R.T. Smith Merwin's Arrows hen I started writing poetry in the seventies, I was callow and fallow and so ignorant as to approach a kind of canine purity. I didn't know anything about twentieth-century poets other than Eliot and Frost, and I wanted to write poems that sounded the former but were as exciting as Homer. The first poet who helped was James Dickey, but beyond his own work, he provided me inadvertently with an even more provocative guide. In his ambivalent but optimistic review of The Drunk in the Furnace, Dickey said Merwin was "one of the master prosodists of our time" and that he should "soar like a phoenix out of the neat ashes of his early work." I wasn't acquainted with that earlier work, and my local library didn't have the book in question, but the review was over a decade old, and I was able to locate a copy of the more recent The Carrier of Ladders at a local bookstore. After that, poetry would never be the same for me. Much of what Merwin offered me I can still locate around the projectiles in two of his poems, "The Judgment of Paris" and "Song of Man Chipping an Arrowhead." The first poem is narrative, allusive, authoritative, astute, alive with incremental variations and patterned echoes, rhetorically rich, with more narrative than ellipsis for anyone who knows this story of the seeds of the Trojan War. I was excited by the fresh perspective, the feel of the brilliantly extemporaneous (which was probably the result of substantial distilled reflection), the deft and severe presentation of the three cynical goddesses. In Merwin's poem, the Paris whom I enjoyed despising in The Iliad becomes ever more clearly a pawn of the immortal forces. One facet of the poem that has continued to haunt me is vegetable in nature, rather than human or divine. From the title, we know that famous apple, "its skin I already carved I To the fairest," will inevitably appear, and some readers will already be recalling that Helen is, in some versions, gathering a bouquet when the Prince of Troy arrives. But who expects the vividness of"one girl gathering I yellow flowers," so stark and isolated as the poem begins to tum toward its ultimate revelation? At the poem's conclusion we learn that this is her perennial habit-
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... to gather as she would do every day in that season from the grove the yellow ray flowers tall as herself whose roots are said to dispel pain. Summer 2005
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