What do you think?
Rate this book
Phoenix Living Poets
Two poems: From the Cupola and The Summer People
48 pages, Hardcover
First published August 1, 1972
8 people want to read
About the author
James Merrill
121 books66 followersJames Ingram Merrill was born on March 3, 1926, and died on February 6, 1995. From the mid-1950s on, he lived in Stonington, Connecticut, and for extended periods he also had houses in Athens and Key West. From The Black Swan (1946) through A Scattering of Salts (1995), he wrote twelve books of poems, ten of them published in trade editions, as well as The Changing Light at Sandover (1982). He also published two plays, The Immortal Husband (1956) and The Bait (1960); two novels, The Seraglio (1957, reissued in 1987) and The (Diblos) Notebook (1965, reissued 1994); a book of essays, interviews, and reviews, Recitative (1986); and a memoir, A Different Person (1993). Over the years, he was the winner of numerous awards for his poetry, including two National Book Awards, the Bollingen Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, and the first Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress. He was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 24, 2022
From the Cupola
The sister who told fortunes prophesied
A love-letter. In the next mail it came.
You didn't recognize the writer's name
And wondered he knew yours. Ah well. That seed
Has since become a world of blossom and bark.
The letters fill a drawer, the gifts a room.
No hollow of your day is hidden from
His warm concern. Still you are in the dark.
Too much understanding petrifies.
The early letters struck you as blackmail.
You have them now by heart, a rosy veil
Colours the phrase repaired to with shut eyes.
Was the time always wrong for you to meet? -
Not that he ever once proposed as much.
Your sisters joke about it. "It's too rich!
Somebody Up There loves you, Psyche sweet."
Tell me about him, then. Not a believer,
I'll hold my tongue while you, my dear, dictate.
Him I have known too little (or, of late,
Too well) to trust my own view of your lover.
Oh but one has many, many tongues!
And you will need a certain smouldering five
Deep in the ash of something I survive,
Poke and rummage with as reluctant tongs
As possible. The point won't be to stage
One of our torchlit hunts for truth. Truth asks
Just this once to sleep with fiction, masks
Of tears and laughter on the moonstruck page;
To cauterize what babbles to be healed -
Just this once not by candor. Here and now,
Psyche, I quench that iron lest it outglow
A hovering radiance your fingers shield.
Renaissance features grafted onto Greek
Revival, glassed, hexagonal lookouts crown
Some of the finest houses in this town.
By day or night, cloud, sunbeam, lunatic streak,
They alternately ravish and disown
Earth, sky, and water - Are you with me? Speak.
[...]
The Summer People
On our New England coast was once
A village white and neat
With Greek Revival houses,
Sailboats, a fishing fleet,
Two churches and two liquor stores,
An Inn, a Gourmet Shoppe,
A library, a pharmacy.
Trains passed but did not stop.
Gold Street was rich in neon,
Main Street in rustling trees
Untouched as yet by hurricanes
And the Dutch elm disease.
On Main the summer people
Took deep-rooted ease -
A leaf turned red, to town they'd head
On Gold lived the Portuguese
Whose forebears had manned whalers.
Two years from the Azores
Saw you with ten gold dollars
Upon these fabled shores.
Feet still pace the whaler's deck
At the Caustic (Me.) Mueseum.
A small stuffed whale hangs overhead
As in the head a dream.
Slowly the fleet was shrinking.
The good-sized fish were few.
Town meetings closed and opened
With the question what to do.
Each year when manufacturers
Of chemicals and glues
Bid to pollute the harbor
It took longer to refuse.
Said Manuel the grocer,
"Vote for the factory,
And the summer people's houses
Will be up for sale, you'll see.
Our wives take in their laundry.
Our kids, they cut the grass
And baby-sit. The benefit
Comes home to all of us."
Someone else said, "Next winter
You'll miss that Chemical Plant."
Andrew breathes in Nora's ear:
"Go, grasshopper! Go, ant!"
The two were summer neighbors.
They loved without desire.
Both, now pushing fifty,
Had elsewhere played with fire.
Of all the summer people
Who dwelt in pigeonholes,
Old Navy or Young Married,
The Bad Sports, the Good Souls,
There were the Amusing,
The Unconventional ones -
Plus ANdrew's Jane (she used a cane
And shook it at his puns)
And Nora's mother Margaret
With her dawn-coloured hair,
Her novels laid in Europe
That she wrote in a garden chair.
"Where's Andrew?" Margaret queried
As Nora entered the room.
"Didn't he want to come over?
It seems to be my doom
To spend long lonely evenings.
Don't we know anyone?"
"Dozens of people, Mother."
"But none of them are fun!
The summer already seems endless
And it's only the first of July.
My eyes are too weak for reading
And I am too strong to cry.
I wish I weren't a widow,
I wish you weren't divorced -
Oh, by the way, I heard today
About a man named Frost
Who's bought the Baptist church
And means to do it over."
