["An Urban Convalescence"] is the first of Merrill’s lyrics to employ what was to become one of his most characteristic and effective patterns: A present experience recalls some past event(s) and the overlay of several temporal frames, like transparencies that build a single image, brings new insight as well as resolution of some internal conflict. …

… The primary model for his rendition of mental process seems to be Elizabeth Bishop, whose work he has so often praised, particularly for its refusal of oracular amplification. The informal talking to oneself and wondering aloud – "Was there a building at all?" "Wait. Yes" … – the questions, as well as the explanatory parentheses – "(my eyes are shut)" – are surely inspired by Bishop. The deliberate flattening and slackening, however, can be traced to Auden, from whom Bishop also learned: "I have lived on this same street for a decade," "It is not even as though the new / Buildings did very much for architecture." …

… [A]mong the developments signaled by "An Urban Convalescence" is the transformation it records in the speaker’s attitude. The poem portrays a conversion experience of sports; religious allusions – the crowd’s "meek attitudes," the old man like a vengeful God directing the crane’s demolition, the speaker’s posture of prayer with "head bowed, at the shrine of noise" – prepare for the speaker’s confrontation with his own failures, or, one might say, his sins. …

By the poem’s close, he no longer rationalizes his behavior with "that is what life does" and instead determines to care for whomever and whatever he encounters. Refusing to fantasize about a lost world of Jamesian elegance – "that honey-slow descent / Of the Champs- Elysees, her hand in his" – he focuses on another destination: "the dull need to make some kind of house / Out of the life lived, the love spent." Auden’s Christmas Oratorio, For the Time Being, the work that (along with The Sea and the Mirror) so captivated Merrill in the forties, helped Merrill to identify that destination. Auden’s poem celebrates Mary and Joseph as people who might "Redeem for the dull the / Average way" and insists that moments of revelation have little to do with life’s real challenge: "In the meantime / There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair, / Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem / From insignificance."