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Chapter 1

Thomas Merton’s Poetic Evolution

from World’s Denial to an Experience of Universal Love¹

Geography comes to an end

Compass has lost all earthly north

Horizons have no meaning

Nor roads an explanation.²

These intriguing apocalyptic lines from Merton’s Early Poems (1940-1942) could well summarise his vision of the secular world at the time he entered the monastery of Gethsemani in 1941. They depict a kind of waste land, a barren scenery where people have lost the capacity to interpret their own existence, and stand as a good testimony of the need to give a new shape to experience.

It is precisely this urgency for creating new maps, new cartographies, new dwellings, and most particularly, for a radical transformation of human consciousness that is the main force which might have led Merton to choose the silent life and write a very fertile poetic work by means of which he tried to give birth to a novel geography: the geography of the Spirit.

The poet meditates, sings, suffers and re-creates the world from his paradisus claustralis, from the pristine and ineffable void of his innermost ground of being. After many years of inner conflict between his two apparently contradictory vocations – the monastic and the artistic – he finally renders a truly significant poetry which is a faithful expression of his spiritual evolution from solitude to solidarity, from contemptus mundi to universal love.

During the 40s, Merton published several books of poems; apart from the already mentioned Early Poems, he also wrote Thirty Poems (1944), A Man in the Divided Sea (1946), Figures for an Apocalypse (1947) or The Tears of the Blind Lions (1949). Most of them show the clear division he made between the sacred and the profane world, between silence and writing, between the religious and the aesthetic, between contemplation and action. His early poems trace back his years as student in Oakham School (England) and his stay at Greenwich Village. Together with others composed later on, they reflect the poet’s critical attitude against the shadows and false values prevailing in Western culture:

Body is truth, truth is body. Fat is all

We grow on earth, or all we breed to grow […]

Beauty is troops, troops beauty. Death is all

We grow on earth, or all we breed to grow.³

we read in his poem “The Philosophers,” an obvious reference to John Keats’s “Ode to a Grecian Urn.”⁴ In the midst of this materialistic and violent context, however, the poet compares himself with a hidden seed, “buried in the earth/waiting for the Easter rains/to drench me in their mirth/and crown my seedtime with some sap and growth.” Merton’s monastery could be seen as the chosen place for this “burial” and this “waiting” for the vivifying waters of solitude and silence. It was considered by the poet as a more authentic space than the city which he regarded as “a stubborn and fabricated dream,”⁵ a world of mechanical fictions in which people are imprisoned in “the monkey-houses of their office-buildings and apartments,”⁶ living in a womb of collective illusion where freedom remains abortive and where distraction – the greatest of our miseries – helps people elude their true human task: contemplation understood as “the fullness of the Christ life in the soul.”⁷

In his Early Poems, Merton strongly criticizes this false “divertissement” with which the city cunningly seduces its servants: “Oh lock us in the safe jails of thy movies!/Confine us to the semiprivate wards and white asylum/Of the unbearable cocktail parties, O New York!”⁸ As opposed to this empty and surrogate happiness that the urban life offers, his verses praise the unspoilt nature, where “the simple grapefruit in the grove/shines like the face of childish love/and sunflowers lean toward the south with the confidence of early youth.”⁹ Faithful to the commands of his own destiny, Merton ended up living in the privileged natural setting of Our Lady of Gethsemani and withdrawing from the more active concerns of a wordly life, in order to devote himself completely to repentance, conversion, renunciation and prayer.¹⁰ Like the sunflower seeking the sunlight, the poet would direct his life toward the sun of Christ, his Beloved. The tireless search for complete union with him became one of the main themes of his early poetic production: “Oh flaming Heart,/Unseen and unimagined in this wilderness,/You, You alone are real, and here I’ve found you”¹¹ he wrote in one of the last poems of this collection.

In his next volume of poetry, Thirty Poems (1944) – mainly written during his stay as English teacher in St. Bonaventure University, but also during the first years of his novitiate – the criticism of the urban life goes into a secondary plane and it is replaced by a direct attack of a world full of wars and death in compositions such as “Lent in a Year of War” (on the Civil American War), “In memory of the Spanish Poet Federico García Lorca”(on the Spanish Civil War), “For my Brother: Reported missing in action, 1943” or “The Night Train” (on the disasters of the Second World War).¹² Making use of clever comparisons, personifications, striking metaphors and exaggerations, they all denounce the barbarism which was isolating Europe and its cities, as well as the material destruction of its culture and art:

Cities that stood, by day, as gay as lancers

Are lost in the night, like old men dying

At a point where polished rails branch off forever

The steels lament, like crazy ladies.

