SOURCE: James Merrill, Twayne Publishers, 1982, 166 p.

In the following excerpt, Labrie surveys the poetry of Merrill's Water Street, Nights and Days, and Braving the Elements.

Gi; water Street =~ Swater Street

The most noticeable difference between the poems in Water Street (1962) and Merrill's earlier work is the relaxed tone. The poems show him in a bemused but absorbed conversation with himself. He wrote the poems from the settled perspective of the house he shared with David Jackson in Stonington, Connecticut, the restive years in New York and the years of foreign travel now well behind him. He divided his time in the early 1960s between Athens and Connecticut, both of which provided him with a sense of rootedness. The title of Water Street conveys a fundamental sense of stability although a symbolic dualism underlies the Heraclitean polarization of water and street. The dualism reflects Merrill's benign consciousness of change...