Introduction

In Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Ludovico Settembrini is asked to write an encyclopaedia of suffering in literature. He quickly realises that it is ‘a very complex task … demanding much prudence and vast reading’, for suffering, he solemnly concedes, is a phenomenon that ‘literature has regularly chosen … as its topic’.Footnote ¹ This little book before you works in an opposite way to an encyclopaedia. It focuses on just one writer’s use of suffering, and mostly on just one collection. This writer is the North American poet Louise Glück, and even though several of her poems and other writings are examined, the discussion is geared towards her 1992 book, The Wild Iris.

The aim may be unencyclopaedic, but the scope isn’t. Glück’s poems are, like all poems are, in conversation with texts and images and ideas that stretch far beyond any one period, geography, or language. And so the book imagines and establishes exchanges between Glück and the ‘great dead’, with whom she said her poetry was always in dialogue, and with the living.Footnote ² It keeps circling back to a small set of poets and artists – T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden and Pieter Bruegel, and, more than anyone else, Rainer Maria Rilke – but various other and very different voices enter the discussion, ranging from St. Paul to Paul Tran; Fra Angelico to Ada Limón; Matthias Grünewald to Martha Rhodes. By bringing these voices together, this small book searches for Glück’s attitude towards suffering and for what her poetry might tell us about poetry’s larger relationship to it.

1 The Kindest Suffering

The suffering Glück wrote about is in some ways (often cruel ways) the kindest: suffering that arises out of love, loss, and loneliness. Suffering in Glück is an inescapable feeling and position. Very often, it is the price we pay for love, whether it is accepted in grace, as it is by heartbroken Dido in ‘The Queen of Carthage’, from Vita Nova, who sees it as ‘favor’ for having lived as Aeneas’s love, or with resignation, when we realise (in The Wild Iris) that ‘it wasn’t human nature to love / only what returns love’.Footnote ³ ‘Why love what you will lose?’ Glück asked in the earlier collection, The Triumph of Achilles. Because, she replied, ‘There is nothing else to love.’Footnote ⁴

In Ovid’s Heroides, Oenone writes a letter to her former husband, Paris, who abandoned her for Helen, telling him that ‘Whatever one deserves to suffer should be borne lightly’ but that ‘what comes undeservedly, comes as bitter punishment’.Footnote ⁵ Glück’s poetry refuses the distinction. It is marked by cutting melancholy and searing uncertainty, and always by a tragic if quiet recognition that suffering is an unavoidable part of our lives, whether it is deserved or undeserved. Glück finds this insight not just in myth but everywhere she looks, which is very often at trees and flowers, rivers and lakes, or, as in that beautiful sequence in The Triumph of Achilles, the moon:

The moon is never full enough to eliminate the suffering of our ‘full hearts’, but it does provide, as nature often does, perspective and relief in Glück’s poetry, lurching ‘like searchlights’ in her early poem ‘Bridal Piece’ or looking ‘as round as aspirin’ in ‘The Game’.Footnote ⁷ In ‘Messengers’, from her second collection, it emerges ‘wrenched out of earth and rising / full in its circle of arrows’, and in ‘October’, from the 2006 Averno, it appears ‘From within the earth’s / bitter disgrace, coldness and barrenness’ looking ‘beautiful tonight, but when is she not beautiful?’Footnote ⁸

It is, of course, some privilege to ‘care about the moon’, as the Palestinian-American poet Noor Hindi puts it in her poem ‘Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying’. She too would have liked to write about the moon and flowers and death as metaphor, Hindi says, but she hasn’t the luxury.Footnote ⁹ In Glück’s poetry, we hardly see any material suffering, nor any discussion about how suffering overlaps with social, racial, or economic injustice. Her poetry, both Marjorie Perloff and Ron Silliman complained, is politically too quiet.Footnote ¹⁰ She herself was aware of that. What we call ‘political art’, she claimed, ‘seems bold, important, serious, whereas the lyric preoccupations with abiding and insoluble dilemmas seem evasive and frivolous’ and, moreover, ‘a parlor art: specialized, over-refined, the amusement of privilege’.Footnote ¹¹

Everyone, wrote Mahmoud Darwish in one of his most memorable poems, has ‘the right to love the last days of autumn’ – even Palestinian poets like Darwish who are expected to focus on the suffering around them. Glück was far more interested in the ‘autumn that blights its leaves with gold’, as Darwish has it in this poem, and in ‘neglected meadow plants’ that watch ‘the seasons change’, than she was in injustice.Footnote ¹² She did, as we’ll see when we eventually turn to The Wild Iris, probe into the theological mystery of suffering’s origins and existence, the problem of its maldistribution and God’s supposed omnipotence, and suffering’s impact on our lives and the responses to it available to us, but the suffering she was most interested in was the suffering that affects everyone, which may be suffering in some senses of the word only, but which will be known well by everyone familiar with life – and with poetry.

2 Poets like Orpheus

Poetry, especially lyrical poetry like Glück’s, has long courted suffering, thinking that, in James Longenbach’s words, ‘we become lyrical when we suffer’.Footnote ¹³ Arthur Schopenhauer and Søren Kierkegaard made much of this idea. It is not just that we turn to poetry when we suffer, they argued, or that suffering creates potent art, but that true, beautiful, poetry cannot happen without it. For Schopenhauer, ‘almost every genuine enlightener of mankind, almost every great master of every art’ must endure ‘martyrdom’.Footnote ¹⁴ For Kierkegaard (who fancied himself a poet rather than a philosopher), the essential qualities of a poet are great capacity and willingness for suffering.Footnote ¹⁵ ‘The poetic life in the personality’, he wrote in his journal in 1840, ‘is the unconscious sacrifice’.Footnote ¹⁶

In that same journal, Kierkegaard quoted the words of the eighteenth-century Danish hymn-writer Hans Adolph Brorson: ‘When the heart is most oppressed / Then the harp of joy is tuned.’ Brorson’s words, Kierkegaard added, were ‘a motto for all poetic experience, which necessarily must be unhappy’.Footnote ¹⁷ He looked back to this idea a few years later in his book Either/Or, there claiming the poet as ‘An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.’Footnote ¹⁸ That was to conceive of the poet like Orpheus, whom Ovid described in Book 10 of Metamorphoses (in the lush eighteenth-century edition) as a bard ‘Inflam’d by love’. This bard, ‘urg’d by deep Despair’ at losing Eurydice, Ovid tells us, ‘melodiously complains’.Footnote ¹⁹ Earlier in The Georgics, Virgil (in David Ferry’s enduring translation) had him ‘Sat underneath a towering cliff’, weeping and singing; his lament, Virgil imagined, ‘fills the listening air’ like a nightingale’s song, entrancing beasts and trees.Footnote ²⁰

It’s a delicious idea, the poet as sufferer, singer, ultimately as saint: someone capable and willing to bear up a great amount of pain for poetry.Footnote ²¹ But it’s also a heavy one. If a poet is a martyr from whose suffering we reap rich profits, where does that position us in the relationship? Are we turned into sadistic voyeurs? And if poets are tasked with singing their suffering, then what does that do to them? And what about those around them? When Glück retold the story of Orpheus in her collection Vita Nova in 1999, she had him protest that ‘I am completely alone now’ and ask what job Eurydice (and the readers) had ‘wanting human comfort’ when it’s known that ‘there is no music like this / without real grief’.Footnote ²² At the same time, Vita Nova called attention to Eurydice’s own position. ‘No one wants to be the muse’, Glück wrote in the poem called ‘Lute Song’; instead, ‘everyone wants to be Orpheus’. More crucial, it was ‘not Eurydice, the lamented one’, that Orpheus’s song restored ‘but the ardent / spirit of Orpheus’. As she did with other poets elsewhere in her work, in Vita Nova Glück accused the suffering poet of ‘deflected narcissism’.Footnote ²³

Delicious was exactly how Rainer Maria Rilke saw suffering. ‘Long must you suffer, knowing not what’, he wrote in Paris in an uncollected poem of March 1913, ‘until suddenly, out of spitefully chewed fruit / your suffering’s taste comes forth in you’. And ‘Then you will love almost instantly what’s tasted’, so much so that ‘No one / will ever talk you out of it’.Footnote ²⁴ Suffering for Rilke was not just delicious but addictive too. Further – and Rilke always likes to go further – suffering for him was desirable, and what marks us as human. In this poem, Rilke was following Kierkegaard, for whom suffering was ‘the negative form of the highest’ and as such evidence of spiritual maturity, as well as in the tracks of Schopenhauer, who saw suffering as positive.Footnote ²⁵ Behind Rilke’s poem we can also hear Nietzsche (say ‘yes’ to suffering), while he also anticipated Franz Kafka, who would write a few years after Rilke (in his Blue Octavo Notebooks, written 1917–19) that suffering was ‘the only link between this world and the positive’ and something we should embrace even in the knowledge that there might be no recompense for it: ‘We … must suffer all the suffering around us.’Footnote ²⁶

Rilke’s ninth Duino elegy, part of the Duino Elegies he began in 1912 and finally published in 1923, drew a link between the condition of being human, of ‘being at one with the earth’, and the experiencing of suffering (Rilke’s German word is Schmerz).Footnote ²⁷ The poem, in Stephen Mitchell’s 1982 translation, opens with a question: ‘why then / have to be human—and, escaping from fate, / keep longing for fate?’ Schopenhauer had argued that happiness is a distraction; that, being the negation of a desire upon satisfaction, happiness is negative and ephemeral.Footnote ²⁸ Rilke agreed, describing happiness in the elegy as ‘that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss’. What we are on this earth for, what we learn from, or what we take with us forward is not happiness but suffering:

The elegy’s opening question answers itself: we suffer because we exist. Let’s embrace suffering and ‘heaviness’, which is ‘the long experience of love’, and let’s not dismay that such feelings might be ‘unsayable’. And let’s not let our sufferings go to waste. This is what Rilke’s tenth Duino elegy prompts us to do, cautioning us not to be wasteful of pain (Vergeuder der Schmerzen). The poem, in Mitchell’s translation, calls our attention to

A. Poulin Jr’s 1975 English translation of this moment in the elegy is sharper:

It’s an arresting – jarring, paradoxical, and hopeful – idea, that of suffering as (both translations agree) ‘our dark evergreen’. We find a similar metaphor of suffering as forest in the fourth of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus (1922), a poem that duly advises us (in Mitchell’s translation) to embrace suffering: ‘Don’t be afraid to suffer’, but instead ‘return / that heaviness to the earth’s own weight’.Footnote ³² In his adaptation of this sonnet in 2006, Don Paterson translated Rilke’s words as ‘Don’t fear your suffering. Give up your burden: / the Earth will barely notice its return.’Footnote ³³ Paterson is on point because, beyond the standard reading of Rilke as encouraging us to embrace suffering, he also stresses that the earth can handle our suffering because it simply doesn’t much notice. How to fall – ‘how to rest patiently in gravity’ – and what we can learn were two questions that concerned Rilke in his earlier collection, The Book of Hours (1905), too, where he associated falling with having faith in the divine.Footnote ³⁴

3 Revenge

‘The Mountain’, a poem from Glück’s 1985 collection The Triumph of Achilles, compares the poet not to Orpheus but to Sisyphus, the cunning King of Corinth who tried to cheat death and who was punished for it by Zeus. A teacher tells her students

She’s trying to teach her students a lesson about the effort required by art, an ‘endless labor’, which, however, she assures them, does contain ‘joy in this, in the artist’s life’. As is, though, the myth won’t quite cut it. ‘Why do I lie / to these children?’, the teacher asks, and

In Glück’s hands, the myth of Sisyphus takes on two twists. The artist accepts Sisyphus’s punishment, his torturous endeavour, and assumes his legendary cunningness, too: ‘I am secretly pushing a rock myself, / slyly pushing it up the steep / face of a mountain.’Footnote ³⁵ Getting one over on Zeus, however, she manages to reach the top of the mountain and place the rock at its top. Like in Rilke, the mountain does not mind (or notice) the heaviness, even if it is transformed by the burden.Footnote ³⁶ In a further twist, the rock the artist places on the mountain makes it, in fact, steeper and so more difficult to be reached the next time: ‘with every breath’, the poem concludes, ‘I am standing at the top of the mountain. / Both my hands are free. And the rock has added / height to the mountain’.Footnote ³⁷ The heaviness returns to the earth, the teacher’s hands become free, her breathing lighter, but the summit a little harder to get to.

Has she reached attainment? Or is she like Sisyphus doomed to carry on? With Glück, it’s impossible to get a straight answer. Her rewriting of the myth earnestly describes the burden of the writing vocation, how it requires living in hell, and how there’s suffering involved in hoping for attainment without ever being able to reach the summit. Yet it’s also clear that the speaker ironises this position. The teacher changes her tune once she realises that her students don’t find the truth – that poetry is an arduous labour without purpose or gain – to their interest or liking. And so she turns what is a story of futility into one of hope. She transplants Sisyphus to hell, making him a martyr; she makes his labour progressive; she turns the mountain that Sisyphus eternally ascends into a pantheon (‘that place where he will live forever’); and she introduces the possibility for an end (‘top of the mountain’) to a journey that has famously no end.

Even with the irony, or actually because of it, there’s something martyric and heroic about the artist in ‘The Mountain’, but more than hero or martyr, this artist is irreverent. Sisyphus rejects his fabled punishment and manages to retain (or regain) his agency. This means that his story is neither a tragedy nor a triumph. It lies somewhere in between, and, crucially, it is a story delivered to a group of eager but distracted students by a teacher in the comfort of one’s classroom. This irreverent approach to suffering and to myth tallies with Glück’s expressed views on suffering’s relationship to poetry. Her essays and lectures and interviews drew on language of poetry as suffering, one 1989 lecture, for example, claiming that the writer must ‘learn to endure the desert’, and her thinking and writing retained throughout her career familiar tropes of poetry as martyrdom.Footnote ³⁸ Further, she not only conceded suffering’s central position in poetry and in our lives but also talked about its capacity to yield meaning and insight – this being, according to her, its crucial profit. However, she was also eager to stress that the role of suffering in poetic composition was not exactly as had often been imagined: that suffering’s part in inspiration and composition had been misplaced and misunderstood, its function idealised.

