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"always beginning as it goes"
W. S. Merwin, Migration:
New & Selected Poems (550 pp, $40, cloth) and
Present Company (152 pp, $22, cloth), both from Port
Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2005.
“for such a journey”
It is clear why Merwin titled this new collection Migration. As
in many great narratives, from Homer, Dante, and Chaucer, to traditional
tales and ballads, to early explorers’ narratives that Merwin
feasted on, the journey provides the structure for much of his poetry.
I can read the early poem “The Station” as an ironic
epigraph to his lifework: “No path went on” for the
wayfarers at the station, “but only the still country / Unfolding
as far as we could see.” Each traveler into this uncharted
territory has visualized a different end to his exodus, yet, come
morning, only a few, “not, to appearances, the bravest / Or
best suited for such a journey, / At first light would get up and
go on.” “Teachers” expresses a dark night of the
soul in which “what I live for I can seldom believe in / who
I love I cannot go to / what I hope is always divided,” yet
“toward morning I dream of the first words / of books of voyages
/ sure tellings that did not start by justifying // yet at one time
it seems / had taught me.”
Similarly, in “Beginning,” the “king of the black
cranes” summons his flock: “it is a long way / to the
first / anything / come even so / we will start / bring your nights
with you.” By 1999, “Shore Birds” begins,
While
I think of them they are growing rare
after
the distances they have followed
all
the way to the end for the first time
tracing
a memory they did not have
until
they set out to remember it.
This late work combines the poet’s feeling for the evolutionary
force that sends birds on their innate journeys with his intimation
that this mysterious inheritance could disappear forever with its
species. I read Migration as more than the sum of its parts—as
indeed one long journey narrative, a reflection of the poet’s
own peregrinations into the unknown. I think of Machado’s
“Caminante, no hay camino. / Se hace camino al andar”
(“Wayfarer, there is no way. / You make a way as you go”
(from “Proverbs and Songs”).
“climbing out of myself”
In Merwin’s early books, the I, we, you, they rarely
refer to anyone specific. While the poet is still seeking his identity,
the general I or we includes the rest of us. It isn’t until
The Lice (1967) that we watch the speaker lower the mask,
first in “For the Anniversary of My Death”: “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.” Merwin then speaks even
more personally:
It
sounds unconvincing to say When I was young
Though
I have long wondered what it would be like
To
be me now
As
far from myself as ever
(“In
the Winter of My Thirty-eighth Year”)
In “When You Go Away” he continues with a memorable
image for the inadequacy of the poet to the earlier poems when,
in the night, he remembers
that
I am falling
That
I am the reason
And
that my words are the garment of what I shall never be
Like
the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy.
A decade later, in “A Contemporary,” he imagines what
it would be like to be one blade of grass, with “no name and
no fear,” who would “turn naturally to the light / know
how to spend the day and night / climbing out of myself / all my
life.”
In the late 1970s Merwin expands this personal dimension. He found
a true home in Hawaii, married Paula in 1983, and, in “The
First Year,” states simply, “When the words had all
been used / for other things / we saw the first day begin.”
In the significantly titled The Opening of the Hand (1983),
with his parents dead, the poet is able to write memorably about
his relationship with them. Look especially at the haunting story
of “The Houses,” an extended metaphor, as I read it,
of the father’s inability to see what his son sees. Then balance
it with the painfully courageous “Yesterday,” in which
Merwin himself and an imagined alter ego talk quietly about his
failure as a son. These, with others in this volume, are brave and
amazing transformations of autobiographical material into impersonal
narrative art.
When the poet has himself wonderfully arrived with his good companion
in his good place, some of the ironies of the quest romance remain.
Even when he has come to a way station, this poet cannot end the
journey; he has to go on. Merwin concludes “Waves in August”
with an emblem for “such a journey”—his memory
of a boat he had hidden as a youth, only to come back and discover
that someone
had taken it and left to him
instead
the sound of the water
with
its whisper of vertigo
terror
reassurance an old
old
sadness it would seem we knew
enough
always about parting
but
we have to go on learning
as
long as there is anything.
