or
not this is an epic at all: “Literary history’s emphasis on epic as totalizing
narrative cannot adequately represent a postcolonial ecopoetic work such
as The Folding Cliffs because the aesthetic premise is faulty.” Perhaps this
20 C. C. LANGDELL

is why Merwin demurred to give his work the generic designation of epic,
and instead subtitled his work with the more modest description “A nar-
rative of 19th-century Hawaii.” Examining Merwin’s The Folding Cliffs
in this light and in the light of the current climate crisis, Festa shows
that Merwin has produced “a poem including environmental history and
a larger protest against the exploitation and expropriation of Hawaiian
resources through American imperialism and evangelistic exceptionalism.”
This chapter is an important contribution to the current multidimensional
dialogues about the epic and the issue of Hawaiian historical dispossession.
Next, in his expansive, exploratory essay, which, like Jeff Gray’s chapter,
traverses Merwin’s entire career, James McCorkle also focuses on dispos-
session. He begins by stating about how it felt to write at the time of the
pandemic. He deliberates some of the

persisting questions Merwin’s poetry has addressed from the very begin-
ning: the adequacy of language, a theme that might be as much a general
concern of the twentieth century, however specifically addressed by
T.S. Eliot, or Paul Celan, W.H. Auden, Ludwig Wittgenstein, or Theodor
Adorno. In varying degrees, each has asked not only how language operates,
but how can language function, and in particular poetry, under regimes of
violence. “Savonarola,” from The Moving Target (1963), offers in its single
line Merwin’s skepticism: “Unable to endure my world and calling the fail-
ure God, I will destroy yours” (13). The choice of Savonarola as a central
voice underscores the prophetic element of Merwin’s work, as Savonarola
decried the corrupt rule of the fifteenth-century Florentine Medicis and
exploitation of the poor.

Questioning whether anyone can write poetry or any work of art in the
time of war or at a time when Western civilization seemed to be eroding,
bringing into question cultural values and how language could function
“under regimes of violence.” In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, Merwin
wrote, “If I were not human I would not be ashamed of anything” (CP I
307). That war precipitated a major recognition of loss and dispossession
in the poet and radically impacted his poetry.
Reflecting on the instances of dispossession in Merwin’s poetry,
McCorkle writes, “Merwin also challenges the efficacy of language to
address both God and creation. Merwin writes at this point of the crisis of
language,” or as Gerald Bruns states, a falling away of the “unity of word
and being” where this “fall of the word … is its dissociation from the
world and its isolation among other words” (190). How is it possible to
 1 INTRODUCTION 21

speak memory when we both collectively and individually exist in a state

of unfolding dispossession?
Ultimately, “Language becomes, for Merwin, a depository or memory-­
site, language is not a projective process, but one of memorialization and
an examination of the vicissitudes of memory. Merwin’s poetry often
returns to and evokes that scene of punishment, the biblical flood, as a
memory: allusion, which is a form of remembering, collapses the reference
of the biblical deluge with the sight and sound of a swollen river.” In this
probing, expansive essay McCorkle analyzes how this examination of the
vicissitudes of memory and these scenes of dissociation of the word from
the world and biblical punishment play out in his poetry and the implica-
tions of this concatenation of loss.
Our final chapter, Daniel Lambert’s “The Last Days of the World:” The
Apocalyptic Visions in the Poetry of W.S. Merwin. and William Butler
Yeats,” offers visions of the apocalypse: its author Daniel Lambert notes
that T.S. Eliot, in his poem “The Hollow Men,” predicts that our world
will end “not with a bang but with a whimper.” In the latter half of the
twentieth century, the threat of nuclear war renewed the ancient fear that
the world would soon end. Now, in the twenty-first century, the new
threat of climate change has engendered an increasing concern for the
health and well-being of earth and its inhabitants. Throughout the history
of human civilization, artists, writers, and shamans have codified our fears
of death and destruction by sharing their apocalyptic visions. How and
when will the world end? What does the end of the world look like?
Lambert then analyzes and links poems evincing forebodings about the
end of the world and the apocalypse. Also noting the increasingly urgent
need to address the climate crisis and the destruction of the environment,
the essay presents and compares images of the apocalypse in Merwin’s and
Yeats’ poetry, also remarking on these resonances and images of the apoca-
lypse in other writers on the apocalypse as well. Certain poems display
these concerns throughout Merwin’s entire career, while his poems gradu-
ally evolve toward the consciousness of “Rain Light” in What Is a Garden?
where, evoking the Fire Sermon as well, Merwin writes that he would
plant a tree “even though the whole world is burning” (47).
22 C. C. LANGDELL

Conclusion: The Survivor: “the future splits

the present with the echo of my voice”

Michael Thurston and Jeffrey Gray have proved, along with others here,
the last part of his life was more a liberation than a retirement, a time when
perhaps Merwin worked harder than ever before, the opposite of what we
commonly think of as retirement: it’s a culmination of all his life’s work
and though and poetry. Unlike many of his poet contemporaries, like John
Berryman and Sylvia Plath, he did not commit suicide in despair, nor did
he struggle with mental illness like Robert Lowell, or subside into alcohol-
ism. He is a survivor. Instead of giving up, he took a year off from writing
preceding the publication of The Lice; he wrote his way through his pro-
testing anger and despair, bringing out one of his best books on the other
side of a time of being lost. The despair that he and some other poets felt
in the 1960s in the face of the nuclear threat and the Vietnam War drove
him to find a wholly new style. In fact, he always tried to make each book
different from the last, but Lice inaugurated an entirely new register, voice,
and style in his writing. While at first he believed he could never write
poetry again, he merely kept moving, literally and physically, protesting
the Vietnam War and the bomb, ultimately writing his way into a new
mode of being in poetry. Later he pushed on from the bitter, sardonic
protest poems of Lice and the subsequent book, simultaneously moving
inward, more deeply into Buddhist practice and outward, expanding his
conservation activism. Reflecting Roethke’s dictum, “By indirection find
direction out,” he got lost only eventually to be found. At least a century
before, Thoreau, whom he greatly admired, had written, “Not till we are
lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find
ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations”
(Roethke 210).
Exploring the Buddhist path in a kind of via negativa analogous to—
but not identical to—the spiritual path of St. John of the Cross, Merwin
realizes his life’s goal of coming home spiritually, realizing his poetic goal,
as Jeffrey Gray clarifies it, and establishing a palm conservancy in the latter
part of his life. At last, he felt he was doing his part to restore a part of
nature, creating a Hawaiian Garden of Eden. He could not return his
exhausted plantation land to its original primal state, but he could partially
redeem it by making it a mecca for palm lovers and poets. At the Merwin
Conservancy, he also established a still center in his forest where poets can
come to write in the still presence of nature. Always a poet of integrity, his
 1 INTRODUCTION 23