Great poets, Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard both told us, must necessarily be unhappy. A poet, Rilke stressed, can’t have enough of suffering. ‘When you’re really miserable’, Glück told an interviewer in 1981, ‘you don’t usually write, just as you don’t usually write when in ecstasy’. The question was whether ‘unhappiness is necessary to keep writing’, and Glück’s point was in some part practical.Footnote ³⁹ Elaborating on the matter years later in her essay ‘The Culture of Healing’ (1999), she explained how

There’s perhaps a little exaggeration in Glück’s remarks; certainly, there is an exasperation, stemming from a resistance to critics reading from her poetry (often sorrowful) back into her biographical plight. In that early interview (‘Of course I go through stages in which I am unhappy, but I don’t feel that I am a terrifically unhappy person’), Glück sounds like the speaker in Ada Limón’s poem, who has had too much of critics ascribing to the poet an expertise in suffering.Footnote ⁴¹ Limón’s speaker is observing a groundhog trespassing a garden when ‘A stranger writes to request my thoughts / on suffering.’ It’s as if the stranger is ‘demanding that I kneel to the trap of coiled / spikers used in warfare and fencing’. But ‘Why am I not allowed / delight?’, the speaker asks. Instead they choose to ‘watch the groundhog more closely and a sound escapes / me, a spasm of joy I did not imagine / when I woke’. The groundhog, the poem concludes, perhaps like the speaker, like the poet herself, ‘is a funny creature and earnest, / and she is doing what she can to survive’.Footnote ⁴² In fact, that’s also what Orpheus does in Glück’s telling of his story in ‘Lute Song’: wishing ‘to survive, / which is, I believe, the deepest human wish’.Footnote ⁴³

Glück would equally object to critics reading from her poetry back into the means by which she approaches writing. For her, writing poetry is the antithesis of suffering, or at least very different to how the great male sufferers made it out to be. When a poet writes, Glück argued in ‘The Idea of Courage’ (1991), she is for one brief moment acting and not acted upon: ‘the natural arrangement is reversed … the last word, for the moment, seized back from fate or chance’.Footnote ⁴⁴ If to suffer means, as the term’s etymology suggests, to be acted upon, writing is its reverse: the poet acts on something, whether an event or a circumstance.Footnote ⁴⁵ Intriguingly, Glück drew in this essay a link between contesting the role of suffering in composition and early Christian martyrs. She imagined these martyrs stepping forward, passing their tormentors and audience to correct our fantasies: ‘as though the dead martyrs were to stand up in the arena and say, “Suppose, on the other hand … ”’.Footnote ⁴⁶

A little polemically, Glück added in this essay that, despite what poets sometimes let on, courage is not strictly speaking involved in the act of writing either:

Aside from back-peddling on the claim she had made that one doesn’t write when in ecstasy, isn’t courage demanded when one writes about trauma, or secrets, or about feelings that disgust? Her point was different. A poet might like to think of themselves as ‘Perseus slaying the Medusa’ or as ‘Cassandra who cannot help but see’ – to think, that is, that ‘truth and vision are costly, their purchase secured by sacrifice or loss’ – but that’s not what in her experience actually happens in composition.Footnote ⁴⁸ She conceded that there’s courage involved in this, but stressed that this courage has not to do with writing as such but with the patience the poet endures during the period they are not writing (a period that can’t be forced or rushed).Footnote ⁴⁹ A similar point was made in an early unpublished poem from the 1960s tellingly titled ‘Journey to the Poignant Word’: ‘That it must take / Time for a poem to evolve’, because such journeys, the young Glück wrote, alluding to a similar journey as the one Orpheus took on the river Styx, ‘are bound / to cross water’. Unlike Orpheus, the writer featured in Glück’s poem travels a long way ‘without the least / Idea where he is going’, his hope being that, ‘with nothing guiding / The delaying, braying beast / That he is riding’, he will in the end ‘Arrive at writing’.Footnote ⁵⁰

When poets eventually gather themselves to write, they usually do so, Glück argued in ‘The Idea of Courage’ decades later, after some time from the event or state they are describing has lapsed. Here, it’s clear that she had in mind her own experience of writing poetry about a personal event after that event has passed – and not, say, those of John Milton writing Paradise Lost or Edmund Spenser The Faerie Queen. In such cases, when one writes after the event, the passage of time safeguards against shame, which, in her mind, is in this occasion the risk taken. She wasn’t interested in the risk of, for example, public ridicule or censorship or imprisonment, and her understanding of shame was limited: someone’s shame can live on with them. Her point was that there’s a ‘discrepancy’, as she put it, between ‘the impression of exposure and the fact of distance’. We as readers might feel that the poet’s experiences are unfolding right in front of us but, as far as she was concerned, poets are ‘unconstrained by them’ at the moment of writing. Or, as she put it more forcefully: ‘personal circumstance may prompt art, but the actual making of art is a revenge on circumstance’.Footnote ⁵¹

Just as suffering was for her not directly involved in the act of writing, neither did she think there’s solace for the poet in the process – at any rate, not the kind of solace the poem can offer for the reader. ‘In regard to the restorative power of art’, Glück wrote in ‘The Culture of Healing’, thinking again very clearly of only some very specific kinds of poem, ‘a distinction must be made between the experience of the reader and the experience of the writer’:

It sounds like a lonely experience, the poet unable to find solace in her writing, the reader finding solace that is not the poet’s. It’s as if poet and reader are pulled apart and pushed to opposite directions. The poet she describes here sounds a little like Orpheus in Vita Nova (‘I am completely alone now’), but her discussion complicates the metaphor of the suffering poet as Orpheus. A poet’s suffering still reaches us as song, as beautiful music, Kierkegaard would say, but the distance the song has travelled is far longer than Kierkegaard imagined. Moreover, by the time the song has reached us, the poet has moved on. Glück’s poet does not look back but actually forward: ‘into the future—the hypothetical moment in which comprehensive darkness acquires limits and form’.Footnote ⁵³

There should be no nostalgia involved in writing, Glück felt, no looking backwards. The poet’s aim, she wrote in ‘The Culture of Healing’, should not be ‘restoration’ but ‘discovery’. It’s only this journey that can make suffering ‘yield to a new form, a thing that hadn’t existed in the world before’. To write was for her to betray the past and to make ‘the mutilator the benefactor’.Footnote ⁵⁴ She had made a similar point in an earlier essay from 1993 called ‘Against Sincerity’, in which she equated this ‘enduring discovery’ with truth and called it ‘the ideal of art’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Truth, not sincerity, not honesty, and definitely not solace, is what poetry should strive for. In ‘Against Sincerity’, she spelled out the difficulty of the task, and the catch: ‘There is, unfortunately, no test for truth. That is, in part, why artists suffer.’ As she went on to explain, ‘If there is no test for truth, there is no possible security.’ Caught up between a rock of ‘anxiety’ and a hard place of ‘fierce conviction’, Glück’s poet has to rely on conviction to ‘compensate for the sacrifice of the sure’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Solace is easy, truth isn’t, and it involves taking a risk, one that, it turns out, requires courage and great capacity for suffering. Though Glück did not say as much, the uncompromising search for the truth does make her poet a martyr of sorts, and a little bit of a hero, too. The poet, she said, ‘cultivates a disciplined refusal of self-deception’. Knowing that ‘suffering … may afford insight’, Glück’s Orpheus looks straight at it.Footnote ⁵⁷

4 Distance

In ‘The Culture of Healing’, Glück explained that artists have a capacity for ‘concentration’ that allows them to be, at times, ‘out of life’. They are ‘for a time in a suspension that is also a quest, a respite that is also acute tension’. This capacity for concentration and absorption ‘makes a kind of intermission from the self’. She turned not to a poet but to a crime writer, Ross Macdonald, to account for the process that takes place when a poet writes about suffering:

As it turns out, in challenging the role assigned to unhappiness and suffering by poets, critics, and readers, Glück was not only candidly describing her personal experience of writing but proposing how one should go about writing about suffering. What a poet should be after is not proximity but distance from suffering and that which only distance can (and should) breed: shifting or multiple perspectives, self-questioning, ambiguity, and melancholy rooted in the recognition of irreparability. Here, as we’ll slowly begin to see, lies Glück’s personal theory of impersonality.

This attitude towards suffering explains why she wrote disapprovingly of texts that according to her parade autobiographical suffering. The ‘memoirs and poems and novels rooted in the assumption that the exhibition of suffering must make authentic and potent art’, she wrote in ‘The Culture of Healing’, without, however, naming names, are akin to ‘a pornography of scars’. It’s not that such writing is uncomfortably personal. It’s that it lacks reflection and self-scrutiny, offering a reductivist view of the world, and by dividing the world into good and bad, its speakers come across as ‘entirely constructed, inhuman’. It is, in short, too comfortable to speak about a difficult and uneasy thing – but ‘if suffering is so hard, why should its expression be easy?’ It is also built on ‘a narrative of personal triumph … filled with markers like “growth” and “healing” and “self-realization”’.Footnote ⁵⁹ And so a lot of writing about suffering actually resists true ordeal. It is as though such texts about suffering do not understand suffering at all.

Glück had made a similar point in her essay ‘The Forbidden’ (1993). Here, she focused on poetry that relies for its impact on the ‘biographical accuracy’ of the suffering of the poet. A lot of this poetry, she protested, as in the later essay, proposes a narrative of triumph that is childish and misplaced. It demands our ‘admiration for unprecedented bravery, as the speaker looks back and speaks the truth’. The problem is that ‘truth of this kind will not permit itself simply to be looked back on’. In place of enquiry and discovery, it offers fate as fixed, ‘and for curiosity regarding an unfolding future, absolute knowledge of that future’.Footnote ⁶⁰ It is static, not dynamic – and for Glück that’s a bad thing.

She was in this essay a little more forthcoming about which texts she had in mind. Linda McCarriston’s Eva-Mary (a book about incest), she wrote, ‘forfeits emotional authority’ because its attitudes are ‘fixed’, because it splits the world into heroes and villains (as if the world were a fairy tale), and because it forgoes self-doubt, insisting on ‘a single rigid interpretation’.Footnote ⁶¹ Further, and here seemingly allowing the poet to look backwards for a moment, she objected that such poetry reports rather than reinhabits anguish. Sharon Olds falls into the same category as McCarriston. Although Glück had many good things to say about Olds’s talent of observation, she found that the poems that make up Olds’s 1992 collection The Father keep making ‘the same points’ and reaching ‘the same epiphanies’. Such poetry fails to apply what she called in this essay the ‘scientific method’, which is to have ‘no bias regarding outcome’.Footnote ⁶² Glück didn’t properly develop her objections or claims in ‘The Forbidden’. As in ‘The Culture of Healing’, her chief objection was against literature that makes of suffering something too easy, too straightforward, and that it is not ‘dynamic’ enough, precluding uncertainty or ambiguity.

5 Mature Poets

What did Glück want, then? To summarise her points and objections so far (and apply them to a discussion about the use of suffering in poetry), she was for distance from private circumstance and personality, a distance which she felt could come through passage of time or through the introduction by the poet of a speaker, device, or story acting as a shield from the circumstance described. This desired distance would in turn ensure that, at the time of writing, the poet is unconstrained and not having, for example, to worry about shame. She also wanted a poetry that doesn’t merely report suffering but that creates out of it something new (‘a thing that hadn’t existed in the world before’). This poetry challenges or, put more dramatically, takes revenge on past suffering; looks into the future (its goal being not restoration but discovery); and acts upon suffering rather than being acted upon by it. Finally, she was against writing about suffering that suggests a narrative of triumph, that depicts it as easy or easily overcomeable, as well as against poetry that is static and not dynamic (this dynamism ensured by the use of doubt and ambiguity).

In ‘The Forbidden’, Glück found something approximating the model of poetry she had in mind in that essay in Carolyn Forché, Martha Rhodes, and Frank Bidart, focusing on how all three poets manage in their works to negotiate past suffering from an adult perspective (distance again). Beginning with Forché, she liked the way that Forché’s The Country Between Us (1981) ‘churns with self doubt as well as rage’ and how ‘the poems question the self’s motives, expose its vanities’.Footnote ⁶³ It’s a strange point to take out of a book that weaves the gruesome violence and brutal abuse that Forché witnessed in 1970s El Salvador while working alongside Archbishop Oscar Romero (in one poem she writes about how ‘There is nothing one man will not do to another’) with personal poems about love, sex, and death.Footnote ⁶⁴ Unlike Olds’s static speakers, Glück wrote in ‘The Forbidden’, Forché’s keep changing. In Glück’s reading, Forché’s collection charts the story of a younger self who is ‘worldly, informed, brutal, direct, marked by suffering, impatient’ and, crucially, who gains distance and who questions its own understanding: ‘divestment—preferably scourging divestment—is the only means by which adult perspective can be achieved’.Footnote ⁶⁵

The lesson of The Country Between Us may not be that which Glück took to be, but she was right that distance is one of the themes the book is interested in. One poem about a woman Forché met in Deya, for example, describes how ‘When we look at someone, we are seeing / someone else’ and how ‘When we listen / we hear something taking place / in the past.’Footnote ⁶⁶ Another, ‘Photograph of my Room’, looks simultaneously backwards and forwards. It opens with the speaker considering how ‘Thirty years from now, you might / hold this room in your hands’. Looking at various objects scattered in her room – china cups, a quilt, army letters, ‘coins / of no value in any other place’, a bullet – she recognises how these objects are both markers of testimony and of flawed memory.Footnote ⁶⁷ To use Forché’s own metaphor, the speaker in this poem knows that there is a country between past and present selves, and a ‘cold length’ between reality and recollection of it.Footnote ⁶⁸

Martha Rhodes’s poetry similarly refuses, for Glück, any ‘fixed perspective’. Glück found that Rhodes’s speaker, in the ‘unpublished collection’ that she ‘had the fortune to read’, was ‘eccentric, various, rather than a spokesperson’.Footnote ⁶⁹ This collection would become Rhodes’s debut volume, At the Gate (1995), which, like McCarriston’s Eva-Mary and Olds’s The Father, deals with abuse and family trauma. Glück found in it a ‘fluidity’ that ‘persuades because it mimics the dilemma, imitates and preserves the child’s helplessly reactive mind as it survives into, and is masked by, adulthood’. Furthermore, Rhodes’s poems are held together by a ‘narrative which fuses the damaged body to the divided heart’. They reinhabit anguish, but they are neither fixed nor fatalist: ‘reading them we are in the presence of harm … and, simultaneously, a wild, stubborn, unkillable life’.Footnote ⁷⁰

To back up her points, and to evidence Rhodes’s ‘sad sardonic voice’ and the way Rhodes blurs past and present, Glück quoted a few poems, five in total, from Rhodes’s collection. She didn’t, curiously, quote from the poem that approaches suffering the closest way she wanted. Called ‘The Nude’ and spread over six brief stanzas, this poem opens with the speaker telling us about how, when she was eighteen, she would ‘lay for three-hour stretches’ on one artist’s ‘gold velvet pillows’:

A decade and a half have passed since the speaker posed for this artist: ‘Now I am here, in this gallery / fifteen years younger and still looking / past him to his wife posed at the piano.’ The speaker looks to the past but forward too, as Glück would have liked. Distinctions between past and present are blurred. There’s an almost unnerving detachment about the way the speaker describes the crime committed. The photo of the wife at the piano was, Rhodes writes,

There’s a coldness in the manner that last line is delivered, reinhabiting rather than reporting anguish. The concluding stanza shows how distance and patience, enquiry and discovery, self-doubt and ambiguity, and a sheer sense of irreparability, make for potent poetry. The speaker shows resilience and commitment, endurance and determination. Turning to the wife in the photo, the speaker tells us that ‘even if it took me years, / I would write and tell her everything’.Footnote ⁷¹

