What Sparks Poetry:
Eric Pankey on W. S. Merwin's
"When You Go Away" "The premise of 'When You Go Away,' is familiar: when the lover is separated from the beloved, the order of the world changes. Given the limits of this conventional subject, how did Merwin make a thing both faithful to its convention and new? I found an answer to my question in the complexity of the poem’s final lines: “my words are the garment of what I shall never be / Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy.” | 