“so short a time”
If, as Donald Sutherland has asserted, classic is concerned
with being, space, permanence, and the one; romantic with
becoming, time, change, and the many; and baroque with
the contradictions and tension between these, Merwin’s lifework
appears as an evolving journey, from the baroque tension of the
early poems toward the romantic (some might say a postmodern romantic),
always moving on. His primary concept of time supersedes the tick-tock
countable. In “The Counting Houses” he asks, “how
many hands of timepieces / must be counting the hours / clicking
at a given moment / numbering insects into machines to be codified,”
and “To the Insects” addresses these “elders”:
“we have been here so short a time / and we pretend that we
have invented memory // we have forgotten what it is like to be
you / who do not remember us” as we, the human race, will
go, “departing from our selves // leaving you the morning
/ in its antiquity.” With this long view of time, Merwin writes
many an elegy: “Most of the stories,” he says in his
magical “White Morning,” “have to do with vanishing.”
Most of the quiet long-lined poems in The Vixen (1996)
are valedictories to the immemorial agricultural history of that
region of France where since 1954 he has owned a house and garden.
He watches the upland pastures and shepherds’ huts go under
the bulldozer, and in poems such as “Present” documents
in devoted detail those moments when he can still encounter that
deep past. In the voice of the displaced farmer, “The Peasant”
addresses “you”—the “Powers Of This World,”
the devastating “improvers” of the earth—lamenting
the social price of economic change, the irreversible loss of his
ancient culture of survival, but ending with the bitterly ironic
“I am bringing up my children to be you.”
In his Paris Review interview (“The Art of Poetry
XXXVIII”) Merwin tells Edward Hirsch that from the time he
was very small he had an “urge to love and revere something
in the world that seemed to me more beautiful and rare and magnificent
than I could say, and at the time in danger of being ignored and
destroyed.” He told Hirsch that he felt the loss of languages,
cultures, and our own language to be tied to the extinction of species
(“Several species a week . . . and this is an accelerating
process. It’s all because of human action.”). A leitmotif
through his mature work is a protest against the loss of whole ecosystems.
In “Chord,” one of his most eloquent poems in The
Rain in the Trees, the two notes are the end of Keats’
life and, simultaneously, the destruction of ancient Hawaiian forests—a
counterpoint, a discord, of chords.
Despite his resignation to the Heraclitan sense of time as an infinite
river compelling resignation to change, Merwin laments the precipitous
rush of ancient forms into extinction. All the poet can do, as he
told Hirsch, is to love what remains and “attempt to articulate
it.” Like Denise Levertov, he speaks for those of us today
who cherish the good life we live in a beautiful place while increasingly
impelled to move beyond complacency by the injustice and impoverishment
and devastation of the world we live in. In “Waves in August”
Merwin inscribes a wry circle:
I
thought I was getting better
about
that returning childish
wish
to be living somewhere else
that
I knew was impossible
and
now I find myself wishing
to
be here to be alive here
it
is impossible enough
to
still be the wish of a child
That quiet surprise, that reversal of anticipation in line six,
with its fresh cadences and simple language, condenses the old romantic
dilemma, familiar in Goethe’s Faust and in the great
odes of Keats: the hopeless passion to arrest the torrent of time,
to imprison the perfect moment. It has always been one of the triumphs
of poetry to finds words to make that moment seem immortal, just
as it evolves from being to becoming.
And moment is a recurring word in Merwin’s work—his
rock in the onrushing Heraclitan current, anchored in memory as
the stream of change pours on. In many of these poems he concentrates
on that moment in which the implications of a story are charged
with energy, something very like epiphany. “If you could get
one moment right,” Merwin told Christopher Merrill, “it
would tell you the whole thing” (Poets & Writers,
July/August 2005, 40). Addressing the dead in “The Hydra,”
he says,
One
thing about the living sometimes a piece of us
Can
stop dying for a moment
But
you the dead
Once
you go into those names you go on you never
Hesitate
You
go on.
When the moment has passed into history, the emptiness precipitates
something close to nihilism—a wasteland that darkens the way
of the mental traveler. In his grimly beautiful “The River
of Bees,” “We are the echo of the future // On the door
it says what to do to survive / But we were not born to survive
/ Only to live.” And to live assumes always becoming, through
a dark time.
