WS Merwin’s Birthday: Poet of Trees, Gardens, and Eternity

September 30, 1927

On this day, the American poet W.S. Merwin — always called William — was born.

Though celebrated for his luminous poetry, Merwin lived as quietly and reverently as the palms he planted.

A poet, translator, and environmentalist, he turned his love of language into a life rooted in listening — particularly to the natural world he so deeply revered.

In 2010, Merwin and his wife, Paula, co-founded the Merwin Conservancy on their property in Haiku, Maui.

There, on 19 protected acres, he cultivated more than 400 species of tropical trees — including many of the world’s rarest palms. When he first purchased the land in 1977, it was barren, stripped, and abandoned. Every day thereafter, he planted one tree.

Decades later, those daily acts of faith became a forest — one of the richest private palm preserves on Earth.

Merwin’s relationship to land was both spiritual and practical — a gardener’s devotion, a poet’s patience.

On paper and in soil, he sought the same harmony: the space between creation and surrender.

His garden was not a performance but a vow, an ongoing conversation between silence and renewal.

come back
believer in shade
believer in silence and elegance
believer in ferns
believer in patience
believer in the rain

In these lines, we hear the quiet faith that guided Merwin’s daily practice — a prayer as much as a poem.

His belief in small, steadfast things — shade, rain, patience — speaks to every gardener who has ever watched a sprout inch skyward with reverence.

Obviously a garden is not the wilderness but an assembly of shapes, most of them living, that owes some share of its composition, its appearance, to human design and effort, human conventions and convenience, and the human pursuit of that elusive, indefinable harmony that we call beauty. It has a life of its own, an intricate, willful, secret life, as any gardener knows.

It is only the humans in it who think of it as a garden. But a garden is a relationship, which is one of the countless reasons why it is never finished.

Here, Merwin perfectly captures the paradox of gardening — control and surrender intertwined.

The garden, for him, was alive in its own right, beyond our notions of order or ownership. His understanding dissolves the boundary between gardener and garden, revealing each as a mirror to the other.

On the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree.

It is difficult to imagine a more fitting epitaph.

For Merwin, planting was both resistance and faith — a gesture toward continuity even amid endings.

Each planted seed was a promise that beauty and life would persist, even when words could not.

So today, as we honor W.S. Merwin, let us remember that hope often arrives disguised as a seed — small, silent, and waiting for hands that believe in rain.