1. I wake in the dark and remember
2. it is the morning when I must start
3. by myself on the journey
4. I lie listening to the black hour
5. before dawn and you are
6. still asleep beside me while
7. around us the trees full of night lean
8. hushed in their dream that bears
9. us up asleep and awake then I hear
10. drops falling one by one into
11. the sightless leaves and I
12. do not know when they began but
13. all at once there is no sound but rain
14. and the stream below us roaring
15. away into the rushing darkness

Setting: a dark bedroom in the speaker’s home. Visual gloom—dark, black, night, sightless—characterizes the first 11 lines, and after a transformation we return to darkness at the end, but now with a tremendous shout. From the outset the diction suggests passivity and slow motion—lie, asleep, hushed, dream—but after the fulcrum in line 10 (“drops falling”), the speaker rapidly wakens into the external environment, no longer merely remembering but swept up in sound.

So in the transition between darkness and darkness we’re launched into energetic activity in the form of the rain and stream roaring and rushing.

Notice the poem’s division into two (unpunctuated) sentences: l. 1-3 and l. 4-15. The first chunk serves as a kind of emblem (in the Renaissance sense), a throwing down of the gauntlet as if to stand for the whole. It establishes that the speaker will be going somewhere alone come morning–not on a routine journey but on the journey, something discussed, planned, large, almost mythic. Whatever’s at the other end, it’s not pleasant; he wishes he didn’t have to set out, but he has no choice. It makes me think of the hero’s journey in Joseph Campbell.

In the second chunk the “I” reappears, listening at first only to the narrow sounds within the room. Although in this longer chunk we have subordinating conjunctions, I’m struck by the lame or even dysfunctional coordinating conjunctions—”and you are still asleep,” “and I do not know”—as if the speaker, just coming into full consciousness, felt his accelerating thoughts tumbling forward. Which reminds me, I exaggerated when I said there were just two sentences. Line 9’s “then” turns this one into something very much like a run-on…which reinforces my point about the effect of and.

Merwin uses no end-rhymes here but leans into consonance and assonance within, most obviously dark/start (l. 1-2), lean/dream (l. 7-8), and rain/away (l. 13 and 15, helping convey a sense of closure). He also goes for the cute sight-rhyme bears/hear (l. 8-9), which actually does fall at the end of the respective lines.

So the loud sounds, first backgrounded then brought forward after the pivot point in l. 10, were always present; it’s the speaker’s attention that has shifted from the small to the large, from the internal to external world, from the private and intimate (someone’s sleeping next to him, after all) to the public. Evidently his journey will put him on display. He’s not headed for, say, a funeral or a conference where he would be nameless and faceless but for some kind of performance—maybe a teaching gig or a poetry reading or something equally unpleasant.

Feel free to let me know what you’ve seen that I missed.