Epilogue: “The Tone We Trusted Most”: Merrill’s The Book of Ephraim

Abstract

Trauma repeats itself in the survivor as an emptiness perennially recited by desire. Yet around this emptiness a discourse also circles that is bound up with trust as one of its creative principles. The Prelude, In Memoriam, and The Waste Land bear out this tension as an ongoing melancholy whose refusal of a substitute for the dead ultimately articulates an ethical stance. Wordsworth offers a vivid touchstone for such faithfulness to desire as he stands “Mute” before the Boy of Winander’s grave (1805, V.422; 1850, V.397). Having placed the boy in his gaze, he is simultaneously exposed as fixed in the gaze of the Other, whose presence is signaled by the impairment of speech. On the one hand, his repeated visits to this and other “spots of time”—through actual journeys and through memory— suggest the pull of a trauma to which, like the grave, he continually returns. On the other hand, the return itself bespeaks a trust in the language for his loss that is the basis of his poetic vocation.