Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1958
Dedication: In Memory of Donald A. Stauffer

Meredith is an expert writer and knows how to make his meters and sentences accomplish hard labors. His intelligent poems, unlike most poems, have a character behind them...

    -Robert Lowell

I think you write "I" poems, where the shifts, pauses, shivers etc. of the struggling voice are all important. You usually need a little space to get going, and perhaps some solid object bridge, battleship or person to keep you from drifting off into the gray. I guess your subject is about meetings: the ship, the bridge, ther persons steely, their myriad wires trembling with communication and rebuff, then giving one's self away with decency.

    -Letter from Robert Lowell to William Meredith, December 2, 1955

We say the sea is lonely; better say
Ourselves are lonesome creatures whom the sea
Gives neither yes or no for company.

Oh, there are people, all right, settled in the sea-
It is as populous as Maine today-
But no one who will give you the time of day.

A man who asks there of his family
Or a friend or teacher gets a cold reply
Or finds him dead against that vast majority.

They are speechless. And the famous noise of the sea,
Which a poet has beautifully told us in our day,
Is hardly a sound to speak comfort to the lonely.

Although not yet a man given to prayer, I pray
For each creature lost since the start of the sea,
And give thanks that it was not I, nor yet one close to me.

Other poems from The Open Sea...

To Ships and Other Figures... | To The Wreck of the Thresher...