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W.S. Merwin — For The Anniversary of My Death
00:15:17
W.S. Merwin’s “For The Anniversary of My Death” is a slim, precise poem — just 13 lines made up of 84 words — about the very weightiest of subjects, one’s future death. With it, Merwin has crafted an elegant vessel, a small and sturdy container to hold some of life’s big questions, uncertainties, and feelings. Are you ready to gaze at it, grasp it, sit with it? And as you contemplate death, he gently reminds, remain here — where there’s rain, birdsong, and life right in front of you.
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My name is Padre Gautuma, and for as long as I can remember, I have remembered anniversaries. I write them on my calendar now, anniversaries of somebody's death or, you know, a move or something big. I find it meaningful when somebody texts me to say I've remembered, that today's a big day or an anniversary of it. So I try to do the same for others. It's a marker of time, I suppose, and it's a way in realizing that it's not just Thursday. It's also five years or one year or 10 years since something happened. It can go backwards as well as forwards, of course, you know, because sometimes you can be thinking it's Thursday for everybody else. But for me, it's one week until the big thing happens. Time happens out of nowhere, and often we can't anticipate it. And one of the things we can do is to market. For the anniversary of my death. By W.S. merwin. Every year, without knowing it, I have passed the day when the last fires will wave to me and the silence will set out, tireless traveler, like the beam of a lightless star. Then I will no longer find myself in life as in a strange garment, surprised at the earth and the love of one woman and the shamelessness of men, as today, writing after three days of rain, hearing the wren sing and the falling cease, and bowing, not knowing, to what. I'd never thought about the day that I'll die until I read this poem. Maybe some people have, but obviously for most of us, we don't know the date. So alongside many things that this poem is about, it's a poem about what it is that we don't know. It ends with a reminder of bowing, not knowing, to what. And that, I think, is a really important feature of what's occurring for the anniversary of my death by Merwin. His poems tend to be almost completely without punctuation, no commas, full stops, periods, em dashes. They're occasionally there throughout his huge body of work, but by and large, he tends to avoid using them. And so even at the end of this poem, it ends with no visual imagination about what a sentence's full stop would look like, bowing, not knowing to what. So it leaves us with the question at the end and the final word. What? What? What? Is that a question? Is it just opening up into the blank space of emptiness? What he calls earlier on, the silence will set out. It brings us into silence, this poem, and we've been in the strange garment of life for it. Here and in a peculiar way, I feel like we're inhabiting both being in life as well as trying to look at the life we're in. By looking at this poem, then I will no longer find myself in life as in a strange garment. So the second stanza starts. But even putting it like that is a little bit awkward. Then I will no longer find myself in life. It almost implies that he's going to find himself somewhere else, which he isn't. But what he's doing is creating a reflection, reflection on reflection. He had a lifelong Buddhist practice, which he was quite private about, and it became more formal in his later decades, but even earlier on, and I think even in this poem, you can see some of the things that would lead him eventually to this deep Buddhist practice. It's a beautiful slow poem. This one is. It's unhurried, and it's got some information about his life. It's got some information about the things he does. It's got some information about the way he goes about poetry and writing. But one of the things it also has is a quiet absence, a quiet absence of fear. And the absence of fear in the midst of looking at death and looking at a deep and profound uncertainty about things. The absence of fear in a poem about such matters is really interesting. There are so many words and ways we have to speak about death. For some, they name the word deliberately and directly. Others prefer the term pass away. And this poem of Merwin's uses so many careful and precise and poetic ways. Not to look away from death or not to try to make anything easy, but to use language to hold it, perhaps, or a language that looks carefully. So, for instance, the day when the last fires will wave to me or the silence will set out, and also then when he'll not find himself in life. And these are more than just euphemisms. They're a way of describing being alive and talking about fire and noise and silence and travel and sky and the garments and the strangeness of being alive and surprise and love and shame and locatedness as well. That's really where I think this poem leads us, to the location of himself. And he is writing about himself, but in his body. He's also turning towards that endlessness, toward the unknown, toward the un being, even while he is in his own being. I spent three weeks this last summer at W.S. merwin's house on Maui. He bought two acres in 1977 on what was called then Wasteland. And then over the course of 40 years, he returned 18 acres. He bought Some more to lush rainforest hand planting palms. And his house is in the middle of it. And so I spent three weeks there working on a manuscript of poetry and being around his books. I think There must be 10,000 books there. I don't think I'm exaggerating. I must check. Sometimes I'd go around lifting the books at random and reading the inscriptions that people might have put in the front. There was a gorgeous one from Mari Heaney, who was married to Seamus Heaney until he died. And they felt like postcards of friendships and lives lived in the friendship of each other and of poetry. Alongside the books, there were many cups. W.S. merwin