If you haven’t heard, I’m the poetry lady. I’m on a mission to show how poetry has fallen out of our culture, why that’s a damn shame, and how to enjoy and extract meaning from poems.
This week’s poem is weird, winding, and will give you whiplash. It deals with what you make of a chapter of your life after you leave it — specifically, what it means to leave one city for another. Especially if, while you’re in that chapter, you know it won’t last.
It’s perfect for what’s happening in my life. After five years of living in America’s weirdest, most disorienting state, I’m grappling with what it means to leave.
To leave the state means to close a chapter that I can’t name — the last five years spent living in South Florida. In case you’re unfamiliar with this area’s oddness, let me explain. In South Florida, the population turns over so fast it’ll make your head spin. Every highway exit feels like a different city. We have Florida Man, skyrocketing COVID cases, hurricanes, are butt of the country’s jokes. Florida is loud and unapologetic and constantly defying categorization, whereas I am mild-mannered, nervous, and crave predictability.
I’m the overly friendly Midwesterner who’s often tried to make small talk with grocery store clerks who look right past me. While others use the beach for selfie-sessions in designer swimsuits, I wander in my street clothes, my one-piece safely tucked in my closet. And in Miami traffic, I grip the steering wheel with white knuckles, anticipating the moment I’ll be honked at, cut off, or slammed into by one of the cars making a “Miami left”: When a car from the farthest right lane swings in front of all the other lanes to make a left turn while the light is red.
W.S. Merwin’s poem “Late” is perfect for preparing to leave something I always knew was temporary, that never felt like mine, that I wanted to feel part of but never did.
Again, I know many people want to scroll straight past the poem — it might feel like asking you to dive into uncertainty, to knowingly make yourself uncomfortable as you encounter something ambiguous and strange.
My advice:
Take your time reading it. Read at half, or even a quarter, of your usual reading speed. The more slowly you read, the more likely the poem is more likely to speak to you. Think of it like a small animal — if you move too fast, it’ll dash away.
Remember poetry is never straightforward because much of our interior lives are not clear or direct — there’s a beauty in ambiguity, room for you to interpret as you will.
Read it out loud: Poetry is partly music. It’s enjoying the sounds of words.
Here we go.
Late
W.S. Merwin
The old walls half fallen sink away under brambles
and ivy and trail off into the oak woods that have been
coming back for them through all the lives whose daylight
has vanished into the mosses there was a life once
in which I lived here part of a life believing
in it partly as though it were the whole story
and so not a story at all and partly knowing
that I clung to it only in passing as in
the words of a story and that partly I was still
where I had come from and when I come back now later
and find it still here it seems to be a story
I know but no longer believe and that is my place in it.
And now, I invite you to read it again. More slowly — again, if your eyes have been fast as a highway, slow down to 15 mph. If you didn’t before, read it out loud.
The first thing I want to say is I understand if this poem frustrates you. It’s OK if it disorients you. Stay with it...I’m going to lead you through this, and it’ll be worth it.
First task: Go back and find any lines that seem to be more alive and urgent (I call these “hot spots”).
Here are mine. It’s OK if yours are different.
The oak woods have been coming back for the oak woods. It’s as though the walls always belonged to the woods, and the woods now reclaim them. The woods have a will, and it’s unsettling.
The lives whose daylight/vanished into mosses. “Vanished” implies suddenness, being here one day and gone the next. The daylight of our lives is a beautiful idea to me and feels like any good, alive, bright part of our days.
That is my place in it. After so many lines of hemming and hawing about what the place was, the speaker says something definitive. His place is to know this part of his life is a story they “know but no longer believe.”
We see how time changes stories. There’s something about time marching on and changing things, changing us. There’s something about endings, slow and fast. Consider these words from the first few lines:
half fallen
sink away
trail off
vanished
There’s a sense of things ending sometimes gradually, sometimes suddenly.
And now, listen to the poem — try to hear which letters are more often repeated. Feel free to reread it.
Here’s what stands out to me: The “l” and “w” repetition. The “l” because it’s so frequent and the “w” because it’s such an unusual letter — the whoosh of air as someone walks past, a letter in “wonderous,” “wandering,” “waif.”
