"For a Coming Extinction" follows the series of war poems in The Lice and ties their despair to Merwin's more metaphysical speculations on the void. The rationalist speaker asks the whale he is making extinct to remind, "The End / That great god" "that it is we who are important." In asserting man's special place, he also reminds us of man's guilt as destroyer of his planet. More important than this basic irony, though, is the religious setting and the other poems in the volume that context calls up. For the consciousness here in his destructiveness is actually altering the gods we must pray to--from gods of life to gods of darkness and death. Making animals extinct is our "sacrifice" to that god we now invoke. And the irony ultimately doubles back on itself and the reader. For our immediate reaction is to want to destroy people who think like this speaker. Even on this practical level, then, apocalyptic destruction--psychically if not physically--comes to seem our one hope for salvation. Yet even in the midst of the despondent social poems near the end of The Lice Merwin finds in his fears a moral note that qualifies and redirects any ultimate surrender to the void. "If I were not human I would not be ashamed of anything" seems just one more statement of a consciousness desiring to erase itself into nonbeing. But it returns us and Merwin to a mode of necessity evident in other despairing moments. We are human, and being human condemns us not just to shameful deeds but to a desire to criticize and correct those deeds. A void sought in despair is an impossible paradox, for the very conditions generating despair keep alive also a sense of moral possibilities and a dream of fuller being. Not only does Merwin resist unjust war and the destruction of Nature, but he makes poems of that resistance. The poems, of course, may only attach one to a dying planet and actually increase the number and beauty of things that must die, but they also suggest the possibility of an abiding permanence capable of providing an alternative to the void.

By Charles Altieri. From M.S. Merwin: Essay on the Poetry. Ed. Cary Nelson and Ed Folsome. Copyright © 1987 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.