Exploring The Changing Light at Sandover: An Interview with James Merrill

Abstract

visionary epic suggests an extensive work expressing sublime revelations, in high artistic style and language. mode is rare nowadays. Yet given its centrality in the tradition of great poetry (Dante, Milton, Blake), it is heartening to find someone ambitious enough to attempt a contemporary work in the genre. work in question is Changing Light at Sandover (New York; Atheneum, 1982), a 560-page poem by Pulitzer prize-winning poet James Merrill. poem charts communications with spirits over a twenty-five-year period, even as it tells the story of the poet's life during that time. Its other-worldly protagonists offer revisionary readings of material from such diverse sources as the Bible and Blavatsky, integrating such material with (especially scientific) and the poet's personal life. I undertook this interview with the purpose of clarifying some of the more difficult aspects of the epic trilogy. First I sought clarification in exploration of the poem's background and mode of composition. Second, since the poem partly challenges the largely Christian perspective of visionary epic since the Middle Ages, a perspective I share, I thought that another mode of clarification might be to explore the ideological divide between Merrill's new age doctrines and mainstream Christian beliefs and values. This also enabled me to pursue the question whether the trilogy trivializes the Great Tradition--Genesis, Milton, Dante--by revising it in line with modern knowledge and the occult, a question the poet himself addresses, with some anguish, early in Mirabell (CLS 136). So the interview progresses from discussion of the poem's background and composition to a skeptical exploration of its esoteric doctrines. interview took place in the poet's home in Stonington, Connecticut. Here Merrill and David Jackson, his partner at the ouija board, received many of the revelations that underpin the poem. Indeed, the ensuing dialogue took place in the very stardeck or attic room mentioned in Ephraim. CB: Let's begin with 1946, and an incident referred to in your poem A Tenancy. You make a pact with the Source of Light; you seem to commit yourself to some visionary project. JM: Well no. It was nothing that grand. What had happened by 1946 was that I had been, for several months in the Army, perhaps been in more physical danger than I had ever been in my life. I had begun to understand some of the implications of Hiroshima, what another war might mean. I was frightened, and I wanted time to do what I had to do on earth, and I think what I was bargaining for was simply a fairly unbroken time without too many outside disturbances. CB: One thing you wanted to pursue without such disturbance, of course, was your writing career. Did you have any difficulty, at that early stage, in getting your work published? JM: No, I don't think so. Of course poets have multiplied according to a geometric progression. Every generation there are more of us. There were many fewer poets--there were fewer periodicals too--in 1945. But by and large the poems that got sent out were taken. Where I felt more at a loss was during the years after First Poems appeared. It had by then come to me that I had really nothing to do except to write, and a kind of stage fright took over. Could I devote that many waking hours to being a poet? So I wasted a great deal of time trying to make the transition from school discipline, where you were told what to write and when to hand it in, to the discipline which you imposed upon yourself. How much time you gave to distraction. How that fitted together with your working time. CB: About 1953 you certainly seem to undergo some sort of writer's block; The Mirror hints at a temporary failure of inspiration. JM: Maybe I had begun to feel that the individual consciousness was not all that reliable, or was not the final court of appeal, and was a rather flimsy perishable affair. …