When Glück’s analysis in ‘The Forbidden’ turns to Bidart, we get a good sense of where her argument was always geared towards. Bidart’s In the Western Night is a stark exploration of suffering because, she maintained, it is also a story about ‘responsibility’. To write, Glück insisted, is to act upon. Bidart looked bravely at his suffering and acted on it. He did not make a fairy tale out of suffering. His poems ‘do not triumph over damage and shame, they find no cure, no respite’.Footnote ⁷² Just like in Forché and Rhodes, there’s no relief, no triumph, but self-doubt and ambiguity instead. Immature poets, Glück wanted to say, complain and recover; mature poets take responsibility and accept discomfort.Footnote ⁷³

For Glück, no poet accepted discomfort more maturely than Eliot – and no poet was more important for Glück than Eliot. She turned to him often in her criticism, admitting that (like William Carlos Williams) she loved him ‘all the time’.Footnote ⁷⁴ In her writings, Eliot comes across as both an inspiration and a kindred spirit, as when, for example, she defended him against accusations (also levelled against her) of indulgence and aloofness. His ‘intense wish to be divested of temporal facts’, she wrote of Eliot in her essay on him included in the 1994 Proofs and Theories, ‘may seem to contemporary readers not simply irresponsible but immoral: an indulgence of privilege and omen of our collective ruin’. However, there was a ‘helplessness in his verse’ that was testament to his profound humanity. She also found him the ‘least materialistic’ of his generation, a quality she claimed also for herself when she said that she was a ‘supernaturalist’ poet and a poet who has ‘a craving for that which is immutable’ and whose ‘orientation is always toward the eternal’.Footnote ⁷⁵

Glück’s attitude towards suffering, specifically her insistence on distance from circumstance, chimes with Eliot’s impersonal approach to poetry. Her talk of ‘scientific method’, ‘intermission from the self’, distance, detachment, and need for a shield between self and biographical ‘radioactive material’, will sound familiar to those who’ve read the early Eliot. We saw how in ‘The Culture of Healing’ she turned to Ross Macdonald to describe this distancing. In ‘The Forbidden’, she associated the ‘scientific method’ that ‘has no bias regarding outcome’ with the method of William Carlos Williams. But it was Eliot who most famously offered a theory of ‘depersonalization that … may be said to approach the condition of science’ and which ensures that ‘feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations’. That’s how Eliot put it in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ in 1919, an essay that cautioned against poetry as the ‘turning loose of emotion’ and that prompted poets to distance themselves from occasion and personality and instead to write as if they were mediators between different worlds and temporalities. Although not interested in the problem of squaring individuality and personality with tradition (or history or religion) as Eliot was, Glück tried, like the author of ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, to find that distance between what Eliot called ‘the man who suffers and the mind which creates’.Footnote ⁷⁶

Above all, Eliot stood for Glück as a model of a poet who did not take any shortcuts regarding suffering. For all his impersonal approach to suffering, which makes his suffering appear sanitised or second-hand, Glück felt that Eliot knew suffering intimately and understood the cosmic tragedy of it. Part of his suffering, she argued, had to do with the way he was never consoled by the physical world but wanted always to ‘see through the material to the eternal’, to ‘experience a closing of the gap between the two worlds’ – even if he knew that ‘a convincing union of these realms’ was highly unlikely. Because he was searching for the truth, he was obsessed with choice, and choice is always ‘vulnerable to some absolute, external judgment’. This obsession explained for her Eliot’s ‘fastidious hesitations’. When one tries to ‘find and say the truth, which is single because inclusive’, Glück wrote, ‘all utterance must be tormented by doubt. The capacity of such a mind for suffering’, she concluded, ‘has to be enormous’.Footnote ⁷⁷

That’s a very specific reading of Eliot, of course. His poetry is deeply rooted in the factual, actual world, from sawdust restaurants with oyster shells via commuters on London Bridge, marital disputes, triumphal military marches, and sounds of birdsong to dried-up swimming pools and the Blitz. Eliot did not exactly wish to be divested of temporal facts, as Glück said, but to transcend them. Moreover, he was for much of his life a poet of bits and pieces, of fragments and disintegration, and he never believed that one can ever write a final, single truth. Yet Glück was right to notice how in Eliot ‘an other cannot be found, or attention secured’.Footnote ⁷⁸ That’s obviously the case with the Eliot of ‘Prufrock’, a man who wanders lone and along unable to make a decision, but it’s also true of the Eliot of Four Quartets. Late Eliot was closer to finding ‘release from action and suffering’, as he put it in ‘Burnt Norton’, but the Quartets are still, to use Glück’s terms, a poem ‘beset by caution’ and one in which ‘ideas are regularly subordinated, delayed, qualified’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Take, for example, this early moment in ‘Burnt Norton’:

In her discussion of Eliot, Glück wanted us to attend to how ‘Eliot’s speakers either can’t speak or can’t be heard’.Footnote ⁸¹ As we’ll see, this is an accurate description of some of the speakers in Glück’s poetry, too – a poetry which was equally fascinated by footfalls and echoes, gardens and doors.

6 Narcissism

To read Eliot was for her ultimately ‘to feel the presence of the abyss’. In this, he couldn’t be more different from Rilke, in whose poetry she sensed ‘the mattress under the window’. Glück was generous to Eliot; she wasn’t to Rilke. She found his poetry inward-looking and self-absorbed. Whereas in Eliot’s poetry we feel ‘the anxiety of the need and the anguish of effort’ – making for what she called ‘a desperate intimacy’ with the reader – Rilke keeps us out and is far more interested in protecting himself than in engaging with his subject or his readers.Footnote ⁸² Even more unforgivably, this being her chief objection to Rilke, while he was happy to suffer, he was in her view suspiciously too quick to let go of suffering. One of the aims of this book moving forward is to test Glück’s fractious relationship to Rilke.

It wasn’t just that Rilke’s attitude towards suffering was objectionable; it was also that his influence on poetry was lamentable. He was to blame for the facile, voyeuristic, and self-involved poetry of some of her contemporaries. Glück discussed Rilke’s influence on American poetry in her essay ‘American Narcissism’ in 1998. She was again not forthright about who these poets who have followed Rilke were, simply stating that this happened in ‘the mid-seventies’, when ‘poets looking inward’ began ‘simultaneously, to watch themselves looking inward’. ‘What begins to characterize American poetry around this period’, she asserted, ‘is a voyeuristic relation to the self’.Footnote ⁸³ In a word, what all this poetry had in common was narcissism. Glück’s definition of narcissism derives straight from the source, from the myth of Echo and Narcissus in Ovid, which she reads as ‘all psychology, no narrative’ and as a story – or, more accurately, a ‘static image’ – concerning ‘the self’s engagement with the self’.Footnote ⁸⁴

She was not, of course, the first to find Rilke narcissistic. His good friend Rudolf Kassner found his poetry ‘the consummation of that marvellous Narcissus-like lyricism that began in England with Keats’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Glück agreed that, in its modern iteration, the story of Narcissus ‘adopts and extends Romanticism’s attentiveness to the soul, or the inward’.Footnote ⁸⁶ But whereas Romanticism was interested in the personal as a corrective to abstract and ‘sterile practice’ and looked for the self in an open and innocent way (‘It made the soul an object of proper study’), and whereas Keats’s poetry in particular was about the ‘soul seeking’, the poetry of Rilke and of those writing in his wake is obsessed with nothing but the poet’s self.Footnote ⁸⁷ In fact, as Glück wrote in what is one of her sharpest observations about Romanticism, ‘the Romantic imagination, projected onto the myth of Narcissus, more naturally mirrors Echo, the pursuer’. For Romanticism was at least self-searching and self-reflective, whereas the narcissistic poetry of Rilke and his followers is self-absorbed: it is ‘transfixed infatuation, that overwhelmed awe that admits no secondary response’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Her point was that, like the mythological Narcissus, this poetry was only interested in the poet’s own reaction: absence of distance again.

Nor did later investigators of the self have for Glück the fascination with the examination of their own initial responses that we find in Rilke and those poets she accused of following him. Henry James wrote about himself, but he approached his subject with ‘curiosity and openness’. James’s are books of ‘inquiry, not conclusion’, which makes them, Glück found, repeating the distinction she used in ‘The Forbidden’ in 1993, ‘dynamic rather than static’. Whitman, customarily thought of as the source for modern American poetry’s interest in the self, also got off the hook. Unlike ‘narcissism’s restricted gaze’, Whitman’s was democratic. Linking narcissism to megalomania and exceptionalism, Glück felt that Whitman ‘celebrates in himself … what is average, common’. Same with Dickinson, who also managed to be ‘never guilty of narcissism’s superficiality and self-aggrandizement’, her revelations being always limited and selective.Footnote ⁸⁹

In narcissistic poetry, said Glück, there’s no distance ‘between private reverie and public display’. On the contrary, ‘the world, it is assumed, will duplicate the narcissist’s fascination with himself, since what else could possibly be of equal interest?’ It’s not quite exhibitionism, though ‘something like exhibitionism’ is one of its results. It is art that is ‘inviolable’, presuming rather than soliciting interest. For this reason, it preempts the view of the reader. It prizes only its own perception, its eye ‘explicitly trained on the self’. And a social agenda does not protect against this narcissism: ‘one of the more appalling forms of narcissism’, Glück wrote in ‘American Narcissism’, in a rare and brief foray into something resembling political commentary, ‘is the appropriation of or annexing of a real other … Whole nations, whole torn civilizations turn out to be waiting to be given voice’.Footnote ⁹⁰

7 The Mirror and the Lens

Glück’s dismissal of Rilke is, on first impression, surprising. For all her criticism of Rilke, she too was interested in the void and in what she disparagingly called the Rilkean self’s ‘helpless receptivity’. In her poetry too, the outside world is only indirectly alluded to and the human world is all too often, as she wrote of Rilke’s poetry, ‘largely absent’ and filled instead with ‘memories, ghosts, signs’.Footnote ⁹¹ Like in Rilke’s, in her poetry there is little to no engagement with politics and the impression she sometimes gives is that which Rilke also gives: in Michael Hofmann’s words, that ‘Even in the context of unworldly poets, he is like one of those cabinet ministers who don’t know the price of a bottle of milk.’Footnote ⁹² Like Rilke once more, Glück searched for spiritual dread, her talk of ‘wonder and awe and terror’ in ‘Against Sincerity’ and ‘terror and hunger’ in ‘The Culture of Healing’ repurposing Rilke’s advice in The Book of Hours: ‘Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.’Footnote ⁹³ And if Rilke has, as Glück claimed in ‘American Narcissism’ in 1998, a ‘vocation for mourning’, so has she, using, in an interview she gave a few years after this essay, the exact same words to reflect on her own attitude towards loss: ‘I understand loss’, she told Joanne Feit Diehl in this interview; ‘I have I suppose a vocation for mourning’.Footnote ⁹⁴

In fact, when she credited Rilke with a ‘vocation for mourning’, she was actually praising him for a ‘major insight’, namely that ‘the present could be treated as a subject for elegy’:

Maybe it’s the case that, to adapt Christopher Ricks on Philip Larkin, when a poet speaks well of another poet, she is speaking, well, of herself.Footnote ⁹⁶ Or maybe it’s a case of ‘it takes one to know one’. For, whatever else she might have said, the predominant feeling in Glück’s poetry is often that which we also find in Rilke: longing and mourning. More likely, it was that Glück recognised that Rilke’s poetry was appealing but perilous, slowly slipping into a narcissism she didn’t want for her own. After crediting Rilke in the passage quoted above for his discovery of ‘a spiritual terrain never before visible or audible’, she explained that it’s a quick step from there to narcissism. Rilke, she argued,

To make the self the beloved is to offer only one perspective, the perspective of Narcissus: poetry that loves itself, that doesn’t allow in other voices (echoes, we might say), that looks in the mirror too much and too closely, and that, assured in its own image, is not interested in those qualities Glück prescribed for poetry: ambiguity, uncertainty, self-questioning, above all distance.

The final point Glück made when she talked about Rilke was that, paradoxically, he found it too easy to let go of suffering. ‘Requiem for a Friend’ is Rilke’s powerful poem about the death in 1907 of his friend, the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker. Glück took issue with Rilke’s unwillingness to sit with his loss longer:

One cannot help but believe that Glück was being a little harsh on Rilke here. ‘Requiem’ was composed a whole year after Modersohn-Becker’s death. A few lines earlier, Rilke, in the Mitchell translation Glück was reading, tells us:

Can’t grief feel too heavy? Can’t it feel possessive? Is it wrong to try to let go? She wasn’t, I don’t think, saying that we shouldn’t; she was instead rightly linking this feeling to Narcissus’s curse, which was to love and mourn simultaneously, and pointing out the perils of Rilke’s mixing melancholy with desire. The best definition of narcissism, Rilke’s translator, Michael Hamburger, wrote, was provided by Rilke himself, in one of the short Narcissus poems he wrote (and which Hamburger translated so movingly): ‘Whatever left him’, Rilke wrote of Narcissus, ‘he loved back again’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Rilke loved longing so much, Glück wrote in ‘American Narcissism’, that ‘he required those separations that precede or guarantee longing’ – in short, loss. He knew how we all at times like to ‘transform what is at hand into something sufficiently remote, immaterial, to be re-created as the focus of longing’, how in order to do so we talk about the present as if it were already the distant past, and that in memorialising a person we also erase them.Footnote ¹⁰¹ This is what happens to Echo in Ovid. She is pushed away, erased. It is also what happens to Narcissus himself, turned into and remembered as a flower.

