James Merrill - The Book of Ephraim

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If we exclude both Jims Book, a limited edition of poems and prose published without the poets knowledge as a fifteenth-birthday present by his famous financier father, the founder of the Merrill Lynch brokerage, and The Black Swan, another limited edition printed privately in Greece when James Merrill was twenty, Divine Comedies was his eighth volume of poems. One of the preeminent American poets of the twentieth century, he received over his career two National Book Awards, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Bollingen Prize, and the first Bobbitt National Prize from the Library of Congress. Merrill also secured the Pulitzer Prize, for Divine Comedies. Coming out in the same year that his friend and favorite contemporary poet, Elizabeth Bishop, published Geography III, her resplendent and last complete volume of verse, Divine Comedies helped make 1976 a very good year for American poetryand surely the best ever for books ten poems in length.

The last poem in Merrills volume is the sequence titled The Book of Ephraim. The Book of Ephraim, presented here in a stand-alone edition, is one of the most ambitious poems of the twentieth century in English and also among the richest. Because its home volume, Divine Comedies, is out of print (all of its poems except Ephraim are in Merrills Collected Poems), because Ephraim was originally intended to be read as a complete work, and because it is currently available only in The Changing Light at Sandoverthe epic trilogy (with coda) whose subsequent parts are later in composition, as well as much longer and quite different in aim and meansit is high time for this edition, to which the fabled general reader and the college student, along with veteran readers who have been annotating their own copies, can have access. Plausibly comparable poems are deep as well as long, and it can be misleading to distinguish their magnitudes simply by totaling their lines, especially when we take into account that one poets line is anothers one or two words. But for the record, at approximately 3,200 lines (including quotations) The Book of Ephraim is about half as long as William Carlos Williamss Paterson (though much of Paterson is in fragmented lines and prose) and about three-quarters as long as H.D.s Trilogy. S. S.

Eliots Four Quartets, roughly five times the length of Wallace Stevenss Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction and John Ashberys shorter Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirrorand eight times as long as The Waste Land, which is a tidy 434 lines without its Notes. Ephraim itself is dwarfed by the subsequent two parts and the coda of the trilogy that complete The Changing Light at Sandover. Mirabell: Books of Number followed The Book of Ephraim in 1978 and was succeeded by Scripts for the Pageant in 1980. The whole of The Changing Light at Sandover, which modified the title of the second volume to Mirabells Books of Number and added Coda: The Higher Keys, came out in a single volume in 1982. Sandover, qualifying for the heavyweight division at some 20,000 lines, is heftier than Miltons Paradise Lost (over 10,000 lines) and Dantes Commedia (14,233 lines) but lighter than the Cantos by Ezra Pound, A by Louis Zukofsky, and The Maximus Poems by Charles Olson. None of these other maximal works has any part that resembles Ephraim.

In addition to being much shorter than Sandovers other two main parts, Ephraim has its own integrity. It implicitly establishes its approximate boundaries at the outset and comes full circle. Taken by itself, it is a modern epyllion, or little epic, which the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics defines as a so-called genre that is characterized by elaborate and vivid description, learned allusion, lengthy digression, and an interest in psychology, as well as a finish of meter and a hero who is humanized by being placed in ordinary situations. Its ancestors include Callimachuss lost Hecale and Moschuss Europa, Ovids Metamorphoses (itself a series of little epyllia worked together), and among its several distinguished English examples are Shakespeares