W.S. Merwin Quotes & Sayings

We are the echo of the future. — W.S. Merwin

The attempt to live that way, the attempt to treat everybody - it fails all the time - but the attempt to treat people as equals is a good attempt. It's a very good attempt. And there have been very few governments that have come anywhere near it in the past. The Greeks began to, the Romans began to - they both failed. — W.S. Merwin

All day the stars watch from long ago
my mother said I am going now
when you are alone you will be all right
whether or not you know you will know
look at the old house in the dawn rain
all the flowers are forms of water
the sun reminds them through a white cloud
touches the patchwork spread on the hill
the washed colors of the afterlife
that lived there long before you were born
see how they wake without a question
even though the whole world is burning — W.S. Merwin

Obviously a garden is not the wilderness but an assembly of shapes, most of them living, that owes some share of its composition, it's appearance, to human design and effort, human conventions and convenience, and the human pursuit of that elusive, indefinable harmony that we call beauty. It has a life of its own, an intricate, willful, secret life, as any gardener knows. It is only the humans in it who think of it as a garden. But a garden is a relationship, which is one of the countless reasons why it is never finished. — W.S. Merwin

Where will the meanings be
when the words are forgotten
will I see again
where you are — W.S. Merwin

Laughter was the shape the darkness took around the first appearance of the light. — W.S. Merwin

We are not born to survive. Only to live. — W.S. Merwin

If you can't bear what's happening to the natural world, if you can't bear the way we treat each other; if you can't bear wars, you just can't bear the whole idea of war, which is possibly unavoidable. But still, you resist it. Because you just hate our treating each other that way and causing that suffering. — W.S. Merwin

A BIRTHDAY
Something continues and I don't know what to call it
though the language is full of suggestions
in the way of language
but they are all anonymous
and it's almost your birthday music next to my bones
these nights we hear the horses running in the rain
it stops and the moon comes out and we are still here
the leaks in the roof go on dripping after the rain has passed
smell of ginger flowers slips through the dark house
down near the sea the slow heart of the beacon flashes
the long way to you is still tied to me but it brought me to you
I keep wanting to give you what is already yours
it is the morning of the mornings together
breath of summer oh my found one
the sleep in the same current and each waking to you
when I open my eyes you are what I wanted to see. — W.S. Merwin

Through all of youth I was looking for you
without knowing what I was looking for — W.S. Merwin

There are poets who believe that you shouldn't engage at all in any cause. And there's something to be said for that. Because you don't want to - I think most political poetry is very bad. And it's very bad because you know too much to start with. You have a sense that you're right, and you're trying to tell other people what's right. And I think that's always kind of fundamentalism, and I don't like it. — W.S. Merwin

we know
from the beginning that the darkness
is beyond us there is no explaining
the dark it is only the light
that we keep feeling a need to account for — W.S. Merwin

Now all my teachers are dead except silence. — W.S. Merwin

When a poem is really finished, you can't change anything. You can't move words around. You can't say, 'In other words, you mean.' No, that's not it. There are no other words in which you mean it. This is it. — W.S. Merwin

I think it's good for anybody to learn languages. Americans are particularly limited in that way. Europeans less so ... We're beginning to have Spanish move in on English in the states because of all the people coming from Hispanic countries ... and we're beginning to learn some Spanish. And I think that's a good thing ... Only having one language is very limiting ... You get to think that's the way the human race is made; there's only one language worth speaking ... Well, this isn't good for English. — W.S. Merwin

The dead are not separate from the living
each has one foot in the unknown
and cannot speak for the other — W.S. Merwin

I think there's a kind of desperate hope built into poetry that one really wants, hopelessly, to save the world. One is trying to say everything that can be said for the things that one loves while there's still time. — W.S. Merwin

My words are the garment of what I shall never be
Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy. — W.S. Merwin

There are aspects of human life that are not purely destructive, and there is a need to pay attention to the things around us while they are still around us. And you know, in a way, if you don't pay that attention, the anger is just bitterness. — W.S. Merwin

