W.S. Merwin, one of the great American poets, passed away on Friday at his home on Hawaii. We admired him for years the his most remarkable poem, Trees, which so tenderly captures their gift:

I am looking at trees
they may be one of the things I will miss
most from the earth
though many of the ones I have seen
already I cannot remember
and though I seldom embrace the ones I see
and have never been able to speak
with one
I listen to them tenderly
their names have never touched them
they have stood round my sleep
and when it was forbidden to climb them
they have carried me in their branches

We’ve learned only upon his passing and reading the New York Times’ obituary, that he was a conservationist who spent years painstakingly restoring the depleted flora on the former pineapple plantation on Hawaii where he made his home. His poetry is shot through with the natural world…

Witness

I want to tell what the forests
were like

I will have to speak
in a forgotten language

Like this one, many of his poems were elegies, reflections on the death of someone or thing, sometimes even himself…

On the last day of the world
I would want to plant a tree

what for
not the fruit

the tree that bears the fruit
is not the one that was planted

I want the tree that stands
in the earth for the first time

with the sun already
going down

and the water
touching its roots

in the earth full of the dead
and the clouds passing

one by one
over its leaves

He wrote For the Anniversary of My Death in the 1990’s, decades before his actual passing.  It is at once anticipatory and strangely commemorative:

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day

When the last fires will wave to me

And the silence will set out

Tireless traveler

Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer

Find myself in life as in a strange garment

Surprised at the earth

And the love of one woman

And the shamelessness of men

As today writing after three days of rain

Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease

And bowing not knowing to what

…bowing not knowing to what

I shared many occasions with William. The one I remember most was having wine at his home with his lovely wife Paula and listening to him recite spontaneous poetry.

Then he looked at me and said, “Your turn . . .“

For more excellent reads on this extraordinary man’s life, we recommend Windows to the World: At WS Merwin’s Old French Farmhouse on Literary Hub, and Whole Earth Troubadour in the New York Review of Books.