poetic persona seems to live outside society and its rules, while maintain-
ing contact with an international circle of friends and poetry lovers.
Merwin as a poet and in his personal life achieved both fame and recogni-
tion as one of the best living American poets. At the same time did what
he could to stop global warming and climate change. Having no children
of his own, he created a palm sanctuary in a remote mountain region of
Maui overlooking the ocean, conserving a part of Paradise for future gen-
erations of poets, animals, plants, trees, and humankind.
When he moved to Maui in 1976 or 1977, could Merwin have intu-
ited, that some of his poems from Lice like “For a Coming Extinction”
and “Avoiding News by the River” would resonate strongly with the
youth protest movement of the 2020s when masses of youth would pro-
test the older generation’s disinclination to deal with and arrest climate
change? Probably not, though throughout his career, his writing could
often verge on the prophetic.6
Certain poems in Merwin’s oeuvre have always spoken of and to the
future, first imparting its truths darkly, unexpectedly, and then in the
twenty-first century declaiming in a more empowered global oracular
style. Now future generations are discovering his work. As he says in
“Noah’s Raven,” “The future / Splits the present with the echo of my
voice / I never made promises” (CP I 207). Echoes of his voice and of his
love for nature continue to resonate down the years and poems as his liter-
ary prominence rises and new generations discover his impassioned poi-
gnant pleas to pay attention and save the earth. As I write, the COP26
world climate summit is taking place in Glasgow, Scotland, with 200
countries in attendance, all environmental activists trying hard to muster
all possible resources to stop global warming and resolve every aspect of
the environmental crisis. Sadly, this past summer the KNP fire in California
killed over 2000 sequoias, some over 2000 years old; and the manatees are
dying by the thousands in Florida. “Place,” the last poem in his last pub-
lished book What Is a Garden? begins, “On the last day of the world / I
would want to plant a tree” (117).

Notes
1. I am grateful to Jeff H. Gray of Seton Hall University for this observation.
2. Cheri Colby Davis (Langdell) W.S. Merwin. Twayne U. S. Authors’ Series
360. Chapman & Hall, 1981. This book is currently out of print. But in
24 C. C. LANGDELL

2023, a new W.S. Merwin will be updated and rereleased. It will be ­published
by Oxbridge Publishing under my current name Cheri Colby Langdell.
3. Merwin said in an interview with Ed Folsom in a 1982 issue of The Iowa
Review that punctuation “seemed to staple the poem to the page, but if I
took those staples out the poem lifted itself right up off the page. A poem
then had a sense of integrity and liberation that it did not have before. In a
sense that made it a late echo of an oral tradition.”
4. In “Berryman” the poet recounts the advice Berryman gave him while they
were at Princeton: he told Merwin:

don’t lose your arrogance yet he said

you can do that when you’re older
lose it too soon and you may
merely replace it with vanity

and he adds, “just one time he is suggested/changing the usual order / of

the same words in a line of verse” (CP I 600). Along with Pound, Berryman
was one of his most important early mentors, unusual in a 27–28-year-old.
5. But of course, for Plath, ultimately her isolation in the English countryside
sadly contributed to her demise. Possibly trying to raise two children on her
own at the same time as she wrote her raw, original, groundbreaking poetry
became overwhelming.
6. In 1970, in The Miner’s Pale Children, he published “The Remembering
Machines of the Future,” a prose poem in which he predicts everyone com-
ing to own machines to help them remember everything they need to know,
and then they all lose their machines. This can be read as a prophetic warn-
ing not to depend too much on computers, smartphones, etc. Equally, “For
a Coming Extinction” and other poems warn about growing threats to the
natural world and predict the extinction of so many species of animals. His
sotto voce tone belies the magnitude of his anger at mankind’s mindless
destruction. Perhaps his poem “Savonarola,” quoted by Alan Soldofsky,
sums up mankind’s powerful instinctive urge to destroy best: “Unable to
endure my world and calling the failure God, I will destroy yours”
(“Savonarola” CP I 209).
 PART I

Merwin and Other Poets

 CHAPTER 2

“High Company”: W.S. Merwin, John

Berryman and the Art of Poetry

Philip Coleman

“I will tell you what he told me,” W.S. Merwin writes in “Berryman,” one
of two poems in which he conjures the presence of the older American
poet.1 Merwin’s “Berryman” was collected in Opening the Hand (1983),
but Berryman also makes an appearance in “Lament for the Makers” in
The River Sound (1999).2 Both poems are included in Michael Wiegers’
Essential selection of Merwin’s poetry, published in 2017, two years before
the poet’s death. Berryman clearly meant a great deal to Merwin and the
presence of these poems in the Essential volume affirms this point, but
what was it that Berryman “told” Merwin? With characteristic clarity of
diction and attention to remember patterns of speech—things that also
make his work as a translator so compelling—Merwin’s “Berryman” tells
us something about the way Berryman spoke: “he snapped down his nose
with an accent / I think he had affected in England.”3 Merwin is recalling
Berryman in the 1940s, when he had an opportunity to study with him at
Princeton, and the account given in the poem accords with several

P. Coleman (*)
Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
e-mail: pmcolema@tcd.ie

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 27

Switzerland AG 2022
C. C. Langdell (ed.), Reading W.S. Merwin in a New Century,
American Literature Readings in the 21st Century,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13157-8_2
28 P. COLEMAN

