The Tutelar of The Place
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Dear Friends,
Over the years I’ve written of W.S. Merwin and Paula Merwin’s palm garden as a living work of art, as an act of resistance, and also a thing made not at all of resistance, but rather of choosing another way. I have come to know these few acres on an island in the middle of the Pacific as a testament to the possibilities of renewal anywhere, at any scale and in any form. But in these first weeks of a new and utterly bewildering year, a haze softened the edges of this knowing, and disoriented (and delayed) my writing. It was Paula who brought it back into focus. I have just come across words she wrote early in 1984:
Somehow out here on an island, what is happening in the whole world seems so much clearer, like isolating the germs of a disease under a microscope. It is awful, and sad and we are all part of it, much as we hate it, and must never forget that. This morning, talking about it again, about the destruction of the earth for money and just for not being able to leave it alone, Wm read David Jones’ beautiful, sad, angry poem, ‘The Tutelar of the Place,’ and wept as he read it. It is a magnificent, deeply moving thing, a cry from a man’s deepest heart—and it seems incredibly close to William’s own work in its feeling and tone. Wm does feel close to him——obviously. That poem should be read——celebrated, like a mass——at regular or irregular intervals.
I had never read the poem, nor had I encountered the word tutelar, except in traces borne by words like tutor and tutelage. As both adjective and noun it invokes guardianship and protection, and here, I learned, the noun conjures a protective deity or spirit of a place. Straightaway I found the January 1961 issue of Poetry, and plunged into a long and prose-like poem that “fore-reads the world-storm.” I imagine the poem felt painfully relevant to William in 1984, when it drew his tears, just as it did to me only last week, when the poem drew mine. It begins:
She that loves place, time, demarcation, hearth, kin, enclosure, site, differentiated cult, though she is but one mother of us all: one earth brings us all forth, one womb receives us all, yet to each she is other, named of some name other…
The purview of this tutelary spirit is both a particular place (“she’s a rare one for locality”) and all places:
Though she inclines with attention from a far fair-height outside all boundaries, beyond the known and kindly nomenclatures, where all names are one name, where all stones of demarcation dance and interchange. . .
For several pages the poem moves back and forth from place to planet, fragment to whole, and then, it unleashes its cry to the tutelar of both and all:
Queen of the differentiated sites, administratrix of the
demarcations, let our cry come unto you.
In all times of imperium save us
when the mercartores come save us
From the guile of the negotiatores save us
from the missi, from the agents
who think no shame
by inquest to audit what is shameful to tell
deliver us.
There are formal echoes of William’s work, and passages that I imagine spoke straight to his own life, to his heart:
Mother of Flowers save them then where no flower blows.
… remember them when the dead forms multiply, where no
stamen leans, where the carried pollen falls to the adamant sur-
faces, where is no crevice.
The last stanza of “The Tutelar of the Place” is both devastating and galvanizing, and I hope you’ll read all the way through it. And, perhaps, as I will, return to this poem at regular or irregular intervals—each time, no doubt, finding an immediacy. From this first read, I take with me into this new year a remembering that the fragment and the whole, the local and the universal, are inextricably linked; that the forces animating both, by way of our collective conjuring, can be empathy, justice, compassion, and commitment. May these root in one and all places, just as they roam widely.
Sonnet
