The Mercy by Philip Levine

First published: 1999, in The Mercy

Type of poem: Narrative/elegy

The Poem

Philip Levine’s “The Mercy” consists of one thirty-eight-line stanza written in primarily five-beat free-verse lines. The poem takes its title from the ship that brought the poet’s mother to Ellis Island in the 1910’s. As in many of Levine’s poems, the grandeur and splendor of mercy is found in small and everyday events that offer only glimpses of the sublime, of redemption, and of joy. Such is the case in “The Mercy,” a narrative elegy that depicts the journey of his mother, at the age of nine, from one home to another. “The Mercy” is the ship she travels on, where she encounters a Scottish sailor who offers her a slice of an orange, the first she has ever seen. The sailor attempts to teach her the word “orange” in English, “saying it patiently over and over.” Thus, by line 8 readers learn that “The Mercy” is concerned not merely with journeying from Europe to America but also with metaphorical journeys, such as from innocence to experience, from confusion to clarity, and from isolation to acclimation.

This idea of journeying, of “A long autumn voyage,” travels from its immediate context of the poet’s mother’s journey into the turbulent realm of language, as readers learn that “She prayed in Russian and Yiddish/ to find her family in New York.” The Scottish sailor, too, supports this dimension of the poem, as he is at once intimately isolated from, yet ineffably in communion with, the poet’s mother. Her prayers, speculates the speaker of the poem, go “unheard or misunderstood or perhaps ignored/ by all the powers that swept the waves of darkness.” The considerable barriers of language, and by extension experience, are nullified by the literal and symbolic sweetness of the orange. The orange embodies a physical form of mercy by the poem’s conclusion, as

She learns that mercy is something you can eatagain and again while the juice spills overyour chin, you can wipe it away with the backof your hands and you can never get enough.

This is a lesson also learned by the speaker of the poem. He, too, travels into his imagination, researching the voyage of the ship that brought his mother to America and, in turn, afforded the speaker the opportunity for a better life. He learns of the hardships endured by his mother and others on board:

‘The Mercy,’ I read on the yellowing pages of a bookI located in a windowless room of the libraryon 42nd Street, sat thirty-one daysoffshore in quarantine before the passengersdisembarked. There a story ends.

The hardships found in this story, of traveling across the dark waves of the North Atlantic in late autumn/early winter, enduring an epidemic of smallpox, only to arrive and be refused to go ashore for a month longer, paradoxically reinforce the degree of mercy the poet, the poet’s mother, and reader feel by the poem’s conclusion. Ultimately, this is the telling moment of a life’s transformation.

Forms and Devices

The straightforward declarative tone of “The Mercy” serves to simultaneously underscore and reinforce the import of the poem’s story, as Levine writes in the poem that this, by all accounts, is a “true” story based on substantiated historical fact. The opening two lines set the tonal stage for the poem; “The Mercy” is a poem to be understood as one borne not only from truth but also from fact: “The ship that took my mother to Ellis Island/ eighty-three years ago was named ‘The Mercy.’” This is a strategy Levine employs to preserve the people he holds dear, not only in the realm of art but also in the realm of indisputable, objective fact.

The tone also possesses a certain almost Frostian conversational ease as it moves from one moment or aspect of the story to the next. It is a voice intended to be heard by the common person. It is a voice one can trust; therefore, when the story begins to digress, readers are willing to follow it on its many tangential, but ultimately crucial, excursions. In line 9, Levine begins to journey toward what is at the heart of this poem:

A long autumn voyage, the days darkeningwith the black waters calming as night came on,then nothing as far as her eyes could see and spacewithout limit rushing off to the cornersof creation.

This lyrical flourish breathes new life into Levine’s deceased mother, recapturing her in a form when the Wordsworthian youth has just been lost. The glory and the dreams of such youth are overshadowed by the fear of the initial witnessing of the indifferent violence of nature, which in this poem is analogous with the unknown.

Perhaps the greatest technical achievement of “The Mercy,” however, is how Levine vacillates between past and present tense and between first-, second-, and third-person pronouns. “The Mercy” begins in the past tense, and in line 3 it shifts to the present: “She remembers trying to eat a banana.” A sense of immediacy reinforces the necessity of memory; in order to experience mercy, Levine says, people must exercise their memories so they might remember themselves and those for whom they care.

The poem’s concluding fourteen lines contain another similar shift in time: “There a story ends. Other ships/ arrived,…. the list goes on for pages, November gives/ way to winter, the sea pounds this alien shore.” The story of other immigrants continues until Levine reintroduces his mother, showing her eating the orange. It is a scene from a memory so acute that it has the facade of existing in the present: “She learns that mercy is something you can eat/.…you can wipe it away with the back/ of your hands and you can never get enough.”

Throughout the poem, Levine addresses his mother, his audience, and himself. Hence, the point of “The Mercy” possesses a universal application. Levine avoids solipsism and egocentrism; instead, “The Mercy” works on the level of symbol, and is reluctant, in fact, to function on that level as well, as the insertion of historical facts in the poem testify. “The Mercy” is a poem with a utilitarian purpose. It is meant, through its techniques and strategies, to illuminate the consciousness of the reader, to urge the reader to examine memory in order to receive mercy from whatever higher powers that be.

Sources for Further Study

The Atlantic Monthly 283 (April, 1999): 108.

Booklist 95 (March 15, 1999): 1278.

Library Journal 124 (March 15, 1999): 83.

The New York Times Book Review 104 (April 18, 1999): 26.

The Progressive 6 (August, 1999): 44.

Publishers Weekly 246 (January 25, 1999): 90.