biographical descriptions of the young Berryman, recently returned to the

United States after two years in England where he had been a Kellett
Scholar at the University of Cambridge (1936–38).4 These were, as
Merwin writes, “the years just after the war,” when Berryman was still try-
ing to find his voice as a poet: his first major collection, The Dispossessed,
would not appear until 1948, but his “breakthrough” work, Homage to
Mistress Bradstreet, was not published until 1953.
Merwin, on the other hand, “had hardly begun to read” at this point in
time, as he puts it in “Berryman,” but through his encounter with
Berryman he learnt important lessons in reading and writing poetry.5
These came about less through the process of formal instruction—
“whatever students can learn from assignments, for grades, in schools and
colleges,” as Stephanie Burt has put it6—than they did through conversa-
tion and informal dealings with his professor, but they stayed with Merwin
over many decades. He acknowledges this in his memoir Summer Doorways
(2005), where he writes of how Berryman, along with the critic
R.P. Blackmur, after his parents “probably had more to do with forming
[his] outlook […] than anyone [he] had known” at this point in his
career.7 This is reflected in the ways that Merwin writes about Berryman
in his poetry, but Berryman’s advice to the young poet has general signifi-
cance too, allowing us to see beyond an individual teacher-student rela-
tionship between two men in the 1940s to the broader context of American
poetic history in the twentieth century. The poet’s accounts of his encoun-
ters with Berryman (and, indeed, Blackmur) speak to an important
exchange in Merwin’s own artistic development, in other words, but they
also suggest interesting ways for thinking about poetic influence, inheri-
tance and affiliation in twentieth-century poetry in the United States. The
purpose of this essay, therefore, is to tease out, in the first instance, what
Berryman told Merwin, based on the evidence to be found in the poems
“Berryman” and “Lament for the Makers,” but also to explore the more
general questions and concerns that arise out of their (real and imagined)
engagements about the art of poetry.

“Berryman”
Arranged in ten carefully enjambed quatrains, Merwin’s poem “Berryman”
has the formal shape of one of the autobiographical lyrics that John
Berryman published in his late collection Love & Fame (1970; rev. ed.
1972). In that volume, Berryman frequently recalls the advice he was
 2 “HIGH COMPANY”: W.S. MERWIN, JOHN BERRYMAN AND THE ART… 29

given by older writers in his youth and in “Olympus” he also singles out
R.P. Blackmur, whom he describes as a “new Law-giver” when he was a
student at Columbia in the 1930s and beginning to make his way in the
world of poetry.8 Berryman describes his discovery of Blackmur’s essays
and his appreciation of what he calls their “sublime assurance,” but he also
reveals that he studied them so carefully that he was eventually “re-­
deploying all of Blackmur’s key terms” in his own critical work. Indeed, he
recalls that “even [Blackmur’s] sentence-structure” was used by him
“wherever [he] could.” Reflecting on a career that brought him into con-
tact with some of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, from
W.B. Yeats and Dylan Thomas to Robert Lowell and Delmore Schwartz,
he writes: “I have travelled in some high company since / but never so
dizzily.”9
Berryman, then, shared Merwin’s admiration for Blackmur. In Summer
Doorways, the younger poet recalls how:

Blackmur, more than anyone, was responsible for my remaining at Princeton,

graduating, and going on to graduate school in Romance languages. “A
good education,” he said to me once, “won’t do you any harm.” And he,
like Berryman, opened the work of writer after writer to me like a new
country.10

The image of the young poet opening the books of writers he has not read
before and exploring them as he would “a new country” recalls Berryman’s
image of the poet travelling in the company of writers he has met along
the way, but both poets credit Blackmur with giving them an expansive
understanding of literature’s value beyond the classroom while, at the
same time, recognizing the utility of scholarship in the development of
one’s craft and practice. For Merwin, the experience of graduate study in
Romance languages played a central role in his development as a translator
later on, while Berryman’s scholarly work on William Shakespeare, in par-
ticular, had a profound influence on his innovations with the sonnet form,
for example, and the poetic sequence in works such as Berryman’s Sonnets
(1967) and The Dream Songs (1969). At the level of the poetic line, how-
ever, and in relation to the nuts and bolts of syntax, in particular, Merwin’s
poem “Berryman” picks up on Berryman’s recognition of the importance
of Blackmur’s “sentence-structure” when he remembers how Berryman
“just one time […] suggested / changing the usual order / of the same
words in a line of verse.”11 Here Merwin describes advice that represents
Another random document with
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 Katsellessaan miestä, joka niin kauan kuin hän saattoi muistaa, oli
ollut osa hänen omasta elämästään, ja joka nyt oli sen maan rajalla,
josta hän ei enää koskaan saattaisi palata, ymmärsi Kitty Reid sen
totuuden, joka on suurempi kuin mikään tieto, minkä ihmiskäden
pystyttämässä koulussa voimme oppia. Hän ymmärsi sydämensä
suurimman totuuden. Hän ei ollut oppinut sitä kirjoista eikä koulusta,
ei opettajiltaan eikä tovereiltaan. Hän oppi sen Elämän Herralta, joka
rajattomassa viisaudessaan opettaa opetuslapsiaan koulussa, joka
on kaikkia muita kouluja suurempi, Luonnon Koulussa. Tänä
hetkenä, kuoleman läheisyyden peittäessä varjoonsa jokapäiväisen
elämän tavalliset ja turhat arvot, tiesi Kitty Jumalan kirjoittamattoman
lain nojalla, että tämä mies oli ainoa, joka oli määrätty hänen
elämäntoverikseen. Ympäristö, olosuhteet, kaikki mitä sanomme
sivistykseksi, kenties kuolemakin, saattoi erottaa heidät toisistaan,
mutta mikään ei saattanut muuttaa sitä tosiasiaa, että Phil oli ainoa,
jonka hänen sydämensä saattoi valita. Kumartuen miehen yli, joka
hiljaa makasi vuoteessaan, kuiskasi Kitty hänelle sydämensä
syvimmän tunteen.

»Tule takaisin, Phil — rakastan sinua, Phil — tarvitsen sinua —

tule takaisin luokseni!»

Hitaasti Phil heräsi heikkoudestaan ja tuskastaan luoden tyttöön

katseen, joka oli täynnä ihmetystä ja epäröintiä. Mutta Kittyn
kasvoista loisti kirkkaus, joka karkoitti hänen epäilyksensä. Hän ei
lausunut sanaakaan — sanat olivat tarpeettomia. Hän ei liioin
liikahtanut, sillä hänen täytyi olla hiljaa ja pitää kiinni elämästä, joka
äkkiä oli muuttunut hänelle arvokkaaksi. Mutta Kitty tiesi sanoittakin,
mitä Phil olisi tahtonut hänelle sanoa, ja Philin sulkiessa jälleen
silmänsä kumartui hän hiljaiseen kiitokseen.
 Sitten hän nousi ja hiipi ikkunan luo. Hänen täytyi luoda katseensa
maailmaan, joka nyt oli uusi ja ihana.

Pähkinäpuiden alla hän näki Rovastin keskustelevan miehen

kanssa, jonka vaimoksi hän oli luvannut tulla.

Hiukan myöhemmin toi herra Reid lääkärin taloon, ja auton surina

keräsi koko kartanon väen kuulemaan hänen tuomiotaan.