Of course there is nothing the matter with the stars It is my emptiness among them While they drift farther away in the invisible morning — W.S. Merwin

The global warming is going on. These are not single cases. These are all part of a general way we've been looking at the world. As long as we look at the world that way it's going to go on. Because the idea that the important thing is for some people get rich while the rest of the people work for them is very deeply dug in. — W.S. Merwin

I have been younger in October
than in all the months of spring. — W.S. Merwin

I wouldn't be happy about being considered a love poet or an environmental - I don't want any of those tags. — W.S. Merwin

If there'd been a better-balanced society, where there were other ways of making a decent living, I think it might have been different. That's not the way this setup work. — W.S. Merwin

I look for you my curl of sleep
my breathing wave on the night shore
my star in the fog of morning
I think you can always find me
I call to you under my breath
I whisper to you through the hours
all your names my ear of shadow
I think you can always hear me
I wait for you my promised day
my time again my homecoming
my being where you wait for me
I think always of you waiting — W.S. Merwin

We're losing a species every few seconds. We cannot put them back. If we change our mind and say, 'Oops, we made a mistake' - it's too late. This is the world we live with. — W.S. Merwin

The moment we turn over the soil we start poisoning it and we go on poisoning it all the way through ... and there's probably not a river in the United States that doesn't have pesticide poisoning in it. The fish are dying. The seas are getting polluted. All of these things are happening. The rain forests are going. That's what the context is. — W.S. Merwin

I am an abyss that I am trying to cross. — W.S. Merwin

I have no way of telling what I miss
I am the only one who misses it — W.S. Merwin

I offer you what I have my
Poverty — W.S. Merwin

Your absence has gone through me — W.S. Merwin

All these years I have looked through your limbs
to the river below and the roofs and the night
and you were the way I saw the world — W.S. Merwin

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me — W.S. Merwin

I also think that life itself is both indifferent to us and the source of all of our joys and everything that we love. And it's necessary to accept the one in order to love the other. — W.S. Merwin

I believe in the ordinary day
that is here at this moment and is me
I do not see it going its way
but I never saw how it came to me
it extends beyond whatever I may
think I know and all that is real to me
it is the present that it bears away
where has it gone when it has gone from me
there is no place I know outside today
except for the unknown all around me
the only presence that appears to stay
everything that I call mine it lent me
even the way that I believe the day
for as long as it is here and is me — W.S. Merwin

Any work of art makes one very simple demand on anyone who genuinely wants to get in touch with it. And that is to stop. You've got to stop what you're doing, what you're thinking, and what you're expecting and just be there for the poem for however long it takes. — W.S. Merwin

What I remember I cannot tell
though it is there in all that I say — W.S. Merwin

In the time that I have been acquainted with this region I have become increasingly aware of it as a testament of water, the origin and guide of its contours and gradients and of all the lives - the plants and small creatures, and the culture - that evolved here. That was always here to be seen, of course, and the recognition has forced itself, in one form or other, upon people in every part of the world who have been directly involved with the growing of living things. The gardener who ignores it is soon left with no garden. — W.S. Merwin

endless patience will never be enough
the only hope is to be the daylight — W.S. Merwin

After an age of leaves and feathers someone dead thought of the mountain as money and cut the trees that were here and the wind and the rain at night. It is hard to say it. — W.S. Merwin

Turning the pages patiently in search of meanings — W.S. Merwin

A visitor to a garden sees the successes, usually. The gardener remembers mistakes and losses, some for a long time, and imagines the garden in a year, and in an unimaginable future. — W.S. Merwin

I needed my mistakes
in their order
to get me here — W.S. Merwin

We are asleep with compasses in our hands. — W.S. Merwin

Apparently we believe
in the words
and through them
but we long beyond them
for what is unseen
what remains out of reach
what is kept covered — W.S. Merwin

In my youth I believed in somewhere else
I put my faith in travel
now I am becoming my own tree — W.S. Merwin

