Thomas Merton Book of Silent
Thomas Merton Book of Silent
Thomas Merton Book of Silent
Lynn Szabo
Two summers ago, when I was attending the annual faculty retreat at
the university where I teach, I participated in a small study group on
solitude. I listened as a colleague read from 1 Kings. Always a rich
passage in prophetic history, the words being read from the New
Revised Standard Version seized me from my half-attention as I heard
again ofElijah's epiphanous discovery, after his wilderness experience:
„.but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake,
and after the earthquake, a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and
after the fire, a sound of sheer silence (1Kgs 19.12). (emphasis mine)
At that moment, my though ts congealed around the idea that
silence is the language of the seemingly absent God-it is the lan-
guage which mystics employ to describe the Absence which is Pres-
ence-the sound of sheer silence. The next things on my mind were
the words of Thomas Merton, which are the touchstone for this study:
Under the blunt pine
Elias becomes his own geography
(Supposing geography to be necessary at all),
Elias becomes his own wild bird, with God in the center,
His own wide field which nobody owns,
His own pattern, surrounding the Spirit
By which he is himself surrounded:
For the free man's road has neither beginning nor end. 1
* The research for this paper was partially funded by a grant from The Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
1. Thomas Merton, The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton (New York: New
Directions, 1977), pp. 239-45.
SZABO The Sound of Sheer Silence 209
And I sensed the certainty that the language of silence is the speech
that frees.
By the time that Thomas Merton's The Geography of Lograire was
published posthumously in 1969, his poetics demonstrated an evolu-
tion that arguably and substantively parallels his journey into mystic-
ism. The central concern of his last years was self-transcendence. In
relation to this, his experiential understanding of eastern mysticism
was documented in scholarly and personal commentary. Merton,
writing out of tensions created in the monastic life, eventually re-
ported that communication is best not as a matter of action but as
communion, and without words.
As witness to the intense conflict between Merton's elected silence
and his calling to write, words were his enemies as much as they were
his allies, circumscribing him with guilt as often as they articulated
his relentless social conscience. Conjointly, Merton experienced the
mystic's profound knowledge that silence is a language of its own. To
engage with Merton's poetry, no less than with his prose, is to follow
his acquisition of a language that defines itself in the sound of sheer
silence.
Merton's distrust of words is apparent at the outset of Early Poems
(1940-42). He opens with a sardonic comment on 'The Philosophers'
who break his rest by 'bitterly arguing in their frozen graves', 'into the
tunnels of his ears'. One can see his contempt for the assault that lan-
guage makes even when spoken by so-thought wise men. 'The Strife
Between the Poet and Ambition' continues this drama depicting the
demise of language. The speaker mimics death who taunts would-be
poets with these words:
Better sing your snatch of song
Before that ostrich voice is dumb:
Better whack your share of gong
Before the sounding brass is mum ... 2
To begin a walk
To make an air
Of knowing where to go
To print
Speechless pavements
With secrets in my
Forgotten feet. ..
To have passed there
Walked without a word ...
Geography.
I am all (here)
There! 8
Further explorations into Merton's 'antipoetry' indicate that his title
designation, Lograire, may have had sources other than the 'real name'
of Frarn;ois Villon (Frarn;ois Des Loges), or Merton's 'loge', the forest
hermitage in w hich he lived during the period of these later writings. 9
Merton's preoccupation with logos, the word /s of language, and their
potential for the ultimate d estruction of meaning and life, is an over-
arching 'geography' for these writings. His decentering of the 'word'
is given further elaboration in 'The Night of D estiny' w herein the
sp eaker declares that '[i]n [his] ending is [his] meaning'-not only are
his words 'speechless', his 'end' is his 'meaning'. 10
On the other hand, in his Foreword to the Anvil Press edition of
Early Poems, Jonathan Green instructively argues that the 'proximity
of matter in [Merton's] beginning and last work persists' in the form
of 'constants in concerns/images/ and metaphors' .11 These cons tants,
with others, form an iconography of silence w hich leads us through
