Louise Glück : Nobel Lecture

 

When I was a small child of, I think, about five or six, I staged a competition in my head, a contest to decide the greatest poem in the world. There were two finalists: Blake’s “The Little Black Boy” and Stephen Foster’s “Swanee River.” I paced up and down the second bedroom in my grandmother’s house in Cedarhurst, a village on the south shore of Long Island, reciting, in my head as I preferred, not from my mouth, Blake’s unforgettable poem, and singing, also in my head, the haunting, desolate Foster song. How I came to have read Blake is a mystery. I think there were a few poetry anthologies in my parents’ house among the more common books on politics and history and the many novels. But I associate Blake with my grandmother’s house. My grandmother was not a bookish woman. But there was Blake, The Songs of Innocence and of Experience, and also a tiny book of the songs from Shakespeare’s plays, many of which I memorized. I particularly loved the song from Cymbeline, understanding probably not a word but hearing the tone, the cadences, the ringing imperatives, thrilling to a very timid, fearful child. “And renownèd be thy grave.” I hoped so.

 
Competitions of this sort, for honor, for high reward, seemed natural to me; the myths that were my first reading were filled with them. The greatest poem in the world seemed to me, even when I was very young, the highest of high honors. This was also the way my sister and I were being raised, to save France (Joan of Arc), to discover radium (Marie Curie). Later I began to understand the dangers and limitations of hierarchical thinking, but in my childhood it seemed important to confer a prize. One person would stand at the top of the mountain, visible from far away, the only thing of interest on the mountain. The person a little below was invisible.
 
Or, in this case, poem. I felt sure that Blake especially was somehow aware of this event, intent on its outcome. I understood he was dead, but I felt he was still alive, since I could hear his voice speaking to me, disguised, but his voice. Speaking, I felt, only to me or especially to me. I felt singled out, privileged; I felt also that it was Blake to whom I aspired to speak, to whom, along with Shakespeare, I was already speaking.
 
Blake was the winner of the competition. But I realized later how similar these two lyrics were; I was drawn, then as now, to the solitary human voice, raised in lament or longing. And the poets I returned to as I grew older were the poets in whose work I played, as the elected listener, a crucial role. Intimate, seductive, often furtive or clandestine. Not stadium poets. Not poets talking to themselves.
 
I liked this pact, I liked the sense that what the poem spoke was essential and also private, the message received by the priest or the analyst.
 
The prize ceremony in my grandmother’s second bedroom seemed, by virtue of its secrecy, an extension of the intense relation the poem had created: an extension, not a violation.
 
Blake was speaking to me through the little black boy; he was the hidden origin of that voice. He could not be seen, just as the little black boy was not seen, or was seen inaccurately, by the unperceptive and disdainful white boy. But I knew that what he said was true, that his provisional mortal body contained a soul of luminous purity; I knew this because what the black child says, his account of his feelings and his experience, contains no blame, no wish to revenge himself, only the belief that, in the perfect world he has been promised after death, he will be recognized for what he is, and in a surfeit of joy protect the more fragile white child from the sudden surfeit of light. That this is not a realistic hope, that it ignores the real, makes the poem heartbreaking and also deeply political. The hurt and righteous anger the little black boy cannot allow himself to feel, that his mother tries to shield him from, is felt by the reader or listener. Even when that reader is a child.
 
But public honor is another matter.
 
The poems to which I have, all my life, been most ardently drawn are poems of the kind I have described, poems of intimate selection or collusion, poems to which the listener or reader makes an essential contribution, as recipient of a confidence or an outcry, sometimes as co-conspirator. “I’m nobody,” Dickinson says. “Are you nobody, too? / Then there’s a pair of us — don’t tell…” Or Eliot: “Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table…” Eliot is not summoning the boyscout troop. He is asking something of the reader. As opposed, say, to Shakespeare’s “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day”: Shakespeare is not comparing me to a summer’s day. I am being allowed to overhear dazzling virtuosity, but the poem does not require my presence.
 
In art of the kind to which I was drawn, the voice or judgment of the collective is dangerous. The precariousness of intimate speech adds to its power and the power of the reader, through whose agency the voice is encouraged in its urgent plea or confidence.
 
What happens to a poet of this type when the collective, instead of apparently exiling or ignoring him or her, applauds and elevates? I would say such a poet would feel threatened, outmaneuvered.
 
