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Louise Glück’s “Messengers”

with discussion by Henri Cole Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/143/1/96/1830317/daed_a_00257.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021

You have only to wait, they will ½nd you. The geese flying low over the marsh, glittering in black water. They ½nd you.

And the deer– how beautiful they are, as though their bodies did not impede them. Slowly they drift into the open through bronze panels of sunlight.

Why would they stand so still if they were not waiting? Almost motionless, until their cages rust, the shrubs shiver in the wind, squat and leafless.

You have only to let it happen: that cry–release, release–like the moon wrenched out of earth and rising HENRI COLE, a Fellow of the full in its circle of arrows American Academy since 2010, is an award-winning American poet until they come before you and Professor of English at Ohio like dead things, saddled with flesh, State University. He is also poetry and you above them, wounded and dominant. editor for The New Republic. His poetry collections include Touch (2011), Pierce the Skin (2010), Black- –“Messengers,” from The First Four Books of Poems by Louise bird and Wolf (2007), and Middle Glück. Copyright © 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, Earth (2003), which was a ½nalist 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1985, 1995 by Louise Glück. Reprinted for the in Poetry. by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

© 2014 by Henri Cole doi:10.1162/DAED_a_00257 96 Louise Glück’s ½rst book, Firstborn, was The self (or should I say the soul?) awak- Henri Cole rejected eighteen times before it was pub- ens inside a body, like a flowering plum lished. Or was it twenty-eight times? tree, which will fade as autumn comes. And there was an interval of seven years * * * before her second book, The House on I ½rst read Glück’s poem “Messengers” Marshland, was published by Ecco Press in Antaeus, the international literary mag- in 1975. But when it appeared, it was clear azine (edited by Daniel Halpern), which that a commanding new voice–classically sadly ceased publication after twenty- restrained, yet emotional–had arrived. It ½ve years in 1994. But during the inter- was the late 1970s, and I was still a graduate vening decades, the poem has not lost its student, reading ’s Geog- intensity for me, or its beauty. Set near a raphy III, Seamus Heaney’s North and Field

marshland, it begins: Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/143/1/96/1830317/daed_a_00257.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 Work, ’s Self-portrait in a Con- vex Mirror, and Robert Hass’s Praise–they You have only to wait, they will ½nd you. were game-changers, too. The geese flying low over the marsh, glittering in black water. * * * They ½nd you. Today, the poems in The House on Marsh- land do not seem to me so much austere And the deer– as essential utterances in which every- how beautiful they are, thing ornamental has been stripped away. as though their bodies did not impede them. The lines are made of simple Latinate Slowly they drift into the open sentences, sometimes with suspensions, through bronze panels of sunlight. sometimes with dashes and ellipses . . . The second-person point of view (you you revealing a writer’s hunger for a listener. you) gives the feeling of experience (even Also, the endings of the poems seem to the protagonist’s own experience) being move outward like the mouth of a river, commented on from a distance–in the instead of stopping abruptly, like a knife most reduced terms–as if it is occurring against a board. Though there are echoes in a myth where we get the haunted of Rilke and James Wright’s To a Blossom- (almost posthumous) commemoration ing Pear Tree–also, Sylvia Plath (in partic- of experience. There is no ½rst-person ular the harsh ) and the narrator revealing the events of her life. of –the dangers of imitation Instead, the tone is matter-of-fact, dis- (is there any greater danger for a poet than embodied, but strangely triumphant, too. drowning in another’s glorious style?) The deer seem to have meaning for the have somehow been surpassed. speaker, who asks: “Why would they * * * stand so still / if they were not waiting?” In The House on Marshland, there are just Like the deer, is Glück waiting for some- thirty-½ve short poems, and the section thing? Has her body impeded her? Is this titles–“All Hallows” and “The Apple why she envies their instinctual grace, Trees”–convey Glück’s love of the earth, stepping through “bronze panels of sun- or, to put it another way, her preoccupa- light” like ½gures on a medallion? I won- tion with death. Family life, the conundrum der now to what degree a deer is a female of marriage, maternal love, childhood– image–for surely femaleness calls up these are some of Glück’s early subjects. something in us that is different than In her poems, life seems continually to be maleness. Is Glück speaking about the mirrored in the passing of the seasons. complicated relationship she had with

143 (1) Winter 2014 97 On Louise her own body as an anorexic? Though I Does Glück long for the same preternatu- Glück’s don’t know the answer to this, I’m drawn ral grace and strength that she observes “Messengers” to the noncircumstantial content of the in the deer as they step through bronze poem–to the symbolic rather than the sunlight like ½gures on a painted screen? biographical–and to the story which * * * feels intimate and heroic. Perhaps, because it is a longing that can * * * never be satis½ed, she will make some- Then the camera pans out, and we see a thing durable from language instead, little more of the landscape: though “Messengers”–like all of Glück’s poems–does not comfort or placate the Almost motionless, until their cages rust, reader. It ends on a note of ungrati½ed the shrubs shiver in the wind,

spiritual hunger. But for the reader there Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/143/1/96/1830317/daed_a_00257.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 squat and leafless. is nobility in recognizing this state, and Glück is not a poet of metrical fluency. pleasure in seeing it digni½ed through Instead, there is a plainness in her poems language. Her poems could be said to be that has an archaic quality. And Glück is influenced by an aesthetic in which beauty not a poet of elliptical fragmentation– is always imperfect, impermanent, or in- she goes deeper. With her simple vocabu- complete, and in which only three simple lary, dramatic juxtapositions, and subtle realities are acknowledged: nothing lasts, pacing, the poems seem to be more in nothing is ½nished, and nothing is perfect. conversation with Blake, Yeats, and Eliot, The soul (or consciousness) must ques- illuminating what all art must, those tion, undergo, and choose, but there is human subjects that she identi½es as never an easy resolution. Instead there is “time which breeds loss, desire, and the a turning away. world’s beauty.” For all of us trying to make something * * * durable from language–who are not Near the end of “Messengers,” there is an drawn to the prettiness of our utterances, invocation to the reader that reframes the or their melodic flourishes; who are ½rst line of the poem, “You have only to attracted to a kind of fatal truthfulness; wait, they will ½nd you.” Glück says: and who seek in poems a voice whose dis- tilled vocabulary demands only one lis- You have only to let it happen: tener (like a conch shell pressed against that cry–release, release–like the moon an ear)–Louise Glück is a liberator. wrenched out of earth and rising full in its circle of arrows until they come before you like dead things, saddled with flesh, and you above them, wounded and dominant. After the mind engages with the landscape and the deer, the poem strives to move toward some fresh idea. Are the grazing deer emblems of pure spirit that do not seem to be detained by anything physical –as we humans are detained by our “wounded” and “dominant” bodies?

98 Dædalus, the Journal ofthe American Academy of Arts & Sciences