East of the Sun and West of the Moon

I spent some of tonight reading W. S. Merwin's "East of the Sun and West of the Moon" in The Dancing Bears (1954). I've never paid much attention to Merwin's work prior to The Drunk in the Furnace (1960); though to be honest, I suppose I haven't really thought much about any book before The Lice (1967). Migration (2005) is giving me a chance to go back and pick up some of the earlier work, but so far what's made the biggest impression on me is his retelling of the Norwegian myth of the peasant girl and the White Bear prince. With its echo of Cupid and Psyche, Merwin's poem anticipates in interesting ways Robert Duncan's "Poem Beginning with a Line from Pindar," which was first published in 1958, four years after The Dancing Bears. Since the two poets have been so firmly separated by their respective anthologies--Merwin in Hall's New Poets of England and America and Duncan in Allen's New American Poetry-- they're not freqently discussed together. Interesting that both of them should adopt a Cupid and Psyche myth at nearly the same time. Probably the most surprising connection that I've discovered, though, is how this fairy tale gave rise to the jazz standard, which I've long associated with Billie Holiday, though it evidently comes to her by way of Princeton. Who knew?