This is Dickinson’s subject. Not always, but often.
 
I read Emily Dickinson most passionately when I was in my teens. Usually late at night, post-bedtime, on the living room sofa.
 
                 I’m nobody! Who are you?
                Are you nobody, too?
 
And, in the version I read then and still prefer:
 
                 Then there’s a pair of us — don’t tell!
                They’d banish us, you know…
 
Dickinson had chosen me, or recognized me, as I sat there on the sofa. We were an elite, companions in invisibility, a fact known only to us, which each corroborated for the other. In the world, we were nobody.
 
But what would constitute banishment to people existing as we did, in our safe place under the log? Banishment is when the log is moved.
I am not talking here about the pernicious influence of Emily Dickinson on teenaged girls. I am talking about a temperament that distrusts public life or sees it as the realm in which generalization obliterates precision, and partial truth replaces candor and charged disclosure. By way of illustration: suppose the voice of the conspirator, Dickinson’s voice, is replaced by the voice of the tribunal. “We’re nobody, who are you?” That message becomes suddenly sinister.
 
It was a surprise to me on the morning of October 8th to feel the sort of panic I have been describing. The light was too bright. The scale too vast.
 
Those of us who write books presumably wish to reach many. But some poets do not see reaching many in spatial terms, as in the filled auditorium. They see reaching many temporally, sequentially, many over time, into the future, but in some profound way these readers always come singly, one by one.
 
I believe that in awarding me this prize, the Swedish Academy is choosing to honor the intimate, private voice, which public utterance can sometimes augment or extend, but never replace.
 
 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
“The Little Black Boy” from Songs of Innocence and of Experience by William Blake. Poetry and Prose of William Blake / edited by Geoffrey Keynes. London : Nonesuch, 1927
 
“Old Folks at Home” / “Way Down Upon the Swanee River”, 1851. Words and music by Stephen Foster.
 
“Fear No More the Heat o’ the Sun” from Cymbeline (Act IV, Scene II) by William Shakespeare.
“I’m Nobody! Who are you?” by Emily Dickinson. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Edited by Martha Dickinson Bianchi and Alfred Leete Hampson. London : Jonathan Cape, 1937
 
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot. Collected Poems 1909 – 1962. London : Faber & Faber, 1963
 
Sonnet XVIII: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” by William Shakespeare.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
 
The Little Black Boy
 
By William Blake
 
My mother bore me in the southern wild,
And I am black, but O! my soul is white;
White as an angel is the English child,
But I am black, as if bereav’d of light.
 
My mother taught me underneath a tree,
And sitting down before the heat of day,
She took me on her lap and kissed me,
And pointing to the east, began to say:
 
“Look on the rising sun: there God does live,
“And gives his light, and gives his heat away;
“And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive
“Comfort in morning, joy in the noonday.
 
“And we are put on earth a little space,
“That we may learn to bear the beams of love;
“And these black bodies and this sunburnt face
“Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove.
 
“For when our souls have learn’d the heat to bear,
“The cloud will vanish; we shall hear his voice,
“Saying: ‘Come out from the grove, my love & care,
“‘And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice.’”
 
Thus did my mother say, and kissed me;
And thus I say to little English boy:
When I from black and he from white cloud free,
And round the tent of God like lambs we joy,
 
I’ll shade him from the heat, till he can bear
To lean in joy upon our father’s knee;
And then I’ll stand and stroke his silver hair,
And be like him, and he will then love me.
 
 
 
“I’m nobody! Who are you?”
 
By Emily Dickinson
 
I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us — don’t tell!
They’d banish us, you know.
 
How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!
 
 
 

Nobel laureate Louise Glück has revealed her “panic” at becoming the 16th female winner of the literature prize for the first time, with her acceptance speech released as her publisher announced her first new poetry collection in seven years.
 
Glück won the 2020 Nobel prize in October, with the judging committee citing her “unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”. Since then, the 77-year-old has barely spoken publicly about her win. “Mostly I am concerned for the preservation of daily life with people I love,” she told the prize organisers on 8 October, when asked how she felt about winning. “It’s disruptive. [The phone] is ringing all the time. It’s ringing now.” Speaking to the press outside her house that same day, she said she felt “agitation and joy” before getting in a waiting car. “I’m sorry you’ve had to wait all day,” she said, before leaving.
 
