Why did it take me so long to figure out her last name rhymes with “click”? Mostly because I read her but did not get much of a chance to talk about her (or any other contemporary poet) for years and years. And years.
I love this poem for many reasons, but mostly for the hints at Eden, Adam and Eve, the Fall, and its acceptance of grief (and some other less noble emotions) as essentially human. I think.
April
by Louise Glück
No one’s despair is like my despair–
You have no place in this garden
thinking such things, producing
the tiresome outward signs; the man
pointedly weeding an entire forest,
the woman limping, refusing to change clothes
or wash her hair.
Do you suppose I care
if you speak to one another?
But I mean you to know
I expected better of two creatures
who were given minds: if not
that you would actually care for each other
at least that you would understand
grief is distributed
between you, among all your kind, for me
to know you, as deep blue
marks the wild scilla, white
the wood violet.
Helen Vendler on Glück: “Glück’s cryptic narratives invite our participation: we must, according to the case, fill out the story, substitute ourselves for the fictive personages, invent a scenario from which the speaker can utter her lines, decode the import, ‘solve’ the allegory.”
“[L]ater,” Vendler added, “I think…we read the poem, instead, as a truth complete within its own terms, reflecting some one of the innumerable configurations into which experience falls.”
Source: The Poetry Foundation.
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