the desert, beyond horiz ons 'which have no meaning' and 'roads'
without explanations. But between the earliest collected poems and
The Geography of Lograire lies a long.journey into silence and solitude-
an expedition into the geography of Merton's spirituality and his
poetics. In 'Sacred Heart 2 (A Fragment-)', the last of the Early Poems,
we have the foreshadowing beau ty of Merton' s spiritual and poetic
(un)mappings:
Geography comes to an end,
Compass has lost all earthly north,
Horizons have no meaning
Nor roads an explanation:
at their 'best' during this period of his w riting), 13 illustrates this claim
in a particularly lovely manner: 'the full fields ... smell of sunrise I
And the valleys sing in their sleep I The pilgrim moon pou rs I Her
waterfalls of silence ... '. The silent moonhours of the matins glide
down the 'long avenue of trees', speaking their glory and kindling in
the young monk's 'soul' their 'elear awakeness'. 14
It soon becomes elear, however, that the mank, infatuated with
silent holiness, must move through many and varied agonies and
p en ances attending mature monastic spirituality. Merton's next col-
lection, A Man in the Divided Sea (1946) shows an altered perception in
the em erging poet/ contemplative. The collection included the con-
tents of Thirty Poems with an additional 63 poems, a number of which
expose the secular I religious dichotomy which Merton was experienc-
ing in the early years of his Catholicism, before and after his entry
into the monastic life. Such a poem is 'Same Bloody Mutiny (which
first appeared in 1944). It potently depicts, in both tone and image, an
earth 'where pretty children curse the sea .. ./ Ripping the rind of
Eden'; a world 'where there is no Good Friday'. But these catastro-
phes are not beyond the powers of a heaven 'given [to] ... / Battle the
ravage of aur ordinary marrow I And flower for u s I Upon the bone-
branch we made dead'. 15 The death march of modern existence is met
with the potentia! of resurrected life. Merton's desire to counter the
secular with the sacred is profoundly present in his evolving poetics.
The continuing evolution of Merton' s poetics parallels his journey
with and through silence, in his life and in his art- his search for
'place' grounded in, but not defined by, the monastery. To follow the
journey is b oth to engage and to penetrate the silence w hich illumi-
nates it. His writings, as indefinable as the man himself, anchor
Merton's poetics in a spirituality whose language is its own silence.
Merton lived his life around the a byss between language and silence
which ever threatened to consume ltim; same of his observers even
thought he might self-destruct as both w riter and contemplative-a
man who insisted on biting the hand that fed him. My contention here
is that both Merton's poetic vision and his contemplative vocation
were necessary to his survival as a mank. But in the mid-1940s he had
not yet begun to accommodate the tension whose forces h ad the
potentia! to keep him in balance. In 1947, he publicly claimed that
13. Thomas Merton, A Thomas Merton Reader (ed. Thomas P. McDonnell; New
York: Doubleday, 1974), p. 15.
14. Merton, Collected Poems, pp. 41-42.
15. Merton, Collected Poems, p. 68.
214 The Merton Ann11al 13 (2000)
16. 'Poetry and The Contemplative Life', The Commonwea/ 46 (4 July 1947),
pp. 280-86.
17. Merton, A Thomas Merton Reader, p. 15.
18. Merton, Collected Poems, p. 192.
19. The Commonwea/ 69 (24October1 958), pp. 87-92.
20. Merton, Co//ected Poems, p . 157.
SZABO The Sound of Sheer Silence 215
The [one] who is outside language ... Ins tead of ... knowing things by
their name, it seems that first he has a silent contact with them, since, by
tuming toward the other species of thing which for bim is the word ... he
discovers in them a slight luminosity of their own ... 21
The poem takes its speaker outside the confines of language and
words as he 'drink[s] rain, drink[s] wind I Distinguish[es] poems I
Boiling up out of the old forest'. At home in his own 'geography', this
poet 'live[s] on [his] own land, on his own island I And sp eak[s] to
God, [his] God'.
Paul Gehl, in his essay 'An Answering Silence', tells us that 'one of
the most common and consistently presented notions in the great
religious traditions is the idea that human language is inadequate to
describe the unifying being or principle at the summit of most reli-
giou s hierarchies; ... that a certain linguistic disappearing point is
assumed in which a quality of standing beyond the ability of human
language opens into God'. 27 Similarly, for Merton, that point (of
silence) is essential to language, not merely as an absence of sounds,
but as attendant and assistant to their inabilities.
