Poem Response 4- To Myself

W.S. Merwin's poem "To Myself" is very reflective of how a person views him or herself. Merwin has a background in Buddhist philosophy, and I feel this poem is very deep and from a philosophical point of view; although, many people can relate to it. To me this poem very much told what I feel about myself. I thought it could be referring to another person. Kind of like the author writing a poem to himself, about a desired person. The poem is more meaningful if it is talking about himself, or in the case of the reader, talking about the reader. The strategy I used was to take it line by line. The first line says, "Even when I forget you... I go on looking for you." I thought about how many times I have lost myself, or lost what I once was and have become something different. Yet, I still look for what I once was, and try to remember. A couple lines later the poem talks about remembering the subject from a long time ago, or just a second ago. I interpreted this to mean that I am always changing. Who I was years ago is completely different than who I am now, which is completely different from who I was even a week ago.

"... and the air is still alive around where you were," is one of my favorite lines of this poem. My family goes to the exact same place for summer vacation every year, and every year I am a different person. The place remains the same, and when I arrive at the condo's, the air around the place is alive from who I was last year. The poem shifts view point a little when it says that the subject "pretend to be, but who are not." A very impacting thought. What I am is not what I pretend to be, or not what I pretended to be. The awkward meanie stage I went through in middle school was not who I was, it was what I thought I had to be. This leads me to ask how do I know when I am not pretending? This poem is a great poem to just make the reader sit and reflect on their life. At least I did!

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