It gives me enormous pleasure to introduce to you the man who
is in my estimation the greatest living American poet, Mr. WS
Merwin.
[APPLAUSE]
I don't know how to do anything after an introduction like that
except say thank you.
I'm going to read from the last two published books of poems,
and then from poems that have not yet
been published in a book.
And the order in which I read is roughly not
pathetically chronological.
And I know you're supposed to break things up
with a certain amount of relaxing nonsense,
and I'll try to do a little bit of that.
But mostly I'll just fall into bashful silence between poems
and let you catch your breath while I catch mine,
rather than do a lot of linking, which may or may not
be relevant, except that it seems to me really essential.
But I'm going to start with two poems that
are obviously related to each other
and are quite unlike each other.
They're both poems which are about animals
and then either of them about zoological I mean, ostensibly
and immediately zoological animals.
They're about animals which are part
of one's own existence of one's own mythology,
so what have been referred to as totem animals.
The first of them is an obviously mythological one
it's not immediately or apparently a private one.
It's called-- it's a poem about a bird
and it's called "Noah's Raven."
And I should say in explaining that we remember
immediately if you talk about Noah's bird
we remember the dog which came back,
and then the dove which did not come back--
the dove which came back first bearing the olive branch
and on the other one.
But we forget about the raven which never came back at all,
and this is the bird that didn't come back,
and it's the bird itself speaking.
Why should I have returned?
My knowledge would not fit into theirs.
I found untouched the desert of the unknown big enough
for my feet, it is my home.
It is always beyond them.
The future splits the present with the echo of my voice.
Hoarse with fulfillment I never made promises.