One of the Lives Analysis

Although Merwin is freewheeling here—holding to no formal patterns or constraints—he is using a couple of technical tricks that are consistent throughout the poem. Just looking at the poem befo...

Our speaker is an adult, who's lying sick in an old farmhouse. He's retelling the (very indirect) history of how he came to be, but without giving us a ton of detail. He's also not letting things g...

The setting of this poem is actually an old farmhouse, in which the speaker is laid up, sick on a cot. However, through his lines, we get to do some more extensive traveling. We go back to the spea...

Take a deep breath. Now exhale all 29 lines without taking a break. Can you do it? If so, email us the video. Really. This poem has a ramblin' man kind of sound. We're not seeing the typical sound-...

This title, "One of the Lives," is quite the dynamo. Reading it before we dig into the poem, we expect to get the scoop on, you know, somebody's life. But, as we read through the poem, the title ta...

While sometimes it seems fashionable for poets to bemoan the state of the world and existence in general, Merwin instead stops to give thanks. His poems are certainly not all rainbows and unicornsâ...

If you can get used to the fact that there's no punctuation and accept that you're going to have to stop and retrace your steps to make sure you're following along correctly, then you'll be okay w...

The W.S. stands for William Stanley. How 'bout that? (Source) Merwin lived in Spain, England, and France. Lucky. (Source) Merwin has been living as a Zen Buddhist in Hawaii since the '70s. Sounds...

Clean as a whistle. (Where that expression comes from, we have no idea.)

World War II (2-7)