Merrill on Fire

As summer approaches, many of you will be having cocktail nights with your friends, so I thought we could look at one of my favorite poems, a short narrative about beauty, appearance, and drinking.

"Charles on Fire" is by James Merrill, one of my favorite poets, and I believe one of the finest and most lasting poets of the 20th century.  Let's look at the poem, written in the mid-sixties:

CHARLES ON FIRE

Another evening we sprawled about discussing 

Appearances.  And it was the consensus

That while uncommon physical good looks 

Continued to launch one, as before, in life

(Among its vaporous eddies and false calms), 

Still, as one of us said into his beard,

"Without your intellectual and spiritual 

Values, man, you are sunk."  No one but squared

The shoulders of his own unloveliness.

Long-suffering Charles, having cooked and served the meal,

Now brought out little tumblers finely etched

He filled with amber liquor and then passed.

"Say," said the same young man, "in Paris, France,

They do it this way"--bounding to his feet

And touching a lit match to our host's full glass.

A blue flame, gentle, beautiful, came, went

Above the surface.  In a hush that fell

We heard the vessel crack.  The contents drained

As who should step down from a crystal coach.

Steward of spirits, Charles's glistening hand

All at once gloved itself in eeriness. 

The moment passed.  He made two quick sweeps and

Was flesh again.  "It couldn't matter less,"

He said, but with a shocked, unconscious glance

Into the mirror.  Finding nothing changed,

He filled a fresh glass and sank down among us.

*

If you are at all interested in writing and the writing process, I encourage you to look at some early drafts of the poem here:  http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/authors/merrill/charlesonfire.html

In one of the drafts, he has written "the beautiful" but then replaces it with "Appearances."  He also writes in one draft that good looks no longer launch one in life, but this seems to contradict the heart of the poem, and beauty, unlike appearance, is not always skin-deep.

What Merrill wants us to see is a group of people focused on superficiality, appearances, fashion (i.e. what Parisians do), and good looks.  This is not a group of people much concerned with depth.  And other than Charles and the young man, no one is given any sense of individuality.  This is a group of people that functions only as a group because they do not have enough depth to be distinguishable from each other.

When the bearded young man says, "Without your intellectual and spiritual / Values, man, you are sunk," the group responds with discomfort, aware of their own shortcomings.  So even tepid platitudes about depth are enough to make the group respond negatively.  This foreshadows the true moment of depth in the poem.

The liquor is lit on fire and the vessel cracks.  In other words, what is inside is coming out, and the surface is being destroyed.  The group, and Charles in particular, is being asked to step down from its crystal coach, to rid itself of pretension.  Then, "Steward of spirits, Charles's glistening hand / All at once gloved itself in eeriness."  Note the pun on spirit here - liquor and otherworldly presence.  We are seeing the mysterious interior of a human leak out, just as the liquor leaked from the glass.

What is Charles's response to this moment of power?  He wants to ignore it.  He looks in the mirror--once again he is concerned with appearance.  And then he "sank down among us."  Whereas before they were above it all in their crystal coach, now they are below.  They see that their sense of hierarchy is an inversion -- a focus on surface lowers oneself, while a focus on the spirit, the inside of things, raises oneself.  But this inwardness is uncomfortable, and no one in this group -- perhaps few people in any group -- is able to sustain it.