Traditional symbolism of dark and light informs Merwin’s
portrayal of time, as time informs the prosody. Writing “On
Open Form” in 1969 he proposes that “what is called
its form may be simply that part of a poem that had directly to
do with time: the time of the poem, the time in which it was written,
and the sense of recurrence in which the unique moment of vision
is set” (in Regions of Memory: Uncollected Prose 1949–82).
Here he is, in “Substance,” writing in the late 1990s
about his life on the French uplands a half-century earlier:
I
could see that there was a kind of distance lighted
behind
the face of that time in its very days
as
they appeared to me but I could not think of any
words
that spoke of it truly nor point to anything
except
what was there at the moment it was beginning
to
be gone
The drop from beginning to the next line—the very
lineation and syntax—enacts what the poet has no words for.
That remembered moment carries its incandescence down to the reader’s
present through the poet’s mastery of cadence—in its
original and its musical sense—“proved upon the pulse,”
as Keats had it.
“I who have always believed too much in words”
Though Merwin accepts that languages evolve and drift and eventually
drown in the stream of time, he mourns the extinction of nonliterate
poetries, losses he compares to the library at Alexandria. The
Rain in the Trees is rich with poems on this subject: “Losing
a Language” begins, “A breath leaves the sentences and
does not come back / yet the old still remember something that they
could say // but they know now that such things are no longer believed
/ and the young have fewer words // many of the things the words
were about / no longer exist.” In “Witness,” just
eighteen words long, he confronts this double loss—of the
forests themselves and of the words for what was there: “I
want to tell what the forests / were like // I will have to speak
/ in a forgotten language.”
What to do? Cherish and celebrate what remains, and “attempt
to articulate it.” In his early “Learning a Dead Language”
he declares that “what you come to remember becomes yourself.”
But he does not assume that human speech is the only or even the
best language, satirizing in the wrenchingly comic little poem “The
Fly” his own obtuseness to the limits of words. He would include
in language the multiplicity of ways nonhuman organisms
communicate. In “The Cold before the Moonrise,”
It
is too simple to turn to the sound
Of
frost stirring among its
Stars
like an animal asleep
In
the winter night
And
say I was born far from home
If
there is a place where this is the language may
It
be my country.
Although finding the right words may be the only way a poet can
mourn the lost and the disappearing, protest injustice, preserve
a symbolic moment, Merwin over and over asserts the inadequacy of
human language to arrest time or to express all that he experiences—the
perceptions and passions and visions beyond language. Here he stands
at the opposite pole to his contemporaries for whom language itself
is the be-all and end-all. In “Lament for the Makers”
he speaks of carrying with him “that breath that in its own
words only / sang when I was a child to me // and caught me helpless
to convey it / with nothing but the words to say it.” Yet
those very makers have inspired him, with all that he has inherited
from them, to emulate their success. And he can still declare (in
his interview with Hirsch),
I have a faith in language. It’s the ultimate achievement
that we as a species have evolved so far. (I don’t mean
that I think we are the only species with a language.) It’s
the most flexible articulation of our experience and yet, finally,
that experience is something that we cannot really articulate.
. . . That’s the other side, one of those things that makes
poetry both exhila- rating and painful all the time. It’s
conveying both the great possibility and the thing that we can’t
do.
“At the fountain of thistles / Preparing to sing”
In his first book in the twenty-first century, Merwin in The
Pupil comes to “waken backward” through time—his
own seven decades and back “beyond time beyond memory.”
In “The Wild” he recalls his earliest passion for nature
unmediated by language, implied in his many references to “the
forest”:
First
sight of water through trees
glimpsed
as a child
and
the smell of the lake then
on
the mountain
how
long it has lasted
whole
and unmoved and without words
the
sound native to a great bell
never
leaving it
He told Hirsch that when he was about three he saw men cutting limbs
off the one tree in the yard, flew into a “real rage,”
ran out, and started beating on the evildoers. Ever since he created
his enchanted white bear in “East of the Sun and West of the
Moon” he has continued to make voices for the beasts. “Lemuel’s
Blessing” (recalling Kit Smart’s cat Jeoffry) takes
the voice of a domesticated dog, blessing the wolf and aspiring
to learn from him. “Noah’s Raven” asks “Why
should I have returned?” since he had “found untouched
the desert of the unknown, / . . . my home. / It is always beyond
them.” In “The Widow” Merwin defines the inherent
divergence of our species from the rest of nature:
How
easily the ripe grain
Leaves
the husk
At
the simple turning of the planet
There
is no season
That
requires us
More appalling than our divergence from the rest of the natural
world is our responsibility for its devastation. As a romantic apostle
of the “many,” Merwin protests the loss of diversity
of species, accelerating in our time. “Inheritance”
laments the lost lusciousnesses, in barely a century, of “as
many as four thousand / varieties of the opulent pear.” “In
Autumn” begins, “The extinct animals are still looking
for home / Their eyes full of cotton // Now they will / Never arrive.”
