W.S. Merwin: The Poetry of Palms
I had the good fortune to be included on a rare guided tour of W.S. Merwin’s palm forest, offered by the Merwin Conservancy. The walk, with only eight other people, would be on a challenging trail up and down ravines for 2 1/2 hours. Camille remained behind at the coastal ranch where we were staying, which is only about 1 mile away as the egret flies. We have stayed at this remote, off-the-grid property annually for about ten years, at the invitation of our friend Selim, aware that Merwin, the respected poet/translator, was reclusively residing nearby on this rugged north coast of Maui. Coincidentally, it was the day I had finished some months of intensive work on a new book: The Mysterion, Rumi and the Secret of Being Human.
W.S. Merwin arrived in Haiku, Hawaii in the early-eighties; the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet was in his early fifties. He first bought a parcel of about three acres, bare land that had been ravaged by poor agricultural practices. A small house was built on a hill. A picture from that time shows the house sitting alone on the scarred land, a former would-be pineapple plantation, whereas now the house is surrounded by trees and other vegetation, looking out over a canopy of diverse palms.
William, as he liked to be addressed, began planting a tree a day, more or less, until finally there were several thousand trees and about 400 species of palms. “Wow, that is a lot of work,” someone once remarked. “Pure indulgence, my friend,” William is said to have responded.
I have huge respect for W.S. Merwin, as much as a translator of poetry as a poet himself. He reserved the mornings from the crack of dawn for meditation and writing; the afternoons for planting — often with Paula, his wife. William was married three times, and had no children of his own.
Earlier in his life he had been rebellious, angry with humanity for all the right reasons: wars, racial injustice, and the destruction of the environment. In Hawaii, he may have found an outlet that allowed him to be more forgiving, engaged as he was with an act of restoration and regeneration.
Through a wide network of palm enthusiasts, many people contributed to this project by sending exotic palms from different parts of the world. Not all palms are showstoppers, but William treated each palm with respect. He would try to find just the right spot on the land that would be closest to the original environment the palm had come from. But once he planted a tree, he let nature take its course. The many species of palms would learn to live with each other, and some perhaps would not survive. Looking at the 17 acres of the Merwin Conservancy today, an untrained eye might not notice the unprecedented nature of such a collection. This is not a manicured botanical garden, but more of a “palms-gone-wild” situation.
Who knows what he thought he was doing? Was it merely indulgence, as he said? Was it some existential commitment to the restoration of a small part of what humanity in its heedlessness had destroyed? Were these visible palms the perfect existential complement to the meanings contained in his poems?
People of a certain age, especially if you’re a poet, might draw parallels with William’s exemplary life, balanced as it was between his writing and his regenerative planting. His project with the palms more or less mirrors our own work with translation of Rumi’s poetry and planting the seeds of this wisdom in the barren, materialistic territories of the post-modern era.
In the presence of the Beloved, the brain needn’t labor;
for there the brain and intellect spontaneously produce
fields and orchards of spiritual knowledge.
If you turn towards that field, you will hear a subtle discourse;
in that oasis your palm tree will freshen and flourish.[Rumi, Mathnawi IV, 1427–28, translated by Helminski]
I was surprised at how small his house was, and yet every detail of it exhibited taste. He must have preferred a very private life, as if he was fending off the world. And yet our guide said William was very interested in how people responded to his palm forest.
Paula died in 2018, William about a year later. There is a single gravestone very near the house. Their ashes lie underneath mixed together.
TO PAULA IN LATE SPRING
Let me imagine that we will come again
when we want to and it will be spring
we will be no older than we ever were
the worn griefs will have eased like the early cloud
through which the morning slowly comes to itself
and the ancient defenses against the dead
will be done with and left to the dead at last
the light will be as it is now in the garden
that we have made here these years together
of our long evenings and astonishment[W.S. Merwin, from his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Shadow of Sirius (2009, Copper Canyon Press) and found in his latest collection, The Essential W.S. Merwin, edited by Michael Wiegers (2017, Copper Canyon Press). Used by permission of the publishers. Copyright © 2009 by W. S. Merwin.]
