Louise Glück, in her book The Wild Iris, works with the changing seasons as well as the changing time through the placement of the individual poems. For example the very first poem, “The Wild Iris,” is a poem with the voice of a wild iris. This iris, which is a perennial plant that grows from a bulb at the beginning of summer, tells its gardener that it knows what death is like since it dies away during the winter months and then grows again when it begins to rain: “that which you call death/I remember.” (1) The following poem, “Matins,” is a poem related to morning prayers or services. This poem also deals with spring as the poet uses the “hollow stems of the white daffodils,” (2) which are flowers that grow in the spring time and are symbolic of spring. Further into the book Gluck’s poems turn to summer themes: “Midsummer--/everything is possible,” (32) from the poem “Heaven and Earth,” as well as daytime: “as the fire of the summer sun/truly does stall/being entirely contained/by the burning/maples/at the garden’s border.” (32) Next, the poems turn to evening as in “Vespers” where the poet is talking to God in an evening prayer, which is what Vespers are: “the stoic lambs turning/silver in twilight,” (38) and the end of summer: “the field itself, in August dotted/with wild chicory and aster.” (38) And finally the last poem of the book, “The White Lilies,” is set in the evening: “here/they linger in the summer evening/and the evening turns/cold with their terror.” (63) The book also closes with the poet putting her garden to sleep as the summer is overtaken by the cold autumnal weather: “It doesn’t matter to me/how many summers I live to return:/this one summer we have entered eternity.” (63) The Lily is telling her gardener that even though she will die off for the winter she will one day return.
Glück’s poetry is also filled with the lyrical “I” but who is speaking changes from poem to poem and even changes within a poem at times. There are three main beings who speak in Gluck’s poems: God, human, and plant. The first, God, is apparent in the poem “Clear Morning” in which God is speaking to human kind: “I’ve watched you long enough.” (7) It is clear that God is speaking because He would have to speak “through vehicles only, in/details of earth, as you prefer,” (7) in order for mankind to understand His meanings. Other poems are written in first person from the point of view of a human such as in “Matins” which is a prayer from a human to God: “I asked you to be human—I am no needier/than other people” (13). And the poem can be from a plant’s point of view as in “Lamium” where a plant, a Lamium, speaks to a human: “The sun hardly touches me./Sometimes I see it in early spring, rising very far away.” (5) Lastly, the point of view can change within a poem as in the poem “The White Lilies” where the beginning is spoken in the point of view of a narrator with no specific “I” but most likely human: “As a man and woman make/ a garden between them like/ a bed of stars,” (63) and then there is a shift to the plant, the white lilies, speaking to their gardener, the human from the beginning: “I felt your two hands/bury me to release its splendor.” (63)
Louise Glück’s poetry is unique in that it usually has a surface meaning which is great because it doesn’t take much time or knowledge to get something out of it, but it also has a deeper meaning when you look closer at it and pick it apart. I enjoyed her poetry for this because even the poems I didn’t look at closely I still got something out of them.
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