This paper was orginally written as a seminar paper for Dr. Miriam Clark's Spring 2013 graduate course on Contemporary American Poetry. My interest in Ecocriticism had long ago inspired an inquiry into W.S. Merwin's writing, but as the course progressed, I abandoned much of what I previously assumed about Merwin's writing and the project he undertook in writing The Shadow of Sirius.
Using the personal, lyric form allowed Merwin to avoid what some critics and readers have cited as an imperal narrative in other epics he has undertaken, such as The Folding Cliffs, A narrative of 19th-century Hawaii. Simeultaneously, Merwin is able to use the lyric to inform the epic stature of the book, which unites ancient religions and philosophies with contemporary fears of ecological devistation. This hybrid style allows him to write from the personal without being consumed by a solipsistic voice.
“Silence and the Lyric-Epic:
Merwin’s Hybrid Ecopoetics in The Shadow of Sirius”
”The wind blowing across the ridge behind me framed the silence. I learned later that, in state assessments of agricultural land, the land there had been pronounced wasteland, ruined beyond agricultural use, after little more than a century of abusive exploitation. Until the early nineteenth century there had been a forest there, its dominant tree the Hawaiian koas (Acacia koa) accompanied by ‘ohias (Metrosideros polymorpha) and other native trees and shrubs, including, perhaps, native palms of the genus Pritchardia."
“Convenience, I believe, never comes gratis, and invasion is always part of the price. None of the places that I had loved in my life had been notable for their convenience, and in fact the feeling of (relative) remoteness along this coast when I first came to it was one of its deep attractions for me…I hoped to have a house set among trees and visible only as one actually arrived there on foot.”
—from the essay, “The House and Garden: The Emergence of a Dream”The Kenyon Review
“On the last day of the world
I would want to plant a tree”
― W.S. Merwin
