Louise Gluck, in my opinion is the most interesting poet that we have read as a class so far. Her style and presentation are unmatched. The amount of personal material Gluck is able to incorporate amazed me. Each of Gluck’s poems had deep personal undertones, yet I was able to indentify with almost all of them. She personalized the poems and at the same time made them relate to every readers past experiences. I believe she is able to do just this by using religion and nature as her main themes. For example her poem “Early Darkness”, I believe has both spirituality and nature as themes throughout. Tone wise, “Early Darkness” has a confused speaker. The speaker first asks the reader a question, “How can you say/ earth should give me joy?” The poem hints constantly to the idea of a Mother Nature, who I gather is the speaker throughout, “Each thing/ born is my burden; I cannot succeed/ with all of you.” Constantly the notion of humans understanding Mother Nature flashes in my thoughts. What Gluck is trying to point out is that, everywhere people are saying, “I’m one with nature”, or “I’m synced with nature”. The entire first stanza dismisses these notions that people of being connected with nature. Mother Nature in “Early Darkness” is burdened with the over abundance of humans.
The third Stanza is where Gluck makes her turn when she writes, “How can you understand me/ when you cannot understand yourselves?” Gluck turns the focus of the poem from humans not understanding nature, to humans not understanding themselves. Mother Nature in the poem has the reason why humans do not understand one another, “Your memory is not/ powerful enough, it will not/ reach back far enough-”
Gluck finishes the poem with a resolution. Mother Nature makes evident that all humans are her children, “Never forget you are my children.” Yet, the following lines after the first in the last stanza force the reader to realize there is nothing that can be done. Mother Nature tells the reader that humans suffer not because of what currently doing, but because they have simply lived and require sustenance separate of that from Mother Nature.
In general, Louise Gluck, is a master poet of which I fully enjoyed. Her masterful incorporation of the expansive themes of spirituality and nature amazed me throughout the book. Her form is simple and lends to the material n the poem. Finally the calmness of voice, even in her most serious of poems leads to a pleasing read.
Richard's Comment:
ReplyDeleteI agree with you on pretty much every point you've made, but one of the things that I liked about Gluck's work was the apparent ambiguity of what kind of spirituality the poems were referring to. The one that you cite, in particular, is a good example of this. The fact that mother nature, and not a conventional god, or even a human speaking to plants, is the one telling all creatures that they are her children, it seems to bring to mind something rather pantheistic instead of something that is worshipped as a deity.
Compared with the other poems we discussed in class, where the relation seems directly correlated to christianity, or at least a monotheistic entity. Because of this, I'd like to think that Gluck isn't so much celebrating religion as she is celebrating spirituality as a whole, both the mainstream and the more alternative forms of worship.
I can certainly appreciate a writer of any kind who can write a beautiful poem about belief without telling the reader what to think. Gluck is trying to portray an experience, not change a person's way of thinking. It's that sort of free thinking in writing that makes me glad to read a poet of such caliber.