Читать книгу Thomas Merton's Poetics of Self-Dissolution онлайн

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In his Early Poems, Merton strongly criticizes this false “divertissement” with which the city cunningly seduces its servants: “Oh lock us in the safe jails of thy movies!/Confine us to the semiprivate wards and white asylum/Of the unbearable cocktail parties, O New York!”⁸ As opposed to this empty and surrogate happiness that the urban life offers, his verses praise the unspoilt nature, where “the simple grapefruit in the grove/shines like the face of childish love/and sunflowers lean toward the south with the confidence of early youth.”⁹ Faithful to the commands of his own destiny, Merton ended up living in the privileged natural setting of Our Lady of Gethsemani and withdrawing from the more active concerns of a wordly life, in order to devote himself completely to repentance, conversion, renunciation and prayer.¹⁰ Like the sunflower seeking the sunlight, the poet would direct his life toward the sun of Christ, his Beloved. The tireless search for complete union with him became one of the main themes of his early poetic production: “Oh flaming Heart,/Unseen and unimagined in this wilderness,/You, You alone are real, and here I’ve found you”¹¹ he wrote in one of the last poems of this collection.