Inside this pencil
crouch words that have never been written
never been spoken
never been taught

they're hiding

they're awake in there
dark in the dark
hearing us
but they won't come out
not for love not for time not for fire

even when the dark has worn away
they'll still be there
hiding in the air
multitudes in days to come may walk through them
breathe them
be none the wiser

what script can it be
that they won't unroll
in what language
would I recognize it
would I be able to follow it
to make out the real names
of everything

maybe there aren't
many
it could be that there's only one word
and it's all we need
it's here in this pencil

every pencil in the world
is like this — W.S. Merwin

We begin to say something that cannot be said. When you see on the front page a woman in Iraq who's just seen her husband blown up, you see her there, her mouth wide open, you know the sound coming out of her, a howl of grief and pain
that's the beginning of language.
Trying to express that, it's inexpressible, and poetry is really to say what can't be said. And that's why people turn to it in these moments. They don't know how to say this, [but] part of them feels that maybe a poem will say it. It won't say it, but it'll come closer to saying it than anything else will.
I think there are always two sides, and one of them is the unsayable. The utterly singular. Who you are; who you can never tell anybody. And on the other hand, there is what you can express. How do we know about this thing we talk about? Because we talk about it. We're using words. And the words never say it, but the words are all we have to say it. — W.S. Merwin

Even there a shining is flowing from all the stones
though the eyes are not yet made that can see it — W.S. Merwin

Certain words now in our knowledge we will not use again, and we will never forget them. We need them. Like the back of the picture. — W.S. Merwin

Separation
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color. — W.S. Merwin

We keep asking where they have gone
those years we remember and we
reach for them like hands in the night — W.S. Merwin

So this is what I am
Pondering his eyes that could not
Conceive that I was a creature to run from
I who have always believed too much in words — W.S. Merwin

Part memory part distance remaining
mine in the ways that I learn to miss you — W.S. Merwin

We travel far and fast and as we pass through we forget where we have been — W.S. Merwin

I'm very pessimistic about the future of the human species. We have been so indifferent to life on the whole that it will take its toll. It's not just the polar bears that are having a hard time; what we're doing is gradually impoverishing and poisoning the whole of the rest of life. — W.S. Merwin

The silence of a place where there were once horses
is a mountain
and I have seen by lightning that ever mountain
once fell from the air
ringing
like the chime of an iron shoe ... — W.S. Merwin

Politically it would be terribly repressive to prevent people from having as many children as they want. But something's got to prevent it; and it won't be pleasant ... We're still behaving in ways that have become disastrous ... I don't think this helps us to survive ... We're very species-centric ... and now exist at the expense of every other form of life on Earth. — W.S. Merwin

He suggested I pray to the Muse
get down on my knees and pray
right there in the corner and he
said he meant it literally — W.S. Merwin

The Divine Comedy is a political poem and when you say poetry is not about - he's always quoted out of context, that "poetry makes nothing happen," that doesn't mean you shrug your shoulders and don't try to make anything happen. And Dante felt that poetry was engaged, there was a point of view; it's not my point of view, it's orthodox medieval Christianity, and I have my troubles with that. He didn't feel that you could just rule out so important a section of life - we care about these things, and it's out of caring about them that we write poetry. — W.S. Merwin

The story of each stone leads back to a mountain. — W.S. Merwin

To succeed [,] consider what is as though it were past, deem yourself inevitable and take credit for it. If you no longer believe, enlarge the temple. — W.S. Merwin

Send me out into another life
lord because this one is growing faint
I do not think it goes all the way — W.S. Merwin

You grieve Not that heaven does not exist but That it exists without us — W.S. Merwin

But is it really you
behind the pretenses
beyond dust and distances
beneath the salt and the siren
announcements and ancient
impurities and decays
that claim to be you — W.S. Merwin

Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing. — W.S. Merwin

Come back
believer in shade
believer in silence and elegance
believer in ferns
believer in patience
believer in the rain — W.S. Merwin

I have with me all that I do not know. I have lost none of it. — W.S. Merwin

There is part of a structure in which every species is related to every other species. And they're built up on species, like a pyramid. The simpler cell organisms, and then the more complicated ones, all the way up to the mammals and birds and so forth. We call it 'developing upward' ... The whole thing depends on every part of it. And we're taking out the stones from the pyramid. — W.S. Merwin