and his wife Paula had a love of poetry and a love of pottery, and I appreciated both enormously. The house is set up like a conservancy, and in many ways it felt like a live in museum. I was sleeping in the bed that he slept in. My friend Jane was sleeping downstairs in the library. And I was reading the poetry books and sometimes seeing his own handwritten annotations. And I was reading this poem every single day that I was there because I knew I'd be making an episode about it. And I was curious to think what it would be like to live in a place that he'd lived for a long time. And in this poem, which is doing this strange and fascinating thing about imagining the date of your own death and writing to and around that he didn't write this poem in that house in Maui. He'd published it way before this poem was published, before he turned 40. And he died in 2019, the 15th of March 2019. That's the date that he didn't know. Perhaps he knew it very close to his death. He would have been 92 had he lived six months longer. And even though I knew this poem wasn't written in and about that house, I found myself choosing to imagine that it was. So every time it rained, I think about the way he speaks about writing after three days of rain. And I didn't hear wrens, but there were all kinds of other birds, tropical birds that I heard all throughout the day and many throughout the night too. WS Merwin's interest in nature was more than an interest, really. It was a lifelong ecological commitment, was about all the other kind of ways that life occurs. Because when we think about death, it might be that we think about a human's death, but obviously life is occurring in all kinds of ways on the planet, in tiny ways, the life of a rain, in huge ways, the life of A glacier. He surrounded himself with trees, palm trees in particular. And he was doing what he could to make sure to return a piece of land to the original lushness that it had had for so long, that had been curated, intended, by native Hawaiians. And in a way, he speaks and implies through LFA's work that such work is also a poem, that a growing thing, a tree, is a made thing. It is a poem. And life occurs around that life, insects and growth and the undergrowth that occurs and the mulch that happens when trees fall and relocate themselves into the earth. This poem is painful for some, I imagine. Maybe it's near an anniversary or maybe, you know, somebody who did choose the date of their own death and you think of how devastating that was and how you wish they hadn't. And Merwin has crafted a poem that is about the bigness of things. The things that cause anxiety and fear, perhaps life and nature and death and time and decay. And alongside that, it's also about the smallest of things today. The rain. The hand holding the pen or pencil that he used to write from the grand, the huge, the existential to the particular. You can see this in the way that the poem is arranged into 13 short lines. And the line breaks sometimes mean that some of the lines stand apart by themselves without the context. Things like tireless traveler and surprised at the earth and then a will no longer. So there's been this largesse of questions about the end of your own existence, I suppose. And then the poem ends in the completely tangible the wren and the song and the strange emerging sound of the ceasing of the falling rain. And so, despite the fact that the wren has such a shorter life than his W.S. merwin leaves us with the song of a wren, which is so much louder than you'd imagine from that ping pong ball sized little bird. Hearing the wren song and hearing the beginning of the ending of the falling rain. That perhaps is a nod of his head towards what poetry might be like after a person has died, but their poetry has continued. He knew he was a celebrated poet. He knew that his poetry would be read after he died. The song of something that we remember after the small body is gone. For the anniversary of my death by W.S. merwin. Every year, without knowing it, I have passed the day when the last fires will wave to me and the silence will set out, Tireless traveler, like the beam of a lightless star. Then I will no longer find myself in life as in a strange garment, surprised at the earth and the love of one woman and the shamelessness of men as today writing after three days of rain, hearing the rain sing and the falling cease, and bowing not knowing to what. For the Anniversary of my death by W.S. merwin originally can be found in the lice and the Second Four Books of Poems, 1993, published by Athenaeum and Copper Canyon Press. Thanks to them for permission to use this poem and to Frederick Courtright of the Permissions Company. Special special thanks to Sonnet Coggins, Nina Politis and all the board members at the Merwin Conservancy for their generous residency and for their ongoing ecological stewardship. Thanks due to Bill Siegmund of Digital Island Studios and his brother Paul, who recorded the bird song in this episode while hiking on their home island in Hawaii. Poetry Unbound is Andrea Prevot, Carla Zanoni, Daryl Chen, Sparrow Murray, Chris Heagle, Bill Sigmund and me, Padre Gotuma. Our music is composed and provided by Gautam Srikishan and Blue Dot Sessions. These episodes were made in New York City on unceded Lenape land. Special thanks to Will Salwin, Nave Yan and Adam Morell at Digital Island Studios in Manhattan. Thanks as well to Frederick Courtright of the Permissions Company. Poetry Unbound is an independent non profit production of the on being projected, founded and led by Krista Tippett. This season of Poetry Unbound is made possible by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation. Our other funding partners include the Liana foundation, the Bidale foundation, and Engaging the Census Foundation. Poetry Unbound would be nothing without the listening community. Thanks to all who listen, who read and give through our weekly Poetry Unbound substack or directly to On Being. For links to the substack and to find out more about Poetry Unbound books and events, visit poetryunbound.org.