"Love. Warmth."
Night 99
10) "The pen falls from it." Ink, draft paper. The first line recalls a line from "Time" in Nights and Days, "The pen reels from your hand."
Night 102A
12) "Ah but the world of forms is with me yet." Ink, draft paper. Verso of a "Class" manuscript.
Night 103
14) "Through clouds at last A fist of brilliants pounds on the salt gulf." In, draft paper. Verso of 12.
Night 109
20) "Is it the voyage at last without a destination. The love without an object." Pencil, draft paper.
Night 111
22) "Enhance [?] him — pardon? Was there, and if so, when." Ink, pencil, draft paper. One sketch.
Night 115
25) "OCT 30 . . . Fear for the senses, frivolity in their use Bitterness at their waste, feelings like this." Ink, pencil, draft paper. Three sketches.
Night 116
26) "Soul, body, body, soul—all [these married] pairs of names." Ink, pencil, draft paper. One sketch.
Night 117b
28) "Love. To put it differently, at last One comes round to." Pencil, draft paper, two sketches.
After the prose quotations following the "Postcards" section of "Carnivals," the third section of six and four lines stanzas (with three short lines intervening) begins "Love. Warmth," with the narrator at home in Stonington dreaming of a trip to Rio de Janerio for the carnival. This section contains the largest number of manuscripts. Some show Merrill's cautious approach to writing an "affirmative" poem and writing directly of love. In Manuscripts 25 and 26, Merrill particularly develops his theme of escaping the mind / body and soul / senses dualities. In Manuscript 20 Merrill again uses the phrase "love without an object."
In "An Interview with Donald Sheenan," Merrill said: "the last thing I had to write was the passage at the end of section three beginning 'Love. Warmth.' I had no idea how to write it; I thought I would do it in free verse and made all kinds of beginnings, before the six-line stanza finally evolved. But the moment for which I'm most grateful is in the third of those five stanzas, when it came to me to make the meter trochaic rather than iambic . . . ." (Collected Prose, ed. J. D. McClatchy & Stephen Yenser, NY: Knopf: 54-55.