… When Merrill uses an idiom, he turns it over curiously. So, for example, the dead metaphor "On the rocks" springs unexpectedly to life. …

[Kalstone quotes the section beginning "When my parents were younger" and that ends "on the rocks."]

[Moffett begins by quoting the second sonnet and describing it as written in a "clear, sane, civilized voice" that works by pulling the reader’s direction in two ways]

It registers the regret of a son whose father’s "soul" was obscured by two consuming interests that could not be shared until "too late"; at the same time it is distracted and entertained by the devices of Merrill’s style: the astronomical metaphor {eclipse, chilled wives in orbit), the double entendres (cloud banks, sable, rings), and the cliché "time is money" being stood on its head. …

"The Broken Home," certainly among the richest of Merrill’s autobiographical reflections, exemplifies this strategy of ironic distancing from both mythic analogue and the language of cliché. The broken home of the title, of course, is the first of many common idioms the poem holds up for scrutiny.

In "The Broken Home," the poet tells the story of his struggle to resurrect his lost name and origin. Since he has been bred to error, his only hope for salvation resides in the possibility of willing his fall. In the first of the poem's seven sonnets, the poet depicts the "break" in consciousness, or "fall" into the unconscious, that marks the first stage of his quest:

[lines 1-14]

… ["Lost in Translation"] begins with the apparently random way things happen to us and it includes a number of episodes not explicitly related. … The poem weaves connections between the world of the child, vividly recalled in the present tense, and that of the remembering adult, who only makes his full entrance in the past tenses of the long rhapsodic coda. (Even a more recent episode – a mind-reader in London – is told as if the child were perceiving it: "This grown man reenters, wearing grey.") An odd massing of consciousness takes place.

{Yenser’s extended survey of "Lost in Translation" focuses on numerous passages and discusses them in detail. In this, he is centered on Merrill’s description of the page in the jigsaw puzzle.] … Mademoiselle perhaps thinks the boy is the veiled woman’s son, and if so she might be swayed by her own maternal feelings or by her keen awareness of her employers’ domestic plight.

"Lost in Translation" calls into play three autobiographical situations. In the most recent one, which the poem outlines last, the setting is Athens, where Merrill had his second home, on Athinaion Efivon Street at the foot of Mount Lykabettos, from 1959 until the late 1970s, and the subject is his rereading of Valery's magnificent lyric, "Palme," and his subsequent search through the city's libraries for Rilke's translation of that poem into German. Merrill half-recalls having seen the translation years earlier, but when he cannot turn up a copy, he wonders whether he hasn't imagined it.

Symbolism turns on an ambiguity between literal and metaphoric, or if ambiguity is too strong a word, on an extension and elaboration of metaphor to the point where it threatens to gain priority over the objects it modifies. … Merrill does not often push to the boundaries of metaphor … but often enough a simple construct of likeness exfoliates into a richly imagined (or described) scene of its own, moving far from its metaphorical function. …

[Shetley cites the lines that begin "Soon, of these May mornings" and end "into a crazing texture."]

Unlike E.P. Thompson, I would like to fasten Thomas McGrath’s "Against the False Magicians" down into a local context. Thompson suggests we read the poem in the context of "Communist cultural circles to illuminate an internal hullabaloo in which McGrath was rejecting both of the barren alternatives, ‘socialist romanticism’ or ‘socialist realism,’ which were being debated." Never a strict party-liner, McGrath’s resistance to the sometimes overly orthodox aesthetic prescriptions of the left no doubt influences, as Thompson argues, both "Magicians" and his poetics.

What makes Thomas McGrath’s "Crash Report" so immediately intriguing is the decidedly anti-populist—for this famously populist poet—last stanza. McGrath challenges his readers to "examine a case on record," to make sense of the apparent contradiction between calling two grossly unequal deaths—one "real" (going "down over Paramashiru"), the other "phony" (the result of "joy-riding"—equally heroic.