In response to Rilke’s poetry, Glück came the closest to offering a coherent set of strategies the poet could use to ensure the desired distance from suffering and to guard against narcissism. As correctives to Rilke’s narcissistic poetry, she prescribed modesty, humour, and detachment. Modesty, stylistically expressed as matter-of-factness, ‘checks narcissism by deflecting attention from the self’. Humour and detachment offer ‘alternative, or conflicting, views’. Humour articulates and ensures a split ‘between the self that feels and the world that interprets’ and ‘sees … that its genuine suffering may look, from the outside, trivial’.Footnote ¹⁰² Detachment, the most important of the three, ensures that multiple voices and perspectives are taken into account. There is a self, Glück wrote, that acts in the world; and then there is the poet or the speaker. By keeping them at bay, a poem can create ‘debate’. The opposite of debate is control. This is what she accused Rilke of, creating art that is too ‘autocratic or controlling’ and in which ‘The poet lets in what allows his projections, or cannot impede them’. The outside self (or ‘acting self’), she argued, is often ‘intent on domination or control’. Through detachment, a poem can divorce this acting self from the meditative speaker, so diminishing ‘the identification on which narcissism depends’.Footnote ¹⁰³

Glück’s thinking of poetry as debate is fascinating considering that lyric poetry is customarily thought of as poetry of one voice: what Eliot, with help from Gottfried Benn, called the ‘first voice’ or ‘the voice of the poet talking to himself – or to nobody’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Glück’s insistence on poetry as debate explains perhaps why many of her poems, chief among these The Wild Iris, stage conversations and include dissenting opinions: it is poetry that aspires to see beyond oneself. In Glück’s terms, opposites must be seen and not disregarded (or quickly reconciled); ‘the point is to entertain them simultaneously and, in so doing, comprehend increasingly complex realities’. She used a quirky metaphor to describe what for her the best poetry does, in this case the poetry of C. K. Williams: his poems, she said, ‘have more other hands than a Hindu god’. Not only does Williams incorporate distinct and different voices, but his poetic self is ‘too guileful, too contradictory, too mobile, to produce stable reflection’, ensuring that his speakers are the opposite of Narcissus and Rilke. Speakers searching for themselves was, we’ll remember, what she liked in Forché, Rhodes, Bidart, and Eliot. Here she added that it’s important for speakers in poetry not to fix themselves in a mirror. Narcissism for Glück chooses a mirror. Detachment, ‘American Narcissism’ concluded, ‘recognizes that the outside world is perceived through a lens’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

8 Icarus

In Book 3 of Metamorphoses, Ovid discusses Narcissus’s slow demise. How, ‘nearly mad, he turned back to the face / And churned the pool with tears until the waves / Obscured its features’ and how, with his ‘self-admiring eyes now closed in death’, he was melting ‘as golden wax / Melts under gentle flame’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Unlike the sudden, spectacular, and quick drop of Icarus, Narcissus’s demise happens slowly. Icarus’s story, and that of his father, the mythological inventor Daedalus, is told in Book 8 of Metamorphoses, where we read how, as part of his plan to escape from Crete, Daedalus devised wings and, turning to his son Icarus, ‘he fixed his arms with untried wings’. Did he force them on him? Or did Icarus beg for them? Ovid is unclear. What we know for certain is that Daedalus first tried the wings on himself and then instructed Icarus to fly neither too low nor too high but instead to ‘follow him and learn the fatal skill’. But Icarus disobeyed or misheard his father’s advice and quickly came down, crashing to his death into the area of the Mediterranean that was to take on his name.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The moment Daedalus realises his son is gone is heart-wrenching: pater infelix, nec iam pater. The loss, the letting go, is quick: in Soucy’s translation, ‘His luckless sire—a sire no longer’; in Raeburn’s older and slicker version, the ‘unlucky father, no longer a father’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In his 2014 poem ‘Daedalus, After Icarus’, Saeed Jones imagines Daedalus after his son’s drop and death as ‘a man with a pair of wings strapped to his arms’ walking ‘along our beach, talking to the wind’ until he suddenly ‘turns, and runs toward the water’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

If it’s difficult in Ovid or Jones to tell exactly what, if anything, Daedalus did to save Icarus, Daedalus is nowhere to be seen in everybody’s favourite rendition of the fall: Pieter Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (Figure 1), a brilliant, wondrous, mesmerising painting which has Icarus drowning (or is he waving?) alone in laurel green waters.Footnote ¹¹⁰ With Daedalus nowhere in sight, and with everyone else minding their own business, Icarus is left to suffer alone in the bottom right corner. We can just about see his legs, and one clasping hand. In William Carlos Williams’s pithy description, Bruegel’s Icarus is ‘a splash quite unnoticed’.Footnote ¹¹¹ ‘Who cares’, Anne Sexton asked in her own retelling of the fall in 1962, ‘that he fell back to sea?’ Look at him ‘come plunging down’, Sexton tells us, ‘while his sensible daddy goes straight into town’.Footnote ¹¹² For W. G. Sebald, it is not just the father but ‘the whole / of nature somehow’ that turns away from the boy’s misfortune.Footnote ¹¹³

Figure 1 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, ‘La chute d’ Icare’, Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Bruxelles.

Wikimedia Commons.

Bruegel’s painting uses detachment, humour, and modesty – the very things that Glück prescribed for poetry. It perceives the world through a lens not a mirror and considers multiple points of view (many of which are points of blocked view). There is in it a (silent) debate between different perspectives and, in the manner Glück liked, opposites are neither disregarded nor reconciled. It’s impossible to find in it one clear message or detect in it an autocratic artist self. The artist is detached and seems uncertain. (Actually, the artist is uncertain in more ways than one: we’re still not sure who painted the version in front of us.)Footnote ¹¹⁴ Icarus’s fall is tragically comical, reminding us, as Glück said in ‘American Narcissism’ humour could do, that profound suffering may still look trivial from the outside.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Finally, the painting depicts quotidian activities, its emphasis on the matter-of-fact, to use Glück’s definition of modesty, ‘deflecting attention from the self’.Footnote ¹¹⁶ One point of the painting made through the use of what Glück called ‘modesty’ is that, whereas we sometimes assume that we’re the hero of the story, we’re much more likely to be a bystander. Another, emphasised in how our initial lack of attention reproduces exactly the lack of attention that allowed Icarus to drown, is that the more closely we look into ourselves, the less likely we are to see the suffering around us.

The sea does a lot of the work in Bruegel’s painting, the waves drowning Icarus’s splash, the water absorbing the son who fell from the sky. This is what the sea does. ‘March’, a poem from Glück’s 2009 collection A Village Life, captures its capacious power:

An earlier poem, ‘Portland, 1968’, part of Descending Figure (1980), describes someone standing ‘as rocks stand’ when the sea reaches them ‘in transparent waves of longing’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ The sea in this poem, like in ‘March’, like in Bruegel’s painting, moves and moves on. The sea in the Fall is that described by Glück in ‘March’ and in ‘Portland,1968’ and also that in Wallace Stevens’s ‘Sea Surface Full of Clouds’, its ‘Paradisal green’ and the ‘sea-blooms from the clouds’ diffusing not in the Pacific calm of Stevens’ poem but in the northern Aegean. In both painting and poem the colour shifts ominously:

As in Stevens, the green in the painting becomes first ‘sham-like’, then ‘uncertain’, ‘malevolent sheen’, ‘macabre’, ‘too-fluent green’, ‘turquoise-turbaned’, until, finally, ‘the sea / And heaven rolled as one and from the two / Came fresh transfigurings of freshest blue’.Footnote ¹¹⁹

In ‘Portland, 1968’, the unnamed addressee refuses to turn towards the speaker (or the reader) and won’t reveal ‘for whom you are suffering, / for whom you are standing still’.Footnote ¹²⁰ Describing the effect of some of Stevens’s poems on her in an essay called ‘Invitation and Exclusion’ (1994), Glück marvelled at how they ‘are not addressed outward’ but are instead only ‘allowed to be overheard’. To overhear is, Glück said, ‘to experience exclusion’.Footnote ¹²¹ Landscape with the Fall of Icarus doesn’t give up its privacy and there’s a lot we’re excluded from. Of the subjects announced in the title, only the landscape can be properly seen, and a lot of that is not very clear. Even if only just, even if slowly, we can still see Icarus, but the advertised fall is only implied. The painting works through ellipsis: suggestion through omission. ‘I am attracted to ellipsis’, Glück said of her own work, ‘to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence’. Because, she went on,

In the painting, ruins – buildings eroded by time and water – are at the heart of the composition. These ruins emphasise the story’s incompleteness, reminding us (in Glück’s words) of ‘a world in which they were whole, or were to have been whole’. The ruinous painting knows like Glück that ‘All earthly experience is partial … that which we do not know, of the universe, of mortality, is so much more vast than that which we do know’.Footnote ¹²³

What Glück didn’t say in her discussion of Stevens was that to overhear is curiously also to be drawn in. It is to hear the voices of others, even if faintly or incompletely – to want in. In ‘every poem, from the private meditation to the epic or the drama’, wrote Eliot, ‘there is more than one voice to be heard … and part of our enjoyment of great poetry is the enjoyment of overhearing words which are not addressed to us’.Footnote ¹²⁴ As our eye wanders Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, it lands on and takes in different stories, all partial, and some inaccessible. The ruined building must be the prison tower in Crete from which Daedalus and Icarus tried to escape. In Crete, Daedalus built the hollow cow for Pasiphaë and then for her furious, vengeful husband Minos, the labyrinth inside which he imprisoned the Minotaur (in a further sad story about a father and a son). The bird sitting on the branch on the right’s got to be a partridge. Daedalus, we know from Ovid, ended up in Crete after his expulsion from Athens for pushing his nephew off a cliff: unlike Icarus, Talos did manage in the end to fly, but only after he was turned into a bird, learning the hard way to avoid heights.Footnote ¹²⁵ Is there a corpse in the thicket on the left? Is that a white head peeking out of the bushes? Did someone else suffer while we were busy looking for Icarus? Or is this man defecating (as x-rays have suggested), a reminder, perhaps, of earthy realities and a sign of Bruegel’s vulgar humour? Why is the ploughman dressed more like a prince than a peasant? Why is there only one horse that pulls the plough and not the expected two? Why does this ploughman have only one foot on the furrow? The sailors on the ship with the anamorphic hull seem to have furled the wrong sails, the lateen at the back, the foresail caught in a squall, and the bellow of the sail at odds. Why are the shrouds of the foremast wrongly positioned and is there a second ship charging into port with a full spread of sail?Footnote ¹²⁶ In the manner of poetry Glück liked the best, in which ‘questions outnumber answers’, Bruegel’s painting leaves us to wonder – and wander.Footnote ¹²⁷

Glück would have also approved of the painting’s dynamism. That was the term she used (in ‘The Forbidden’) to describe poetry that prioritises ‘curiosity regarding an unfolding future’ and which is ambiguous, uncertain, and changing, as against ‘static’, and (in ‘American Narcissism’) poetry that is not interested in a conclusion.Footnote ¹²⁸ When a poet creates ‘something whole’ and gives directions, she had earlier stated in ‘Disruption, Hesitation, Silence’, that amounts to ‘bossiness’ at the cost of ‘virtuosity’. ‘What wholeness gives up’, she wrote in this essay, ‘is the dynamic: the mind need not rush in to fill a void’.Footnote ¹²⁹ Bruegel’s painting does not give us Icarus’s story as complete but leaves it unfinished, and prolongs it, telling not the story of his death but of his falling.

In her essay ‘Story Tellers’, Glück distinguished between lyric and narrative by focusing on how one is marked by stasis, while the other by unfolding. Whereas ‘lyric time disdains or opposes history’ and can therefore be thought of as ‘stopped time’, narrative refuses finality.Footnote ¹³⁰ She was in this essay praising Robert Pinsky and Stephen Dobyns, whose poetry, she wrote, resists the lyric’s ‘commitment to the concluded, the archetypal, the timeless’.Footnote ¹³¹ A painting is, of course, very different to a poem, but Bruegel’s painting captures what Glück appreciated in the narrative. It is not just a question of sequential action. To explain what she meant, she turned once again to Ovid. ‘When Apollo pursues Daphne and Daphne turns into a laurel tree’, Glück argued, ‘something occurs that, despite its narrative structure, seems unmistakably the terrain of lyric’. Ovid’s story of Daphne ‘moves through time not as evolutionary unfolding but toward transformation’ and this makes the story operate under lyric time, ‘a condition independent of time, one thing or one state having become another’. By contrast, narrative time is interested in the ‘endless unfolding of time’ and is never happy to land on a still point: ‘it finds in moving time what lyric insists on stopped time to manifest’.Footnote ¹³² Bruegel’s Icarus is not yet dead; he’s still transforming, his story unfolding, and nothing is yet final.

Something similar happens in the opening poem of the last poetry collection Glück published in her lifetime, the 2021 Winter Recipes from the Collective, which mixes lyric intensity with narrative to tell a story about a different kind of fall. As well as dynamic, unfolding, and changing, it is one of the most beautiful poems Glück ever wrote. It displays what Elisabeth Dodd called Glück’s ‘postconfessional personal classicism’, Dodd’s term for the way in which in Glück’s poetry ‘the voice of the self is muted by an amplified sense of the mythic, the archetypal … without losing the compelling presence of an individual, contemporary “I”.Footnote ¹³³ Glück doesn’t invoke any myth explicitly but there’s a strong mythic quality to her poem. To me, it recalls the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Long ago, Vernon Lee described the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice as ‘a myth of the dawn, one of those melancholy, subdued interpretations of the eternal, hopeless separation of the beautiful light of dawn and the beautiful light of day, which forms the constantly recurring tragedy of nature’.Footnote ¹³⁴ Glück’s poem restages exactly such separation. Or perhaps it was another myth Glück drew upon: can we also hear Icarus falling and Daedalus darting the skies for him?

The speaker and their unnamed companion go on a private journey that ended with a fall but which, like Bruegel’s painting, is given to us as still unfolding.

When a story is given to us incomplete, it stirs us to complete it. The opposite, a climax resolved, would have required a ‘presentation of extremes to the eye’, which, as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing wrote in his discussion of the painter’s task, ‘clips the wings of fancy’.Footnote ¹³⁶ Bruegel’s painting of Icarus does not clip the wings of fancy. This is also what Glück wanted when she advocated for dynamism. The genius of Bruegel’s painting is in how it asks us to complete a finished story: Icarus is dead but what exactly went through his mind in his final minutes on earth? That’s often how religious paintings work, mixing lyric intensity with narrative, to use Glück’s terms, asking us to recomplete a done story. One stunning example of a religious painting that foregoes climax fully resolved is Fra Angelico’s Attempted Drowning of Cosmas and Damian (Figure 2), which depicts a story about a fall that ends very differently to that of Icarus’s – but which has a delicious likeness to the later painting.

Figure 2 Fra Angelico, Die hll. Cosmas und Damian und ihre Brüder werden ins Meer gestürzt, von einem Engel errettet und befreien Lysias von Dämonen, um 1438/40, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen-Alte Pinakothek München.

Creative Commons.

Attempted Drowning of Cosmas and Damian is one of a series of seven panels Fra Angelico painted on the predella in San Marco in Florence around 1435, all of which tell the story of Cosmas and Damian, the twin physician brothers sentenced to death (under the directives of Diocletian) by the governor of Cilicia, Lysias.Footnote ¹³⁷ As part of their torturing, they were thrown into the sea, alongside their three brothers, Anthimus, Leontius, and Euprepius, only for them to be eventually rescued by an angel. In the panel that now hangs in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, we see (moving counterclockwise) the two brothers as they fall into the water; an angel sweeping down from the sky to rescue them; all five brothers being escorted out of the sea by this angel; the siblings brought before Lysias; and, finally, after they pray for a remorseful Lysias, the two demons that have been tormenting him making their exit.Footnote ¹³⁸

There’s a chronological cohesion in the story told that we don’t find in Bruegel, and it is also one of rescue and triumph rather than of fall and death ignored. But look to the top left of the background and you’ll see, like in Bruegel, the hero (one of the twin brothers) submerged into green waters. Notice how the angel falling from the sky sees him but how on earth no one seems to notice, and no one looks his way. More than a hundred years before Bruegel, Fra Angelico captured in a similar way the lonely nature of suffering.

