Separation
by W. S. Merwin
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
§
When I first read this poem, I was in Columbia University, The Norton Anthology of Poetry in front of me, ignoring my professor and skimming the book. (Seduction comes in paperback.) I had been reading Byron and found myself faced with a modern poet who, in nineteen words and three lines had said everything there was to say about death, separation, your best friend moving away and every other form of loss.
'Why,' I thought (and probably said), 'do I bother?'
Years passed before I found the beginning of an answer to that why.
Merwin now lives in Hawaii. Like Denise Levertov, he was the son of a religious man (using 'religious' in the professional sense). Merwin's father was a Presbyterian minister. In another near-parallel, Merwin began writing hymns when he was five years old. As a young man (as against young boy), he went to Europe, travelled and discovered a love for languages that would enable him to serve as a translator of poems from other tongues: surely, an ultimate form of bridge-building, poet to reader, writer between words to seeker between words.
He's won too many awards to mention, and he's done it while alive, which is unto itself noteworthy.
I travel fairly often and cycle through welcomes and farewells more often than through weeks. My history with death is an intimate one (not always by my choice, although it could be argued that volunteering with the dying was a purposeful seeking-out and finding). I've copied 'Separation' into uncounted notes and cards and anticipate, without foreseeing specifics, doing so again. His words have woven themselves through my story, threading into other lives.
Today, as I ready myself to board a flight, as I approach a departure (mine) and farewell (to one I leave behind, albeit in in terms only of location), 'Separation' speaks me: Your absence has gone through me . . .
When I first read this poem, I was in Columbia University, The Norton Anthology of Poetry in front of me, ignoring my professor and skimming the book. (Seduction comes in paperback.) I had been reading Byron and found myself faced with a modern poet who, in nineteen words and three lines had said everything there was to say about death, separation, your best friend moving away and every other form of loss.
'Why,' I thought (and probably said), 'do I bother?'
Years passed before I found the beginning of an answer to that why.
Merwin now lives in Hawaii. Like Denise Levertov, he was the son of a religious man (using 'religious' in the professional sense). Merwin's father was a Presbyterian minister. In another near-parallel, Merwin began writing hymns when he was five years old. As a young man (as against young boy), he went to Europe, travelled and discovered a love for languages that would enable him to serve as a translator of poems from other tongues: surely, an ultimate form of bridge-building, poet to reader, writer between words to seeker between words.
He's won too many awards to mention, and he's done it while alive, which is unto itself noteworthy.
I travel fairly often and cycle through welcomes and farewells more often than through weeks. My history with death is an intimate one (not always by my choice, although it could be argued that volunteering with the dying was a purposeful seeking-out and finding). I've copied 'Separation' into uncounted notes and cards and anticipate, without foreseeing specifics, doing so again. His words have woven themselves through my story, threading into other lives.
Today, as I ready myself to board a flight, as I approach a departure (mine) and farewell (to one I leave behind, albeit in in terms only of location), 'Separation' speaks me: Your absence has gone through me . . .
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