Written in December 1957, “The Drunk in the Furnace” describes a particular place. Scholars mistakenly read the poem as referring to an “empty iron furnace [that] rusts” in a junkyard at the edge of a town.10 In fact, the poem depicts the Scranton Iron Furnaces, a structure of locally quarried stone that resembles a “bad castle” (14). Originally, the furnaces used anthracite to heat iron ore; later the company imported anthracite’s rival, bituminous coal. A nineteenth-century description of the furnaces notes that “one large coal mine opens directly between the stacks of the furnaces, and you pass into it through the buildings.”11 In visiting the site and studying early photographs of it, one realizes that the furnace in the poem is a “hulking black fossil” because it represents a remnant of a large industrial complex that was dismantled in 1902 (4).
Large corporate interests and New York investors dominated the Lackawanna Valley almost from the beginning of white settlement. Scranton grew up around the furnaces, which produced rails for the railroads that made anthracite coal mining profitable.12 During their sixty years of operation, the furnaces were “the single most significant factor in the economic, social, and industrial life of Scranton”; they helped to fuel nineteenth-century industrial development in the United States, which prepared the ground for many of the ecological problems we confront today.13 Lodged, then and now, in the heart of the city, the furnaces are today a tourist attraction beside a cleaned-up Roaring Brook Creek.
“The Drunk in the Furnace” depicts a place damaged by the ravages of coal mining. Early drafts of the poem describe the final version’s “naked gully” (2) as “stripped,” a word that echoes the strip mining and deforestation that denuded the surrounding landscape. The revision underscores that the hollow is defenseless against erosion, even that caused by a tamed Roaring Brook. The “poisonous creek,” which once powered the furnaces’ hot air blasts, is venomous with mine acid, a common problem of the region’s waterways (6). One draft’s description of the furnaces as “unregenerate” recalls the words “unacknowledged,” “unreclaimed,” and “unavoidable” in an earlier poem, “Luzerne Street Looking West” (30, 31, 39).14
The poem contrasts the drunk in the “unnoticed” furnace with nearby churchgoers, who assume better days ahead. In singing, the drunk nudges them to pay attention to what they have “added / To their ignorance,” the ground around them (5, 6–7). Self-closeted inside the furnace, “behind the eye-holed iron / Door” (12–13), the drunk’s intoxicated state is a metaphor for the toxic state of the land. A captive audience, the churchgoers are confined inside the church, asleep, or with their attention riveted to the abstract landscape of hell, which they don’t realize the furnaces’ “stoke-holes” have made manifest on earth (23).
In a 1969 interview, Merwin notes about the drunk, “I wanted to invent a figure who to me was absolutely sensual and who belonged completely to that part of the world.... And then this one turned out to be like an invented myth for the place... he was a man who probably couldn’t exist, but if he did, the place then had its man.” The myth he makes is that of the singer/worker; the poem alludes to Orpheus and Phaeton, which many scholars have noted, but also, I believe, to Hephaestus, the ugly, lame god of fire, the craftsmen of the gods, whose forge is located under an active volcano. The Orpheus myth, Merwin reminds us, “evokes a harmonious relation with the whole living world”; Phaeton, he explains, is a “myth based on ego, envy, and exploitation, in which you try to take the chariot into the sun and drive it whether you can drive it or not, and you end up by destroying what you drive over and being destroyed yourself.”15 A welding of these myths, the drunk represents the region’s people, who have retreated into their history and armed themselves with heroic accounts of building the nation that has forgotten them. Like the drunk, they cannot see straight.
A once-abandoned workplace, the furnaces become, under the drunk’s direction, a new workshop, one that takes work as its subject. A “twist of smoke like a pale / Resurrection” signals the drunk’s relighting of the furnace; at the sight, people are “astonished,” literally a stonied, driven to fear and wonder (9–10; 8). Announcing a new kind of work in “Hammer-and-anvilling with poker and bottle / To his jugged bellowings” (17–18), the drunk’s music calls the churchgoers’ attention to the gully, reminding them of human transgressions against the hill and the creek, both poisoned and junked, a damage supported by their “tar-paper church,” a weatherproof haven underwritten by the abstract fears of sin that the reverend paints in his sermon (22). Instead of fashioning rails, the furnace, at the city’s heart, will now, with the drunk at its heart, shape songs that teach “agape” (i.e., love) to the sober churchgoers’ “witless offspring,” who “flock like piped rats to its siren / Crescendo” (26–27). Unlike the adult townspeople who nod off in their church pews and “hate trespassers,” the children “on the crumbling ridge / Stand in a row and learn,” gaping in rapt attention at what they hear and see, recognizing what they had been taught to ignore: the story of a careless destruction written into the world around them (24, 27–28).
The children, who will make their own mark on the land, can change the course of that history. Ending with the word “learn,” the poem asserts that our thoughtless wasting of the world is not natural. It can be unlearned. The genius of the poem asks us to remember what we’ve done in the world, never mind the next.
In September 2008, I attended at a local university a workshop about sustainability that was devoted to the writings of Wendell Berry. When discussion turned to practical ways to create a new relationship with the natural world, a political scientist wondered how such a relationship could be created in a landscape as damaged as that of the Anthracite Region. I wanted to say, you need to love it, critically love it. But even living here is suspect in some eyes. In discussing the poem, literary biographer Frank MacShane remarks, “One must be mad to live in such a place.”16 Maybe, but what MacShane refuses to see is that we all already live here. We may not be aware that we do, but we will soon be all too aware. The only madness is assuming we can escape the hard places.
The furnaces—and this lesson—have still not reached everyone. The next October, students and I gathered at the furnaces to hear art historian Darlene Miller-Lanning explain the site’s industrial history. We read the poem at the opening of one of its stone arches, before a grate that still contained pig iron. Of the half dozen students, who had all grown up in Scranton, only one had been to the place before, and then on an elementary school field trip. The other students had never set foot there and knew nothing of it; two of these students were women in their late sixties. No one had heard of the poem. Sad, I thought. If we don’t pay closer attention to our work in the world, all worlds will be lost. We pay a steep price for our inattention to places and poetry.
Like “The Drunk in the Furnace,” “Luzerne Street Looking West” (1956) and “Burning Mountain” (1960) are parts of Merwin’s “homecoming sequence.”17 As a set, they explore the diminished and forgotten landscape that anthracite mining left between urban and natural environments. This postindustrial landscape bears silent witness to industrialism’s lingering effects on people and places. These poems’ appearance coincided with a key moment in local history, one that challenged Scranton residents’ faith in material progress: the disappearance of deep mining in the Lackawanna Valley. The poems imagine the region’s human and environmental trauma, even as they acknowledge the region’s rapid deindustrialization, one of the first in U.S. history.18 In probing the region’s injuries, both literal and figurative, the poems gesture as much inward toward the local environmental legacy of coal mining as they do outward toward the universal human urge for order in the face of death’s inevitability.
“Luzerne Street Looking West” invites literary fieldwork. The poem places the reader on an actual street in Scranton and names a neighborhood cemetery, the Washburn Street Cemetery, and a stream, Lucky Run. To look west from Luzerne Street is literally to turn one’s back on the site of the Washburn Street Presbyterian Church, where Merwin’s father served as minister.19 To look west from Luzerne Street is to confront the human and environmental damage