Foundational to Merton's early thinking about silence was Picard's
The World of Silence. This is acknowledged in the author's note at the
beginning of Thoughts in Solitude. As Altany has observed, 'The early
Merton believed mystica! experience directed him towards silence,
but the poetic vision compelled him to speak.'28 Altany refers to Mer-
ton's antiphonal psalm, 'A Responsory', as an illustration of this on-
going attempt to balance his silent vocation with his artistic vision
and its need to speak: 'Words and silence, s tanding face to face I
Weigh life and d eath'. In this spiritual exercise, the speakers of the
chorus intone that 'the Mystery was in [their] wicked midst' while
they 'waited for ... their light in win ter I Learning discipline'. The
soloist counters that it is 'lighted children, friends of silence' who
'sing to u s', who are 'the signals of aur Christ'. 29 In entering the dark
emptiness of silence, the poet incarnates, in words, the light of the
sacred in the profane. As Altany further explains, 'The [true] self
grows in the fertile darkness of the sacred ...what seems to all appear-
ances to b e purely profane is in reality a womb for the sacred teeming
with unlimited life'. 30 Later, Merton synthesized this understanding
with the study of H eidegger, Sartre, Rahner, and others. The reading
journals are chock full of his notations and insights about this com-
plex matter.
Merton lived into the discovery that it was the evocative silences of
his monastic contemplation that encompassed his spiritual and mysti-
ca! union with God and the world. He wrote, in his essay, 'Philosophy
of Solitude' that ' [the] inner 'I' which is always alone, is always uni-
versal; for in this inmost 'I' my own solitude meets the solitude of
every other man and the solitude of Gad ... It is only this inmost and
solitary 'I' that truly loves with the love and the spirit of Christ'. 31 For
Merton, this was the 'hearing proper', a 'hearkening', a transposition
into the spiritual realm, as in the vein of Heidegger.
In tandem with the desert ex peri en ce of Merton' s spiritual journey
into this and other knowledge, he writes same of his finest in the tra-
dition of poetry as religious experience. These poems have that qual-
ity of experience which is 'reproduced' rather than 'described'.
Indeed, such poems can be found throughout Merton' s collected
works. There is a surprising consistency in their literary qualities- an
observation demonstrated by the examination of so-called drafts of
his poems in his working notebooks. Later, these drafts appear in
publication as almost identical to their originals, even after same
attempts at revision. Moreover, same of his acknowledged best poems
appear as often in his early work as in the later writings. That his
huge canon of poems is inconsistent in its quality does not undermine
Merton's vision as a poet.
'Song: If You Seek ... 'is a pertinent and compelling example. Here,
Merton's speaker assumes the pose of Solitude, the consumrnate spiri-
tual director: the poem is a straightforward claim that Solitude is the
Who areyou?
Who
Arc you? „.
Who (be quiet)
Are you (as these stones)
Are quiet? ...
Obe stil!.. .
Speaking by the Unknown
That is in you and in themselves.
The intensity of the imagery and its disquieting stillness calls the
reader to contemplation. As one listens to the silence, one must
ponder the imponderables and in so doing, is led away from oneself
to the silent sounds of all things that live around one and are not
heard in one's own being. Further, one looks away and beyond to dis-
cover that the 'world is secretly on fire' . (Here, one cannot help but
recall the echoes of Hopkins's 'The World Is Charged With The
Grandeur of Gad'). By the poem's end, one has been silenced into
contemplative action by the very listening to 'all things burning'. In
such a moment, the icon has broken open-silence has burst into the
fire of the Unknown that is in oneself and others- mystical union
with Gad and with the world further fuels the icon's fire.
Th ere are many other poems that serve to demonstrate similar
power. Their beauty evolves parallel to their power as icons. 'Song for
Nobody' speaks of the 'Nobody' that lives outside itself. Written in
the early 1960s, it unfolds Merton's mature relationship with the
solitude and silence tha t nourished him and his poetry. Again, the
imagery focu ses on the power of light and emptiness as seen in the
simplicity of a brown-eyed Susan, p lentiful in the knobs of Kentucky
that were home to the monastery. The poem's speaker hears the
flower singing by itself-for nobody. This flower sings 'without a
word; but in its dark eye, 'someone' is awake. There is no light, no
gold, no name, no color/ And no thought'. 'Someone' sings a 'song to
35. Thomas Merton, Tlwughts in Solitude (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
1956), p. 86.
36. George Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature and the
lnhuman (Kingsport, TN: Kingsport Press, 1967), p. 39.
SZABO The Sound of Sheer Silence 221