By claiming that The Changing Light at Sandover was
dictated to him by spirits, perhaps Merrill simply means the origin of the poem
is mysterious even to its maker. Merrill is naturally as self-conscious and
self-doubting about his poem’s occultism as he is about its “monumental”
ambitions. In the many interviews about the trilogy, he is sometimes assertive
and sometimes dismissive of the poem’s claim to otherworldly revelations. To
the skeptical Helen Vendler, who interpreted W. B. Yeats’s A Vision as
a book of poetics rather than revelations, he confesses that he “climbed the
wall trying to escape” occult and New Age material. When Vendler asks the
direct question, “how real does it all seem to you?” Merrill reassures her, “Literally
not very.” But he slyly qualifies his statement for the Keatsian Vendler: “except
in recurrent euphoric hours when it’s altogether too beautiful not to be true.” [1] To C. A. Buckley, who questioned Merrill from a
Christian viewpoint, Merrill replied: “I don’t care whether you believe the
revelations as long as you believe that we had the experience.” [2] Similarly, he
told Fred Bornhauser that the one thing that holds the work together is “that
it all truly happened to us, came to us in these various ways”; but he added
that he did not want “to be merely skeptical or merely credulous. Either way
would have left us in reduced circumstances.” [3]
1 Merrill, J. (1986). Recitative: Prose. United States: North Point Press; p. 51
2 C. A. Buckley, “Exploring The Changing Light at
Sandover: An Interview with James Merrill,” Twentieth Century
Literature 38 (Winter 1992): 419-20.
3 Merrill, J. (1986). Recitative: Prose. United States: North Point Press; pp. 61, 53