9 Human Position

Auden famously named this suffering’s ‘human position’ in his 1938 poem, ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, reminding us of the enduring and essential problem of suffering: of how it is not only unevenly distributed but also and so often a lonely business. Glück would also address the problem of suffering’s shareability – in The Wild Iris – where she’d also question, like Auden, its theological justification. Unlike Auden, however, she would not dwell on its injustice.

Bruegel’s painting mapped for Auden a chasm (incompleteness again) between an individual’s suffering and the world around them. Not noticing another’s suffering, Auden felt, is something we humans do terribly well. Susan Sontag would coolly notice years after Auden that ‘it seems normal for people to fend off thinking about the ordeals of others, even others with whom it would be easy to identify’.Footnote ¹³⁹ Even if we noticed, however, would we understand, given that, as Elaine Scarry put it, our sensations of pain are interior to our bodies and so hearing about another person’s pain ‘may seem as distant as the interstellar events referred to by scientists who speak to us mysteriously of not yet detectable intergalactic screams’?Footnote ¹⁴⁰ If we look back to Bruegel’s painting for a moment, we’ll see the shepherd, the fisherman, and the sailors all looking another way from Icarus. Auden was certain that they aren’t just looking another way but turning away from Icarus. The ploughman ‘may / Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, / But for him it was not an important failure’. The ‘expensive delicate ship’ might also have seen ‘Something amazing’ – but it ‘Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on’. And it’s not just humans who don’t notice but animals, too: ‘dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse / Scratches its innocent behind on a tree’.Footnote ¹⁴¹

Like Bruegel’s painting, Auden’s poem notices Icarus’s suffering and, like the painting, it mimics this injustice by looking away. Auden left Icarus in the margin Bruegel had banished him to, never naming him but merely mentioning, in the last four lines: ‘white legs disappearing into the green / Water’ and ‘a boy falling out of the sky’.Footnote ¹⁴² It’s been fashionable to take aim at Auden for that. In ‘Memo to Mr Auden, 29/8/66’, Alistair Te Ariki Campbell accused him of acting like ‘the ploughman’ and ‘the delicate / Expensive ship that sees something amazing, perhaps / Even tragic – a boy falling out of the sky, / But you have a poem to finish and sail calmly on’.Footnote ¹⁴³ Paul Tran’s recent retelling of the painting and of Auden’s poem rescues Icarus and assigns him agency and authority. Tran’s poem recentres the story of ‘the child // following the father, as the child was instructed to, / from one dungeon to another / of sky’. Tran’s Icarus comes to slowly recognise – to ‘accept’ – that ‘it was me, and only me, falling from the sky // to the sea’. As Icarus falls crashing, he looks up:

‘His’ here is the man who raped the speaker: ‘the jeans unbuttoned and unzipped, the right hand placed over my mouth / while the left hand held me, held me’. Tran’s poem wants us to know that ‘suffering, its human position, isn’t entirely random’.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

A year before ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, Auden had concluded his poem ‘Spain 1937’ with the observation that ‘The stars are dead; the animals will not look’. Unlike the animals and the various travellers in Bruegel, unlike the British government, Auden did look, and volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ ‘Academic knowledge is not enough’, he told his friend E. R. Dodds at the time: ‘I feel I can speak with authority about la Condition Humaine of only a small class of English intellectuals and professional people and that the time has come to gamble on something bigger.’Footnote ¹⁴⁶ In ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, however, he took the longer, more distant, tragic view: we suffer, and the ‘dreadful martyrdom’ runs its course. The mention of martyrdom and then of the children who suffer its effects brings two other Bruegel paintings into view and explains his decision to name the poem after a museum where several Bruegel paintings hang. ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, it turns out, looks away not just from Icarus but also from Bruegel’s Icarus painting. The Census at Bethlehem (1566) depicts the census of Quirinius that brought Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem. The Massacre of the Innocents (1565–66) shows the fabled slaughter of all babies under two in the vicinity of Bethlehem at the orders of the paranoid King Herod. There is also possibly a third painting hidden beneath Auden’s lines, Winter Landscape with Skaters and a Bird Trap (1565), which, like The Census, features children skating on a pond. ‘For the miraculous birth’, Auden wrote with reference to Christ’s birth, ‘there always must be / Children who did not specially want it to happen’.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Auden was expert at understatement: the children murdered by Herod, since celebrated as the first Christian martyrs, had no say in their sacrifice. As if that weren’t bad enough, their sacrifice wasn’t even particularly significant.

To see our suffering as lonely, inevitable, and insignificant is to accept that ‘The world is complete without us’. That’s how Glück put it in an introductory essay she wrote in 1993. This is, she added, an ‘Intolerable fact. To which the poet responds by rebelling, wanting to prove otherwise’.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ and Landscape with the Fall of Icarus accept the tragic nature of suffering’s ‘human position’ and quietly and in their own way rebel against this position. The poet’s voice, Glück wrote in that 1993 essay, ‘though it has no impact on the non-human universe, profoundly alters human experience of that universe, as well as of the world of relations, the solitude of the apparently marginal soul’.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Auden and Bruegel recognised suffering’s loneliness yet also directed our attention to the marginal soul drowning. The stanza containing Auden’s oft-quoted line about poetry making nothing happen (in his poem on W. B. Yeats) should be read right up to the end: poetry, Auden told us, ‘survives / A way of happening, a mouth’.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ As we’ll see when we turn to The Wild Iris, this is how Glück conceived of the role of poetry too.

10 All Alike

Auden was not the first (or the last) to make the association between Icarus and Christ, who no more asked for his ‘miraculous birth’ than the martyred children of Bethlehem their death.Footnote ¹⁵¹ A link between Icarus and Christ had been drawn by Gérard de Nerval in ‘Le Christ aux oliviers’, a cycle of five sonnets published in de Nerval’s 1854 collection, Les Chimères. During his final hours, we know from Mark, Christ and his disciples ‘went to a place called Gethsemane … and he began to be deeply distressed and troubled’. Knowing that he would soon be captured, that he was about to be betrayed by Judas, Christ told his companions, Peter, James, and John, that ‘My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death’. ‘Going a little farther,’ Mark tells us, Christ ‘fell to the ground and prayed that if possible the hour might pass from him’.Footnote ¹⁵² However, his companions had fallen asleep, and no one could hear him. De Nerval tells the story a little differently, maybe more believably. In Derek Mahon’s translation-adaptation of ‘Le Christ aux oliviers’, Christ raises his ‘wasted hands’ towards heaven (‘as poets do’). Feeling ‘abstracted in his silent sorrow’ because he ‘knew / himself abandoned by his faithless friends’, he exclaims: ‘There is no God!’Footnote ¹⁵³ Robert Lowell translated it a little differently: Christ was ‘lost in wordless agonies’ and ‘cried aloud, “No, God does not exist”’. While his friends sleep, Christ (in Lowell’s words) tells of how he’s ‘scaled’ God’s heaven, how ‘I have walked his ways, / broken, bleeding, and sick for many days’. His mood darkens quickly: ‘All is dead.’ Having been left alone to ‘suffer and cry’, and with no one there to hear ‘the eternal victim groan and shake, / giving the world his flooded heart in vain’ and ‘Fainting, defeated, bleeding from each vein’, Christ’s voice reaches first Judas and then Pilate, who instructs ‘some satellite’ to ‘Go, catch the fool’. This fool was Christ, a ‘God who’d lost his use, / drowned Icarus remounting to the sky’.Footnote ¹⁵⁴

Christ and Icarus move in opposite directions, one ascending to heaven and the other dropping from the sky. Their difference couldn’t be greater or starker: one can ascend and keep ascending, the other, burnt, cannot; one dies because of his own hubris, the other because of ours. Yet both suffered lonely. Earlier in the poem, de Nerval hinted at the comparison-to-come when he wrote (again in Lowell’s translation) about how Christ ‘scoured the sky, / And lost my foothold in the Milky Way—’.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Christ’s journey towards Gethsemane sounds like Icarus’s fateful flight:

In the original New Testament Greek, Mark’s word for how Christ feels in Gethsemane is ἐκθαμβεῖσθαι (ekthambeisthai). In this context, this translates as ‘distressed’ or as ‘overwhelmed’. In modern Greek, ekthambos would come to be associated with the shock one feels at seeing a very bright light: we still speak in Greek of the sun’s rays as ‘εκθαμβωτικό φως’ (overwhelming light).

The other word Mark uses to describe how Christ feels is ἀδημονεῖν (adêmonein).Footnote ¹⁵⁷ For Emmanuel Falque, Christ moves ‘from the loneliness of alarm (thambos) to the real solitude of anxiety and anguish (adêmoneo)’.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ For Hans Urs von Balthasar, in Gethsemane, Christ comes to feel ‘the horror which isolates’.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Rilke imagined Christ’s horror, which he isolated in his own Gethsemane poem, ‘The Garden of Olives’, part of his New Poems from 1902–1907. Christ was ‘all lost’, Rilke wrote, in Susan Ranson and Marielle Sutherland’s translation, beneath the olive trees and their ‘grey leaves, just / drained and grey’. He knew that ‘I am alone // I am alone with all this human pain / I came here to relieve’. God his father is nowhere to be seen or heard. It’s dark and getting darker: ‘It was the night that came.’ It is a lonely, terrible, and frightening thought, Christ’s suffering feeling insignificant. Out there in the garden, ‘The night that came was of no special kind; / it went as many others have’ and, as in Auden, Rilke’s dogs go on with their doggy lives: ‘dogs just sleep and stones just lie’.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ His prayers unanswered, feeling lost, Rilke’s Christ comes to see how ‘Those who lose themselves are cut loose soon. / Fathers leave them simply to their fate, / and they are excluded from their mother’s womb.’Footnote ¹⁶¹ There is something heart-breaking in Christ’s admission, which could also be Icarus’s, that those who suffer are cut loose. That as Mark put it, suffering alone overwhelms ‘to the point of death’. About suffering, the New Testament Fathers too were not wrong.

In Matthias Grünewald’s Crucifixion, a marvellous painting from the early sixteenth century now hanging in Basel (Figure 3), we can only just about see Gethsemane. Sebald described the garden in the background of Crucifixion as a landscape that ‘reaches so far into the depths / that our eyes cannot see its limits’. He wrote of how

Somewhere in the dark background – we can’t much see, and definitely not at first look – Christ kneels alone and lost, unloved. Sebald found in this painting a ‘catastrophic incursion / of darkness, the last trace of light / flickering from beyond, after nature’ and linked its darkness to the sun eclipse Grünewald would have witnessed, Sebald was certain, on October 1, 1502. But the painting as it survives also captures eerily Christ’s fall from the sky as depicted in de Nerval’s poem, his body looking as if sunburnt.

Figure 3 Matthias Grünewald, Die Kreuzigung Christi. c. 1510–15. Kunstmuseum Basel.

Wikimedia Commons.

In the concluding sequence of ‘The Garden’, a five-part poem in Descending Figure, Glück imagined a body’s loneliness after it dies:

The body is alone and unnoticed by ‘the remote, trembling lights of the village’, which are so busy they are ‘not pausing for it as they scan the rows’. The loneliness of death described here, of the body as it ‘waits to be claimed’, is the loneliness we can imagine Icarus feeling in the sea and Christ in Gethsemane.Footnote ¹⁶³ Glück didn’t consider Christ’s loneliness in Descending Figure, but she did wonder about Mary’s. Before Glück, Rilke had looked at Christ’s suffering from Mary’s perspective in his poem about Michelangelo’s Pietà, where he imagined the mother’s sadness at the thought that her son’s limbs have been untouched by love.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Looking at the same sculpture in her own Pietà poem in Descending Figure, Glück described Mary’s awed sadness at the thought that her son ‘wanted to stay / in her body, apart / from the world / with its cries, its / roughhousing’.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Glück’s Mary is in this poem wistful and overwhelmed. In another poem about Mary, this time in her following collection, The Triumph of Achilles, Glück thought of her as a woman ‘looking neither forward nor backward, / sitting in perfect composure on the tired animal / as the child stirred, still sealed in its profound attachment—’. The depiction of Mary in this poem, ‘Winter Morning’, is reminiscent of how Bruegel showed Mary sitting on the donkey in Census at Bethlehem, her pregnancy revealed by the tiniest of folds in her dress. Glück’s ‘Winter Morning’ goes on to recount Christ’s final hours on earth in terms that recall Icarus’s first and last flight. As Christ is ‘raised on a cross’, there are ‘crowds representing / humankind, the lost / citizens of a remote time’ and birds that ‘circled the body, not partial / to this form over the others’. These birds know, Glück writes in an inversion of the resurrection myth, that men can’t fly: that ‘men were all alike, / defeated by the air’.Footnote ¹⁶⁶

11 In the Garden

Glück’s The Wild Iris stages a conversation between a human speaker, a divine presence, and plants and flowers in a garden that has plenty of de Nerval and Rilke’s Gethsemane about it. The unnamed human speaker, often desolate, lonely, and impatient, speaks in poems that take their titles from liturgical prayers: ‘Matins’ and ‘Vespers’.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Like Christ in Gethsemane, this speaker feels like their suffering is unnoticed. They tell an ‘Unreachable father’ that they feel ‘abandoned’ and unloved compared to ‘the beasts of the field, even / possibly, the field itself’.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ That’s how the third of the ten ‘Vespers’ puts it, making explicit the human speaker’s frustration at the divine’s indifference and their sense that animals and plants are much more loved by the divine than humans. The comment the book immediately makes on suffering is the same as that made earlier by Bruegel, Auden, Rilke, and de Nerval: that it is a lonely affair. The other point made is that it’s difficult for humans to unquestioningly accept suffering as part of their lives.

An early draft of the poem expanded on this frustration. It’s titled ‘Affliction’, it’s stored in Glück’s archive at the Beinecke, and its opening is directed at the divine:

Other versions probed the divine’s position on suffering further:

And yet another, emphasised how much the human speaker desired an answer:

Glück kept most of the words but dropped the part about the divine’s position on suffering when she published The Wild Iris in 1992. It would, however, remain one of the collection’s principal subjects.