We wake, and weep the deaths of cathedrals

That we have never seen,

Because we hear the jugulars of the country

Fly in the wind, and vanish with a cry.¹³

In this night of compulsion and massacre, Merton invites the soldiers who take part in the war to be aware of the sun, once more identified with Christ: “Here is the hay-colored sun, our marvellous cousin,/walking in the barley,/Turning the harrowed earth to growing bread,/and splicing the sweet, wounded wine./Lift up your hitch-hiking heads/and no more fear the fever,/you fugitives, and sleepers in the fields,/Here is the hay-colored sun.”¹⁴

To Christ and the Holy Communion he is also going to devote the major part of the poems he wrote in the monastery such as “The Trappist Abbey: Matins,” “The Holy Sacrament of the Altar,” “An Argument: of the Passion of Christ,” “The Flight to Egypt,” or “The Holy Child’s Song.” Merton speaks of Him as “our holy stranger” and “bright heaven’s open door,” that is to say, “the “shewing,” the revelation, the door of light, the Light itself”¹⁵ which is incarnated everywhere and becomes a source of healing and redemption: “I shall transform all deserts into garden-ground:/[…] and I will come and be your noon-day sun,/and make your shadows palaces of moving light.”¹⁶

The dichotomy between world-God, city-monastery, solitude-solidarity continues to be present in A Man in a Divided Sea and Figures for an Apocalypse, collections of poems written before and after entering Gethsemani which clearly reflect his firm decision to begin a journey from the unreal city (London, New York) to what he thought to be the paradisiacal city, the Trappist community.¹⁷ As it has been pointed out, this trip was considered by the poet not as evasion but as a way of retreating into his own inner truth to find the Christ within.¹⁸ Overwhelmed by a post-war society ruled by false democracy and threatened by massive destruction, he writes:

Time, time to go to the terminal

And make the escaping train

With eyes as bright as palaces

And thoughts like nightingales.

It is the hour to fly without passports

From Juda to the mountains,

And hide while cities turn to butter

For fear of the secret bomb.

We’ll arm for our own invisible battle

In the wells of the pathless wood.¹⁹

Here the symbol of the nightingale could be identified with the poet himself, the prophet or the mystic who remains faithful to its own vocation: that of being the singer of Truth.²⁰ This prophet must abandon the city (the world of conventional knowledge) and climb the mountain (mirror of the divine order), making a spiritual voyage towards its peak, always regarded as the place of mystical union. The dense woods he must cross during the ascent contribute to this darkness which precedes the revelation of divine light to the people whose eyes are open to see it, and their unknown paths seem to be the only possible shelter of more genuine voices.

Voices such as the ones of the Desert Fathers, who also abandoned their previous ways of life and retired to the deserts of Egypt or Palestine, or the mountains of Syria, and to whom Merton devoted several poems such as “St. Jerome” or “St. Paul the Hermit.” In these compositions the monk praises the ascetic and contemplative life of these solitaries whose inner and spiritual journey is “far more crucial and infinitely more important than any journey to the moon.”²¹ Men who left a world that divided them from themselves following the example of the great people of the Old and New Testament monachism (Abraham, Moises, Elias, Saint John the Baptist, the apostles and the Jerusalem primitive community), great men who gave themselves completely to the love of God, loyal to San Basilio’s saying that the person who loves God abandons everything and goes into solitude with God:

Alone, alone

Sitting in the sunny den-door

Under that date-tree,

Wounded from head to foot by His most isolated Trinity

Asking no more questions

Forgetting how to spell the thought of scrutiny

And wanting no secret

You died to the world of concept

Upon the cross of your humility.²²

Verse by verse, line by line, Merton’s poetry aspires to contemplate the nakedness beyond any ideology or dogma, in order to reach a deeper wisdom, the wisdom of the divine within man, that is to say, a clear unobstructed vision of the true state of affairs, an intuitive grasp of one’s own inner reality, as anchored, or rather lost, in God through Christ. As the Desert Fathers, he is going to desire more and more solitude in order to strike out fearlessly into the mystery of life, a territory which does not belong to us but by which we will remain eternally seduced.

