A Pattern of Visionary Imagery in W. S. Merwin :: Poem Poet Essays

A Pattern of Visionary Imagery in W. S. Merwin After quoting Blake's own words to establish his work as essentially "'Visionary,'" and then defining that term as the "view of the world . . . as it really is when it is seen by human consciousness at its greatest height and intensity" (143), Northrop Frye suggests an important but largely ignored point for criticism in his essay "Blake After Two Centuries" when he observes that works like Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception "seem to show that the formal principles of this heightened vision are constantly latent in the mind," and that it is this constant availability of vision, near at hand but suppressed, which "perhaps explains the communicability of such visions" (143). Frye is right, of course, but there is another reason for his observation's importance to criticism, which is that the imagery and perceptions of visionary experiences, whatever their cause, occur in readily identifiable clusters, the affective nature of which is determined largely by the emotional reaction of the person experiencing them. Because of this, and because there are poets and authors other than Blake whose work is also visionary--that is, concerned to a large extent with the imagery and perceptions of what we now call altered states of consciousness--one can construct from various works and research on these states a visionary schema that will indicate not only when such a writer's subject is the unconscious, but whether his or her emotional reaction to it is positive, negative, or some ambivalent combination of the two. By means of such a schema, for example, it is possible to trace through W. S. Merwin's deep image poetry a pattern of reconciliation with the unconscious: to argue that, in the works published from 1962 through 1977, he moves from a generally negative sense of it to a far more positive one. Though individual poems in the collections ranging from The Moving Target to The Compass Flower reflect varying senses of the unconscious--there are quietly happy poems in his darkest collection The Lice, for instance--the general pattern in these books and those published between is one of a coming-to-terms with the unconscious, a movement visible largely as a coming-to-terms with death. Before arguing that this acceptance of death is no less than a willing (rather than a fearful) acceptance of the self-surrender necessary to any visionary experience or altered state, even one as specialized as the successful writing of deep image poetry, it is first necessary both to provide the general outlines of that schema mentioned above, and to establish that Merwin's work, like Blake's, is in fact visionary.