I glean from what I am
A fine self-centered glue.
—James Merrill, “The Pardoner’s Tale”

James Merrill’s principal work of poetry, The Changing Light at Sandover,[1] has appeared piece by piece. “The Book of Ephraim” was published in 1976, as the larger part of his volume Divine Comedies; Mirabell: Books of Number followed in 1978; and Scripts for the Pageant closed out the trilogy in 1980. Praise and prizes have come his way as a result: Divine Comedies won Merrill a Pulitzer, Mirabell brought him his second National Book Award, and when in 1982 Merrill gathered all the parts together and attached a new coda, entitled “The Higher Keys,” he won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award. One wonders whether the judges even bothered to read Sandover before deciding to grant it these honors: the most cursory inspection, after all, proves that in size, in scope, in seriousness, nothing of the past few years could possibly have hoped to compete with it. Twice the size of the average novel, Sandover aims to be nothing less than the Atomic Age’s answer to Dante, a Paradisofor this cynical yet superstitious century of Mesdames Sosostris and Blavatsky. Like Dante, Merrill learns everything he always wanted to know about the hereafter but was afraid to ask; his journey of knowledge, however, begins not with the wrong turn in a dusky wood, but with the act of setting up house with his lover David Jackson in a village of