JEFFREY BROWN: For more than 30 years, Hawaii has been Merwin's home. He lives with his wife, Paula, in a house he designed and built at the edge of a dormant volcano on the island of Maui. There he cultivates his other lifelong passion, gardening. And he is passionate as both activist and poet of the natural world.W.S. MERWIN: I can trace that all the way back into early child, and I think it's always been there. But I think I've always -- the thing that makes me want to write is the same thing that makes me love that blade of grass in the -- and I can't separate them.
JEFFREY BROWN: Another thing that comes through here in a kind of simplicity of language, of form.
W.S. MERWIN: I'm so glad you say that, because I've been trying since I was 30, at least, to write more simply and more directly. I like the idea that sometimes one hears poetry as though one were overhearing it, you know?
And sometimes my favorite passages of poetry seem like that. They're something that -- they're just around in the air somewhere, you know, and they seem so simple, the way Mozart seemed so simple, you know? He certainly is not, but neither is Shakespeare, but, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" I mean, it takes your breath away. You stop and think, "My god, how beautiful that line is."
JEFFREY BROWN: You mean, you're trying to pare down to a kind of clarity?
W.S. MERWIN: I would like it -- if people respond to a poem of mine at all, I would like them to feel finally that they might have written it, you know?
JEFFREY BROWN: Really, that they might have written it?
W.S. MERWIN: They might have written it, yes.
JEFFREY BROWN: On a New York street, that clarity of memory and the natural world came together in the poem "Rain Light."
W.S. MERWIN: All day the stars watch from long ago
my mother said I am going now
when you are alone you will be all right
whether or not you know you will know
look at the old house in the dawn rain
all the flowers are forms of water
the sun reminds them through a white cloud
touches the patchwork spread on the hill
the washed colors of the afterlife
that lived there long before you were born
see how they wake without a question
even though the whole world is burning
