The Lice

W.S. Merwin

This fiftieth anniversary edition revisits a groundbreaking moment in American poetry. The Lice responded, in part, to the atrocities of the Vietnam War and the national unrest of the Civil Rights Movement. Found within these haunting, urgent poems is a citizen artist ensnared in a grand-scale moral crisis. At this key moment in the twentieth century, early in W.S. Merwin’s career, he captured a “peculiar, spiritual agony” (Yale Review) that is both of the time and utterly timeless.

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ISBN: 9781556594984

Format: Paperback

Caesar

My shoes are almost dead
And as I wait at the doors of ice
I hear the cry go up for him Caesar Caesar

But when I look out the window I see only the flatlands
And the slow vanishing of the windmills
The centuries draining the deep fields

Yet this is still my country
The thug on duty says What would you change
He looks at his watch he lifts
Emptiness out of the vases
And holds it up to examine

So it is evening
With the rain starting to fall forever
One by one he calls night out of the teeth
And at last I take up
My duty

Wheeling the president past banks of flowers
Past the feet of empty stairs
Hoping he’s dead

About the Author

W.S. Merwin was born in New York City in 1927 and was United States Poet Laureate in 2010. He graduated from Princeton University in 1948, where he studied with John Berryman and R.P. Blackmur. From 1949 to 1951 he worked as a tutor in France, Mallorca, and Portugal; for several years afterward he made the greater part of his living by translating from French, Spanish, Latin, and Portuguese. His first book of poetry, A Mask for Janus (1952) was selected …

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