His next book of poems, The Tears of the Blind Lions (1949), expresses the need of having a fruitful interior life of thought and love in the midst of a noisy world full of “lighted beasts” and threatened by the Cold War. It is a poetry characterized by a more direct style, concise and vigourous, with a less lush imagery and an increase in the use of the first person, and it shows more clearly than ever before the Agustinian polarity Merton saw between the earthly city (the Babilon of Louisville), where “the windows shiver with business,” and the Sion of Gethsemani, a dwelling of vision “whose heights have windows finer than the firmament.”²³ Within the context of his own monastic community, which at that time was mainly characterized by a superficial and external religiosity based on abstract ideals and self-complacency, this work reflects how Merton tried to strengthen his contemplative vocation and how he retired more frequently to a kind of shelter in the woods whenever the busy monastic schedule allowed him to do it. Over there he would write:

Silence is louder than a cyclone

In the rude door, my shelter

[…] I eat my air alone

With pure and solitary songs

While others sit in conference

[…] I no longer see their speech

And they no longer know my theatre.²⁴

Merton becomes an exile in the far end of solitude, living as a listener and praying for a world which is tumbling down, “for a land without prayer.”²⁵ Nevertheless, this dualism between the sacred and the profane sphere present in The Tears… would be partially overcome in The Strange Islands (1957) when the poet talks about the possibility of building a new Jerusalem on the Ohio shores: “Gather us God in Honeycombs,/My Israel in the Ohio valley!/For brightness falls upon our dark/[…] Bless and restore the blind, straighten the broken limb/These mended stones shall build Jerusalem.”²⁶ Although the book cannot boast of a deep lyricism or a formal complexity, it illustrates a much more committed and critical poetry which hopes for a radical transformation of humankind and, thus, of the whole society. It was written at a time in Merton’s life when, as we have just pointed out, he felt a more profound necessity to go into solitude,²⁷ but also saw the urgency to open a dialogue with the world outside the walls of Gethsemani.

However, in this collection the contradictions between nature and civilization, freedom and social structures are still present in some of the poems. There is a strong criticism of the bad and dangerous working conditions of employees in the technological age, as well as a depiction of the chaotic life in the metropolis, where the identities of the inhabitants have been distorted by consumerist mirages:

Everywhere there is optimism without love

And pessimism without understanding.

They who have new clothes and smell of haircuts

Cannot agree to be at peace

With their own images, shadowing them in windows

From store to store.²⁸

Although this dualistic attitude is still accompanied by a condemnation of the vanities and absurdities of the world, nevertheless, in this collection, unlike in previous books, Merton does not try to evade or deny it. On the contrary, he tries to redeem and transform it, moved as he was by a great compassion which might have been motivated by his approach at that time to the Oriental religions, most particularly to Zen Buddhism. His poem “Elias–Variation on a Theme” is precisely a meditation on his double vocation, the contemplative one and the active one, as well as an attempt to reconcile two apparently opposed inner tendencies: on the one hand, his need for contemplative solitude; and on the other hand, the urge to a revolutionary action in the midst of an individualistic divided world. From this lyrical piece, one can deduce that he conceived solitude not as sterile self-isolation but as a path to real communion. As he would write some years later, during the sixties, “the true solitary does not seek himself, but loses himself. He forgets that there is number in order to become all […] He is attuned to all the Hearing in the world, since he lives in silence.”²⁹

By making an inner journey towards what he called “the inward Stranger,” Merton could overcome all divisions and paradoxes within himself and open up to an awareness of interbeing.³⁰ As he wrote in the poem “In Silence”:

And all things live around you

Speaking to your own being.

Speaking by the Unknown

That is in you and in themselves.³¹

Everything speaks about God, and God speaks in all and through all. The poet encourages us to enter a sonorous solitude which, far from secluding men from the rest of people, awakens in them a new perception based on the certainty that we are united to one another by a unique Love, “God’s love living and acting in those whom He has incorporated in his Christ.”³²

At the beginning of the sixties, Merton began to speak about a wide range of contemporary problems, advocating peace and social justice in a season characterized by social and political unrest and deep emptiness of spirit. He considered he could not ignore horrors such as nazism in Germany, the Vietnam war, the Hiroshima disaster, or the latent threat of a nuclear war. All these bad dreams, – “the dreams of giants without a center”³³ – were dealt with in his books of poetry Original Child Bomb (1962) and Emblems of a Season of Fury (1963), where he strongly denounced the illogical and nonsensical attempt to establish peace through war. Compositions such as “And the Children of Birmingham” shows Merton’s defence of non-violent action exemplified in the strike that black children and young people held in the city of Birmingham with Martin Luther King as the leader of the pacifist movement against racial, political and economic discrimination.³⁴