This frustration is mostly voiced by the human speaker, to whom it feels that the divine presence discloses ‘virtually nothing’, existing mostly as silence, silence that the speaker finds excruciating and ‘useless to us’. The speaker pleads for a sign of love and care without much success, receiving, in one ‘Matins’, only ‘absence / of all feeling’ and ‘the least / concern for me’. Like Gethsemane, the garden of The Wild Iris is dominated by non-responsiveness: ‘Now, everywhere I am talked to by silence.’ At times this loneliness is too much to take: ‘What is my heart to you’, asks one ‘Matins’, ‘that you must break it over and over / like a plantsman testing / his new species?’ It is terrible to feel like an experiment, the speaker complains in this same poem, like ‘the lowest of your creatures’. One ‘Vespers’ puts it painfully pithily: ‘why / torment me?’Footnote ¹⁷⁰

The speaker’s isolation and frustration is emphasised by the darkness that envelops them. Christ reached Gethsemane at about midnight and, accordingly, both Rilke and de Nerval set their poems at night.Footnote ¹⁷¹ Light conditions change in The Wild Iris but there’s plenty of darkness in its garden, too. In one ‘Vespers’, the speaker says that ‘I live essentially / in darkness’. Even when the sun emerges, as in the first of the series of ‘Matins’, darkness refuses completely to give way: underneath this new sun there are ‘hollow stems of the white daffodils’ and ‘dark / leaves of the wild violet’.Footnote ¹⁷² It’s the reverse of what John described in the New Testament: the sun may shine on the dark in the garden of The Wild Iris but the darkness is never quenched.Footnote ¹⁷³ The penultimate poem by the human speaker, a ‘Vespers’, has this darkness mingling with silence:

Here, the speaker sees darkness as evidence of the divine’s absence. Mixing metaphors, Glück describes the absent voice as ‘starry’. It’s an effective metaphor because, though they’re part of our universe, stars are unreachable, some already dead, all light-years away. The human speaker in The Wild Iris is – as Robert Frost said of poets – ‘acquainted with the night’.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ This human, however, speaks in ‘Matins’ and in ‘Vespers’, prayer liturgies delivered in low light: matins before dawn, vespers at sunset. There’s darkness in The Wild Iris – but there’s light in it too.

In the second of the seven ‘Matins’, the speaker takes us back to the moment ‘when we were first / exiled from heaven’, suggesting that the garden of The Wild Iris may more closely resemble Eden than Gethsemane.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ In this ‘Matins’, we read about how the ‘Unreachable father’ made a replica of heaven on earth (‘beauty on either side, beauty / without alternative’), the only difference between the original and the copy being that, on earth, there was meant to be a lesson. ‘Except’, the speaker says, ‘we didn’t know what was the lesson’.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ As if responding to the question Glück asked in that early draft of the ‘Vespers’, the ‘Matins’ here suggests that the search for explanation about suffering’s nature in the divine might be misguided; that there’s cruelty in the way our fate is being decided upon without us having a say; or maybe it is that we must simply accept the absurdity of it all.

According to the familiar story of the Fall, we were banished from heaven when we disobeyed God’s instructions. In Glück’s revised history, darkness came not after our exile from heaven but after, as this same ‘Matins’ puts it, ‘we exhausted each other’. It was then that ‘Years / of darkness followed’ and ‘we took turns / working the garden’. (Were ‘we’ collaborating or were they unable to work together and so only in turns?) According to legend (nowhere, actually, to be found in the Bible), flowers – Our Lady’s Tears – grew out of Eve’s tears when she was exiled from the Garden of Eden. There’s no such causal chain in the garden of The Wild Iris, and no such symbolism: ‘the first tears / filling our eyes as earth / misted with petals, some / dark red, some flesh colored—’Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Likewise, Peter wrote that ‘All flesh is like grass’, meaning that humans wither like vegetation.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ Yet again, no such lesson can be got here. Only the knowledge, driven home by the poem’s concluding distich and delivered with matter-of-factness, that we often love what doesn’t love us back.

12 Empty Hands

The Wild Iris will neither follow nor adhere to any one theology but it will still tap into the rich cultural depot of religious myth, and its human speaker will continue to ask questions about (and of) the divine. In ‘The Garden of Olives’, Rilke described how Christ rested his forehead ‘deep in the dustiness of his hot hands’.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ In de Nerval’s Gethsemane, Christ held his ‘wasted hands’ towards heaven, his desperate position compared by de Nerval to that of poets.Footnote ¹⁸¹ In The Wild Iris, the hands of the speaker searching for the divine in one ‘Matins’ are likewise ‘empty’ but they are pointed towards the earth rather than the sky.Footnote ¹⁸² More closely than de Nerval or Rilke’s Christ in Gethsemane, the hands in this ‘Matins’ recall the hands of the speaker in Rilke’s The Book of Hours, a sequence of poems which, like Glück’s, searches for a divine presence that won’t clearly come forward but which, unlike The Wild Iris, is absolutely assured of its existence.

In one poem, Rilke’s speaker lifts his ‘half-hands’ up to God ‘in nameless pleading, / that I might discover again those eyes / with which I once beheld you’. The speaker is a painter. Earlier, his hands were ‘trembling’ and ‘clenched and afraid’. He tells God that ‘I listen always. Give a small sign. / Feel me here’ – even in the knowledge that ‘a thin wall lies between us’. He finds himself feeling ‘too alone in the world’ and ‘too slight in the world’ to be noticed by God. He is also uncertain whether God can hear him at all, beseeching Him, at one point, to listen to his song: ‘it is lonely and unheard’. ‘Don’t you hear me / surging against you with all my senses?’, he protests in another poem.Footnote ¹⁸³ Once again, we are in a garden, the speaker telling God how ‘We stand basking in your garden year on year’ and how ‘you inherit the green / of bygone gardens and the silent blue / of scattered skies’. Like the human speaker in The Wild Iris, Rilke’s painter searches for the divine in the earth rather than the sky, because God ‘breaks through the earth in trees’ and ‘he rises from the soil’ and is surrounded by the ‘morning dew, / flowering around you like a meadow—’. Anticipating Glück’s speaker, Rilke’s feels envious that God is more accessible to the earth than to him: ‘I want to grasp you’, one poem tells God, ‘the way the earth grasps you’.Footnote ¹⁸⁴

We are yet again surrounded by darkness, and silence. In this garden, ‘the dark collects everything’. God ‘is more like night than night itself’, and ‘dark and like a web / of tangled roots all drinking soundlessly’.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ Like in the garden of The Wild Iris, it’s likewise unclear in this garden whether the divine can feel us, hear us, or notice us:

This God remains for the most part unknown even if He is existent and everywhere, His voice being to us ‘like stone’: ‘we’d like his speech to be arresting, / but we only half hear his words’. Mixed with earth, Rilke’s God is sometimes a ‘forest’ and ‘water and burgeoning wilderness’, other times a ‘fig tree, which even in rock-hard ground / superabundantly bears fruit’, and other times ‘nestling like seed in what is smallest’. At one strange moment, this God is described as ‘the dew, the matins, and the maid, / the stranger, the mother, and our death’.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ Father, mother, or stranger, Rilke’s God is as lonely as the speaker, if not more. He is ‘anxious’ and ‘in that huge room alone’. He needs us as much as we need Him: ‘What will you do, God’, the speaker asks without getting an answer, ‘when I die?’Footnote ¹⁸⁸

The human speaker with their empty hands in The Wild Iris is also looking for a sign: ‘for courage, for some evidence / my life will change’. But the divine is not forthcoming and the speaker doesn’t have faith that it will. The summer is ending, the leaves are turning and dying, and ‘a few dark birds perform / their curfew of music’. Silence is enforced only for the human, who once more is made to feel excluded. ‘You want to see my hands?’, Glück’s speaker asks:

What is the sign plead for here? And what might it mean to continue and where to? This is not the first time we encounter someone lost and looking in Glück’s poetry. Her 2004 collection Faithful and Virtuous Night opens with a poem called ‘Parable’, a retelling of the story of King David and a poem about a group of individuals unable to decide ‘whither or where we might travel’, whether their journey should have a purpose, and if they are ‘pilgrims rather than wanderers’. Unable to reach an agreement, ‘after many years’ they find themselves ‘traveling / from day to night only, neither forward nor sideward’ which, in a way, the poem concludes, ‘seemed / in a strange way miraculous’.Footnote ¹⁹⁰

Another poem in the same collection, this one called ‘Afterword’, tells a similar story differently. It is spoken – just like other poems in the collection are, and just like Rilke’s The Book of Hours is – by a male painter. In this poem, this ageing painter feels the chaos and the ‘Darkness, silence: that was the feeling’.Footnote ¹⁹¹ The poem, according to Marie Olivier, shows ‘how the perception of the world can be anaesthetized and artistic expression silenced by suffering’.Footnote ¹⁹² The painter tries to overcome a ‘“crisis of vision”’. Taking a deep breath, he becomes for a moment a child again, when he was ‘an explorer to whom the path is suddenly clear’.Footnote ¹⁹³ He is now able to remember a different kind of solitude than the one he has been experiencing in the present moment:

The mention of Kant (with whom Glück actually shared a birthday) is intriguing. What, on earth, was Kant’s exalted solitude?Footnote ¹⁹⁵ A possible theory (rather than explanation) is made possible earlier in the poem, at the moment the ageing painter steps out of his crisis of vision:

Are we to understand, via Kant, that a transcendental ego is needed to organise sensations into a unified experience and that this ego, which is not the empirical self, somehow orders (‘forms’) the chaos (‘stream’) of experience? It’s a stretch, but we might say that the point of Kant’s transcendental dialectic (as against ‘rational theology’) is that there is no possible proof of God’s existence, because such proof would presuppose the possibility of knowing the thing-in-itself, which would be impossible to know since only phenomena can be proper objects of knowledge. That was, after all, roughly, why Kant wanted to set the bounds of knowledge: to make room for faith. Kant didn’t talk about ‘signs’ but one could think of his claim as being that there is no possible phenomenon that could serve as a sign of how the thing-in-itself actually is. Kantian faith would then be pure courage in the sense of being completely ungrounded in knowledge or evidence or the possibility of proof. In ‘Afterword’, Glück’s ageing poet proceeds to ask, ‘What would my twin have said, had my thoughts / reached him?’ Is his twin Kant, with whom, we were just told, he shares a birthday? Or is this Glück, born on the same day as Kant, speaking?

The speaker’s tone and the description of religion as a ‘cemetery’ suggest that neither the painter nor the poet would have been content with blindly accepting religious faith. Unlike Kant (or Rilke), the ageing painter/poet could not simply or unquestioningly admit God into their thinking.

It wouldn’t have been worth us thinking much about Kant in a discussion about Glück’s attitude towards suffering had it not been for the fact that an early draft of the ‘Matins’ discussed above had originally a slightly different ending to the published version. ‘You want to see my hands?’ one draft in Glück’s archives in the Beinecke asks:

Another version ends a little differently:

Kant didn’t make it in the final and published version of this ‘Matins’, but the speaker in The Wild Iris is not unlike the ageing painter who shares Kant’s birthday in ‘Afterword’: both are trying to break through a moment of stasis, both want to continue, and both have a difficult time unquestioningly accepting faith in the divine.

13 More in Sorrow than in Anger

Glück described in an interview the divine in The Wild Iris as a ‘divinity, or celestial presence … whatever is not included in the human, and the natural’.Footnote ¹⁹⁹ Glück’s divine lyricist, speaking ‘as a phenomenon of natural force through the “voice of nature”’, often sounds, as Daniel Morris has argued, like a Yahweh-type God.Footnote ²⁰⁰ Twice this divine presence is referred to as a ‘father’, though Glück said that, to her, it sounded like her mother and, moreover, that she wouldn’t herself call it god: it’s, she said, ‘shorthand’.Footnote ²⁰¹ Call it god, divinity, or celestial presence, find it in the Bible or elsewhere, gender it mother (as Glück did in that interview) or father (as her book does), the divine in The Wild Iris expresses very human feelings, being by turns angry, disappointed, misunderstood, and, much like Rilke’s God in The Book of Hours, whose gender is equally uncertain, lonely.

The first we hear from this divine presence is in the seventh poem of the book, our having to wait further emphasising how it is not exactly forthcoming. In Descending Figure twelve years earlier, Glück had depicted a garden similar to the one of The Wild Iris (‘crowded with flowers’) and imagined a divine presence with a voice that doesn’t reach us clearly or exactly:

These lines are from the poem called ‘The Garden’, specifically the section in it tellingly titled ‘Origins’. Glück retold in this section the story of Genesis, explaining how much humans needed a god, and how dreams of redemption set us up for failure. Like in the garden of The Wild Iris, the speaker in Descending Figure looks for a god and tries to hear its voice but the divine is either not sending signals or sending mixed signals, its seeming toughness and cold-heartedness symbolised in the marble of the moon. Glück returned to this divine voice in the final poem of Descending Figure, ‘Lamentations’:

In The Wild Iris, this god finally has their say. For a long time, the divine presence of The Wild Iris has been observing us from above and speaking to us ‘through vehicles only, in / details of earth’. But we’ve not been paying attention. Fed up with our ignoring of the signs and, worse, disputing its meaning, it announces that it is ‘prepared now to force / clarity upon you’.Footnote ²⁰⁴ A similar point is made in the next poem, in which, after admitting that ‘I have two selves, two kinds of power’, it tells us, rather creepily, needily, and with a hint of passive aggression, that ‘I have shown you what you want: / not belief but capitulation / to authority, which depends on violence’.Footnote ²⁰⁵

As the book progresses, the divine appears to be more in sorrow than in anger. It looks down on us literally and metaphorically: ‘When I made you, I loved you. / Now I pity you.’Footnote ²⁰⁶ It dismisses our souls as ‘small talking things’ and ‘incidental’, and refers to us condescendingly as ‘little ones’.Footnote ²⁰⁷ It says it wants to help but doesn’t know how: ‘How can I help you when you all want / different things’? This divine presence grows exasperated: ‘Listen to yourselves, vying with one another—// And you wonder / why I despair of you’.Footnote ²⁰⁸ It complains that ‘you would never accept // a voice like mine’ and finds us greedy and ungrateful: ‘I gave you every gift … you wanted more.’Footnote ²⁰⁹ It’s as though we hear a parent: loving, well-meaning, yet sometimes controlling and resentful. At one point, it blames us for being born: ‘You wanted to be born; I let you be born. / When has my grief ever gotten / in the way of your pleasure?’ To this divine presence, ‘Each thing / born is my burden’.Footnote ²¹⁰ In one poem, it sounds terrifyingly close to Daedalus, telling us to stay close to it, not to veer from its path: ‘You were / my embodiment, all diversity // not what you think you see / searching the bright sky over the field.’Footnote ²¹¹

The divine reserves special criticism for the way we love and form relationships: as absolute beginners.Footnote ²¹² In a poem called (like that other one in Descending Figure) ‘The Garden’, a young couple is ‘planting / a row of peas, as though / no one has ever done this before’. The couple have a little argument:

We love selfishly, desperately, tragically, this being, as so often in Glück, one of the major sources of our suffering. In another poem, ‘Love in Moonlight’, ‘a man or woman forces his despair / on another person, which is called / baring the heart’.Footnote ²¹⁴ And in ‘April’, the couple are each too interested in themselves to notice the other’s grief: ‘Do you suppose I care’, the divine asks, ‘if you speak to one another?’Footnote ²¹⁵ The divine presence raises two points here, both of which relate to Glück’s views on suffering. First, we can be self-absorbed. This criticism is levelled at us elsewhere in the book, whether it’s ‘never imagining the sound of my voice / as anything but part of you—’ or thinking (in ‘April’) that ‘No one’s despair is like my despair—’.Footnote ²¹⁶ The divine keeps telling us to look beyond ourselves, that, however difficult it is to understand, ‘You were not intended / to be unique’. We are, the divine presence tells us in ‘Midsummer’, ‘fixed like telescopes on some / enlargement of yourselves—’.Footnote ²¹⁷ To use Glück’s later term, we are being accused of narcissism.

