Stehen Yenser on James Merrill’s “Grass”

GRASS

The river irises
Draw themselves in. 
Enough to have seen
Their day.  The arras

Also of evening drawn,
We light up between
Earth and Venus
On the courthouse lawn,

Kept by this cheerful
Inch of green
And ten more years—fifteen?—
From disappearing.

— James Merrill
from Selected Poems, ed. J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser (New York: Knopf, 2005)

Peering and Disappearing:  On James Merrill’s “Grass”

Like the French Symbolists he admired, James Merrill was fascinated by nuance — in tone, subject, and technique alike. “Grass,” the first poem in Merrill’s Late Settings, (1985), epitomizes this fascination even as it serves, like many of his opening poems, as a succinct foreshadowing.  As the volume’s title hints, much of Late Settings makes an elegiac music, and “Grass” begins appropriately at sunset, when the irises close for the day. As darkness begins to fall, however, the speaker and his friend respond rather defiantly, and they themselves “light up” on the lawn of the village courthouse. It soon occurs to the reader that they are thumbing their noses not simply at the passing of another day but also at the law the courthouse represents, since it must be a joint that they light. Hence the drawing in or reduction of the other irises (the surprising pun is a hallmark of Merrill’s lyrical mode) and the shortness of the cigarette as well as the hue of its contents (a “cheerful / Inch of green”).  Nor is it just the law of the land they would scoff at.  Although quite different from Dylan Thomas’s villanelle with its notorious refrains—“Do not go gentle into that good night. / Rage, rage against the dying of the light”—this poem, too, urges vitality in the face of the dark law of death.  But this poet is hardly enraged.  If, as the line from Isaiah that lays down that law has it, “All flesh is grass”—well, then, here’s to grass! What better representative of inspiration? Merrill defines more narrowly the life he celebrates by situating himself and his friend precisely between the earth that will cover them (the lawn at hand is of course closely mown) and the planet Venus. The planet named for the goddess of love lights up right along with the two friends — or lovers, we must now say.

This mini-elegy, which is also a lark of a love poem, blends whimsy with dead serious recognition. So, too, the rhymes are a matter of wit and nuance. If we want to be technical, they go like this: a1b1b2a2  /  b3b2 b2 (+ a)b3  /  cb2b2c.  But even such fussy notation misrepresents the sonic delicacy.  The c rhymes are rhymes because of their accented penultimate syllables (“cheer-“ and “-pear-”), just as the word “Venus” rhymes, because of its first syllable, with “seen” and “between,” “green” and “fifteen.” The final unaccented syllable of “Venus” rhymes barely with the whispering ends of “irises” and “arras.” (For any literary reader, that “arras” with its inevitable echo of Hamlet will have its own ominous overtones.) Meanwhile, the final accented rhyme, “-pear-”, shades (by virtue of our requisite close attention to prosodic matters) into the homophonic “peer,” which term confirms the way we must by now look again at the first line, with narrowed eyes, though still as through a glass darkly.

Merrill hoped that he might have as much as fifteen years left.  It was 1985.  He was 59.   In fact, he was diagnosed HIV-positive the next year, and he had only ten.

— Stephen Yenser

Ed note:  Stephen Yenser is Distinguished Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at UCLA, where he has received the Harvey L. Eby Award for the Art of Teaching. He curates the Hammer Poetry Readings at the Hammer Museum in Westwood and teaches courses in the writing of poems and in twentieth and twenty-first century American poetry. Find more about Yenser here.