Additionally, he wrote poems supporting the most marginal people. In “There Has to Be a Jail for Ladies” he empathises with the misfortune of prostitutes (“I love you, dusty and sore/I love you, unhappy ones”), and in “A Picture of Lee Ying” with the thousands of Chinese refugees during the communist government of Mao Tse-Tung. “Chant to be Used in Processions around a Site with Furnaces” also evokes the terrible suffering of the Jews in the concentration camps during the nazi regimen and criticizes the insane attitude of people such as Adolf Eichman who came to be convinced that his work of extermination was efficient and satisfactory: “In my day we worked hard we saw what we did our/self-sacrifice was conscientious and complete our work/was faultless and detailed.”³⁵

To sum up, in Emblems… Merton did break his silence with such a cry as he had always been afraid of. In his opinion, Christian hope was “inseparable from an incarnational development in the struggle of living and contemporary man.”³⁶ Therefore, he reconciled his contemplative vocation with his responsibility as social critic and prophet who announces and denounces the crepuscular hours of history, calling us to recover our original unity and integrity in the wisdom of Love and of the Cross.³⁷

The subversive component of his poetry is still pervasive in his last two books. Influenced by the theories of Herbert Marcuse and his attack on the functional discourse of a unidimensional society, in Cables to the Ace (1968), he focuses on the trivialization of language and the death of the symbol in our modern times. As George Woodcock has pointed out, this long poem is “the antipoetic diagnosis of the world’s ills, accompanied by a poetic prescription for its cure.”³⁸ Written in a style which lacks all kind of literary ornaments, it could be described as a radical experiment with the language of alienation and its subsequent transfiguration in a new poetry, an antipoetry, characterized by the absence of metrics and rhyme, the abandonment of conventional syntax, and the break of the linear and chronological sequence of the text in the manner of modernist authors such as T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound.

The Geography of Lograire (1968) also questions the alienated and alienating discourse of the Western myth, whose oppressive power has always been imposed on other cultures, considered as inferior, such as the Sioux, Mayans or Melanesians.³⁹ Like Cables this epic poem appears as a denunciation of the mental and linguistic habits of our philosophical, religious, political and cultural heritage, and it calls for a new sensitivity which can act as a guidance for a reinterpretation of the word “man” and the word “Life.”

As Anthony Padovano has suggested, the four “Cantos” tell “the history of a human family tragically torn asunder but pathetically persistent in its dream for harmony.”⁴⁰ They present a world threatened by wars, genocide, poverty and degradation, but they are also an evidence of Merton’s hope for a spiritual revolution which may reveal to us the path to unbounded life and sincere union beyond the collective illusion of division and separateness. As a matter of fact, the whole poem is about unity, final integration and it places emphasis on the oneness of all existence:⁴¹ “same is the Ziggurat of everywhere/I am one same burned Indian/purple of my rivers is the same shed blood/all is flooded/all is my Vietnam charred/charred by my co-stars/the flying generals.”⁴²

To conclude this promenade along the poetry of Thomas Merton, it could be said that within the context of a world possessed by the demon of alienation and destructiveness, in his lyrical fragments Merton tried to recreate a political and poetical area wherein man could imagine new forms of awareness rooted in the hidden ground of love. It is in this sapientia cordis that remains unknowable in the non-limitation and non-definition of the infinite, that Merton sees an extraordinary potential for profound changes within the material concreteness of our world and amidst the contingencies of human and personal stories.

¹ This essay is a revised version of an article which was peer-reviewed and selected to be published in the volume Estudios de Traducción, Cultura, Lengua y Literatura, ed. I. Pascua, B. Rey-Jouvin and M. Sarmiento (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 2008), pp. 359-373.

² The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton (New York: New Directions, 1977), p. 2.

³ The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton, op. cit., p. 3.

⁴ “Beauty is truth, truth is beauty, – that is all/ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” in The Poems of John Keats, ed. Miriam Allot (London: Longman, 1977), p. 32.

⁵ Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable (New York: New Directions, 1966), p. 11.

⁶ The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton, op. cit., p. 20.

