The Language of Westward Migration in “The Last One” by W. S. Merwin

September 25, 2018

In “The Last One,” W.S. Merwin presents a moralist fable confronting mankind’s impact on and sense of ownership over the environment – the world of which he is a part – and does so using syntax, punctuation, and repetition privileging forward movement across a horizontal plane. While the poem and its characters are left deliberately ambiguous, its formal construction reveals deeper meaning if read in the context of a similar, more specific narrative: America’s westward expansion. In this framework, Merwin’s manipulation of sentence structure parallels real-world migration while also deflating the ideology motivating that movement, challenging America’s sense of itself as the separate, destined owner of the lands that comprise it.

To begin, this comparison between America’s westward expansion and Merwin’s poem is justified in that both narratives depict processes of expansion and multiplication. Merwin’s agents resolve “to be everywhere” (1), to “cut everything” (6), assuming a sense of ownership over the land in which “everything was theirs because they thought so” (2), just as the American concept of manifest destiny was a resolution to spread American civilisation across the continent, to be everywhere. In both cases there is a clear divide between subject and object in which human agents see themselves as separate and superior to their own environment (a mere possession to be acted upon). This divide between subject and object is seen even in the labels Merwin assigns: his human agents are referred to only as “They” (3) a pronoun suggesting either a small group or a faceless collective, but in either case implies personhood, an entity capable of conscious action – while the shadow is continually characterised as an “It” (16), an inanimate, unconscious object. When They attack It, it is an attempt to reinforce the perceived divide between subject and object that in real life motivated westward migration, and thus their attack is described in the visual language of spreading civilization: they “laid boards” as though laying homesteads in the Midwest (23); “exploded the water … built a fire … sent up black smoke” as though clearing paths for the railway (25-27); and “poured” stones into the water as though pouring concrete for Pacific Northwest dams (34-35). The quoted actions all allude to processes Americans subjected the land to as they moved gradually west – a movement further inscribed through Merwin’s use of repetition. The sentences in stanza five, six and seven almost all begin with an action such as “They built” (26), “They came” (30), “They decided” (33), “They started” (31), a constant refrain of They multiplying itself through the lines of the poem just as the United States multiplied itself through the continent, exerting the conscious power of themselves as subject foregrounded by the They pronoun.

The idea of language paralleling the real-world horizontal movement of the United States is also seen in the syntax and punctuation of each individual line within the poem. Merwin refrains from enjambment by giving each line a definitive end, for example: “Well in the morning they cut the last one. / Like the others the last one fell into its shadow. / It fell into its shadow on the water” (17-19). The lines are linear, repetitious, and driving – with all the regularity of a hammer – suggesting painful and relentless movement. By refusing to carry any ideas between two different lines, Merwin prevents the reader from following any idea downward (i.e. vertically) thus inscribing the idea of horizontal movement into one’s reading of the text. The form reflects at once the journey west and the impact of each foot upon the land. The relentlessness of this movement is also seen in the fact that, while Merwin ends every line with a period, he does not make every line an independent thought: he will shove two clauses together without any punctuation to suggest a pause. Lines such as, “The shadow was not filled it went on growing” (36) or “They took it away they took it away the water went down” (41) each demand a stop but Merwin refuses to give in; he forces an urgency into the movement of the text itself and leaves the reader powerless, carried along through language. As these and other lines concern actions taken upon the land, and the shadow growing in response, their respective accelerations suggest inevitability: they are both going forward until one of them is made to stop. This finally happens in the penultimate stanza; Merwin’s single use of enjambment (given its total absence throughout the rest of the poem) provides a defamiliarizing cut in which “The ones that could see and stood still / It swallowed their shadows” (59-60). In a poem defined by constant horizontal movement, the symbolic movement of its actors across the American West, the single interruption reads, “stood still,” implying that the subjects – forced into recognition of their object – can no longer advance. As the shadow grew with the movement of settlers and their impact upon the land, it could be said to embody both the growing human impact upon the larger whole to which everything belongs, and a growing consciousness of that impact – an understanding of humanity’s existence as a part of nature, not outside it, blurring the divide between They as human-subject and It as thing-object. This is why “It swallowed their shadows” then “swallowed them too” (60-61). The object absorbs the subject into itself to suggest they are one in the same – the divide has collapsed, deflating the ideology informing manifest destiny as a flawed effort. When Merwin writes that “The ones that were left went away” (63), it suggests an alternate narrative of horizonal movement – a de-migration, a return – in which the ones that once “were left” (i.e. on the left side of the continent) are forced to turn back East, the “lucky ones” whose sole remaining possessions are their shadows – their consciousness of what they have done.

While the universality of Merwin’s poem lends itself to other diverse and nuanced interpretations, when taken in the context of American expansion its form and language reveal a wealth of meaning. It is a narrative that, despite the violence of its content, suggests a sort of unity – an acknowledgment that that what one does to the land makes one apart of it, that no human being is an island, and that we all have a place in the family of things.