The full force of the poet’s irony bites through “For
a Coming Extinction,” which opens,
Gray
whale
Now
that we are sending you to The End
That
great god
Tell
him
That
we who follow you invented forgiveness
And
forgive nothing.
The speaker boasts that “we were made / On another day,”
and concludes,
When
you will not see again
The
whale calves trying the light
Consider
what you will find in the black garden
And
its court
The
sea cows the Great Auks the gorillas
The
irreplaceable hosts ranged countless
And
foreordaining as stars
Our
sacrifices
Join
your word to theirs
Tell
him
That
it is we who are important.
After these hortatory poems, even more moving for me is “Empty
Water,” called by a poet I respect “perhaps the greatest
poem of the second half of the last century.” Merwin’s
dedication to protecting and restoring the ecological wealth of
the Hawaiian Islands recalls Marguerite Yourcenar’s telling
a Maine interviewer, “I’ve always loved islands. You
feel you are standing on the border between the human world and
the rest of the universe.” “Empty Water” is worth
considering as a whole, for what it says, for what it implies, and
as an example of this poet’s mature art:
I
miss the toad
who
came all summer
to
the limestone
water
basin
under
the Christmasberry tree
imported
in 1912
from
Brazil for decoration
then
a weed on a mule track
on
a losing
pineapple
plantation
now
an old tree in a line
of
old trees
the
toad came at night
first
and sat in the water
all
night and all day
then
sometimes at night
left
for an outing
but
was back in the morning
under
the branches among
the
ferns and green sword leaf
of
the lily
sitting
in the water
all
the dry months
gazing
at the sky
through
those eyes
fashioned
of the most
precious
of metals
come
back
believer
in shade
believer
in silence and elegance
believer
in ferns
believer
in patience
believer
in the rain
Try reading this poem a line at a time, reenacting the process
of composition. Ask what would happen if one ended the poem there.
Ask how each hypothetical terminal line casts its light back over
the preceding lines, determining what the poem is “about.”
What it gives me is an overlay of thirty-three delicately different
poems in a succession of voices—the affectionate observer,
the historian, the gently amused (“left for an outing”),
the ecologist, the metaphor maker, and ultimately the voice of formal
supplication. Reading “Empty Water” in the context of
all that preceded it, I hear resonance of the famous toads in folk
literature; I hear Merwin’s concern for geologic and natural
history (no mask here: the poet speaks of his own spot of time on
earth); I hear and am moved by the shifting rhythms of the syntax
and lineation, by the limpid lyric progressions, by the clarity
and simplicity of the words, always conscious of the silences behind
them, and by repetitions all culminating in the incantatory litany.
“A poem,” Merwin has said, “is an act of attention.”
His attention here contemplates with sensuous intension a small
creature which, in its absence, signifies something crucial about
our future on this planet.
“it’s even worse now”
Merwin’s environmental commitment illuminates his lifelong
engagement in political action. Though he has declared himself profoundly
bored by “politics themselves” with their “power
to manipulate other men’s lives,” he cannot be silent
to “injustice, official brutality, and the destruction on
a vast scale of human liberties” (“On Being Loyal,”
on refusing to sign a loyalty oath, New York Review of Books,
19 November 1970. More recently, see his “Statement of Conscience”
in Sam Hamill’s Poets Against the War). At a time
when so many poems in English are self-absorbed, narrow in their
field of vision, Merwin reminds me of Yannis Ritsos, who when asked
in 1970 by Stelios Pattakos, vice-president of the Greek military
junta, “You are a poet. Why do you get mixed up in politics?”
replied, “A poet is the first citizen of his country and for
this very reason it is the duty of the poet to be concerned about
the politics of his country.”
