A Meditation without Punctuation

As psychoanalysts we've long been taught to recognize that thought follows its own drift. We're reminded of this on an hourly basis in our offices (not to mention, on a nightly basis in our dreams). Ideas will slide into associated ideas. Organized thought is a civilizing, daytime afterthought.

Poets know this, too, of course. They know that even the organizing gestures of punctuation (which appeared late in written language historically) can be dispensed with if the flow of language is true to the experience it is evoking. And no contemporary poet knows this better than W. S. Merwin, who writes wonderfully evocative poetry free of punctuation's constraints—poetry that relies instead on line break and breath stop and internal associative logic. “Before the Flood”1 is a fine example of his work.

Merwin is a former consultant to the Library of Congress, much admired and much honored in the world of contemporary poetry.2 In his long career and in his prodigious output he worked in many forms before arriving at the unpunctuated verse that has become his stylistic signature.

I think you will agree that “Before the Flood” is wonderfully evocative of essential psychological experience. But clearly, essential doesn't mean simple. Indeed, the hallmark of essential may be complexity. How complex the evocation is here—even as it is achieved in the simplest diction and in a few short lines. The ideas flow the way a child's ideas flow. There is the child's plaintive repetitiveness (“why” and again “why,” and “ourselves” and “ourselves,” “could we do that” and “I want to,” and “nobody will believe,” “nobody ever believed,” “nobody would believe”). But at the same time it's clear that the “I” of the poem is an adult absorbed in the memory of his own childhood experience. There is, strikingly, an absence of metaphor—which signals the concreteness of a child's thinking—but which signals too the still lingering concreteness of childlike thinking in the man.

But more, and this, of course,