The second and more difficult point the divine makes in The Wild Iris is that suffering is what marks us out as humans – or, more accurately, as beings in the world. This point is made most forcefully in ‘April’, a poem originally titled ‘The Overlord’:

The question of suffering’s existence and of the divine’s ‘true position on suffering’, as Glück put it in that early draft of one of the ‘Vespers’, will always be difficult to answer. Nothing has tried harder to answer it than religion, yet no religion could ever fully account for its existence. Ecclesiastes offered the most honest account of it: suffering simply exists, and we can’t say why God made it so or why ‘the good … receive the treatment the wicked deserve; and the wicked the treatment the good deserve’.Footnote ²¹⁹ We could accept it as simply existing (Scripture) or as the work of Satan and his agents (New Testament); as retribution for sin (Qur’an); as the means by which we are made aware of God (Suffism); as source and route for redemption (Shi’a); as the result of a basic conflict and tension in the universe (Upanishads); or, as in Buddhism, the result of desire and craving that can be conquered through compassion (the bodhisattva ideal). Still, however, we wouldn’t be able to explain why it has come to exist.Footnote ²²⁰ Responding to a question many including Glück herself asked, the divine presence in ‘April’ accounts for suffering’s existence in the world by telling us that it is a marker of our humanity and how it can tell us from one another, and from other beings. It is a quality and a sign of life, and it is part of our fabric: as another poem puts it, ‘You are not suffering because you touched each other / but because you were born’.Footnote ²²¹

‘To know you’ would suggest also that our suffering can bring us closer to the divine, a conventional strategy for broaching difficult questions about suffering among many religions. In The Wild Iris, Glück turns the religious justification for suffering on its head. The most moving poem spoken by the divine in The Wild Iris comes early in the collection when, sounding like a mix of Echo and Ophelia, it tells us that we should not seek its voice in ‘the clear sound’:

Our suffering is not what binds us to the divine; it’s the other way round: suffering is not what brings us closer to the divine but what brings the divine closer to humans. The divine presence of The Wild Iris is as capable of suffering as we are, like Eve in Eden, Christ in Gethsemane, Icarus in the Aegean. Despite being god, it is part of the garden we all inhabit. It is part of nature, as sensitive and susceptible to seasons as plants and humans. At one point, the divine protests that, by the end of summer, there’s no one to take care of it. If only we’d open our eyes, it says in this poem called ‘End of Summer’, ‘you would see me, you would see / the emptiness of heaven / mirrored on earth’.Footnote ²²³

As the collection moves to a close, the divine appears increasingly caring. Having already reassured us (in ‘Spring Snow’) that it hears our cries (‘I have heard your cries, and cries before yours’), it makes the same point once again in ‘Sunset’:

There’s still a cutting ambiguity to its words, however, as, for example, when it tells us in ‘Retreating Light’ that ‘You will never know how deeply / it pleases me to see you sitting there / like independent beings’.Footnote ²²⁵ The word ‘like’ hurts because it undermines our sense of independence; it also makes the divine sound like it doesn’t really care, calling into question its own good faith. Any possibility for resolution or union is sabotaged by the last words Glück gives to the divine presence of The Wild Iris: ‘I can erase you / as though you were a draft to be thrown away’.Footnote ²²⁶ For all its searching, all its tapping into religious language and myth, all its irreverent rewriting of Biblical myth, The Wild Iris cannot settle on one answer regarding suffering’s existence, choosing instead ambiguity, self-questioning (on both the part of the human speaker and the divine), melancholy, discomfort, and multiple perspectives that prioritise debate over consensus.

14 Back from the Romantics

The debate includes the natural, which has its say too. Genesis 2:9 tells us that out of the ground of Eden grew ‘every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food’ (including, of course, the tree of life and the tree of knowledge). In yet another deviation from the Biblical story, in The Wild Iris there are no plants that can be consumed by humans, and no trees whose fruit is edible.Footnote ²²⁷ Further, even though its garden might share plenty with the mount of olives of Gethsemane, olive trees cannot grow in The Wild Iris. Nor fig trees: this is not the garden of Rilke’s Book of Hours. In one ‘Vespers’, the speaker plants a fig tree in Vermont as a ‘test’ to see whether the divine exists, only to find out that fig trees do not grow in the ‘country of no summer’.Footnote ²²⁸

Eighteen of the fifty-four poems have living organisms as their speakers, their identity revealed in their titles. These living organisms – the flowers, the grass, the clover, the vine, and the one flowering tree – speak in similar tones but they are still independent entities, with lives and grievances of their own. Adding to the human’s sense of exclusion, they seem much more in concert with the divine than the human speaker. And just as we do not have a free pass into the divine world, so the plants in the garden of The Wild Iris keep us at bay. It’s a delicate and somewhat paradoxical strategy. Glück gives voices to the natural (just as she does to the divine), and they express human feelings in human language. It’s a strange feeling, because we instinctively assign voices to human speakers, and because – in the lyric tradition in which Glück is writing – we customarily assign the lyrical ‘I’ to the poet. Though it has much wisdom to pass on, the non-human world refuses to be co-opted by those in whose language it speaks. By keeping us at bay, the non-human entities in the collection guard against the narcissism that Glück detected in many poems about suffering.

Further, and just like with the divine that speaks, by having the natural speak, Glück was able to turn on the lyric’s preoccupation with itself once more. The poetry of invocation, and specifically apostrophe, ‘the calling out to what is by definition absent’, as Ann Keniston has argued, is always doomed to stay with itself at the expense of the other. The Wild Iris, Keniston maintains, responds to this problem in an ironic way: it critiques apostrophe by persisting with it. It sees apostrophe as ‘outdated’, as ‘associated with the Romantics’, and as ‘often ridiculous’, and by utilising it extensively, it emphasises ‘the self-absorption of the lyric’ to stress that, for the lyric, ‘the other is in fact not there’.Footnote ²²⁹ Keniston’s argument helps us read a decision Glück made during the composition of the collection. An early draft of a poem addressed to birch trees concludes with the lines ‘I will take you back from the romantics’; or, reworked, ‘I will save you from the romantics’. This poem, originally called ‘Birches’, eventually became a ‘Matins’ in which a human speaker addresses, first, the divine, and then the natural world (the birch trees). As though admitting defeat at the initial plan to rescue the natural from the Romantics, the lyric from self-absorption, the published poem concedes: ‘I might as well go on / addressing the birches […] let them / bury me with the Romantics’.Footnote ²³⁰ In the published version, the speaker has no option but to passively (‘let them’) accept that their desire for intimacy will remain unobtainable, and that also and at the same time that they must remain paralysed by this desire.Footnote ²³¹

Glück was fascinated by plants and flowers, also trees and leaves, and very often she set her poems in gardens.Footnote ²³² These gardens can be quiet and triumphant, dark and disorienting, monastic and communal. Her speakers wander through them, feeling, as one poem in Descending Figure puts it, ‘so alive, among the stone animals’ or lonely in the knowledge that, as another poem, from A Village Life, has it, the garden (an olive grove in this case) is a ‘trap’, because nature may be beautiful but it is ‘useless and bitter’.Footnote ²³³ ‘Before poetry began pitching its tent in the library and museum’, Glück wrote in her introduction to Jay Hopler’s debut collection, Green Squall (2006), ‘before, that is, mediated experience supplanted what came to seem the naïve fantasy of more direct encounter, a great many poems began in the garden’. Glück lamented in this short essay how after centuries of pastoral and horticultural poetry late-twentieth-century poets came ‘to treat the natural world as a depleted or exhausted metaphor’ until, finally, ‘disinterest has given way to fierce stewardship as the environment grows more and more imperiled’.Footnote ²³⁴ In The Wild Iris, Glück bucks the trend. She harnesses the old power of gardens and the ‘naïve fantasy’ of direct encounter they harbour while, at the same time, prohibiting identification with nature – or union with the divine.Footnote ²³⁵

Taken together, the human, the divine, and the natural are, like the parts that make up Bruegel’s land- and sea-scape, living next to each other without always communicating or paying attention to each other. As readers, we experience the exclusion and inclusion of overhearing and become ‘privy’, as Bidart wrote of The Wild Iris, ‘to a vast hierarchic celestial conversation in which those who talk only dimly apprehend one other’. Bidart felt that this is a conversation that ‘intertwines identities that remain separate but whose coexistence sustains the grandeur and stability of the whole’.Footnote ²³⁶ The whole may be like in Bruegel grand but it is – exactly like in Bruegel – far from stable.

Glück spoke about the powerful effect that William Blake’s poetry had on her as a child, and there’s an element of Blake’s The Book of Thel (1789) in the way flowers speak in The Wild Iris.Footnote ²³⁷ In that poem, Blake told the story of a young woman who wanted to find out why all things in nature must end. Hearing her question and sensing her worry, the ‘Lilly of the valley’ tells Thel that it may be small and lowly and weak ‘Yet I am visited from heaven’. In his Sermon on the Mount, Christ is supposed to have told his disciples not to worry about earthly possessions (in this case clothes) but to instead ‘Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin’.Footnote ²³⁸ In Blake’s poem, the lily reassures Thel that God treats it well: it is ‘clothed with light’ and ‘fed with morning manna’.Footnote ²³⁹ In The Wild Iris, plants talk and share their deepest thoughts but, unlike in Blake, they don’t exactly talk back to us, in the sense that it’s never a true dialogue: their talk neither invites nor expects a response.Footnote ²⁴⁰

It’s also not always clear who they address.Footnote ²⁴¹ The Jacob’s ladder directs its words both to an indetermined ‘you’ and to a ‘lady’:

The white rose asks three questions, all without a clear recipient:

The gold lily addresses a ‘father and master’. The ipomoea also mentions a ‘master’ but seems to address someone or something else:

Glück’s ambiguity about the plants’ audience is deliberate; to presume that they speak to us would be as narcissistic as when we confuse the divine speech for ours (or our speech for that of a god’s).

As in Bruegel’s landscape, there is an asymmetry to the world of The Wild Iris: we all belong in it yet are different from and often indifferent to one another. The plants and flowers insist on this difference. Violets want us to know that they ‘do not grieve / as you grieve, dear / suffering master’ and mock us for ‘clasping your great hands, / in all your greatness knowing / nothing of the soul’s nature’.Footnote ²⁴⁵ Field flowers are also unimpressed, even condescending:

It’s tough to think that someone’s thoughts are uncompelling, and tough to hear that someone thinks that about us. Field flowers find us not just boring but also unwilling to change: ‘How / would you know, who are neither / here nor there, standing in our midst?’Footnote ²⁴⁶ The scilla tells us that ‘You are all the same to us, / solitary, standing above us, planning / your silly lives’.Footnote ²⁴⁷ The witchgrass is resentful (‘If you hate me so much / don’t bother to give me / a name’), the lamium accusatory (‘You and the others who think / you live for truth and, by extension, love / all that is cold’), and the clover has had enough of our hypocrisy: ‘You should know / that when you swagger among us / I hear two voices speaking, / one your spirit, one / the acts of your hands.’Footnote ²⁴⁸

Some plants are more forgiving and understanding, but even when they appear caring their words cut deep. The daisies tell us that ‘It is very touching … to see you cautiously / approaching the meadow’s border in early morning’. This is both said in earnest and in judgement:

It’s foolish to think of nature as our friend, to pick the petals of a daisy to find out if we are loved like we did when we were children. It makes sense, as the daisies state at the poem’s opening, ‘to resist / nostalgia’.Footnote ²⁴⁹ But it’s also pathetic: the daisies tell us to grow up. ‘Hush, beloved’, says the white lily at the book’s end. There’s a softness to the white lily’s words, which both aim to comfort us and to express a complaint. ‘It doesn’t matter to me’, it says, ‘how many summers I live to return’.Footnote ²⁵⁰ Perhaps it doesn’t matter to white lilies greatly, but there’s a familiar asymmetry in this relationship. The point made here is also that some plants live longer than other, that there’s unevenness in the natural world. It’s in their nature and there’s nothing they can do about it. The white lilies might come back, snowdrops ‘waken again … in the cold light / of earliest spring’, and the witchgrass will outlive us all: ‘I’ll be here when only the sun and moon / are left, and the sea, and the wide field.’Footnote ²⁵¹ But the gold lily ‘will not speak again, will not / survive the earth, be summoned / out of it again’, the ipomoea is not ‘permitted to ascend ever again’, the silver lily ‘won’t see the next full moon’, and the white rose ‘won’t last’.Footnote ²⁵²

What all the flowers and plants in The Wild Iris have in common is their consciousness: fears, feelings, desires, and voices – which is to say that they all suffer. Resist anthropomorphism, The Wild Iris, tells us, and look beyond your reflection, beyond yourselves, and you’ll find that other things around you are (also) suffering. Glück was not Auden, nor Auden’s Bruegel, but The Wild Iris is as interested in questions about suffering’s uneven distribution and about the ease with which we bypass the suffering around us as the older masters. By giving equal voice to flowers and plants, to the divine, and to humans, Glück added her own voice to those before her who found suffering’s position to be lonely and unnoticed and who, at the same time, sought to share it. She did so in her own way, by utilising many of the strategies she prescribed in her essays as correctives to narcissism: a matter-of-factness that deflects attention from the self (what she called ‘modesty’); humour, which acknowledges that ‘suffering may look, from the outside, trivial’; detachment, reminding us that there are ‘alternative, or conflicting, views’ and which so ensures that multiple voices and perspectives are taken into account; and the separation of poet from speaker.Footnote ²⁵³ Glück teasingly called attention to this separation by including in the collection references to ‘my husband’ and to ‘Noah’ (the name of her son) while, at the same time, refusing to share with us any private information.Footnote ²⁵⁴ All these strategies create distance, and distance, which is a form of patience, Glück thought, is what a poet writing about suffering should aim at.

15 ‘The Wild Iris’

The collection’s opening poem, the one that gives the book its title, is also the one that sits most oddly with the book. Despite its prominent position, or perhaps because of it, it’s a poem we gradually lose sight of as the sequence progresses. The Wild Iris works, we might say, in the opposite way to Bruegel’s painting – though towards the same outcome. Our eye lands quickly on the titular poem, it’s drawn by it, struck by its force, but its voice is subsequently lost in the business of the ensuing debate: in the grievances, the arguments, the disagreements. It’s a poem spoken by a flower (or, to be exact, its bulb), a flower that originates in the ‘wild’, in marshes, swamps, wet meadows, along shorelines, and in forested wetlands, its connection to water reminding us once again of Icarus. No other flower or plant in the poem is described as ‘wild’. Like the other poems spoken by plants or flowers, ‘The Wild Iris’ keeps us at bay, revealing some information as it withholds other. Like the rest of the book, it exhibits detachment, matter-of-fact modesty, ambiguity, and a cutting irony, and it fuses lyric intensity while precluding stasis, operating both under lyrical and narrative time. It’s the collection’s – and Glück’s – most powerful statement about suffering, showing suffering to be a necessarily lonely affair but also potentially transformative.

