Late Happiness

W.S. Merwin has been writing and publishing poetry for more than 60 years, since W.H. Auden selected Merwin’s first book for the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1952. He’s collected awards ever since, especially in recent years: he was awarded the National Book Award in 2005 and the Pulitzer Prize in 2009, and in 2010, he was appointed the 17th poet laureate of the United States. Merwin also became the second living poet to have work published by the Library of America, in two volumes totaling more than 1,500 pages.

Last month, Merwin celebrated his 89th birthday and the publication of a new book of poetry, Garden Time. While writing some of the best work of his career, he has recently faced health challenges, including losing his eyesight. He spoke to the Poetry Foundation from his home in Hawaii about his dismay over the state of the environment, not living for others’ expectations, and trying to enjoy his luck. The following interview was condensed and edited.

I know you’ve been losing your eyesight over the last few years. How has that changed the process of writing for you?

It depends on what I’m writing. Poetry always has been a matter of being taken by surprise–sometimes in the middle of the night. My table in my study here is cluttered with little pieces of paper with a few words on each. They’re the beginning of something that might be a poem. 

It’s been five years since I was able to read. My left eye is completely gone, and my right one has macular degeneration, which is getting worse all the time. That’s just the condition one lives with. I’ve been pretty well assured by my eye doctor that although my eyesight will be poor in my right eye, I won’t go blind. That’s nice because we live in a very beautiful place here. 

Do you dictate everything now or do you still scribble on pieces of paper?

I try to write it down on a clipboard, and I give it to one of the people who comes to read to me. They are singularly good people. They’re all volunteers, and they’re very capable, very helpful. A great deal of Garden Time was done that way. I don’t know what people imagine the title means, but I was thinking of Blake: “The hours of folly are measur’d by the clock, / but of wisdom: no clock can measure.” The hours of wisdom are where you simply forget about time. For me, that’s the garden—this wonderful garden of palm trees around us. There are 900 species of palms here. I go for a walk in the morning, and I just love being here. I feel extremely lucky living here with my wife, my only love, and I’m able to see enough to wander around in the garden. It’s just a joy. 

One of my favorite poems in your new book is “After the Dragonflies,” which beautifully describes these once-so-common creatures. “Now there are grown-ups hurrying / who never saw one / and do not know what they / are not seeing,” you write, which makes the issues of climate change and the sixth great extinction so very real and personal. How conscious are you of addressing conservation and environmental concerns in your work?

To my great astonishment, people got very excited about that poem. I’m delighted that they did. I have a biologist friend who works at the great biology department at the University of Oregon. Some years ago I was there, and he said, we’re losing a species a week. I was shocked, of course. The last time I saw him, he said, we’re losing a species every few seconds. We’re doing it. We’re using poison in the environment as though it didn’t matter. People use poison in the grass in front of their houses; they use poison along the roadsides. We’re poisoning the whole place. A number of species of birds have just disappeared from here in the last five years. I don’t know whether they’re completely gone or if we’ll ever see them again. We know that we lost a species just this year. People ask, how did you get interested in conservation, and I say if you’re interested in the world it’s not a matter of conservation, it’s a matter of reality. 

People ask, what led you to live in the country? Well, this is the real world. The real world is not the red light down at the corner—it’s right here. It’s the thrush waking in the morning. We’ve allowed ourselves to get very far out of touch with it. It’s not bad just for the world; it’s very bad for us. I’m very sorry to see it happening. E.O. Wilson, the great biologist, said there’s a great division between the people who think the world is a city and then a whole lot of nothing and then another city, and the people who think the world is the forest and the grass and then a city and then the forest and the grass and then a city. One being the real world and the other one being something less than that. 

Many of your poems have a fairly bleak vision of where things are going. But you also have poems that are more personal and celebrate nature, celebrate moments of joy.

It’s strange there are so many poems in world literature about unhappiness and that so few poems have been written about happiness. I think I’m so lucky because I’m relatively happy. Among the bits of luck is to have a temperament that is not gloomy. I may sound very gloomy in what I write, but I think we have a chance to be happy here. I don’t feel selfish about it. I think that the only right thing to do with good fortune like that—if one has the rare luck to have it—is to enjoy it, if one can.

Poems such as “December Morning,” with its first line, “How did I come to this late happiness,” definitely do that. Do you have any advice for the rest of us, besides being lucky? Is there something you did or a way that you approached life that you credit?