Rovastin ollessa Philin huoneessa lääkärin mukana ja kaikkien

muiden kokoontuessa pihalle seisoi Jim Reid hiukan syrjässä muista
keskustellen matalalla äänellä Bobin kanssa. Patches, joka seisoi
auton takana, kuuli Bobin korottavan hiukan ääntään ja sanovan
selvästi: »Siitä ei ole epäilystäkään. Siellä on vastamerkitty vasikka
maassa. Hän varmaan unohti säikähdyksissään päästää sen irti tai
kenties hän ajatteli, ettei siitä olisi mitään hyötyä, jos Phil pääsisi
kertomaan siitä, mitä oli tapahtunut. Minun luuloni on, että Phil yllätti
hänet teossa ja niin äkkiä, että hän ampui lainkaan ajattelematta;
tehän tiedätte, miten harkitsematta hän toimii. Ja sitten, kun hän
näki, mitä oli tehnyt ja luuli, ettei Phil kuitenkaan saattaisi jäädä
henkiin, hän arveli parhaaksi jäädä tänne ja koettaa pelastautua
jollakin valheella. Jos hän olisi koettanut karata, olisi asia ollut ilman
muuta selvä, mutta hän on kyllin kylmäverinen pelatakseen
uhkapeliä.»

Patches liikahti kuin rynnätäkseen miesten luo, mutta samassa

astui lääkäri pihalle. Hänen tullessaan odottavan joukon luo hymyili
Patches ivallisesti itsekseen. Sitten hän astui eteenpäin kuullakseen
lääkärin sanat.

Phil voi parantua, vaikkakin se oli hyvin epävarmaa, arveli lääkäri.

Haavoittuneen erinomainen terveys ja voima saattoivat pelastaa
hänet, mutta ennen kaikkea oli huolellinen hoito välttämätön.

Helpotuksesta huoahtaen joukko hajaantui. Patches lähti yksinään

pois.
Herra Reid, joka aikoi viedä tohtorin Prescottiin, sanoi tyttärelleen:
»Tule, Kitty, ajamme kodin kautta ja viemme sinut ja rouva
Manningin
äidin luo.»

Mutta Kitty pudisti päätään. »Ei, isä. En minä tule kotiin. Stella
tarvitsee minua. Helen kyllä ymmärtää sen, eikö niin, Helen?»

»Hyvä», vastasi herra Reid, jolla näytti olevan kiire. »Sano

Stellalle, että äiti tulee käymään myöhemmin illalla.» Ja auto lähti
liikkeelle.

Yöllä, kun herra Baldwin ja Kitty istuivat Philin vuoteen ääressä ja

Patches makasi unettomana vuoteessaan ajatuksiensa vallassa,
ratsasti muutamia naapurikartanon miehiä äänettömästi halki pimeän
yön. Ennen kuin uusi päivä oli karkottanut tähdet taivaalta, keräytyi
Pata-Koukku-S-kartanon veräjille äänetön, vakava ratsastajajoukko.
Aamuhämärissä he seurasivat Jim Reidiä, joka tuli talostaan, ja
ratsastivat laakson poikki Risti-Kolmiota kohti. Muuan miehisiä
kuljetti hevosta, jolla oli selässään tyhjä satula. He pysähtyivät
lähelle kartanon veräjää pienen kukkulan luo, Jim Reidin ja kahden
muun miehen jättäessä hevosensa toisten huostaan ja piiloutuessa
suuren vesialtaan taakse, niin ettei heitä saattanut nähdä kartanosta.

Helenin ja Rovastin ollessa neljännestuntia myöhemmin

pihamaalla, he näkivät Curlyn juoksevan täyttä vauhtia taloon päin.
Kun Rovasti kiiruhti häntä vastaan, huusi paimen kalpeana
kiihtymyksestä ja vihasta: »He ovat vieneet hänet — he yllättivät
hänet, kun hän oli lähdössä laitumelle.»

Helen ymmärsi heti, mitä oli tapahtunut.

Kiihtyneenä hän selitti Rovastille, miten Kitty oli kertonut Philin

selostaneen tapahtuman, sekä lisäsi kuiskaten Rovastille jotakin,
joka sai tämän kokonaan hämmästyksen valtaan.

»Hevoseni, Curly», huusi Rovasti ja juoksi satulavajaan päin

Helenin seuratessa. »Mitä tietä he ratsastivat?» kysyi hän
hypähtäessään satulaan.

»Setrimetsikköä kohden, sinne, missä se tapahtui», vastasi mies.

»Tarvitsetteko minua?»

»En. Älkää sanoko mitään muille. Rouva Manning, teidän

läsnäolonne voisi nyt olla tarpeen.» Ja he ratsastivat kohden
setrimetsikköä.

Ratsastajajoukko, joka vei Patchesin, oli ehtinyt pienelle

aukeamalle ja tehnyt lyhyet valmistelunsa. Siitä hetkestä lähtien, kun
he olivat yllättäneet ja vanginneet hänet, ei Patches ollut virkkanut
sanaakaan.

»No, herra», virkkoi mies, joka johti puhetta, »onko teillä mitään
sanottavaa, ennen kuin käymme toimeen?»

Patches pudisti päätään ja ihmeekseen he näkivät ivallisen hymyn

hänen huulillaan.

»Enpä luule niiden huomautusten, joita minulla saattaisi olla

tehtävänä, tekevän suurtakaan vaikutusta herroihin», vastasi hän
tyynesti. »Olisi joutavaa viivyttää teitä tarpeettoman kauan.»

Miesjoukko ei saattanut pidättää ihailun mutinaa. He olivat miehiä,

jotka osasivat arvostaa tällaista horjumatonta rohkeutta.

Lyhyen hiljaisuuden aikana, joka seurasi Patchesin sanoja,

syöksähtivät Rovasti ja Helen äkkiä keskelle miesjoukkoa. Ennen
kuin kukaan ennätti estää, seisoi Helen Patchesin vieressä ja tarttui
häntä käteen. Nopealla liikkeellä tempasi Rovasti lassonsilmukan
miehen kaulasta. Vielä hetkinen, ja hän oli leikannut poikki nuoran,
joka kahlehti miehen kädet.
 »Kiitos», virkkoi Patches rauhallisesti.

»Älä tee sitä, Will», huudahti Jim kiivaasti. »Tämä on meidän

asiamme.» Ja samaan hengenvetoon hän huusi tovereilleen:
»Sitokaa hänet uudelleen, pojat», ja ryntäsi eteenpäin.

