Throughout The Changing Light at Sandover – a poem and collection that contains many poems formed from the fragments of “contacts” David Jackson and James Merrill had with spirits through the Ouija board – many of the lesser spirits misspell their messages. Ephraim, the otherworldly spirit that is the focus of The Book of Ephraim who contacted James Merrill and David Jackson for years, usually spells correctly.

Wallace Stevens (1879–1975) was a successful American poet that appears throughout The Changing Light at Sandover as one of the spirits Merrill contacts through the Ouija Board.

Attar of Rose is the essence of the rose taken from rose petals to make an oil. It can take pounds of petals to produce attar of rose and here the word-play is off of “Time, it had transpired, was of the essence” and then mentioning the essence of the Rose – which is of course often symbolic of English poetry.

Print of “The Sick Rose” by William Blake

Carl Jung (1875–1961) was a Swiss psychologist who parted from Freud early on and wrote how the psyche could best be understood through art, mythology, and astrology (among many other amazing contributions to his field but those are the relevant ones to Merrill).

Possibly a Spenser reference – in The Faerie Queene “err” is one of Spenser’s important words – literally meaning “to wander” and the root of the word “error.”

Commedia dell'Arte show by Karel Dujardin in 1657 (before the form became extremely popular).

Commedia dell' arte was a type of improvisational theatre style (particularly popular in eighteenth-century Italy among other places) that involved a repertory of stock characters and situations.

Specifically, this quote is from Frye’s 1957 Anatomy of Criticism and can be found in the chapter “Theory of Mythos: An Introduction.”

Note: see also this annotation for further information of Frye.