I’ve never relied on money. People asked, what are you going to do when you grow up? I said, well, I’m already a poet, but when they said, that’s not enough to make a living, I would say, what do you call a living? I don’t want any more than I need. I’ve always felt that way. I’ve never had any money unless I had a grant for a year or something like that. I say to young people, trust your luck and see how far it can take you. If you want to settle down and have a nice good American middle-class life and raise children, that’s one thing. If you don’t want to, that used to be considered rather shocking. There’s a wonderful line of Ibsen from The Lady from the Sea about being overridden by other people’s expectations. When I first got to Princeton, I thought, this is what I want. I wanted freedom and the ability to find out a little about who I am. I’ve been unbelievably lucky. I don’t know why. One never knows why one’s lucky. Some of it is skill, but most of it’s luck.
 
Garden Time moves between these beautiful passing moments and more haunting complex poems, as we’ve been talking about, and you close the book with “The Present,” which  begins “As they were leaving the garden / one of the angels bent down to them and whispered / I am to give you this.” Could you talk a little about the poem? Because it’s about a moment of transition and coping and finding a new way forward.

It’s about the myth of the Garden of Eden. I think it’s a fascinating myth. There were the great angels behind Adam and Eve. As they’re leaving the garden, one of the angels bends down and says, I was told to give you this. I don’t know what it is, but it’s something that will apparently be of use to you. What it is, is laughter. 

Real laughter is a great boon to our species, I think. We can find the world so remarkable that it makes us laugh. My sister said, you were that way as a child. You found everything, you just delighted in everything. I can remember watching sparrows on the wire along the street and spending a long time just watching the sparrows. I love the world. That’s what the angel is giving them—something they don’t have in the garden. There’s no laughter in the Garden of Eden. Why would they laugh? They’re in the Garden of Eden. But now you’re outside and here; you can know how to laugh. The moment their hands touch, they laugh. That’s what the poem is about. 

Outside the garden–outside “garden time,” if you will—laughter is one of the things that sustains us.

Yes, I think so. 

Could you talk a little about the Merwin Conservancy and the work you’ve been doing in Hawaii? You have 18 acres on the island of Maui with hundreds of varieties of palm trees.

I was living a few miles from here and a woman said there’s a piece of land for sale right out near the coast. I came over to see, and the land was very cheap. My parents had just died, so I had a little bit of money. There was nothing growing on it except down in the streambed. It was bleached, and it was listed in the county books as ruined land. I thought, I don’t believe nothing will grow here. I’d like to buy it and see about this. I think there are ways it can be brought back to life. It’s hard for people to come now and realize that was ever said about this land because it’s covered with trees. We welcome groups of schoolchildren and other people to come and be guided through the garden because fewer and fewer people get to even see places like this. It makes them happy. That’s the extraordinary thing. It does make them happy. 

There are lot of mysterious things about trees we’re just learning all the time—communications among the root systems and communications among the leaf systems. The green world is very mysterious. It’s absolutely fascinating, and without it we wouldn’t exist. People talk about the environment as though it were something you could be interested in, like having a stamp collection or something. It’s not so. If there’s no environment, there’s no us. 

In the past 12 years, you’ve been awarded the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, you were named poet laureate, and you became one of two living poets published by the Library of America. I’m not sure any other writer has had such a decade.

I can assure you it had nothing to do with politics on my part. [laughs] I don’t know why it happened. I don’t know how any of those things were chosen. They’d offered poet laureate to me several times, and I’d said no. It seemed to me that I would be tied to a reputation, and I felt that that was a limitation on my own freedom. It was important to be free. I had this very severe upbringing, and I wanted to find out who the hell I was. It’s taken me the rest of my life to find out who I was. I realized that so much of the modern world is based on people having to follow other people’s expectations. I wanted to avoid other people’s expectations. My upbringing was this strict Calvinism and I thought, throw it all out and see what’s really there. At the other end of my life, I’m still doing that. 

I live just down the hill from the astronomers who get all the information from the telescopes over on the Big Island. They found 1,200 unknown planets in the Milky Way. I called up one of the astronomers, a friend of mine, Jeff, and I said, that was exciting! Was it exciting for you? He said, sure, we knew they were there, we just had never seen them on the screen, and then we saw them. He said, every time something like that happens I realize it could happen again and again. 

The universe is a great unknown wonderful place, and we know nothing, really, to speak of about it. I think that either depresses and frightens one or is exhilarating. We are very important, and we’re not important in quite the way we think we are. Each one of us is unique, and we can find out a whole lot just by examining ourselves. I think that’s the essential thing. Not paying attention to how you’re going to make money, just paying attention to whatever is around you. Each one of those seconds is your only chance. It’s your life. And it’s wonderful. The more attention that we pay to our ordinary lives leads to a real elation that we’re here at all.