»Paikoillenne», karjaisi silloin Rovasti, ja nähdessään ankaran

päättäväisyyden ilmeen rakastamansa ja kunnioittamansa miehen
kasvoilla miehet pysähtyivät.

»Minä teen tämän ja teen vielä enemmänkin, Jim Reid», sanoi

Rovasti varmana, ja hänen äänessään oli sointu, joka muinaisina
villin lännen päivinä oli pakottanut hurjimmatkin miehet tottelemaan.
»Tämä teidän kokouksenne liikuttaa nähdäkseni myöskin minua.
Minä vastaan tästä miehestä. Te, pojat, tarkoitatte hyvää, mutta te
olette tällä kertaa hiukan liian kärkkäitä toimimaan.»

»Me aiomme vihdoin tehdä lopun näistä Tailholt Mountainin

karjavarkauksista, Will», vastasi Reid, »ja me aiomme tehdä sen nyt
juuri.»

Piiristä kuului hyväksymisen murinaa.

Rovasti seisoi järkkymättömänä. »Tällä tavoin ette tee loppua

mistään! Te aiotte tehdä jotakin, joka on paljon pahempaa kuin
muutamien vasikoiden varastaminen. Se aika on ollut ja mennyt
Arizonassa, jolloin täällä yksistään epäluulon perusteella piestiin
miehiä pahanpäiväiseksi. Luulenpa, että Risti-Kolmiolla on enemmän
sellaisia lehmiä, joiden polttomerkkiä on muutettu, kuin teillä kaikilla
yhteensä, ja se antaa minulle nähdäkseni oikeuden olla mukana
asiasta keskusteltaessa.»
 »Hän on oikeassa, pojat», sanoi muuan vanhemmista miehistä.

»Tiedät minun olevan oikeassa, Tom», vastasi Rovasti nopeasti.

»Sinä ja minä olemme eläneet naapureina melkein kolmekymmentä
vuotta vaihtamatta milloinkaan pahaa sanaan keskenämme, ja me
olemme yhdessä kestäneet monta pahaa päivää. Sinä myöskin,
George, ja sinä, Henry ja sinä, Bill. Teidät muut minä olen tuntenut
siitä saakka, kun olitte pikku poikia, — ja minä ja teidän isänne
olemme taistelleet rauhan ja laillisten olojen saavuttamiseksi, ennen
kuin te olitte edes syntyneet. Sen me teimme lastemme vuoksi. Ja
nyt te luulette voivanne jättää minut kaiken tämän ulkopuolelle. Te
luulette voivanne hiipiä tänne salaa, ennen kuin minä olen edes
noussut vuoteestani, ja hirttää yhden paimenistani — pojan, joka on
miesten parhaita. Sanomatta minulle sanaakaan te väijytte minun
aitauksessani ja nostatte hitonmoisen jutun. Minä olen tullut tänne
sanoakseni teille, että siitä ei tule mitään. Siitä ei tule mitään, sillä
minä en salli sitä.»

Katseet maahan luotuina istuivat miehet vaieten hevostensa

selässä. Jotkut murahtivat hyväksyvästi. Jim Reid virkkoi vakavasti:
»Mutta kuulehan, Will. Me tiedämme, miltä se sinusta tuntuu, mutta
tahdoimme säästää sinut enemmältä harmilta. Tailholt Mountainin
varkaat menivät liian pitkälle tällä kertaa. Me emme voi antaa sinun
vapauttaa tuota miestä.»

»Minä en aiokaan vapauttaa häntä», vastasi Rovasti.

Miehet katsoivat toisiinsa.

»Mitä sinä siis aiot tehdä?» kysyi Reid.

 »Minä aion saada teidät vapauttamaan hänet», kuului yllättävä
vastaus.
»Tehän hänet vangitsittekin, teidän on siis vapautettava hänet.»

Tilanteen vakavuudesta huolimatta nauroivat useat Rovastin

vastaukselle — se oli niin hänen kaltaisensa.

»Panenpa parhaan härkäni vetoon, että hän sen myöskin tekee»,

kuiskasi muuan.

Rovasti kääntyi vieressään seisovan miehen puoleen. »Patches,

kerro näille miehille, miten asia tapahtui.»

Paimenen kerrottua yksityiskohtaisesti tapahtumasta siihen

hetkeen saakka, jolloin Phil ilmestyi paikalle, keskeytti Rovasti hänet.
»Menehän nyt sinne ja näytä meille tarkalleen, miten kaikki tapahtui
sen jälkeen, kun Phil oli tullut sinun ja Yavapai Joen luo.»

Patches totteli. Ja hänen näyttäessään heille, missä Phil oli seissyt

laukauksen kajahtaessa, keskeytti Rovasti hänet uudelleen:
»Odotahan hetkinen. Tom, asetu seisomaan siihen, missä Phil
seisoi.»

Karjanhoitaja noudatti hänen käskyään.

Hänen asetuttuaan paikoilleen jatkoi Rovasti: »No Patches, asetu

nyt siihen, missä itse olit.»

Patches totteli.

»No, ja mistä suunnasta laukaus tuli?» kysyi Rovasti.

Patches osoitti suunnan.

 Rovastin ei tarvinnut kehoittaa miehiä seuraavaan
toimenpiteeseen.
Kolme miestä oli jo hypännyt satulasta ja rynnännyt pensaikkoon,
jota
Patches oli osoittanut.

»Täällä on tosiaan jälkiä», huusi joku. »Ja täällä», lisäsi toinen

muutamia askelia etäämpänä, »tähän hän oli jättänyt hevosensa.»

»Ja nyt», jatkoi Rovasti miesten palattua pensaikosta, »minä

kerron teille jotakin. Philin kertomus on täydelleen yhtäpitävä
Patchesin äskeisen selostuksen kanssa. Sitä paitsi Phil sanoi
minulle heti, kun kysyin sitä hänellä, ettei hän voi sanoa, kuka ampui
laukauksen.»

Hän vaikeni hetkeksi antaakseen sanoilleen suuremman

painavuuden.
Sitten hän esitti selityksensä, johtopäätökset.

»Asian näin ollen ei meillä ole selviä todisteita ketään vastaan. Ei

voida todistaa, ettei vasikka ollut Nickin omaisuutta. Ei voida
todistaa, kuka ampui laukauksen. Se saattoi olla Yavapai Joe tai joku
toinen aivan yhtä hyvin kuin Nick. Phil itse pilasi hätäilemisellään
koko jutun. Jollei Phil olisi ollut niin kärkäs syyttämään tätä miestä
pelkkien epäluulojen nojalla, olisimme varmasti saaneet Yavapai
Joelta tarvitsemamme todisteet ja voineet vihdoinkin selvittää asiat
noiden varkaiden kanssa. Mutta nyt seisomme sen sijaan täsmälleen
samalla paikalla kuin ennenkin. No, mihin aiotte nyt ryhtyä?»