Merwin’s acts of protest throughout his life and especially
many of his poems of the 1960s and 1970s express his anger and near-despair
at the Cuban missile crisis, the renewal of nuclear testing, and
the war in Vietnam. The most explicit is “The Asians Dying,”
which begins, “When the forests have been destroyed their
darkness remains,” and his most cynical, “When the War
Is Over.” His “Presidents,” sad to say, might
have been written this morning. The nightmare poem “The Old
Room” seems to address the Holocaust but to me suggests, beyond
that, our anger compounded of potent guilt and impotent outrage
in the face of atrocities done in our name. Evidence that such outrage
has deepened since then is his most desperately ironic “Thanks”
(1988), where he counterpoints gratitude for our comfortable private
lives with a dissonant catalogue of the atrocities of our public
life. The last stanza draws in many of the objects of Merwin’s
philosophical and political protest:
with
the forest falling faster than the minutes
of
our lives we are saying thank you
with
the words going out like cells of a brain
with
the cities growing over us
we
are saying thank you faster and faster
Bad as it appeared then, “I think it’s even worse now,”
Merwin told Hirsch. But anger, he goes on, is a dead end. If it
“is to mean anything, it has to lead you back to caring about
what is being destroyed. It’s more important to pay attention
to what it is that you care about.”
Ultimately, what Merwin cares about is the fate of the earth. As
he told Hirsch, “When we destroy the so-called ‘natural’
world around us we’re simply destroying ourselves. And I think
it’s irreversible.” One of his deservedly best-known
poems is “The Last One,” which begins, “Well they
made up their minds to be everywhere because why not.” It
indicts not only our invasion of Vietnam but also all our “globalization”
of natural “resources,” a protest more explicitly and
comically dramatized in “Questions to Tourists,” on
the commodification of a crop, the pineapple, that exhausts the
fertility of ancient soil.
“to the islands of the ancients”
I hope I have convinced my reader that Migration is an
essential book for our time. But before I go on to examine his latest
volume, I have to mention my own candidate for the most important
poem of the second half of the last century, Merwin’s true
epic poem The Folding Cliffs: A Narrative. (You can read
my BPJ review in Winter 1998–99.) Here the concerns
and powers that distinguish this lifework combine. In a 1981 interview,
Merwin discusses a prose work on Hawaii he was working on as a “gathering
together of almost all my interests—interest in non-literate
peoples, in their and our relation to the earth, to the primal sources
of things” (Regions of Memory). He continues with
“our relation to and necessary opposition to the overweening
authority of institutions and institutionalized greed, the destruction
of the earth for abstract and greedy reasons.” The narrative
of Pi’ilani and her family in The Folding Cliffs
not only chronicles a deeply moving love story but also provides
us with a true epic poem for our age. As the New Princeton Encyclopedia
of Poetry and Poetics has it, the epic follows a figure (or
group) central to the traditions and beliefs of a culture, “at
a period when a nation is taking stock of its historical, cultural,
and religious heritage.” I do not know of any poem in the
past century that so completely fulfills this need. The period of
Merwin’s epic is when Western expansionism and exploitation
were appropriating the ancient lines of Hawaiian authority and replacing
them with evangelistic capitalism, representing, as I’ve written
before, “the whole history of colonialism, still today evolving
globally with new leprosies, new deforestations, new economic and
political and cultural imperialisms.” In the rich and varied
poetry of The Folding Cliffs, Merwin sublimates his rage
in order to record and honor the pre-contact environment and the
values of its culture.
“As though beginning went on and on”
Merwin’s twenty-fourth volume of poems, Present Company,
borrows from Neruda’s Odas Elementales the idea of
a book of dedications—about a hundred new poems on the specific
(“To a Mosquito”), the abstract (“To Purity”),
and the imaginary (“To Zbigniew Herbert’s Bicycle”).
The themes that recur through Migration are here, from
the journey that “turns / into the traveler,” to the
ever-evolving, often inadequate, words—“you that were
spoken / to begin with / to say what could not be said.” With
only shadows here of the raging political poet, these poems nevertheless
do confront grief, often through elegy, and—obliquely—with
the way of the world.