To me, there’s a tone of otherworldliness in this poem. Some of it comes from what we associate with fairy tales — ivy, stories, trees and moss that have their own will. There’s magic, and there’s confusion, and there are chapters ending the speaker can’t make sense of.
Part of this disorientation is the speaker’s. The poem is one long sentence, like someone who keeps changing their mind. How casually it moves into “there was a life once,” a phrase that shows us that life is no more, that this scene is personal. And how confusing to have a life once that “I lived part of a life/believing in it partly.” What does it mean to believe in a life or only partly believe in it? What does it mean for only part of the life to be lived? We don’t get clear answers.
Late
W.S. Merwin
The old walls half fallen sink away under brambles
and ivy and trail off into the oak woods that have been
coming back for them through all the lives whose daylight
has vanished into the mosses there was a life once
in which I lived here part of a life believing
in it partly as though it were the whole story
and so not a story at all and partly knowing
that I clung to it only in passing as in
the words of a story and that partly I was still
where I had come from and when I come back now later
and find it still here it seems to be a story
I know but no longer believe and that is my place in it.
Because this is one winding sentence, it isn’t always clear what’s happening. Let’s break it down. We start in nature. Once there was a building, then it fell and nature grew around it so thickly it was as though the woods were absorbing the wall. Just as one could revisit the “half fallen walls” and recognize them as part of what is no longer here, so the speaker revisits his story and tries to understand what it meant now that everything around it has changed.
...there was a life once
in which I lived here part of a life believing
in it partly as though it were the whole story
and so not a story at all...
The poem is one full sentence that winds, changes direction. This place is first a whole story, then part of a story, then not a story at all. then the words of a story, then a story familiar but not believed in. It seems like it’s trying to disorient us, trying to keep us from understanding it. What the speaker’s past life was, how he believed in that part of life, why it becomes “not a story at all” is frustratingly unaddressed and unclear. I only know the speaker is revisiting a piece of his past he once, partly believed was real, lasting, he would stay there.
If you ever moved to a new city on a whim, were in a relationship you knew but never admitted wouldn’t last, tried a fad diet you knew you couldn’t sustain but lied to yourself that you could, you understand this. It’s what it feels like to brush against a memory you will never understand.
But part of the speaker knew this part of his life was temporary, knew it was “a story” but not “the story” of his life. And, looking back, it’s so far away it is as if it’s a different life. Time takes things away, like how nature reclaims abandoned buildings, like how the day ends. Note the title is “late,” as though it’s a late hour and the day’s almost over.
Merwin was criticized for being inaccessible and enigmatic. We get lost in the poem, just as we get lost when we try on new roles, new places, new groups of people, knowing we’ll soon shrug them off and return to our core definition of ourselves. I think this is part of the poem’s mission — to show through its syntax how the speaker grapples with the problem of how to fit into his life’s story a chapter that never quite belonged. He changed, but then reverted back to before the change began.
...I was still
where I had come from and when I come back now later
and find it still here it seems to be a story
I know but no longer believe and that is my place in it.
Here’s what I think.
If there was ever a poem to describe feeling displaced, as though you can’t articulate the ways you’ve shifted, how your identity is not what it once was, this is it.
And if there was ever a place that disoriented you the same way this poem does, Florida is that place. I grew up in Kansas, can explain it to you in a few sentences. But Florida is so many identities, cultures, lifestyles together it’s impossible to pin down or understand my role in it.
South Florida is of wealthy New Yorkers, immigrants, wine sections in CVS, iguanas, anhingas, and other animals that look like dinosaurs, Tesla, the country’s wealthiest and poorest populations, a (typically) hot real estate market built on sinking land, a swing state, the exits off I-95 as different as states.
I always felt that Florida was only a few sentences in my life, but while I was here, I had to convince myself it was part of my story in order for it to make sense. I had to make it part of my identity. Now I’m leaving, and I predict I’ll one day wake up feeling like the Florida portion of my life was just a fever dream. I’ll revisit the memory later and see it almost as another life, one that I only partly believed in, knowing while I was here I tried to make it feel like I belonged though I could never convince myself fully.
In a way, every chapter of our lives is transient. Time will overtake and obscure each chapter as it obscures everything. What matters is how we look back in retrospect.