On Monday, her acceptance speech was published, which reveals her conflicted feelings about the win. Writing of her lifelong relationship with poetry, particularly “poems of intimate selection or collusion” by William Blake and Emily Dickinson, she writes: “It was a surprise to me on the morning of 8 October to feel the sort of panic I have been describing. The light was too bright. The scale too vast.
 
 “Those of us who write books presumably wish to reach many. But some poets do not see reaching many in spatial terms, as in the filled auditorium. They see reaching many temporally, sequentially, many over time, into the future, but in some profound way these readers always come singly, one by one.” She writes that she feels the prize was a decision to “honour the intimate, private voice, which public utterance can sometimes augment or extend, but never replace.”
 
On Monday, it was also announced that Winter Recipes from the Collective will be published in autumn 2021. Michael Schmidt, managing director of Glück’s longtime publisher Carcanet, said: “Carcanet started publishing Louise with The Wild Iris back in the 1990s and we have gone on to publish all her collections and her essays. It’s a joy to be able to continue as her publisher now that she is a Nobel laureate. At a time when performance is almost de rigueur, it is possible to see how radical the Nobel committee’s choice is, affirming the primacy of the art in the teeth of the preferences of the age. At Carcanet she has been an inspiration for the last three decades.”
 
American Originality, a collection of essays on contemporary poetry that was published in the US in 2017, will be published in the UK in April. Schmidt described it as “a forceful and revealing critical achievement, including erudite analyses of poets of interest to Glück throughout her career, such as Rilke, Pinsky and Dobyns”.
 
Penguin also announced its plans to republish some of her past work: Poems 1962-2012, a collected works, and her 2006 collection Averno, a reworking of the Persephone myth that is often considered to be her masterpiece.
 
Glück is the author of 12 books of poems and two collections of essays, and has previously won the Pulitzer prize, the National Book Award, the National Humanities medal and the gold medal for poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
 
 
Nobel literature prize winner Louise Glück reveals 'panic' in acceptance speech. By Sian Cain. The Guardian,  December 7, 2020.

Louise Glück : 17 poems

The Drowned Children

You see, they have no judgment.

So it is natural that they should drown,

first the ice taking them in

and then, all winter, their wool scarves

floating behind them as they sink

until at last they are quiet.

And the pond lifts them in its manifold dark arms.

But death must come to them differently,

so close to the beginning.

As though they had always been

blind and weightless. Therefore

the rest is dreamed, the lamp,

the good white cloth that covered the table,

their bodies.

And yet they hear the names they used

like lures slipping over the pond:

What are you waiting for

come home, come home, lost

in the waters, blue and permanent.

Mock Orange

It is not the moon, I tell you.

It is these flowers

lighting the yard.

I hate them.

I hate them as I hate sex,

the man’s mouth

sealing my mouth, the man’s

paralyzing body—

and the cry that always escapes,

the low, humiliating

premise of union—

In my mind tonight

I hear the question and pursuing answer

fused in one sound

that mounts and mounts and then

is split into the old selves,

the tired antagonisms. Do you see?

We were made fools of.

And the scent of mock orange

drifts through the window.

How can I rest?

How can I be content

when there is still

that odor in the world?

The Pond

Night covers the pond with its wing.

Under the ringed moon I can make out

your face swimming among minnows and the small

echoing stars. In the night air

the surface of the pond is metal.

Within, your eyes are open. They contain

a memory I recognize, as though

we had been children together. Our ponies

grazed on the hill, they were gray

with white markings. Now they graze

with the dead who wait

like children under their granite breastplates,

lucid and helpless:

The hills are far away. They rise up

blacker than childhood.

What do you think of, lying so quietly

by the water? When you look that way I want

to touch you, but do not, seeing

as in another life we were of the same blood.

The Fear of Burial

In the empty field, in the morning,

the body waits to be claimed.

The spirit sits beside it, on a small rock--

nothing comes to give it form again.

Think of the body's loneliness.

At night pacing the sheared field,

its shadow buckled tightly around.

Such a long journey.

And already the remote, trembling lights of the village

not pausing for it as they scan the rows.

How far away they seem,

the wooden doors, the bread and milk

laid like weights on the table.

Lamentations

1. The Logos

They were both still,

the woman mournful, the man

branching into her body.

But God was watching.

They felt his gold eye

projecting flowers on the landscape.

Who knew what He wanted?

He was God, and a monster.

