Thomas Merton’s Three Best Poems

His three best poems:

For My Brother: Reported Missing in Action, 1943

The Merton Prayer

Evening: Zero Weather

For My Brother: Reported Missing in Action, 1943

Sweet brother, if I do not sleep

My eyes are flowers for your tomb;

And if I cannot eat my bread,

My fasts shall live like willows where you died.

If in the heat I find no water for my thirst,

My thirst shall turn to springs for you, poor traveller.

Where, in what desolate and smokey country,

Lies your poor body, lost and dead?

And in what landscape of disaster

Has your unhappy spirit lost its road?

Come, in my labor find a resting place

And in my sorrows lay your head,

Or rather take my life and blood

And buy yourself a better bed—

Or take my breath and take my death

And buy yourself a better rest.

When all the men of war are shot

And flags have fallen into dust,

Your cross and mine shall tell men still

Christ died on each, for both of us.

For in the wreckage of your April Christ lies slain,

And Christ weeps in the ruins of my spring:

The money of Whose tears shall fall

Into your weak and friendless hand,

And buy you back to your own land:

The silence of Whose tears shall fall

Like bells upon your alien tomb.

Hear them and come: they call you home.

This poem was originally published in The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), page 404.

I don’t believe this poem can be fully appreciated without taking into account the Roman Catholic doctrine of temporal punishment and the expiation of sins. Merton in this poem implicitly professes the belief that his dead brother’s soul is in purgatory and that Merton’s suffrages and sacrifices facilitate his brother’s entrance into heaven by expiating his brother’s sins.

Below is a concise explanation of the relevant doctrine:

“Sin has two consequences, or punishments (CCC 1472). The first is eternal punishment, in which the soul loses heaven and is confined to an eternity in hell. This punishment is remitted through the forgiveness of sins. The second is temporal punishment, in which a person must expiate, or make reparation for his sins. This temporal punishment remains even after sin is forgiven. Some examples include Adam and Eve getting thrown out of Paradise when they ate the forbidden fruit (Genesis), and the Israelites losing the privilege of seeing the Promised Land because they worshiped the golden bull (Exodus). Unlike eternal punishment, temporal punishment remains only for the period of time it takes for the expiation of one’s sins. Temporal punishment is God’s method of loving discipline: ‘Do not disdain the discipline of the Lord...for whom the Lord loves, he disciplines; he scourges every son he receives’ (Heb. 12:5).

“…What happens if one has not fully expiated his sins before dying? Such a person, before going to heaven, would have to expiate his sins in purgatory (CCC 1030), where love for God is perfected through our sufferings there. Traditionally, the sufferings of purgatory have been compared to a ‘consuming fire’ (1 Cor. 3:11-15). …Catholics have always prayed for the dead—for the relief of their souls, or their speedy deliverance, if they are in purgatory, for ‘it is a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead, that they may be loosed from their sins’ (2 Macc. 12:46).”

Link: http://www.catholic-forum.com/members/catholictracts/tract117.html 

 

—“Temporal Punishment and Suffering,” The Catholic Community Forum 

Why is this poem Merton’s best? The poem is supremely poignant. Beginning to end, Merton’s deep feelings for his brother, John Paul, show forth—“Sweet brother,” he tenderly addresses him, introducing a series of delicately wrought metaphors—“my eyes are flowers for your tomb,” “my fasts shall live like willows where you died,” “take my life and blood / And buy yourself a better bed.” If words were tears, the poem weeps throughout, inviting the reader to join in the pathos of the speaker.

The fourth stanza invokes the Roman Catholic belief in the redemption of humanity through the sacrifice of Christ, and in the participation of humanity, in particular, that of Merton and his brother, through identification with Christ, in the expiatory value of human suffering—“your cross and mine shall tell men still / Christ died on each, for both of us.”

Two successive lines allude, respectively, to the time of John Paul’s death and that of Merton’s first knowledge of it—“in the wreckage of your April Christ lies slain, / And Christ weeps in the ruins of my spring.”

