Water Street (1962) is a volume of poems by the American poet James Merrill. It takes its title from the main commercial street of the Borough of Stonington, Connecticut, where he made his home.
In the introduction to the volume, Sandy McClatchy and Stephen Yenser write:
Merrill believed, with Marcel Proust, that the only true paradise is a lost paradise. Love is not fully itself until it is lost, until it becomes memory, then becomes art.
Merrill pays homage to Marcel Proust in one of gems, poem “For Proust”. The volume also contains poems “An Urban Convalescence” and “Swimming by Night”, that have been widely praised by literary critics.
Famous quotes containing the words water and/or street:
“We then entered another swamp, at a necessarily slow pace, where the walking was worse than ever, not only on account of the water, but the fallen timber, which often obliterated the indistinct trail entirely. The fallen trees were so numerous, that for long distances the route was through a succession of small yards, where we climbed over fences as high as our heads, down into water often up to our knees, and then over another fence into a second yard, and so on.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“What are you now? If we could touch one another,
if these our separate entities could come to grips,
clenched like a Chinese puzzle . . . yesterday
I stood in a crowded street that was live with people,
and no one spoke a word, and the morning shone.
Everyone silent, moving. . . . Take my hand. Speak to me.”
—Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980)