Miehet hymyilivät häpeissään, mutta iloitsivat yhtäkaikki siitä, että

uhkaava murhenäytelmä oli vältetty. He eivät suinkaan olleet
kokonaan varmoja Patchesin viattomuudesta, mutta he tunnustivat,
että erehdys heidän puoleltaan oli mahdollinen.

»Luulenpa Rovastin lykänneen kokouksen toiseen kertaan, pojat»,

arveli muuan.

»Tulkaa», virkkoi toinen. »Lähdetään kotiin.»

Viimeisen miehen hävittyä metsikköön pyyhki Rovasti hikipisarat

otsallaan ja katsoi miettiväisenä Patchesiin. Sitten syttyi
hyväntahtoinen väike hänen sinisiin silmiinsä, jotka hetkistä
aikaisemmin olivat näyttäneet niin ankarilta ja teräksisiltä.

»Tulkaa», virkkoi hän hilpeästi, »lähdetään aamiaiselle. Stella

ihmettelee varmaan, missä me viivyttelemme.»
XVI LUKU.

Taivaanrannan taa.

Iltapäivä oli jo kulunut pitkälle, kun Curly palasi laakson toisesta

päästä tuoden mukanaan erään naisen, joka vapauttaisi rouva
Baldwinin taloushommista, ja Helen arveli nyt voivansa palata
Reidien luo.

»Minä käsken Patchesin saattamaan teitä kärryillä», sanoi

Rovasti. »Olitte hyvin ystävällinen jäädessänne tänne, te olette ollut
meille korvaamattomaksi avuksi.»

»Älkää puhuko mitään kärryistä, herra Baldwin. Käveleminen tekisi

minulle varmasti hyvää. Mutta olisin todellakin iloinen, jos Patches
tulisi saattamaan minua — tuntisin itseni paljon turvallisemmaksi»,
lisäsi hän nauraen.

Rouva Baldwin nukkui, ja Kitty istui sairasvuoteen vieressä

Helenin lähtiessä kartanosta, mutta Rovasti itse saattoi häntä ja
Patchesia hiukan matkaa. Sanottuaan hyvästi Rovastille ja
luvattuaan palata huomenna Helen sanoi seuralaiselleen: »Oi, Larry,
minä olen iloinen tästä tilaisuudesta, tahdoin välttämättä tavata sinua
kahdenkesken, enkä ymmärtänyt, miten se kävisi laatuun. Minulla on
jotakin sanottavaa sinulle, Larry, jotakin, joka minun täytyy sanoa
sinulle, ja sinun on oltava hyvin kärsivällinen kuunnellessasi.»

»Sinähän näit, mitä tänä aamuna tapahtui. En löydä sanoja, joilla

voisin sinua kiittää!» sanoi mies vakavasti.

»Se oli kauheata — kauheata, Larry! Miksi et sanonut heille, kuka

olet?
Miksi annoit heidän —» Hän ei saattanut lopettaa lausettaan.

Mies naurahti lyhyesti. »Sehän olisi ollut turhaa sanojen

haaskausta. Luuletko, että he niissä olosuhteissa olisivat ottaneet
uskoakseen sellaisia juttua?»

Hetkisen he kulkivat vaieten. Sitten Patches kysyi: »Jim Reidin

epäluulojenko takia sinä tahdoit tavata minua, Helen?»

»En, Larry, vaan Kittyn tähden», vastasi Helen.

»Kittyn?»

»Kitty kertoi kaiken minulle tänään», jatkoi Helen. »Lapsiraukka on

miltei suunniltaan.»

Mies ei vastannut. Helen katsoi häneen äidillisesti.

»Rakastatko sinä häntä niin suuresti, Larry? Sano minulle

rehellisesti, onko niin?»

Patches ei saattanut — ei uskaltanut — katsoa häneen.

»Sano minulle, Larry», intti Helen. »Minun täytyy saada tietää se.
Rakastatko sinä Kittyä, niin kuin miehen tulee rakastaa vaimoaan?»
 Nyt Patches vastasi ääni liikutuksesta väristen. »Miksi kysyt
minulta sellaista? Sinähän tiedät vastauksen. Mitä oikeutta sinulla on
pakottaa minut sanomaan sinulle se, minkä jo tiedät — että minä
rakastan sinua — toisen miehen vaimoa?»

Helen kalpeni. Tahtoessaan auttaa Kittyä ei hän lainkaan ollut

tullut ajatelleeksi, mihin tilanteeseen hän tällä kysymyksellä oli
saattanut itsensä.

»Larry!» hän sanoi ankarasti.

»Niin», vastasi tämä intohimoisesti, »sinähän vaadit minua

sanomaan totuuden.»

»Minä vaadin sinua sanomaan minulle totuuden Kittystä», vastasi

Helen.

»Ja sen sinä nyt tiedät», vastasi mies nopeasti.

»Oi, Larry», huudahti tyttö, »kuinka sinä saatoit — kuinka sinä

saatoit pyytää vaimoksesi naista, jota et rakasta? Kuinka sinä
saatoit, Larry? Ja juuri kun minä olin niin ylpeä sinusta, niin iloinen
siitä, että vihdoin olit löytänyt oman itsesi, että sinä olit niin kelpo
mies!»

»Kitty ja minä olemme hyvät ystävät», vastasi Patches matalalla,

synkällä äänellä, »ja hyvät toverit. Viime vuonna olen oppinut
pitämään hänestä hyvin paljon — meillä on niin paljon yhteistä. Minä
voin antaa hänelle sen elämän, jota hän kaipaa — elämän, johon
hänet on luotu. Minä teen hänet onnelliseksi, minä olen hänelle
uskollinen, minä tarjoan hänelle kaiken, mitä mies voi tarjota
vaimolleen.»
 »Ei, Larry», sanoi Helen hellästi miehen äänen avuttomuuden
liikuttamana, sillä Patches oli puhunut aivan kuin itsekin olisi ollut
selvillä siitä, että hänen yrityksensä puolustaa kihlaustaan Kittyn
kanssa olivat turhia. »Ei, Larry, sinä et voi tarjota Kittylle kaikkea,
mitä miehen tulee tarjota vaimolleen. Ilman rakkautta et voi olla
hänen miehensä.»

