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though it just happened that way, when it may have taken months or years. It has taken you your whole life so far.
BG: You've referenced Camus's belief that all true writers have two or three images to which they continually return. Is this something of which the poet himself can be aware? Do you have a sense of the two or three images that haunt you? WSM: I think partly aware. I wouldn't say what I think they are. But I think it's true. I think if you look through many writers you can see that. Look at Faulkner and you can see that he's sometimes writing the same story over and over again in different ways. Different characters, different everything, but basically the story is the same. There's something about the way the story develops that's deep in Faulkner. Then take a great poet like Milton. I realized some years ago that all of Milton is in the sonnet "Methought I saw my late espoused saint." Everything that Milton ever wrote is in that sonnet. Milton is blind and the whole theme of blindness runs through Milton. Blindness in every sense. That's there from the sonnet "When I consider how my light is spent" all the way through to Samson and Agonistes. There's the sense of lost innocence, and the wife he's talking about as his "late espoused sail)t," he never saw. He was blind already when he married her. He dreamed that he saw her. So this is the lost paradise, which he sees only in his imagination. He sees it only in a dream. "But Oh! as to embrace me she inclin'd, / I wak'd, she fled, and day brought back my night." I think in some ways it's the greatest poem he ever wrote, that sonnet.
BG: You've spoken about "moving on" in one's work from one kind of writing to another. The huge movement from the poems in The Drunk in the Furnace to those in The Moving Target has been well-documented. In reflecting, where else do you see a clearly demarcated "moving-on" in your poetry? WSM: This isn't planned or programmed. But I really come to the point where I try to find some slightly different way of doing something, which is, in part, a feeling that I'm coming to the end of what I have been doing.
BG: You talked about feeling that way particularly after you finished The Drunk in the Furnace. I guess I'm wondering whether you've had that same kind of feeling after any subsequent book. WSM: Not quite as crucially as that. But in a general way, every new poem is supposed to be somewhat different. There's always a point where the Summer 2005
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