The opening ten words quickly draw us in:

It’s almost flash fiction. Someone or something, we don’t yet know who or what, has experienced suffering that was very much their own. (Was it also lonely?) It was not fatal, but we don’t know when it ended or whether it will recur. We also know that, whatever else this suffering involved, it went on for some time. We don’t know for how long or why, but we do know that it took place in the past. Unlike with the paintings of Bruegel and Grünewald, we arrive in Glück’s poem after the tragic incident. Moreover, unlike both these paintings with well-known stories behind them, here we lack the information we would need to pry. ‘Pain’, Emily Dickinson wrote, ‘has an element of blank; / it cannot recollect / When it began’, and so it seems with the suffering described here.Footnote ²⁵⁶ Further, we also don’t know whether the door was open or closed, where it led, or whether the speaker went through it. Was there a transition or a shutting into? We keep guessing but the speaker doesn’t second-guess: there was suffering and there was a door.

Doors are unexpected in gardens, even more so in the type of wild surroundings a wild iris would grow in, but Glück’s poetry loves doors as much as it loves gardens. Usually the doors are shut, blocked, locked, or abandoned.Footnote ²⁵⁷ Even when they are open, their thresholds are seldom crossed: instead they are stared at, leaned on, or lingered beneath. In the early poem ‘Bridal Piece’, from Firstborn, a family is ‘frozen’ in the doorway. In ‘Seconds’, also in Firstborn, a son stands ‘rigid’ in the doorway.Footnote ²⁵⁸ In ‘Abishag’ (in The House on Marshland) and in ‘Terminal Resemblance’ (Ararat), it’s a father who stands in the doorway. In ‘The Doorway’ in The Wild Iris, a child hovers at the door. In ‘A Village Life’, the concluding poem of her 2009 collection of the same title, a dog ‘waits for me in the doorway’.Footnote ²⁵⁹ Another poem from the same book, ‘Midsummer’, has the poem’s speaker ‘Standing at the front door at twilight’ and in the earlier ‘October’ (Averno), the speaker ‘stood / at the doorway’ again.Footnote ²⁶⁰ In ‘The White Series’ (Faithful and Virtuous Night), a voice sounds like ‘a great door’ that is ‘swinging open’ but it’s not yet entered.Footnote ²⁶¹ In ‘A Slip of Paper’ (A Village Life), the door turns out to be a trap-door that leads only to ‘the country of the dead’.Footnote ²⁶²

Occasionally, doors are finally gone through, but never in a straightforward way. In ‘Ripe Peach’ (The Seven Ages), a speaker has long been looking at the fruit on the table. Unable or unwilling to reach for it, they spent a lot of their life ‘famished with love’ and caught between ‘anticipation and nostalgia’. Glück tells us that the speaker has long identified with ‘the hard pit’ and not with the fruit, slowly coming to doubt its existence and to think of the peach as ‘A replica’. This Prufrock-like speaker was paralysed by ‘So much fear. / So much terror of the physical world’, until, at the poem’s end, they walk ‘a long walk / from the door to the table’ and towards the peach that was ‘in a wicker basket’.Footnote ²⁶³ But do they dare eat the fruit? Like with Prufrock, it’s unclear.

In ‘The Gift’, from Descending Figure, a poem addressed to ‘Lord’, a young son standing at a screen door (a door designed to allow air and light and nothing else to move through it) welcomes a dog with the beginnings of language:

The almost-formed word ‘doggie’ is the threshold of something important, for the child is struggling to cross into the word the new line turns to: language. His transition to a realm beyond that of the doggy life is encouraged, ironically ‘perhaps / accidentally’. ‘May he believe / this is not an accident?’ Or, read aloud, the question mark lost, the sentence may instead be a form of blessing: please let this child believe that all this is more than a cosmic accident. In ‘The Wild Iris’, the door at the end of the iris’s suffering is similarly the door through which the iris will eventually break to find again its voice.

In ‘Immortal Love’ in Vita Nova, Glück compared a body to a door that opens for the soul to look out. Like in ‘The Wild Iris’, the door opens, ‘Timidly at first … Then in brazen hunger’. The speaker in this poem is advised ‘to live in the body, not / outside it, and suffer in it / if that comes to be necessary’. For, the poem goes on, ‘How will god find you / if you are never in one place / long enough, never / in the home he gave you?’Footnote ²⁶⁵ Likewise in the earlier poem, the iris tells us of its life inside the earth, the home inside which it is necessary to suffer, and not outside it.

For most of the poem, the iris looks inwards, just as the poem looks inwards. Quickly after the opening, the poem plunges to the moment the iris slipped underground:

The mention of ‘nothing’ unsettles us, pointing to what we can’t fathom: absence of life and presence of negation. The sun is not the overwhelming sphere of hot plasma that burnt Icarus but the distant star that flickers on the surface of the sea inside which Icarus is drowning, the sun described in one ‘Vespers’ by the human speaker as ‘neither falling nor rising’.Footnote ²⁶⁷ We are kept out through the non-responsiveness of the blank space, the delay of the enjambments, the self-contained stanzas, unities that, as Isaac Cates put it, speak to each other only obliquely.Footnote ²⁶⁸ There’s a noise-cancelling feel to the poem. The speaker’s demand that we ‘Hear me out’ accuses us of not listening, not paying enough attention to this other world, and when the iris says, ‘I tell you I could speak again’, it twice makes the point that we do not hear it, reminding us that we don’t always see the suffering around (or in this case below) us. The poem does, of course, like Bruegel’s painting, like Auden’s poem, make us pay attention. Even if we were to reach for the iris, speak to it, it wouldn’t, couldn’t, however, hear us. Like the iris inside the ground, we are limited to overhearing, and we too are not properly heard.

The feeling is similar to the one Glück described in 2006 in her poem ‘Averno’. A parent talks to her children but the children ‘pay no attention’:

‘It is terrible’, the iris goes on to report, ‘to survive / as consciousness / buried in the dark earth’. The single syllables sound like nails in a coffin: ‘in the dark earth’. How it must feel being locked in, knowing, thinking, struggling to move or be heard: ‘being / a soul and unable / to speak’.Footnote ²⁷⁰ Antigone immured in a cave comes to mind, also Persephone who (as Glück wrote in Averno) spent half her life in a garden in the underworld.Footnote ²⁷¹ The iris retreating into an opening reminds us also of Thecla’s retreat into a rock (a story told in the tenth century by Symon Metaphrastes). More than Thecla, the iris resembles Margaret of Antioch (known as Marina in the East), the apocryphal virgin martyr who is swallowed by Satan and who through patience, strength, and charisma manages to break out. Her virtuous ability to see, Benjamin A. Saltzman explained, marks her out from those around her who make her suffer and who cannot see, hear, or speak.Footnote ²⁷² In a fifteenth-century Book of Hours (Figure 4), Margaret is depicted covered in a brilliant blue cloak, surrounded by leaves and flowers.

Figure 4 Detail of a miniature of St Margaret emerging from the dragon, from a Book of Hours, France (Troyes?), c. 1460–c. 1470.

© British Library Board, Harley MS 2974, f. 165v.

The iris may share something with these charismatic women but none of these comparisons actually works. It was God who helped Thecla step into the opening to save herself from the men who had come to rape her, while, with Margaret, it was again God who helped her escape. There’s no suggestion in ‘The Wild Iris’ that anyone is trying to hurt the iris, or that anyone is looking after it either. Like the book it gave its title to, ‘The Wild Iris’ is not a religious poem – certainly not Christian. For the iris, suffering just happens. There’s no divine intervention and no apocalyptic triumph, however miraculous its reemergence is.

At first, the iris emerges out of the depth it’s been confined to slowly:

Although it suffers when locked in the ground, the iris doesn’t panic. There’s a resilience to the language and a sense of control. Glück would write years later (in 1999) in an essay that she was ‘drawn … to sentences that falter’, but in ‘The Wild Iris’ her sentences didn’t, because the iris does not dither.Footnote ²⁷⁴ The syntax is conventional, the diction modest, the tone declarative. The most frequently used verb in the poem is to be, the strongest of verbs, testament in the poem to the iris’s perseverance: ‘there was’, ‘it is’, ‘it was’, ‘being’, ‘to be’. There’s none of the love-while-mourning Glück found in Rilke, nor does the iris parade its suffering as what Glück would name ‘pornography of scars’. In its quiet determination, the iris recalls less Blake’s lily of the valley than Kierkegaard’s lily of the field, which ‘keeps silent and waits’. Like the iris, this lily, Kierkegaard wrote in his discussion of Matthew 6:24–34, ‘does not ask impatiently, “When is the spring coming?” because it knows that it will come at the appointed time; it knows that it would not benefit in any way whatever if it were permitted to determine the seasons of the year’. ‘For the lily’, Kierkegaard goes on, ‘to suffer is to suffer, neither more nor less’.Footnote ²⁷⁵

The language remains limited and controlled until, suddenly, language and iris flourish and adjectives spring out of the dead land:

Adjectives assign qualities and meaning. The only possible advantage of suffering, Glück wrote in ‘The Culture of Healing’ in 1999, is when it provides insight and meaning. In that essay, she also urged ‘disciplined refusal of self-deception’.Footnote ²⁷⁷ The speaker of ‘The Wild Iris’ has no illusions: it recognises and it remembers. It also does what Glück said in the same essay she did herself when she was suffering: tried to stay alive in case something changes.Footnote ²⁷⁸ For the iris, when something did change, that change felt great.

‘I have repeatedly seen’, Glück claimed in 1993, ‘long silence end in speech’.Footnote ²⁷⁹ The most succinct reading of ‘The Wild Iris’ is as long silence that ends in speech. It’s also the best account of how Glück thought a poet should approach and use suffering in their work. Prolonged silence guarantees distance, and distance can get to truth and to speech that is powerful. The return of the iris to life may share something with William Wordsworth’s ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ – for Wordsworth the aim of all good poetry. In the ‘Preface’ to the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth explained that this poetry ‘takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity’.Footnote ²⁸⁰ In 1991 in ‘The Idea of Courage’, Glück spoke about the poet as experiencing ‘ecstatic detachment’.Footnote ²⁸¹ The iris’s re-emergence is one of such detachment. More than Wordsworth, it follows more closely, as Reena Sastri has argued, Eliot’s idea of poetic composition, whereby ‘something germinating’ is transformed into (and replaced by) new and unanticipated words, the idea being that the poet ‘does not know what he has to say until he has said it’.Footnote ²⁸² This is what Glück had also demanded, in ‘The Culture of Healing’, when she called for poetry that aims for ‘discovery’ rather than ‘restoration’ and for a poetry that makes suffering ‘yield to a new form, a thing that hadn’t existed in the world before’.Footnote ²⁸³ The iris storms out from inside the oblivion of winter with new colour and new insight. In the manner of the poetry Glück liked the best, it has travelled a long distance. And like the mythological Iris, the goddess of the rainbow, the iris in Glück’s poem arrives spectacularly to deliver a strong message earnt over a long time quickly – in just twenty-three short lines.

The journey of the wild iris is the journey Glück argued in essays and interviews a poet writing about their own suffering ought to take. It also provides a way of understanding poetry’s long, complex, and intimate relationship with suffering, and why it might be that poetry has always turned to suffering. ‘When you read anything worth remembering’, Glück had written in her 1984 essay ‘Death and Absence’, ‘you liberate a human voice; you release into the world again a companion spirit’.Footnote ²⁸⁴ When Auden and Bruegel silence Icarus, it is to give Icarus a voice. In a not dissimilar way, ‘The Wild Iris’ releases into the world a voice, a voice that were it not for poetry we wouldn’t hear. Poetry may not make much else happen but, to borrow Auden’s word, it is – and survives as – ‘a mouth’.

16 Again and Again

Suffering is a form of death just as it is evidence that we are alive. The wild iris exists between life and death, forgetting neither. Like Christ, it rises knowing that it will rise again, and like Icarus it falls. Its azure blue may be a sign of life after a long winter, but it’s also a reminder of its death. Like the ‘bell-like blue’ in James Schuyler’s late poem ‘Six Something’, its blue is that of the ‘blessed tired heart / wakening otherwhere’.Footnote ²⁸⁵ Its stunning blue is the blue of the fly that buzzes in Dickinson’s after-death poem: the fly that returns

It’s the blue that reflects on Eurydice’s face in H.D.’s poem, ‘the colour of azure crocuses’, which H.D. described as at once the ‘blue of that upper earth’ and the ‘blue of the depth upon depth of flowers, / lost’.Footnote ²⁸⁷ The iris’s blue is the piercing, unending blue of Eurydice’s eyes that is also found at the end of Ingeborg Bachmann’s poem, ‘Darkness Spoken’. Bachmann retold the story of Orpheus, who ‘can only speak of darkness’ because he knows ‘life on the side of death’, yet who also knows ‘the deepening blue’ of Eurydice’s ‘forever closed eye’.Footnote ²⁸⁸ The iris in Glück’s poem is Orpheus and Eurydice at once: it defies death but it knows death and refuses to forget death. The blue of the iris is saline, the colour of ‘shadows on azure seawater’. It’s intriguing to find the sea in this garden – as if we’re back in the depths of Bruegel’s painting. Icarus, Ovid tells us, dropped and sank ‘Into the azure sea named after him’.Footnote ²⁸⁹ ‘Everyone forgets’, wrote Jack Gilbert in his 2005 poem ‘Failing and Flying’, ‘that Icarus also flew’. To Gilbert it seemed that ‘Icarus was not failing as he fell / but just coming to the end of his triumph’.Footnote ²⁹⁰

The iris’s return may be triumphant but this wild iris knows what heartbroken Kafka (writing to his father) also knew: that ‘it is, after all, not necessary to fly right into the middle of the sun, but it is necessary to crawl to a clean little spot on earth where the sun sometimes shines and one can warm oneself a little’.Footnote ²⁹¹ For J. M. Coetzee, all utterance should ‘come accompanied by a reminder that before too long we will have to say goodbye to this world’. Adjusting the Kierkegaardian metaphor of suffering as music, Coetzee makes the point that ‘Behind every paragraph the reader ought to be able to hear the music of present joy and future grief’.Footnote ²⁹² ‘The whole purpose of art’, Glück wrote in one the earliest drafts of ‘The Wild Iris’, ‘is to say goodbye’.Footnote ²⁹³ For Solmaz Sharif, it is ‘the duty of the writer … to remind us that we will die’, but, