Voices From The Other World Comments

Merrill the mystic hears voices, and we should listen. I wonder if anyone has heard his voice since his death. Perhaps we should listen for it. What he hears is what we need to hear; what he says is what needs to be said: the gloom here, all is doom, Our lives have never seemed more full, more real.

think this may be Merrill's most glorious effort: he achieves in the reader, a more or less willing suspension of disbelief, what Keats called a negative capability. One enters into his experience even as one stands aside and wonders, Can this be happening? Do I wanna go there? In spite of ourselves we hear his voices (if they are voices, these mute spellers-out): we affect his nonchalance. We hear the humming in the jasmine. All the while his language (its rhythms and rhetoric) are building toward those final two (magnificent) lines: Our lives have never seemed more full, more real, Nor the full moon more quick to chill. The consonance (all those l's) , the half-rhymes (real, chill) , the onomatopeia (buzzings in the jasmine) , the almost (but not quite) regular iambs, etc. etc. The music of the poem leads us on into just such a commitment that we no longer have the wit to postpone.