“The Surest Home Is Pointless”: A Pathless Path through Merton’s Poetic Corpus

Abstract

“The Surest Home Is Pointless”: A Pathless Path through Merton’s Poetic Corpus Patrick F. O’Connell Finding one’s way through the 1,000‐plus pages of the Collected Poems1 is a daunting prospect for even the most dedicated reader of Thomas Merton. The sheer number of the poems, the obscurity of many of them, as well as their uneven quality, have tended to keep most Merton readers from acquaintance with more than a handful of the most familiar pieces. Daniel Berrigan, in an oft‐quoted comment, said, “He needed a Pound, to cut him to size”2 (alluding to Ezra Pound’s editing of T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land). Just hefting the book itself might incline us to modify that to: he needed someone to cut it to a pound—even the paperback edition weights three times that. Merton’s poetry is probably too heavy, in more than one sense, ever to be popular, yet neglecting it leads to an incomplete and thus distorted understanding of Merton as both writer and person. Although I doubt anyone would claim that his verse is as important as his prose, the fact that Merton, particularly at the outset (1939‐1949) and again toward the conclusion (1966‐1968) of his writing career, dedicated a considerable portion of the limited time available to him for writing to poetry, and identified himself explicitly, at times even primarily, as a poet, should never be overlooked or minimized. Merton’s verse is both an important resource for discovering and evaluating his developing spiritual and social vision, and a quite significant if secondary contribution to his overall achievement as literary figure and as “spiritual master” (to borrow a term from Lawrence Cunningham’s now classic anthology3). The poetry, therefore, needs to be recognized as an integral part and not a peripheral dimension of his work. The poetry reinforces and extends themes and ideas found in the prose and provides insights on some topics available nowhere else. I believe, moreover, that the Collected Poems needs to be read complete, that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This is not to say, of course, that unless one is going to read all the poems one should not read any of them—hardly a proposition that will increase the familiarity and popularity of Merton’s verse.4 What I mean, rather, is that patterns of recurring and developing imagery and themes weave their way through the nearly three decades of Merton’s verse in such a way that a reading of virtually any poem is enriched by seeing it in the context of these broader patterns.5 One such pattern that seems to me among the most central and significant for appreciating Merton’s poetry can be discerned by noting an apparent coincidence with regard to work dating from the beginning and the end of his career. The last of Merton’s separately published volumes of verse, which appeared the year after his death, is entitled The Geography of Lograire.6 The very first word in the Collected Poems also happens to be “geography”: it is found in the four‐line epigraph that opens Early Poems (1940‐1942): “Geography comes to an end, /Compass has lost all earthly north, /Horizons have no meaning, /Nor roads an explanation.”7 The fact Merton selected these lines to introduce this gathering of previously uncollected early verse (which actually appeared only after his death, in 19718) signals his own recognition of the consistent though multivalent presence of topographical images and themes throughout his verse. This can be seen in such poems as “Landscape: Wheatfields,”“Landscape, Prophet and Wild Dog,”“Landscape: Beast,” or “Aubade: Lake Erie,”“The Ohio River—Louisville,”“The Trappist Cemetery—Gethsemani,” and “Grace’s House,” yet is by no means restricted to poems with specific locations in their titles. Michael Mott has commented that “It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of place for Thomas Merton,”9 and this is particularly, though certainly not exclusively, applicable to the poetry. His extraordinary attentiveness to the spatial dimension, to place, not just as setting but as subject—as sacramental revelation of divine creativity; as symbolic...