Jälleen he kulkivat äänettöminä kappaleen matkaa. Sitten Helen

kysyi: »Ja oletko varma siitä, että Kitty rakastaa sinua — niinkuin
naisen tulee rakastaa, tarkoitan.»

»En olisi pyytänyt häntä vaimokseni, jollen olisi uskonut sitä»,

vastasi Patches hiukan innokkaammin.

»Et tietenkään», virkkoi Helen hilpeämmin, »eikä Kitty olisi voinut

sanoa 'kyllä', jollei hän olisi uskonut sinun rakastavan häntä!»

»Tarkoitatko luulevasi, ettei Kitty rakasta minua, Helen?»

»Minä tiedän, että hän rakastaa Phil Actonia, Larry. Minä luin sen
hänen kasvoistaan, kun hän ensin kuuli onnettomuustapauksesta.
Hän on aina rakastanut häntä, Larry, siitä saakka, kun he lapsina
leikkivät yhdessä. Kitty on koettanut tukahduttaa sydämensä tunteen
— hän on koettanut voittaa rakkautensa, mutta nyt hän tietää, että
se on mahdotonta. Olipa onni teille molemmille, että hän huomasi
rakastavansa Actonia, ennen kuin oli ehtinyt pilata sekä omansa että
sinun elämäsi.»

»Mutta kuinka hän saattoi lupautua vaimokseni, jos hän rakasti

Philiä?» kysyi Patches.
 »Mutta kuinka sinä saatoit pyytää häntä vaimoksesi, vaikka —»,
vastasi Helen nopeasti lainkaan ajattelematta itseään. Sitten hän
jatkoi urheasti syrjäyttäen itsensä: »Sinä johdatit hänet suureen
kiusaukseen, Larry. Sinä et kenties tarkoittanut sitä, mutta sinä teit
sen joka tapauksessa. Sinä houkuttelit häntä rikkaudellasi — kaikella
sillä ylellisyydellä ja loistolla ja hienoudella, mitä saatoit hänelle
tarjota. Sinä sait hänet vaihtamaan rakkauden kaikkeen tähän. Minä
tiedän, Larry — minä tiedän, sillä minäkin olin kerran samassa
kiusauksessa.»

Patches teki eleen kuin väittääkseen vastaan, mutta Helen ei

antanut hänen keskeyttää. »Sinä et tiennyt sitä, mutta vain muisto
isävainajani opetuksista pelasti minut tekemästä hirveätä erehdystä.
Nyt sinä olet mies, Larry. Sinä olet minulle rakkaampi kuin kukaan
muu mies maailmassa paitsi yhtä, ja enemmän kuin ainoatakaan
muuta miestä — paitsi tuota yhtä — minä kunnioitan ja ihailen sinua
saavuttamasi miehuuden takia. Mutta Larry, etkö ymmärrä: kun mies
on mies, on olemassa asia, jota hän ei koskaan voi tehdä — hän ei
koskaan voi käyttää hyväkseen naisen heikkoutta. Hän ei voi
johdattaa häntä kiusaukseen, joka on suurempi kuin hänen
voimansa. Hänen täytyy olla voimakas sekä omasta että hänen
puolestaan. Hänen täytyy pelastaa hänet hänestä itsestään
huolimatta.»

Patches kohotti päänsä ja loi katseensa kauas Granite Mountainia

kohden. Kerran ennen oli tämä nainen herättänyt hänessä uinuvan
miehuuden, ja nyt hän jälleen vetosi siihen, mikä hänen
sisimmässään oli hienointa ja parhainta.

»Sinä olet aina oikeassa, Helen», hän sanoi miltei nöyrästi.

 »Ei, Larry», vastasi Helen nopeasti, »mutta sinä tiedät minun tällä
kertaa olevan oikeassa.»

»Minä vapautan heti Kittyn hänen lupauksestaan», virkkoi Patches

ikäänkuin päättääkseen keskustelun.

Mutta Helen vastasi nopeasti: »Juuri sitä sinä et saa tehdä.»

Mies hämmästyi. »Miksi — mutta minä luulin — mitä ihmettä sinä

oikeastaan tarkoitat?»

Helen nauroi onnellista naurua vastatessaan: »Tuhma Larry, etkö

ymmärrä? Sinun täytyy saada Kitty itse antamaan sinulle rukkaset.
Sinun on pelastettava hänen itsekunnioituksensa. Etkö käsitä,
kuinka se nöyryyttäisi häntä, jos hän hetkenkään kuvittelisi, että sinä
et rakastakaan häntä? Ajattelehan, mitä hän kärsisi tietäessään, että
sinä olit yksinkertaisesti vain yrittänyt ostaa hänet rikkauksillasi ja
kaikella, minkä omistat?»

Patches-raukan vastaväitteet kaikuivat jälleen kuuroille korville.

»Juuri sitä sinun kosintasi oli, Larry. Ja Kittyn kaltainen tyttö, jos
hän tietäisi, mitä itse asiassa on tehnyt, pitäisi sen jälkeen varmasti
itseään arvottomana ottamaan vastaan onneaan silloinkin, kun se
todellakin kolkuttaa hänen ovelleen. Sinun täytyy saada hänet
ylpeänä ja iloisena antamaan kätensä miehelle, jota hän rakastaa.»

»Mutta — mitä voin tehdä?» kysyi Patches alakuloisena.

»Sitä minä en tiedä, Larry. Mutta sinun täytyy yrittää — Kittyn

tähden sinun täytyy.»
 »Jollette sinä ja Rovasti aamulla olisi sekaantuneet asiaan, olisi
kaikki ollut paljon yksinkertaisempaa!» arveli Patches, ja Helen
huomasi hänen taas nauravan itselleen.

»Sinä et saa sanoa noin — et saa, Larry!» huudahti hän.

Tämä katsahti kysyvästi Heleniin. »Tahdotko minun valehtelevan

hänelle — suorastaan valehtelevan?» kysyi hän.

Helen vastasi rauhallisesti: »En luule, että ottaisin sitä huomioon,

jos olisin sinun sijassasi, Larry — näissä olosuhteissa.»

Matkalla Risti-Kolmioon päätti Patches käydä käsiksi vaikeaan

tehtäväänsä niin pian kuin mahdollista.

Illallisen jälkeen hänen onnistui puhutella Kittyä, kun kukaan muu

ei ollut lähellä.