This is what I have heard at last the wind in December lashing the old trees with rain unseen rain racing along the tiles under the moon wind rising and falling wind with many clouds trees in the night wind. — W.S. Merwin

How long ago the day is
when at last I look at it
with the time it has taken
to be there still in it — W.S. Merwin

I will take with me the emptiness of my hands. What you do not have you find everywhere — W.S. Merwin

What I really believe is the only hopeful relation between our life and the whole of life is one of reverence and respect and of feeling at one with it. The other attitude which is the one our society is based on is devastating and it is killing the earth and it is killing us too. — W.S. Merwin

Tell me what you see vanishing and I will tell you who you are — W.S. Merwin

here is the known hand again knowing remembering
at night after the doubting and the news of age — W.S. Merwin

When I was me I remembered
I could remember what was not there
but may have been there
once — W.S. Merwin

It's an attitude of superiority. We are superior to the rest of life. The Book of Genesis says: 'Increase and multiply and have dominion over the birds of the air and the animals and so forth.' You run it; it's yours; do what you like with it. I don't know how old that text is, but it represents an attitude that probably really got going with the beginning of agriculture. Before that, the hunter-gatherers were gentler people than the agriculture. — W.S. Merwin

To say what or where we came from has nothing to do with what or where we came from. We do not come from there any more, but only from each word that proceeds out of the mouth of the unnamed. And yet sometimes it is our only way of pointing to who we are. — W.S. Merwin

As though it had always been forbidden to remember
each of us grew up
knowing nothing about the beginning — W.S. Merwin

My cradle
was a shoe. — W.S. Merwin

A garden is made of hope. — W.S. Merwin

The universe is a great unknown wonderful place, and we know nothing, really, to speak of about it. I think that either depresses and frightens one or is exhilarating. We are very important, and we're not important in quite the way we think we are. Each one of us is unique, and we can find out a whole lot just by examining ourselves. I think that's the essential thing. Not paying attention to how you're going to make money, just paying attention to whatever is around you. Each one of those seconds is your only chance. It's your life. And it's wonderful. The more attention that we pay to our ordinary lives leads to a real elation that we're here at all. — W.S. Merwin

Going too fast for myself I missed
more than I think I can remember
almost everything it seems sometimes
and yet there are chances that come back
that I did not notice when they stood
where I could have reached out and touched them — W.S. Merwin

Utterance
Sitting over words
Very late I have heard a kind of whispered sighing
Not far
Like a night wind in pines or like the sea in the dark
The echo of everything that has ever
Been spoken
Still spinning its one syllable
Between the earth and silence — W.S. Merwin

But most love poetry is awful; nobody knows how to write good love poetry either. But that's not a reason not to write love poetry. Some of the best poetry ever written has been love poetry, and some of the greatest poetry ever written has been political poetry. — W.S. Merwin

The wind lifts the whole branch of the poplar
carries it up and out and holds it there
while each leaf is the whole tree reaching
from its roots in the dark earth out through all
its rings of memory to where it has never been — W.S. Merwin

Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time. — W.S. Merwin

On the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree — W.S. Merwin

What you remember saves you. — W.S. Merwin

I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can't
you can't you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don't write — W.S. Merwin

Old Man At Home Alone in the Morning"

There are questions that I no longer ask
and others that I have not asked for a long time
that I return to and dust off and discover
that I'm smiling and the question
has always been me and that it is
no question at all but that it means
different things at the same time
yes I am old now and I am the child
I remember what are called the old days and there is
no one to ask how they became the old days
and if I ask myself there is no answer
so this is old and what I have become
and the answer is something I would come to
later when I was old but this morning
is not old and I am the morning
in which the autumn leaves have no question
as the breeze passes through them and is gone — W.S. Merwin

How beautiful you must be
to have been able to lead me
this far with only
the sound of your going away — W.S. Merwin

Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca. — W.S. Merwin