When the War is Over

The Lice (Athenaeum, 1967), is probably W. S. Merwin's most notable book of poetry. It is widely known for its gnomic difficulty, for being nearly hermetic. Joyce Carol Oates has called it “monochromatic” and remarked on its “uncompromising plainness.” Edward Hirsch called Merwin “the Samuel Beckett of postwar American poetry.” And in an interview from 1982 Merwin himself comments on the despair evident always in the book: “. . . most of the time that I was writing The Lice I thought I had pretty much given up writing because there was really no point to it. . . . That can easily be described as despair, but I think it may not be just despair---it may be a kind of searing vision: a dumb vision, and I don't think you can stay there if you're going to go on living.” It is a book of ghosts and abandonment, and the chief of the ghosts is Merwin, which gives the book a strange vulnerability, despite its fierce and uncompromising stance. The book's strangeness, its haunting recalcitrance is of course, partly because of its themes, the dying out of large numbers of animals and large parts of the earth, the dark violence of the Vietnam War, and the triumph of consumerism evident everywhere in American society. It is also due to the use of indeterminacy as a major structuring principle (through the rejection of punctuation, the minimalist look and impersonal tone, the almost mystical use of non-specific words, the shifting pronouns, the lack of antecedents to pronouns, the defamiliarization of the object, and the consistent use of parataxis). This very indeterminacy is also a theme of the book, the difficulty of coming to resolution, the difficulty of acting, the impossibility of knowing. Despite the uncertainty there is a certain and bitter corrosiveness about the calling up of pictures of extinction, loss and sadness which are the poems of this book. The best known poems are “I Live up Here, “ “The Last One,” “A Scale in May,” “The Asians Dying,” “When the War is Over,” and “For a Coming Extinction.” “The Asians Dying” is exemplary and still a powerful anti-war poem, perhaps because of its unspecificity of the nouns used in the poem: “The dead go away like bruises,” the blood vanishes into the poisoned farmland.” The last stanza aptly creates a landscape of war and horror:

“The possessors move everywhere under Death their star
Like columns of smoke they advance into the shadows
Like thin flames with no light
They with no past
And fire their only future”

With the change of a title, the poem is unfortunately and perfectly suited to our day and time: “The ash the great walker follows the possessors.” This poem is followed by “When the War is Over,” also fitting:

“When the war is over
We will be proud of course the air will be
Good for breathing at last
The water will have been improved the salmon
And the silence of heaven will migrate more perfectly
The dead will think the living are worth it we will know
Who we are
And we will all enlist again”