The Lost Steps: W. S. Merwin and the Journey Backward

“We look for what we have lost,” W. S. Merwin writes in “A Ring,” a poem from his late book The Shadow of Sirius. Merwin was a poet animated more than most by the drive to getback, as Joni Mitchell sang in 1970, to the garden—“before the garden is extinct,” as Merwin himself wrote in “The Vixen” (The Vixen69). This drive is directed--as it was for the Romantics--toward the question of recovering a connection to primal, even pre-human realities. The present essay examines poems in which this journey backward is presented as either epiphanic in the poems’ touching a lost world, elegiac in their failure to do so, or, toward the end, critical of the quest itself, such a contact with an Ur-site before modernity being hindered by the human psyche and by the strangling of nature at the hands of “our own bloated species-ego,” as Merwin described it in a 1984 interview (“A Conversation”).