College Literature

This essay examines the recurrent and polysemic image of the sunlight and its underside darkness in W.S. Merwin’s later writings such as Opening the Hand (1983), The Rain in the Trees (1988), The Vixen (1996), Present Company (2005), and The Shadow of Sirius (2008). Sunlight represents the transient object that prompts Merwin to contemplate time, origin, grief, and death. Merwin’s father-complex, I argue, plays an indispensable role in the formation of sunlight imagery in his recent poetry, as the Sun, according to Freud’s study on psychosis, symbolizes paternal authority. Largely foreclosing the Lacanian Name-of-the-Father in search of fluid and infinite realizations, Merwin has incurred a strong sense of guilt through the years, which finally erupts into a poetry of endless mourning after his father’s death. To overcome grief, Merwin evokes ancestral origins and memory traces from childhood; his yearning for anonymous origins to surpass the paternal function summarizes his lifelong pursuit of the infinite Other outside the socio-symbolic order.