William Stanley Merwin's The Shadow of Sirius won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for poetry and was widely recognized as a notable achievement in the poet's career, confirming his status as an “indispensable poet and ecopoet” (Dunning 2013: 94). The poet, whose first volume was published in 1952, was already 82 years old at that time, and he seemed inclined, more than ever before, to reflect on the passing of time. As Elizabeth Lund writes, ”… the collection, which explores loss, memory, and the continuum of time, lingers with readers the way light from Sirius reaches the earth – long after leaving its source.” It seems that memory, a recollection of the past which becomes the present, plays a special role in the poems in this collection. Before I discuss the eleven poems in Section II of The Shadow of Sirius, I would like to quote what Merwin has said on the topic of memory:

Merwin's perception of time, the idea that we cannot really touch the emotional present which is comprised of the continuous flow of past events, determines the shape of his poems in this volume. In his vision, the past covers a spectrum of emotional experience that accumulated over a long period of time, and blends into an emotional reality that we may never have experienced in actuality, but only in our dreams and imagination.