“At
last the sigh of recession: the land
Wells
from the water; the beasts depart; the man
Whose
shocked speech must conjure a landscape
As
of some country where the dead years keep
A
circle of silence, a drying vista of ruin,
Musters
himself, rises . . .”— American poet W. S. Merwin, “Dictum: For
a Masque of Deluge,” in A Mask for Janus (1952)
I
am not familiar with the work of W.S. Merwin, and Dan Chiasson, in his 90th-birthday retrospective on him in this week’s issue of The New Yorker, is not particularly impressed with the poet’s early
collection, A Mask for Janus. No matter: As soon as I read the
poem excerpted here, on Noah’s reaction to the world he found after the Great
Flood, it seemed all too appropriate to the Southern U.S. in the wake of
Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, particularly the “circle of silence, a drying vista
of ruin.”
(The
photo accompanying this post, showing storm surge flooding caused by Hurricane Isabel
in Bowleys Quarters, Maryland, in September 2003, was taken by Jason Cohen.)
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