“A Dedication” by James Merrill

Credit: Lee Sie

James Merrill’s elegiac poem, “A Dedication” observes grief in its most intimate setting: the mind. Addressed to his friend, the Dutch poet Hans Lodeizen (who died while still a young man in 1950), the poem suggests its close relation to the poet’s actual life. However, the poem is not like most other confessional poems; like a lyric it invokes a single speaker’s experience, but unlike a lyric it eschews the first person “I.” Instead, the poem narrates the workings of a mind (presumably the poet’s) and begins by establishing a dramatic figure, a face in grief, on this metaphysical stage:

Hans, there are moments when the whole mind

Resolves into a pair of brimming eyes or lips

Parting to drink from the deep spring of a death

That freshness they do not yet need to understand (1-4).

James Merrill (left) and his partner David Jackson (right)
(Credit: www.judithmoffett.com)

But whose face do we see? Are the “brimming eyes” the poet’s tears, or a memory of Hans’s? Perhaps ambiguity allows for both answers—for both poets to cry at once. By entering the poet’s mind, Hans becomes Merrill; it’s a psychological union that suggests the deceased only exist through us. When we grieve, we realize how those we’ve lost have imprinted us by informing our dreams, our ways of thinking and senses of self. The mind in question, then, becomes a gateway—a sort of astral plane—for the speaker, the deceased and the divine.

One of the few times I’ve known my mother to speak sincerely on any spiritual matter was after her father’s—my grandpa’s—funeral. “Do you think he’s in a better place?” she asked, with a lightness that all but veiled the more ponderous feelings beneath. When grief seemed to strain her emotional resources to their limit, perhaps her only solace was an idea of the afterlife, where powers beyond our comprehension, for whatever reason, warmly take us in.

No wonder, then, that the next line in Merrill’s poem cues an angel in relief to the poet. The divine spirit deigns to descend, like royalty among the impoverished, to provide its comfort:

These are the moments, if ever, an angel steps

Into the mind, as kings into the dress

Of a poor goatherd, for their acts of charity.

There are moments when speech is but a mouth pressed

Lightly and humbly against the angel’s hand (5-9).

We are not necessarily to take this angel as a literal being, as the key phrase “if ever” evokes a skepticism that refuses to accept the angel wholeheartedly for what it is. Nevertheless, the comfort it provides is the same. The tone of the poem grows conciliatory as the poet accepts this act of grace without looking too far into what it means.

My father was also visited by a presence in a dream, though he says it was his late aunt who came to him in lieu of an angel. While alive, she too was visited by her deceased sister, who told her it would soon be time. Were these only dreams? We are a family comfortably suspended in the unknown. Whether these phenomena are real or not—the angel in Merrill’s poem, my mother’s musings, my father’s and great aunt’s dreams—the feelings they produce are no less profound and moving. At the onset of grief, it is the feelings granted by the divine and the conversation we have with it—or else the silence that says more than any words—that matter more than the divine itself.