So they waited. And the world

filled with His radiance,

as though He wanted to be understood.

Far away, in the void that He had shaped,

he turned to his angels.

2. Nocturne

A forest rose from the earth.

O pitiful, so needing

God’s furious love—

Together they were beasts.

They lay in the fixed

dusk of His negligence;

from the hills, wolves came, mechanically

drawn to their human warmth,

their panic.

Then the angels saw

how He divided them:

the man, the woman, and the woman’s body.

Above the churned reeds, the leaves let go

a slow moan of silver.

3. The Covenant

Out of fear, they built a dwelling place.

But a child grew between them

as they slept, as they tried

to feed themselves.

They set it on a pile of leaves,

the small discarded body

wrapped in the clean skin

of an animal. Against the black sky

they saw the massive argument of light.

Sometimes it woke. As it reached its hands

they understood they were the mother and father,

there was no authority above them.

4. The Clearing

Gradually, over many years,

the fur disappeared from their bodies

until they stood in the bright light

strange to one another.

Nothing was as before.

Their hands trembled, seeking

the familiar.

Nor could they keep their eyes

from the white flesh

on which wounds would show clearly

like words on a page.

And from the meaningless browns and greens

at last God arose, His great shadow

darkening the sleeping bodies of His children,

and leapt into heaven.

How beautiful it must have been,

the earth, that first time

seen from the air.

Siren

I became a criminal when I fell in love.

Before that I was a waitress.

I didn't want to go to Chicago with you.

I wanted to marry you, I wanted

Your wife to suffer.

I wanted her life to be like a play

In which all the parts are sad parts.

Does a good person

Think this way? I deserve

Credit for my courage--

I sat in the dark on your front porch.

Everything was clear to me:

If your wife wouldn't let you go

That proved she didn't love you.

If she loved you

Wouldn't she want you to be happy?

I think now

If I felt less I would be

A better person. I was

A good waitress.

I could carry eight drinks.

I used to tell you my dreams.

Last night I saw a woman sitting in a dark bus--

In the dream, she's weeping, the bus she's on

Is moving away. With one hand

She's waving; the other strokes

An egg carton full of babies.

The dream doesn't rescue the maiden.

Celestial Music

I have a friend who still believes in heaven.

Not a stupid person, yet with all she knows, she literally talks to God.

She thinks someone listens in heaven.

On earth she's unusually competent.

Brave too, able to face unpleasantness.

We found a caterpillar dying in the dirt, greedy ants crawling over it.

I'm always moved by disaster, always eager to oppose vitality

But timid also, quick to shut my eyes.

Whereas my friend was able to watch, to let events play out

According to nature. For my sake she intervened

Brushing a few ants off the torn thing, and set it down

Across the road.

My friend says I shut my eyes to God, that nothing else explains

My aversion to reality. She says I'm like the child who

Buries her head in the pillow

So as not to see, the child who tells herself

That light causes sadness-

My friend is like the mother. Patient, urging me

To wake up an adult like herself, a courageous person-

In my dreams, my friend reproaches me. We're walking

On the same road, except it's winter now;

She's telling me that when you love the world you hear celestial music:

Look up, she says. When I look up, nothing.

Only clouds, snow, a white business in the trees

Like brides leaping to a great height-

Then I'm afraid for her; I see her

Caught in a net deliberately cast over the earth-

In reality, we sit by the side of the road, watching the sun set;

From time to time, the silence pierced by a birdcall.

It's this moment we're trying to explain, the fact

That we're at ease with death, with solitude.

My friend draws a circle in the dirt; inside, the caterpillar doesn't move.

She's always trying to make something whole, something beautiful, an image

Capable of life apart from her.

We're very quiet. It's peaceful sitting here, not speaking, The composition

Fixed, the road turning suddenly dark, the air

Going cool, here and there the rocks shining and glittering-

It's this stillness we both love.

The love of form is a love of endings.

End of Winter

Over the still world, a bird calls

waking solitary among black boughs.

You wanted to be born; I let you be born.

When has my grief ever gotten

in the way of your pleasure?

Plunging ahead

into the dark and light at the same time

eager for sensation

as though you were some new thing, wanting

to express yourselves

all brilliance, all vivacity

never thinking

this would cost you anything,

never imagining the sound of my voice

as anything but part of you—

you won't hear it in the other world,

not clearly again,

not in birdcall or human cry,

not the clear sound, only

persistent echoing

in all sound that means good-bye, good-bye—

the one continuous line

that binds us to each other.