"Mother, he sounds like just the type
I don't need for a lover."
[...]
for H.M.
The sister who told fortunes prophesied
A love-letter. In the next mail it came.
You didn't recognize the writer's name
And wondered he knew yours. Ah well. That seed
Has since become a world of blossom and bark.
The letters fill a drawer, the gifts a room.
No hollow of your day is hidden from
His warm concern. Still you are in the dark.
Too much understanding petrifies.
The early letters struck you as blackmail.
You have them now by heart, a rosy veil
Colours the phrase repaired to with shut eyes.
Was the time always wrong for you to meet? -
Not that he ever once proposed as much.
Your sisters joke about it. "It's too rich!
Somebody Up There loves you, Psyche sweet."
Tell me about him, then. Not a believer,
I'll hold my tongue while you, my dear, dictate.
Him I have known too little (or, of late,
Too well) to trust my own view of your lover.
Oh but one has many, many tongues!
And you will need a certain smouldering five
Deep in the ash of something I survive,
Poke and rummage with as reluctant tongs
As possible. The point won't be to stage
One of our torchlit hunts for truth. Truth asks
Just this once to sleep with fiction, masks
Of tears and laughter on the moonstruck page;
To cauterize what babbles to be healed -
Just this once not by candor. Here and now,
Psyche, I quench that iron lest it outglow
A hovering radiance your fingers shield.
Renaissance features grafted onto Greek
Revival, glassed, hexagonal lookouts crown
Some of the finest houses in this town.
By day or night, cloud, sunbeam, lunatic streak,
They alternately ravish and disown
Earth, sky, and water - Are you with me? Speak.
[...]
The Summer People
". . . et l'hiver resterait la saison intellectuelle créatrice."
- Mallarmé
On our New England coast was once
A village white and neat
With Greek Revival houses,
Sailboats, a fishing fleet,
Two churches and two liquor stores,
An Inn, a Gourmet Shoppe,
A library, a pharmacy.
Trains passed but did not stop.
Gold Street was rich in neon,
Main Street in rustling trees
Untouched as yet by hurricanes
And the Dutch elm disease.
On Main the summer people
Took deep-rooted ease -
A leaf turned red, to town they'd head
On Gold lived the Portuguese
Whose forebears had manned whalers.
Two years from the Azores
Saw you with ten gold dollars
Upon these fabled shores.
Feet still pace the whaler's deck
At the Caustic (Me.) Mueseum.
A small stuffed whale hangs overhead
As in the head a dream.
Slowly the fleet was shrinking.
The good-sized fish were few.
Town meetings closed and opened
With the question what to do.
Each year when manufacturers
Of chemicals and glues
Bid to pollute the harbor
It took longer to refuse.
Said Manuel the grocer,
"Vote for the factory,
And the summer people's houses
Will be up for sale, you'll see.
Our wives take in their laundry.
Our kids, they cut the grass
And baby-sit. The benefit
Comes home to all of us."
Someone else said, "Next winter
You'll miss that Chemical Plant."
Andrew breathes in Nora's ear:
"Go, grasshopper! Go, ant!"
The two were summer neighbors.
They loved without desire.
Both, now pushing fifty,
Had elsewhere played with fire.
Of all the summer people
Who dwelt in pigeonholes,
Old Navy or Young Married,
The Bad Sports, the Good Souls,
There were the Amusing,
The Unconventional ones -
Plus ANdrew's Jane (she used a cane
And shook it at his puns)
And Nora's mother Margaret
With her dawn-coloured hair,
Her novels laid in Europe
That she wrote in a garden chair.
"Where's Andrew?" Margaret queried
As Nora entered the room.
"Didn't he want to come over?
It seems to be my doom
To spend long lonely evenings.
Don't we know anyone?"
"Dozens of people, Mother."
"But none of them are fun!
The summer already seems endless
And it's only the first of July.
My eyes are too weak for reading
And I am too strong to cry.
I wish I weren't a widow,
I wish you weren't divorced -
Oh, by the way, I heard today
About a man named Frost
Who's bought the Baptist church
And means to do it over."
"Mother, he sounds like just the type
I don't need for a lover."
[...]
Read
September 6, 2024It’s not often the case that two poems of less than epic length justify a whole book to themselves, but James Merrill’s marvelous “Two Poems: From the Cupola and The Summer People” easily merits the volume Chatto and Windus has bestowed on them. The first is more complex and leans toward a mild sort of abstraction, with humane figures and times of day among its diffusely arranged dramatic elements, and the second is sheer delight, with crisply evoked characters and a good deal of witty social observation. Both have clever rhymes, infectious rhythms, and vivid atmospheres. Highly recommended.
May 15, 2025
Clever and bitter. A good combo. “The Summer People” was especially lashing, a long poem that was almost like a novella satirizing, castigating the out-of-towners who just stay for the summer but don’t care about the town itself. I can relate.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews