Now all my teachers are dead except silence W. S. Merwin

 Now all my teachers are dead except silence

W. S. Merwin

A

That line is from the poem “Separation” by W. S. Merwin.

“Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.”

And the line you quoted—

“Now all my teachers are dead except silence”

—lands with a similar quiet force. Merwin often wrote about loss, memory, aging, and the way wisdom changes over time. In that sentence, “teachers” can feel literal (mentors, elders, loved ones) and symbolic: the voices that once instructed or guided him are gone, leaving silence itself as the final teacher.

One way to read it is that after enough loss, what remains is listening—paying attention to absence, to what can’t be explained, to time itself. Silence becomes instruction.

It’s also striking because it avoids sentimentality. The line is plain, almost austere, which makes it hit harder.

The Shadow of Sirius, one of Merwin’s later collections, carries a lot of this feeling—mortality, memory, gratitude, and disappearance.

What drew you to that line?