Vespers [In your extended absence, you permit me]

In your extended absence, you permit me

use of earth, anticipating

some return on investment. I must report

failure in my assignment, principally

regarding the tomato plants.

I think I should not be encouraged to grow

tomatoes. Or, if I am, you should withhold

the heavy rains, the cold nights that come

so often here, while other regions get

twelve weeks of summer. All this

belongs to you: on the other hand,

I planted the seeds, I watched the first shoots

like wings tearing the soil, and it was my heart

broken by the blight, the black spot so quickly

multiplying in the rows. I doubt

you have a heart, in our understanding of

that term. You who do not discriminate

between the dead and the living, who are, in consequence,

immune to foreshadowing, you may not know

how much terror we bear, the spotted leaf,

the red leaves of the maple falling

even in August, in early darkness: I am responsible

for these vines.

The Wild Iris

At the end of my suffering

there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death

I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.

Then nothing.  The weak sun

flickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to survive

as consciousness

buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being

a soul and unable

to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth

bending a little.  And what I took to be

birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember

passage from the other world

I tell you I could speak again: whatever

returns from oblivion returns

to find a voice:

from the center of my life came

a great fountain, deep blue

shadows on azure sea water.

Anniversary

I said you could snuggle. That doesn’t mean

your cold feet all over my dick.

Someone should teach you how to act in bed.

What I think is you should

keep your extremities to yourself.

Look what you did—

you made the cat move.

            But I didn’t want your hand there.

            I wanted your hand here.

            You should pay attention to my feet.

            You should picture them

            the next time you see a hot fifteen year old.

            Because there’s a lot more where those feet come from.

Parable of the Swans

On a small lake off

the map of the world, two

swans lived. As swans,

they spent eighty percent of the day studying

themselves in the attentive water and

twenty percent ministering to the beloved

other. Thus

their fame as lovers stems

chiefly from narcissism, which leaves

so little leisure for

more general cruising. But

fate had other plans: after ten years, they hit

slimy water; whatever the filth was, it

clung to the male’s plumage, which turned

instantly gray; simultaneously,

the true purpose of his neck’s

flexible design revealed itself. So much

action on the flat lake, so much

he’s missed! Sooner or later in a long

life together, every couple encounters

some emergency like this, some

drama which results

in harm. This

occurs for a reason: to test

love and to demand

fresh articulation of its complex terms.

So it came to light that the male and female

flew under different banners: whereas

the male believed that love

was what one felt in one’s heart

the female believed

love was what one did. But this is not

a little story about the male’s

inherent corruption, using as evidence the swan’s

sleazy definition of purity. It is

a story of guile and innocence. For ten years

the female studied the male; she dallied

when he slept or when he was

conveniently absorbed in the water,

while the spontaneous male

acted casually, on

the whim of the moment. On the muddy water

they bickered awhile, in the fading light,

until the bickering grew

slowly abstract, becoming

part of their song

after a little longer.

Vita Nova

You saved me, you should remember me.

The spring of the year; young men buying tickets for the ferryboats.

Laughter, because the air is full of apple blossoms.

When I woke up, I realized I was capable of the same feeling.

I remember sounds like that from my childhood,  

laughter for no cause, simply because the world is beautiful,

something like that.

Lugano. Tables under the apple trees.

Deckhands raising and lowering the colored flags.

And by the lake’s edge, a young man throws his hat into the water;

perhaps his sweetheart has accepted him.

Crucial

sounds or gestures like

a track laid down before the larger themes

and then unused, buried.

Islands in the distance. My mother  

holding out a plate of little cakes—

as far as I remember, changed

in no detail, the moment

vivid, intact, having never been

exposed to light, so that I woke elated, at my age  

hungry for life, utterly confident—

By the tables, patches of new grass, the pale green  

pieced into the dark existing ground.

Surely spring has been returned to me, this time  

not as a lover but a messenger of death, yet  

it is still spring, it is still meant tenderly.

The Empty Glass

I asked for much; I received much.

I asked for much; I received little, I received

next to nothing.

And between? A few umbrellas opened indoors.

A pair of shoes by mistake on the kitchen table.

O wrong, wrong—it was my nature. I was

hard-hearted, remote. I was

selfish, rigid to the point of tyranny.

