James Merrill's Poetry Manuscripts

A Hamam is a bathhouse, or "Turkish bath." In A Different Person, Merrill writes about his visit to a hamam in one of his many visits to Istanbul: "One winter dusk David and I tried out the louche hamam. One June, after wishing my mother good night at our hotel, I was roughly treated in a park" (Collected Prose, NY: Knopf, 2004, p. 661). The reference to his rough treatment minimizes what was a dangerous mugging, and the reference to the hamam in the poem eliminates its "louche" quality.

The manuscripts again show Merrill working in the sonnet form. Manuscript 1 is dated "Sept 3-4-5, 1962." Manuscript 6 contains a draft of the prose passage about the grandmother's wen.

Stephen Yenser comments on the sonnet form of this section in The Consuming Myth: "The new section opens with a quatrain that assonates abba and thus might seem a continuation of the normative form, except that the lines are tetrameter instead of pentameter. When the second quatrain shuffles its assonantal pattern to abab, and is followed by two tercets, [it] forms itself into a sonnet. It is not until this sonnet ends that Merrill stops for breath and the poem has its first real break . . . " (p. 125).