"One of the Butterflies"
(from The Shadow of Sirius)

The trouble with pleasure is the timing
it can overtake me without warning
and be gone before I know it is here
it can stand facing me unrecognized
while I am remembering somewhere else
in another age or someone not seen
for years and never to be seen again
in this world and it seems that I cherish
only now a joy I was not aware of
when it was here although it remains
out of reach and will not be caught or named
or called back and if I could make it stay
as I want to it would turn to pain.

About W. S. Merwin

W.S. Merwin was born in New York City in 1927. His first poems were hymns written for his father, a Presbyterian minister. He studied Romance languages at Princeton University, made his living in the 1950s as a translator in England, France & Spain, tutored Robert Graves’ son in Majorca, knew Ted Hughes & Sylvia Plath when he was living in England in the early 1960s, was at Naropa before he moved to Hawaii in the 1970s, where he has lived for 30 years, restoring his remote ranch to rainforest.

Merwin as translator:

Merwin has published nearly 20 books of his own translations, ranging from Spanish old & new (El Cid, Pablo Neruda) to medieval French (Song of Roland) to 20th century Russian (Osip Mandelstam) to his celebrated new translation of Dante’s Purgatorio from medieval Italian. He has also collaborated with translators on collections of poetry from languages he does not himself speak (Urdu, Chinese, Sanskrit, Japanese, Persian, Vietnamese...), making the translations into poems in English.

Merwin’s poetry:

Merwin’s first book of poems, A Mask for Janus, was chosen by W.H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Prize series in 1952. His early poems were formal, classical, often concerned with themes from mythology, influenced by Wallace Stevens & Robert Graves. In the 1960s he began to experiment with loosened poetic forms & autobiographical subjects, and his work became less technically crafted & more personal. Merwin is revered by other poets as a master, containing the universal in the particular.

Merwin as Buddhist & environmentalist:

When Merwin was awarded the Academy of American Poets’ first $100,000 Tanning Prize (now known as the Wallace Stevens Prize) in 1994, The New York Times published a profile of him by Dinitia Smith, “A Poet of Their Own,” which clearly articulates the intersection of violence, pacifism, Buddhism & concern for the natural world in Merwin’s life, his family history, his experience at Naropa, his long work of restoring his land in Hawaii, and of course his poetry. It’s a piece well worth reading.

In 1952 Merwin's first book of poetry, A Mask for Janus, was published in the Yale Younger Poets Series. W. H. Auden selected the work for that distinction. Later, in 1971 Auden and Merwin would exchange harsh words in the pages of The New York Review of Books. Merwin had published "On Being Awarded the Pulitzer Prize" in the June 3, 1971 issue of The New York Review of Books outlining his objections to the Vietnam War and stating that he was donating his prize money to the draft resistance movement.

From 1956 to 1957 Merwin was also playwright-in-residence at the Poet's Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts; he became poetry editor at The Nation in 1962. Besides being a prolific poet (he has published over fifteen volumes of his works) he is also a respected translator of Spanish, French, Latin and Italian poetry (including Dante's Purgatorio) as well as poetry from Sanskrit, Yiddish, Middle English, Japanese and Quechua. He also served as selector of poems of the American poet Craig Arnold (1967-2009).

Merwin is probably best known for his poetry about the Vietnam War, and can be included among the canon of Vietnam War-era poets which includes such luminaries as Robert Bly, Adrienne Rich, Denise Levertov, Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg and Yusef Komunyakaa. In 1998, Merwin wrote Folding Cliffs: A Narrative, an ambitious novel-in-verse about Hawaiiin history and legend.

Merwin's early subjects were frequently tied to mythological or legendary themes, while many of the poems featured animals, which were treated as emblems in the manner of William Blake. A volume called The Drunk in the Furnace (1960) marked a change for Merwin, in that he began to write in a much more autobiographical way. The title-poem is about Orpheus, seen as an old drunk. 'Where he gets his spirits / it's a mystery', Merwin writes; 'But the stuff keeps him musical'. Another powerful poem of this period is 'Odysseus', which reworks the traditional theme in a way that plays off poems by Stevens and Graves on the same topic.

In the 1960s Merwin began to experiment boldly with metrical irregularity. His poems became much less tidy and controlled. He played with the forms of indirect narration typical of this period, a self-conscious experimentation explained in an essay called 'On Open Form' (1969). The Lice (1967) and The Carrier of Ladders (1970) remain his most influential volumes. These poems often used legendary subjects (as in 'The Hydra' or 'The Judgment of Paris') to explore highly personal themes.

In Merwin's later volumes, such as The Compass Flower (1977), Opening the Hand (1983), and The Rain in the Trees (1988), one sees him transforming earlier themes in fresh ways, developing an almost Zen-like indirection. His latest poems are densely imagistic, dream-like, and full of praise for the natural world. He has lived in Hawaii since the 1970s, and one sees the influence of this tropical landscape everywhere in the recent poems, though the landscape remains emblematic and personal. Migration (Copper Canyon Press, 2005) won the 2005 National Book Award for poetry. A life-long friend of James Wright, Merwin's elegy to him appears in the 2008 volume From the Other World: Poems in Memory of James Wright.

(notes extracted from "About Poets" and Wikipedia)