But I was always that person, even in early childhood.

Small, dark-haired, dreaded by the other children.

I never changed. Inside the glass, the abstract

tide of fortune turned

from high to low overnight.

Was it the sea? Responding, maybe,

to celestial force? To be safe,

I prayed. I tried to be a better person.

Soon it seemed to me that what began as terror

and matured into moral narcissism

might have become in fact

actual human growth. Maybe

this is what my friends meant, taking my hand,

telling me they understood

the abuse, the incredible shit I accepted,

implying (so I once thought) I was a little sick

to give so much for so little.

Whereas they meant I was good (clasping my hand intensely)—

a good friend and person, not a creature of pathos.

I was not pathetic! I was writ large,

like a queen or a saint.

Well, it all makes for interesting conjecture.

And it occurs to me that what is crucial is to believe

in effort, to believe some good will come of simply trying,

a good completely untainted by the corrupt initiating impulse

to persuade or seduce—

What are we without this?

Whirling in the dark universe,

alone, afraid, unable to influence fate—

What do we have really?

Sad tricks with ladders and shoes,

tricks with salt, impurely motivated recurring

attempts to build character.

What do we have to appease the great forces?

And I think in the end this was the question

that destroyed Agamemnon, there on the beach,

the Greek ships at the ready, the sea

invisible beyond the serene harbor, the future

lethal, unstable: he was a fool, thinking

it could be controlled. He should have said

I have nothing, I am at your mercy.

Mother and Child

We’re all dreamers; we don’t know who we are.

Some machine made us; machine of the world, the constricting family.

Then back to the world, polished by soft whips.

We dream; we don’t remember.

Machine of the family: dark fur, forests of the mother’s body.

Machine of the mother: white city inside her.

And before that: earth and water.

Moss between rocks, pieces of leaves and grass.

And before, cells in a great darkness.

And before that, the veiled world.

This is why you were born: to silence me.

Cells of my mother and father, it is your turn

to be pivotal, to be the masterpiece.

I improvised; I never remembered.

Now it’s your turn to be driven;

you’re the one who demands to know:

Why do I suffer? Why am I ignorant?

Cells in a great darkness. Some machine made us;

it is your turn to address it, to go back asking

what am I for? What am I for?

A Village Life

The death and uncertainty that await me

as they await all men, the shadows evaluating me

because it can take time to destroy a human being,

the element of suspense

needs to be preserved—

On Sundays I walk my neighbor’s dog

so she can go to church to pray for her sick mother.

The dog waits for me in the doorway. Summer and winter

we walk the same road, early morning, at the base of the escarpment.

Sometimes the dog gets away from me—for a moment or two,

I can’t see him behind some trees. He’s very proud of this,

this trick he brings out occasionally, and gives up again

as a favor to me—

Afterward, I go back to my house to gather firewood.

I keep in my mind images from each walk:

monarda growing by the roadside;

in early spring, the dog chasing the little gray mice

so for a while it seems possible

not to think of the hold of the body weakening, the ratio

of the body to the void shifting,

and the prayers becoming prayers for the dead.

Midday, the church bells finished. Light in excess:

still, fog blankets the meadow, so you can’t see

the mountain in the distance, covered with snow and ice.

When it appears again, my neighbor thinks

her prayers are answered. So much light she can’t control her happiness—

it has to burst out in language. Hello, she yells, as though

that is her best translation.

She believes in the Virgin the way I believe in the mountain,

though in one case the fog never lifts.

But each person stores his hope in a different place.

I make my soup, I pour my glass of wine.

I’m tense, like a child approaching adolescence.

Soon it will be decided for certain what you are,

one thing, a boy or girl. Not both any longer.

And the child thinks: I want to have a say in what happens.

But the child has no say whatsoever.

When I was a child, I did not foresee this.

Later, the sun sets, the shadows gather,

rustling the low bushes like animals just awake for the night.

Inside, there’s only firelight. It fades slowly;

now only the heaviest wood’s still

flickering across the shelves of instruments.

I hear music coming from them sometimes,

even locked in their cases.

When I was a bird, I believed I would be a man.

That’s the flute. And the horn answers,

When I was a man, I cried out to be a bird.

Then the music vanishes. And the secret it confides in me

vanishes also.

In the window, the moon is hanging over the earth,

meaningless but full of messages.

