The domesticity of the opening and closing poems of Water Street, "An Urban Convalescence" and "A Tenancy," establishes the volume's down-to-earth quality. Both poems express Merrill's need for a settled life after the rootless one he had been living since 1947. "A Tenancy" concludes the volume with the poet welcoming his friends into his new life in Stonington, Connecticut, where in 1956 Merrill and David Jackson permanently moved into a house on Water Street. Before Merrill attains this fulfillment, the opening poem must deal with the internal and external destructiveness that threatens the hope of stability. In " An Urban Convalescence," the poet is still in New York, which resembles Robert Lowell's Boston in "For the Union Dead." Like Boston, New York is suffering through an urban renewal in which buildings are destroyed before "you have had time to care for them." Although there is nothing in "An Urban Convalescence" as apocalyptic as the Hiroshima image of "For the Union Dead," Merrill 's poem also envisions total destruction. The equivalent of Lowell's dinosaur-like steam shovel in Merrill's poem is a "huge crane" from which the "jaws dribble rubble":
An old man
Laughs and curses in her brain,
Bringing to mind the close of The White Goddess.
The allusion to Robert Graves's The White Goddess is to a disaster as total as the Hiroshima bomb. Graves maintains that all true poets write in praise of the female, natural life force represented by the Moon goddess. As the triple deity Diana (virgin huntress), Ceres (mother goddess) and Hecate (goddess of hell), she is called the White Goddess. Her nature may thus be destructive as well nurturing. We glimpse her destructiveness in "Childlessness" when "the enchantress, masked as a friend" appears in the heavens as a sunset that is both beautiful and noxious, with "poisons visible at sunset" (SF 71). A, rationalistic, patriarchal, urban culture has suppressed the worship of the White Goddess, which will lead to a destructive reassertion of her power. In the conclusion to The White Goddess, Robert Graves says that "the longer her hour is postponed," the more "exhausted by man's irreligious improvidence the natural resources of the soil and sea "will become; and so the more mercilessly destructive her return. Graves portrays her apocalyptic return in the form of a "gaunt, red-wattled crane" who will use her beak "like a spear" to wipe out a society of frogs who worship a log. The jaws of Merrill's crane destroy the urban landscape and threaten those who watch with "meek attitudes," but it is only preparing the way for more "towering voids." Borrowing an image from Mallarme, Merrill imagines the "massive volume of the world" closing after its revelation of "Gospels of ugliness and waste" (SF 58).
More serious than this physical destruction is the internal loss of places and people whom Merrill's persona can no longer envision. His attempt to imagine the destroyed building sets off a series of associations in which he tries to recapture his past and a vaguely remembered personal relationship. But the "whoIe structure" of the attempt collapses like a building, "filling / The air with motes of stone" (SF 58). Returning to his apartment, its "walls weathering in the general view," he imagines the destruction of the new buildings and then even entire cities:
The sickness of our time requires
That these as well be blasted in their prime.
You would think the simple fact of having lasted
Threatened our cities like mysterious fires.
Merrill is not so willing to moralize or invoke apocalyptic imagery as Robert Lowell is in "For the Union Dead." Instead, he criticizes his own phrase " sickness of our time" as a facile expression that "Enhances, then debases, what I feel" (SF 59). What gives anyone the right to diagnose the moral sickness of the times? After admitting his own inner waste, Merrill can only acknowledge the need to make something out of his rootless life: "some kind of house / Out of the life lived, out of the love spent" (SF 59).