»Minun täytyy saada tavata sinua kahdenkesken tänä iltana», hän

kuiskasi kiireisesti. »Niin pian kuin mahdollista. Minä odotan sinua
puiden alla hevosuittamon rannalla. Tule sinne heti, kun tulee pimeä
ja sinä pääset pujahtamaan talosta kenenkään näkemättä.»

Tyttö hämmästyi hänen ilmeestään. Hän puhui nopeasti ja näytti

hermostuneelta.

»Mutta Patches —»

»Sinun täytyy!» keskeytti mies katsahtaen Rovastiin, joka lähestyi

heitä. »Minulla on jotakin sanottavaa sinulle, jotakin, joka minun
täytyy sanoa tänä iltana.»
 Hän kääntyi puhumaan Rovastin kanssa; ja Kitty lähti pois. Tuntia
myöhemmin, kun oli tullut pimeä, meni hän Patchesin mainitsemalle
paikalle, jossa tämä jo odotti häntä.

»Kuulehan, Kitty», alkoi tämä viivyttelemättä, ja äänestään ja

ilmeestään päättäen hän oli suuren levottomuuden vallassa. »Minun
täytyy lähteä pois täältä. En uskalla enää jäädä tänne päiväksikään,
minun täytyy lähteä vielä tänä iltana.»

»Mitä, Patches?» sanoi Kitty pakottautuen puhumaan tyynesti

häntä rauhoittaakseen. »Mikä nyt on hätänä?»

»Sinähän tiedät, mitä he aikoivat tehdä minulle tänä aamuna.»

Kitty oli hämmästynyt. Oli totta, että hän ei voinut rakastaa tätä
miestä niin kuin hän rakasti Philiä, mutta hän oli pitänyt häntä
parhaana ystävänään ja kunnioittanut ja ihaillut häntä. Hänestä
tuntui pahalta nähdä hänet tällaisena — arkana ja pelästyneenä.
Hän ei voinut ymmärtää.

»Mutta Patches», hän sanoi vakavasti, »sehän on nyt ohitse, —

sitä ei enää uudelleen voi tapahtua.»

»Sinä et tiedä», vastasi tämä, »silloin et olisi niin varma siitä. Phil
saattaisi —», hän vaikeni, ikäänkuin ei olisi uskaltanut päättää
lausettaan.

Kitty arvasi nyt, että hänen pelollaan mahtoi olla syvemmät syyt
kuin hän oli luullutkaan.

»Mutta ethän sinä ole karjavaras», väitti hän. »Sinun tarvitsee vain
selittää kuka olet. Kukaan ei luulisi hetkeäkään Lawrence Knightiä
varkaaksi. On naurettavaa ajatellakaan sellaista.»
 »Sinä et ymmärrä», virkkoi Patches jälleen. »On kysymys aivan
muusta kuin varkaudesta.»

Kitty hämmästyi. »Ethän sinä voi tarkoittaa, Patches — ethän

tarkoita, että Phil —», sopersi hän.

»Kyllä, minä tarkoitan Philiä», kuiskasi Patches. »Minä — me

olimme riidassa — minä kiivastuin. Hyvä Jumala — tyttö, etkö
ymmärrä, että minun täytyy lähteä täältä? Minä en uskalla jäädä
tänne. Kuule nyt, Kitty! Se on kaikkein parasta. Kunhan vain pääsen
pois täältä ja voin jälleen ottaa oman nimeni, niin olen turvassa.
Myöhemmin sinä voit tulla luokseni. Tulethan sinä, etkö tulekin,
rakkaani? Sinä tiedät, kuinka minä ikävöin sinua. Tämä ei millään
lailla muuta suunnitelmiamme. Jos rakastat minua, niin sinä —»

Kitty keskeytti hänet hiljaa huudahtaen. »Ja sinä — sinäkö siis teit
sen?»

»Mutta minähän sanoin sinulle, että me olimme riidassa», yritti

Patches selittää.

»Ja sinä luulet, että minä nyt lähtisin kanssasi?» Tyttö vapisi
suuttumuksesta. »Oh, sinä erehdyt suuresti! Ja minä luulen itsekin
erehtyneeni. En voinut koskaan kuvitella, että sinä! Ei mikään, mitä
ikinä tekisitkin, voisi saada minua unohtamaan sitä, minkä juuri
kerroit minulle. Sinä saat lähteä.»

»Tarkoitatko, ettet tahdo seurata minua?» sopersi Patches.

»Luuletko minun voivan tehdä sitä?» kysyi Kitty.

»Mutta Kitty, ajatko sinä näin minut pois? Ethän sinä voi hylätä
minua?»
 »Se on ainoa, mitä saatan tehdä», vastasi tyttö kylmästi. »Kuolisin
häpeästä, jos joku saisi tietää, että aioin kerran olla sinulle enemmän
kuin tähän saakka olen ollut. Mutta sinun on välttämättä lähdettävä
tänä iltana.»

Ja näin sanoen Kitty juoksi takaisin kartanoon jättäen Patchesin

seisomaan paikalleen.

Mutta yksinään pimeässä hymyili Patches itsekseen.

Aamun koittaessa joutui koko Risti-Kolmion-Kartano kuohuksiinsa.

Patches oli hävinnyt. Ja lisäksi oli paras Rovastin hevosista — suuri
täpläotsainen ori — myöskin poissa.

Tämä uutinen levisi nopeasti koko laaksoon etäisimpiä

karjakartanoita myöten. Ja moni viisas pää nyökkäsi ymmärtävänä,
ja monet huulet virkkoivat: »Minähän tiesin sen.» Mies, joka niin
salaperäisellä tavalla oli ilmestynyt heidän keskuuteensa ja joka
vuoden ajan oli ollut koko seudun puheenaiheena, oli viimeinkin
ilmaissut oikean luonteensa. Mutta karjanhoitajat tiesivät Rovastin
päättävästä esiintymisestä heidän kokouksessaan, että asia nyt oli
jätettävä hänen hoidettavakseen. He tarjosivat hänelle apuaan ja
neuvojaan. He laskivat leikkiä hevosen hinnasta, mutta Rovasti
nauroi heidän leikinlaskulleen, kuunteli heidän neuvojaan ja sanoi
sitten aikovansa antaa asian Yavapai Countyn sheriffin huostaan.

Helen oli ainoa, jolle Kitty kertoi viimeisestä keskustelustaan

Patchesin kanssa. Ja hämmästyneenä ja liikutettuna siitä uhrista,
jolla
Patches oli ostanut Kittyn vapauden ja mielenrauhan, Helen pyysi
tyttöä
unohtamaan ja olemaan onnellinen.