W.S. Merwin: Self Understanding, Duty, Identity

Merwin reflects on some challenges and life factors influencing our understandings and expressions of identity. First, in "To Waiting," he explores our inclination to more often be looking forward and to change--sometime seeking escape from ourselves--than to understand, accept and respect who we are today. 

Then, in "To Duty," he acknowledges the power of an inborn or developed sense of duty in or on who we are and how we face life. And though he treats it as a force unto itself, he leaves each of us to sort out whether this sometimes dominating sense of duty is a quality or product of our inborn personality, or the influence of life-learning and training in shaping it. That's what I hear and feel in his verse today, but tomorrow, perhaps more. From W.S. Merwin:


To Waiting

You spend so much of your time

expecting to become

someone else

always someone

who will be different

someone to whom a moment

whatever moment it may be

at last has come

and who has been

met and transformed

into no longer being you

and so has forgotten you

meanwhile in your life

you hardly notice

the world around you

lights changing

sirens dying along the buildings

your eyes intent

on a sight you do not see yet

not yet there

as long as you

are only yourself

with whom as you

recall you were

never happy

to be left alone for long


To Duty

Oh dear

Where do you keep yourself

whose least footstep wakens

all those sentences

that begin I thought

what makes you so sure

as you lay claim

to the cloudless sky of morning

assuming the grammar of the hours

and whatever they

are supposed to be saying

even if we try

to imagine what life

would be like without you

you who do not

seem to listen

you who insist

without a sound

you who know better

even better you say

than nature herself

you who tell us

over and over

who we are