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Merrill spent many years in Greece, and there's an overbrimming sunniness ("There at the highest trumpet blast/ Of Fahrenheit") in much of his poetry, particularly in his early books: with polychromatic warmth and humor he captures lovers, society ladies, fortune-tellers, merchants, children. In recent years he registered more moon than sun perhaps, in poems bathed in a blue, chilly and at times merciless light. Merrill wrote beautifully-painfully-about the daily diminutions of the body and the passing of friends, about aids, alcoholism and senility.
Under sun and moon-in all weathers-he went on constructing, a process whose natural culmination was his vast phantasmagoria The Changing Light at Sandover, an epic poem stretching over three volumes and chronicling extended conversations with the illustrious dead, whom Merrill summoned by Ouija board. He has gone on to become one of them, leaving behind the paradoxical legacy of a man who loved both understatement and sumptuosity, nicety and grandeur. In the end, his contradictions were expansive. Collectively the poems declare, Here's a world, and it's a good one.