Keeping A Log - James Merrill

Log by James Merrill (1972)

Then when the flame forked like a sudden path

I gasped and stumbled, and was less.

Density pulsing upward, gauze of ash,

Dear light along the way to nothingness,

What could be made of you but light, and this?

***

‘In Merrill’s poem, the inevitable splitting of the self, the forking of the vital flame, diminishes the speaker thus reminded of his mortality. but the very bifurcation produces sudden illumination and even gaiety. (The poet can make light of the dilemma after all, and as soon as ‘upward’ suggests ‘up word,’ the word “Log” itself in retrospect breaks into two meanings, a journal entry and a piece of fuel. So it is that dark is made light – and ‘light’ becomes heavy, dense with implication’ (J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser)

***

James Ingram Merrill was an American poet. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1977 for Divine Comedies. His poetry falls into two distinct bodies of work: the polished and formalist lyric poetry of his early career, and the epic narrative of occult communication with spirits and angels, titled The Changing Light at Sandover, which dominated his later career. Although most of his published work was poetry, he also wrote essays, fiction, and plays.

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