Perkins teaches American and British literature and film. In this essay, Perkins explores the poem's statement on the modern separation between nature and humanity. I

n his article on W. S. Merwin for the Yale Review, Laurence Lieberman writes that Merwin's poetry often "pronounces a judgment against modern men," in that they have "betrayed [that which] had power to save us." One such redemptive force that Merwin identifies in his poetry is nature, which, Lieberman notes, the poet insists can save us from "a moral vacuity that is absolute and irrevocable." In many of his poems, Merwin condemns the modern impulse to ignore and separate ourselves from nature. In "Horizons of Rooms," he illustrates this theme in an exploration of our alienation from the natural world and the sense of nothingness that results.

In his review of Merwin's The Rain in the Trees, Mark Jarman determines that...