W.S. Merwin

Here’s a meditation on aging by American poet W. S. Merwin (September 30, 1927 – March 15, 2019) who wrote more than fifty books of poetry and prose, and many works in translation.

Merwin received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1971 and 2009 and the National Book Award for Poetry in 2005. In 2010, the Library of Congress named him the 17th United States Poet Laureate.

In the Winter of My Thirty-Eighth Year

It sounds unconvincing to say When I was young
Though I have long wondered what it would be like
To be me now
No older at all it seems from here
As far from myself as ever

Walking in fog and rain and seeing nothing
I imagine all the clocks have died in the night
Now no one is looking I could choose my age
It would be younger I suppose so I am older
It is there at hand I could take it
Except for the things I think I would do differently
They keep coming between they are what I am
They have taught me little I did not know when I was young

There is nothing wrong with my age now probably
It is how I have come to it
Like a thing I kept putting off as I did my youth

There is nothing the matter with speech
Just because it lent itself
To my uses

Of course there is nothing the matter with the stars
It is my emptiness among them
While they drift farther away in the invisible morning
--W. S. Merwin