It’s dead, it’s always been dead,

but it pretends to be something else,

burning like a star, and convincingly, so that you feel sometimes

it could actually make something grow on earth.

If there’s an image of the soul, I think that’s what it is.

I move through the dark as though it were natural to me,

as though I were already a factor in it.

Tranquil and still, the day dawns.

On market day, I go to the market with my lettuces.

A Sharply Worded Silence

Let me tell you something, said the old woman.

We were sitting, facing each other,

in the park at ___, a city famous for its wooden toys.

At the time, I had run away from a sad love affair,

and as a kind of penance or self punishment, I was working

at a factory, carving by hand the tiny hands and feet.

The park was my consolation, particularly in the quiet hours

after sunset, when it was often abandoned,

But on this evening, when I entered what was called the Contessa’s Garden,

I saw that someone had preceded me. It strikes me now

I could have gone ahead, but I had been

set on this destination; all day I had been thinking of the cherry trees

with which the glade was planted, whose time of blossoming had nearly ended.

We sat in silence. Dusk was falling,

and with it came a feeling of enclosure

as in a train cabin.

When I was young, she said, I liked walking the garden path at twilight

and if the path was long enough I would see the moon rise.

That was for me the great pleasure: not sex, not food, not worldly amusement.

I preferred the moon’s rising, and sometimes I would hear,

at the same moment, the sublime notes of the final ensemble

of The Marriage of Figaro. Where did the music come from?

I never knew.

Because it is the nature of garden paths

to be circular, each night, after my wanderings,

I would find myself at my front door, staring at it,

barely able to make out, in darkness, the glittering knob.

It was, she said, a great discovery, albeit my real life.

But certain nights, she said, the moon was barely visible through the clouds

and the music never started. A night of pure discouragement.

And still the next night I would begin again, and often all would be well.

I could think of nothing to say. This story, so pointless as I write it out,

was in fact interrupted at every stage with trance-like pauses

and prolonged intermissions, so that by this time night had started.

Ah the capacious night, the night

so eager to accommodate strange perceptions. I felt that some important secret

was about to be entrusted to me, as a torch is passed

from one hand to another in a relay.

My sincere apologies, she said.

I had mistaken you for one of my friends.

And she gestured toward the statues we sat among,

heroic men, self-sacrificing saintly women

holding granite babies to their breasts.

Not changeable, she said, like human beings.

I gave up on them, she said.

But I never lost my taste for circular voyages.

Correct me if I’m wrong.

Above our heads, the cherry blossoms had begun

to loosen in the night sky, or maybe the stars were drifting,

drifting and falling apart, and where they landed

new worlds would form.

Soon afterward I returned to my native city

and was reunited with my former lover.

And yet increasingly my mind returned to this incident,

studying it from all perspectives, each year more intensely convinced,

despite the absence of evidence, that it contained some secret.

I concluded finally that whatever message there might have been

was not contained in speech—so, I realized, my mother used to speak to me,

her sharply worded silences cautioning me and chastizing me—

and it seemed to me I had not only returned to my lover

but was now returning to the Contessa’s Garden

in which the cherry trees were still blooming

like a pilgrim seeking expiation and forgiveness,

so I assumed there would be, at some point,

a door with a glittering knob,

but when this would happen and where I had no idea.

more information on Louise Glück :

  Louise Glück, a former Poet Laureate of the United States, is the author of over a dozen books of poetry including Faithful and Virtuous Night (winner of the National Book Award for Poetry) and her recent anthology, Poems: 1962-2012. Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Hass has called her “one of the purest and most accomplished lyric poets now writing.”

Glück taught at Williams College for 20 years and is currently Rosenkranz writer-in-residence at Yale University. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 1999 was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Her numerous books of poetry include A Village Life (2009), The Seven Ages (2001), and The Wild Iris (1992), for which she received the Pulitzer Prize. Louise Glück says of writing, “[It] is not decanting of personality. The truth, on the page, need not have been lived. It is, instead, all that can be envisioned.”

Louise Glück with Peter Streckfus, Conversation.  Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on May 11, 2016. This was a Lannan Literary event.

Louise Glück,  is introduced by Peter Streckfus and then read from her work.

A Lannan Literary event.

 Poetry Foundation 

Stand-Up Vampire. By  Gillian White. London Review of Books ,  September 26, 2013. 

Acquainted With the Dark. By  Peter Campion. New York Times , September  26, 2014