Two qualities struck me freshly in this book, both anticipated
in earlier volumes but flowering more freely here. First, the quiet
humor—not so much the wry, ironic humor of the 1970s, but
the playfulness of a seriocomic spirit. In “To the Face in
the Mirror” he asks, “how do you / know it’s me.”
“To My Teeth” develops a hilarious epic simile. And
“To the Present Tense” begins,
By
the time you are
by
the time you come to be
by
the time you read this
by
the time you are written.
The other quality I especially enjoyed is the dramatic voice, most
engaging in Present Company because he is indeed addressing
that company, so that each poem, implying a listener, enacts a dramatic
monologue. One needs to remember that the you here is the addressee:
“Ashes,” “the Next Time,” “the Mistake,”
“the Consolations of Philosophy.” Merwin abandoned punctuation
in 1963 when he wanted to let the syntax, the lineation, and the
weight of the words carry the pace, as it does in conversation.
This colloquial style is a wonder, never prosy—always richly
cadenced, and full of the ambiguities and silences of a thoughtful
person caught in the act of thinking. In Present Company
I felt that I needed to read every poem aloud—always poised
at the line end to anticipate how to pace it and pitch it, feeling
that I was reading a dramatic script, on stage in the lyric theater
of the mind.
I have always agreed with Merwin that poetry is a way of hearing.
Each poem has its own distinctive music. The fluidity of Merwin’s
composition makes excerpting difficult, but I’d like to sample
a couple more, hoping to send you out for the whole book. Here’s
how “To a Mosquito” opens:
Listen
to you
me
me me
nothing
but me
even
without a voice
and
rash though it may be
to
sing out anyway
here
I am
this
is me
out
for your blood
The ee sound whines through the rest of the poem. A different
timbre of ee opens “To Ashes,” and different syntactic
rhythms and a more complex vowel harmony create this almost hymn-like
sonority:
All
the green trees bring
their
rings to you
the
widening
circles
of their years to you
late
and soon casting
down
their crowns into
you
at once they are gone
not
to appear
as
themselves again
These words are both transparent and resonant: crowns, for example,
means tree crowns, obviously, but crowns “cast down”
also calls up the organ notes of “Holy Holy Holy.” And
“late and soon” echoes out of Wordsworth. Listen to
those last three lines—the sudden shift of the position of
the you, creating the dramatic suddenness of “at once they
are gone.” How different this would be if the poet had written
“down their crowns into you.”
Now consider that “To Ashes” is the fourth of six extraordinary
poems, dated between 10 and 23 September 2001. Knowing how “9/11”
has passed into our language and having seen in The Academy of American
Poets documentary, The Poet’s View, that Merwin’s
New York apartment had a clear view of the twin towers, I am in
awe of the accomplishment. I had already read these six, admiring
their variety, their elegance, their freshness, before I noticed
that these, alone, had been dated. I read them now as a great gift
from one of our strongest living poets, at the height of his powers,
and am profoundly moved. “To the Light of September,”
composed on the tenth, does something very like Keats’s “To
Autumn.” “To the Words,” which begins, “When
it happens you are not there,” suddenly takes on a double
meaning. So do “To the Grass of Autumn” and “To
the Coming Winter,” which carry on from “To the Light
of September” without mentioning the disaster, but follow
the natural cycle down into the darkness. And there in their midst
is that deliciously liberating address to Zbigniew Herbert’s
imaginary bicycle.
Returning in conclusion to Merwin’s own selection from his
half-century’s poetry and having reviewed the last ten books,
I feel more at home. I notice that he has winnowed out much that
now might appear sentimental, persistently obscure, or too personal.
Among those omitted is “A Scale in May,” which I return
to now hearing a great deal in its memorable opening lines (“Now
all my teachers are dead except silence / I am trying to read what
the five poplars are writing / on the void”) but understanding
why the poet cut it. The images of the poem’s eight notes
of the scale have never converged into chords. Though sorry to miss
those five eloquent wordless poplars, I still applaud most of the
cuts in Migration, cuts that help clarify this lifetime’s
work as a coherently evolving odyssey:
we
are words on a journey
not
the inscriptions of settled people
(from
“An Encampment at Morning”)
The individual books are still there for the scholar and critic,
but I am grateful to Copper Canyon for providing this handsome collection
that allows a volume-by-volume journey through the lifework of one
of the most richly rewarding poets of our age.
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