The poem closes powerfully, citing the grace of Christ’s redemptive sacrifice applied as ransom for the life of Merton’s brother:

The money of Whose tears shall fall

Into your weak and friendless hand,

And buy you back to your own land:

The silence of Whose tears shall fall

Like bells upon your alien tomb.

Hear them and come: they call you home.

Reading this poem, I have several times been moved to tears.

THE MERTON PRAYER

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

“The Merton Prayer” was originally published in Thoughts in Solitude (1958).

The text of what has come to be known as “The Merton Prayer” is widely known and reproduced today. It originally appeared in the above book, Part II, “The Love of Solitude,” not as a poem but as a single prose paragraph constituting Chapter 2. The prayer readily passes for a prose poem distinguished by Merton’s signature lyricism.

The unity of this piece arises from connected thoughts and sentiments expressed in the first person. Merton eases into his engaging style, almost meandering but with sure direction.

Notable in this poem is Merton’s sincerity. He speaks from the heart, laying bare his inner life. The poem reads like a prayer. Beginning with human perplexity we might describe as universal—“I have no idea where I am going”—it ends with an expression of faith and trust in God—“Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.” Merton’s allusion to the famous Psalm 23 is no doubt intentional. His prayer is a contemporary version of this psalm.

Evening: Zero Weather

Now the lone world is streaky as a wall of marble

With veins of clear and frozen snow.

There is no bird song there, no hare’s track

No badger working in the russet grass:

All the bare fields are silent as eternity.

And the whole herd is home in the long barn.

The brothers come, with hoods about their faces,

Following their plumes of breath

Lugging the gleaming buckets one by one.

This was a day when shovels would have struck

Full flakes of fire out of the land like rock:

And ground cries out like iron beneath our boots

When all the monks come in with eyes as clean as the cold sky

And axes under their arms,

Still paying out Ave Marias

With rosaries between their bleeding fingers.

We shake the chips out of our robes outside the door

And go to hide in cowls as deep as clouds,

Bowing our shoulders in the church’s shadow, lean and whipped,

To wait upon your Vespers, Mother of God!

And we have eyes no more for the dark pillars or the freezing windows,

Ears for the rumorous cloister or the chimes of time above our heads:

For we are sunken in the summer of our adoration,

And plunge, down, down into the fathoms of our secret joy

That swims with indefinable fire.

And we will never see the copper sunset

Linger a moment, like an echo, on the frozen hill

Then suddenly die an hour before the Angelus.

For we have found our Christ, our August

Here in the zero days before Lent—

We are already binding up our sheaves of harvest

Beating the lazy liturgy, going up with exultation

Even on the eve of our Ash Wednesday,

And entering our blazing heaven by the doors of the Assumption!

This poem was originally published in Thirty Poems (1944).

In poetry, one rule of thumb is less words, more said. In this regard, Merton’s poems generally could use pruning. Some of his poems should be edited down just a little bit more, to better effect. 

“Evening: Zero Weather,” well-trimmed, is I would say an exception to the aforementioned.

In this poem the succession of metaphors and images transport us to a vivid vignette deriving from Merton’s monastic experience. Merton limns the hour just after manual work and preceding Vespers on a wintry Ash Wednesday. His sketch memorably engages us, in part because monastic cloister is restricted and inaccessible to most.

Many verses are strikingly graphic, for example:

Now the lone world is streaky as a wall of marble

With veins of clear and frozen snow.

And:

The brothers come, with hoods about their faces,

Following their plumes of breath

Lugging the gleaming buckets one by one.

As the poem draws to a close, it moves interiorly, forsaking awareness of the external and sensible: “we have eyes no more for the dark pillars or the freezing windows, / Ears for the rumorous cloister or the chimes of time above our heads.”

The poem concludes with mystical invocations: “we are sunken in the summer of our adoration, / And plunge, down, down into the fathoms of our secret joy / That swims with indefinable fire.”

Paradoxically, in the zero cold of winter, the speaker finds the warmth of August in the felt experience of Christ: “we have found our Christ, our August / Here in the zero days before Lent.” The sentiment expressed is ecstatic.

 

Thomas Merton by John Howard Griffin. Used with permission of the Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University.