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Feb 8, 2016 · Poetry and psychoanalysis “like a May fete” became inextricable, a double helix “wound in ribbons round the pole” of a developing self. Those last quoted phrases are from James Merrill ’s poem, “The Black Swan,” almost an apposing poem (not opposing exactly) to Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan.”. Merrill names the black swan ...
Nov 15, 2012 · That does not change but is Always brilliant ice and air. Always the black swan moves on the lake. Always The moment comes to gaze As the tall emblem pivots and rides out To the opposite side, always. The blond child on The bank, hands full of difficult marvels, stays Now in bliss, now in doubt. His lips move: I love the black swan.
Jul 18, 2008 · Black on flat water past the jonquil lawns. Riding, the black swan draws. A private chaos warbling in its wake, Assuming, like a fourth dimension, splendor. That calls the child with white ideas of swans. Nearer to that green lake. Where every paradox means wonder. Though the black swan’s arched neck is like. A question-mark on the lake,
One of Merrill’s most famous poems, “The Black Swan,” is cele-brated for its formal brilliance and originality, yet it is also criticized for its purposeful obscurity; critics allege the poem’s obscurity serves to mask a lack of depth. Kimon Friar provides an anecdote that reveals the conception of the poem:
Like "The Black Swan," many of Merrill's early poems are about this crisis. His earliest volume, The Black Swan (1946), was conceived by Friar himself as a collection of poems concerning their love affair. Friar suggested publishing the volume when he asked Merrill in August 1946 to send him a poem he had misplaced.
Apr 6, 2015 · Merrill did not normally improvise; his drafts show that his first thought was by no means his best. In his early poems, collected in “The Black Swan” (1946) and “The Country of a Thousand ...
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The first poem in this collection, ''The Black Swan,'' gave its name to Merrill's first serious collection, published in a limited edition in Athens when the poet was 20; its description of the eponymous bird, ''Black on flat water past the jonquil lawns / Riding'' is remarkably assured: the undulating alternation of vowel colors -- black'' and ...