⁷ Thomas Merton, The Ascent to Truth (Great Britain: Burn & Oates, 1994), p. 10. As the monk pointed out: “Man was made for the highest activity, which is in fact his rest. That activity, which is contemplation, is imminent and it transcends the level of sense and of discourse. Man’s guilty sense of his incapacity for this one deep activity which is the reason of his very existence, is precisely what drives him to seek oblivion in exterior motion and desire […] He has but to remain busy with trifles.” He finishes this reflection quoting Pascal’s wise words: “Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries and yet it is, itself, the greatest of our miseries.” Blaise Pascal quoted by Thomas Merton, The Ascent to Truth, op. cit., pp. 19-20.

⁸ The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton, op. cit., p. 20.

⁹ Ibid., p. 8.

¹⁰ Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable, op. cit., p. 19.

¹¹ The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton, op. cit., p. 24.

¹² As Ross Labrie has pointed out, all these compositions where written in a period of great poetic fertility which might have coincided with the excitement that preceded his decision to enter Gethsemani. See Ross Labrie, The Art of Thomas Merton (Texas: The Texas Christian University Press, 1979), p. 111.

¹³ The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton, op. cit., pp. 30-31.

¹⁴ Ibid., p. 35.

¹⁵ The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (New York: New Directions, 1975), pp. 154-155.

¹⁶ The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton, op. cit., p. 55.

¹⁷ Fernando Beltrán Llavador, Thomas Merton: la contemplación en la acción (Madrid: San Pablo, 1996), p. 73.

¹⁸ We agree with Robert Waldron when he writes that “his poetry and prose serve as a bell summoning people to enter the waters of the psyche and embark on their own inner journey, one that calls every person ‘home’ to the Christ within.” Robert Waldron, “Merton’s Bells: A Clarion Call to Wholeness,” The Merton Seasonal, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Winter 1993), p. 28.

¹⁹ The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton, op. cit., p. 139. In these lines one can clearly see the influence of William Blake on the poetry of Thomas Merton. The English mystic wrote a poem entitled “Contemplation” which shares thematic and symbolic similarities with the poem we have just quoted: “Clamour brawls along the streets, and destruction hovers in the city’s smoke; but on these plains, and in these silent woods, true joys descend: here build thy nest.” William Blake, Selected Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1996), p. 47.

²⁰ This image of the bird has been used by many authors. Let us remember, as an example, the nightingale of Keats, the robin of Emily Dickinson, the sparrow of Wallace Stevens, among others.

²¹ Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert (London: Shambhala Pocket Classics, 1994), p. 11.

²² The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton, op. cit., p. 168.

²³ Ibid., p. 212.

²⁴ Ibid., p. 197.

²⁵ Ibid., p. 219.

²⁶ Ibid., p. 282.

²⁷ Thomas Merton, A Search for Solitude: The Journals of Thomas Merton, ed. Lawrence S. Cunningham (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997), p. 57.

²⁸ The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton, op. cit., p. 227.

²⁹ Thomas Merton, Love and Living (New York: Bantam Books, 1980), p. 15.

³⁰ See Thich Nhat Hanh, Interbeing (Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1987).

³¹ The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton, op. cit., p. 290.

³² Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island (Great Britain: Burns & Oates, 1993), p. xiii.

³³ The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton, op. cit., p. 374.

³⁴ According to Merton, this movement of the black population in the US was “one of the most positive and successful expressions of Christian social action that has been seen anywhere in the twentieth century.” Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1968), p. 131.

³⁵ The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton, op. cit., p. 349.

³⁶ Thomas Merton, Love and Living, op. cit., p. 40.

³⁷ Thomas Merton, The Non-Violent Alternative (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987), p. 112.

³⁸ George Woodcock, Thomas Merton: Monk and Poet (British Columbia: Douglas & McIntyre Ltd., 1978), p. 176.

³⁹ James York Glimm, “Thomas Merton’s Last Poem: The Geography of Lograire,” Renascence 26 (1974), pp. 93-95.

⁴⁰ Anthony Padovano, The Human Journey: Thomas Merton: Symbol of a Century (New York: Image Books, 1984), p. 136.

⁴¹ See Michael Higgins, “Merton and the Real Poets: Paradise Rebugged,” The Merton Annual, Vol. 3 (1990), p. 175; Paul Pearson, “The Geography of Lograire: Thomas Merton’s Final Prophetic Vision,” in Thomas Merton: Poet, Monk, Prophet (Great Britain: Three Peaks Press, 1998), pp. 88-89.

⁴² The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton, op.cit., p. 123.