Personal anthology: James Merrill
Something, probably the cold weather, brought this poem to mind this evening:
Nightgown
A cold so keen,
My speech unfurls tonight
As from the chattering teeth
Of a sewing machine.Whom words appear to warm,
Dear heart, wear mine. Come forth
Wound in their flimsy white
And give it form.— James Merrill (from Nights and Days, 1966)
Not a major poem, but one I’ve always admired for its compactness, its almost metaphysical conceit of teeth as sewing machine gears and clouds of breath as the nightgown of the title, and the way it plays on the classical notion of words as the clothing of thought. Thinking about it, I also noticed for the first time how the addressee of the poem, the implied "you" of the second stanza, humanizes and gives depth ("form") to what might have otherwise been a clever but rather chilly — indeed, "flimsy" — simile, on multiple levels. There’s something at once seductive and ghostly about that nightgown: a revealing garment, but one that suggests a shroud, almost (another reason for the chattering teeth?). People sometimes accuse Merrill’s poems of being all virtuosity and nothing else; I think this poem gets answers that charge, however indirectly.
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