Louise Gluck - Blog Posts

Louise Glück, from Meadowlands; "The Dream"

[Text ID: "why couldn't it go on longer? / Because it was a dream."]

whatever was left, that was ours for a while.

sunrise - louise glück

Sunrise

by Louise Glück

This time of year, the window boxes smell of the hills, the thyme and rosemary that grew there, crammed into the narrow spaces between the rocks and, lower down, where there was real dirt, competing with other things, blueberries and currants, the small shrubby trees the bees love— Whatever we ate smelled of the hills, even when there was almost nothing. Or maybe that’s what nothing tastes like, thyme and rosemary.

Maybe, too, that’s what it looks like— beautiful, like the hills, the rocks above the tree line webbed with sweet smelling herbs, the small plants glittering with dew—

It was a big event to climb up there and wait for dawn, seeing what the sun sees as it slides out from behind the rocks, and what you couldn’t see, you imagined;

your eyes would go as far as they could, to the river, say, and your mind would do the rest—

And if you missed a day, there was always the next, and if you missed a year, it didn’t matter, the hills weren’t going anywhere, the thyme and rosemary kept coming back, the sun kept rising, the bushes kept bearing fruit—

The streetlight’s off: that’s dawn here. It’s on: that’s twilight. Either way, no one looks up. Everyone just pushes ahead, and the smell of the past is everywhere, the thyme and rosemary rubbing against your clothes, the smell of too many illusions—

Between them, the hills and sky took up all the room. Whatever was left, that was ours for a while. But eventually the hills will take it back, give it to the animals. And maybe the moon will send the seas there, and where we lived will be a stream or river coiling around the base of the hills, paying the sky the compliment of reflection.

I went back but I didn’t stay. Everyone I cared about was gone, some dead, some disappeared into one of those places that don’t exist, the ones we dreamed about because we saw them from the top of the hills— I had to see if the fields were still shining, the sun telling the same lies about how beautiful the world is when all you need to know of a place is, do people live there. If they do, you know everything.

The hills are terrible, they hide the truth of the past. Green in summer, white when the snow falls.

Here is my hand, he said Here is my hand that will not harm you.

— Louise Glück Epithalamium from "Descending Figure.”

i think that sometimes the best thing that you can do is remind yourself that there are beaches. lakes, rivers, and ponds. there are forests. little woods and meadows. there are canyons. gullies and mountain cliffs. there are rainy days. dry spells and scorching blue skies. that the world turns. changes as much as it repeats. that feeling slow today won't stop tomorrow's high tide. won't make july's blackberries any less ripe

Persephone the Wanderer (I)

by Louise Glück

In the first version, Persephone is taken from her mother and the goddess of the earth punishes the earth—this is consistent with what we know of human behavior,

that human beings take profound satisfaction in doing harm, particularly unconscious harm:

we may call this negative creation.

Persephone’s initial sojourn in hell continues to be pawed over by scholars who dispute the sensations of the virgin:

did she cooperate in her rape, or was she drugged, violated against her will, as happens so often now to modern girls.

As is well known, the return of the beloved does not correct the loss of the beloved: Persephone

returns home stained with red juice like a character in Hawthorne—

I am not certain I will keep this word: is earth “home” to Persephone? Is she at home, conceivably, in the bed of the god? Is she at home nowhere? Is she a born wanderer, in other words an existential replica of her own mother, less hamstrung by ideas of causality?

You are allowed to like no one, you know. The characters are not people. They are aspects of a dilemma or conflict.

Three parts: just as the soul is divided, ego, superego, id. Likewise

the three levels of the known world, a kind of diagram that separates heaven from earth from hell.

You must ask yourself: where is it snowing?

White of forgetfulness, of desecration—

It is snowing on earth; the cold wind says

Persephone is having sex in hell. Unlike the rest of us, she doesn’t know what winter is, only that she is what causes it.

She is lying in the bed of Hades. What is in her mind? Is she afraid? Has something blotted out the idea of mind?

She does know the earth is run by mothers, this much is certain. She also knows she is not what is called a girl any longer. Regarding incarceration, she believes

she has been a prisoner since she has been a daughter.

The terrible reunions in store for her will take up the rest of her life. When the passion for expiation is chronic, fierce, you do not choose the way you live. You do not live; you are not allowed to die.

You drift between earth and death which seem, finally, strangely alike. Scholars tell us

that there is no point in knowing what you want when the forces contending over you could kill you.

White of forgetfulness, white of safety—

They say there is a rift in the human soul which was not constructed to belong entirely to life. Earth

asks us to deny this rift, a threat disguised as suggestion— as we have seen in the tale of Persephone which should be read

as an argument between the mother and the lover— the daughter is just meat.

When death confronts her, she has never seen the meadow without the daisies. Suddenly she is no longer singing her maidenly songs about her mother’s beauty and fecundity. Where the rift is, the break is.

Song of the earth, song of the mythic vision of eternal life—

My soul shattered with the strain of trying to belong to earth—

What will you do, when it is your turn in the field with the god?

Persephone the Wanderer (II)

by Louise Glück

In the second version, Persephone is dead. She dies, her mother grieves– problems of sexuality need not trouble us here. Compulsively, in grief, Demeter circles the earth. We don’t expect to know what Persephone is doing. She is dead, the dead are mysteries. We have here a mother and a cipher: this is accurate to the experience of the mother as she looks into the infant’s face. She thinks: I remember when you didn’t exist. The infant is puzzled: later, the child’s opinion is she has always existed, just as her mother had always existed in her present form. Her mother is like a figure at a bus stop, an audience for the bus’s arrival. Before that, she was the bus, a temporary home or convenience. Persephone, protected, stares out of the window of the chariot. What does she see? A morning in early spring, in April. Now her whole life is beginning–unfortunately, it’s going to be a short life. She’s going to know, really, only two adults: death and her mother. But two is twice what her mother has: her mother has one child, a daughter. As a god, she could have had a thousand children. We begin to see here the deep violence of the earth whose hostility suggests she has no wish to continue as a source of life. And why is this hypothesis never discussed? Because it is not in the story; it only creates the story. In grief, after the daughter dies, the mother wanders the earth. She is preparing her case; like a politician she remembers everything and admits nothing. For example, her daughter’s birth was unbearable, her beauty was unbearable: she remembers this. She remembers Persephone’s innocence, her tenderness– What is she planning, seeking her daughter? She is issuing a warning whose implicit message is: what are you doing outside my body? You ask yourself: why is the mother’s body safe? The answer is this is the wrong question, since the daughter’s body doesn’t exist, except as a branch of the the mother’s body that needs to be reattached any any cost. When a god grieves it meas destroying others (as in war) while at the same time petitioning to reverse agreements (as in war also): if Zeus will get her back, winter will end. Winter will end, spring will return. The small pestering breezes that I so loved, the idiot yellow flowers– Spring will return, a dream based on a falsehood: that the dead return. Persephone was used to death. Now over and over her mother hauls her out again– You must ask yourself: are the flowers real? If Persephone “returns” there will be one of two reasons: either she was not dead or she is being used to support a fiction– I think I can remember being dead. Many times, in winter, I approached Zeus. Tell me, I would ask him, how can I endure the earth? And he would say, in a short time you will be here again. And in the time between you will forget everything: those fields of ice will be the meadows of Elysium.

"My soul has been so fearful, so violent: forgive its brutality."

—Louise Glück, RIP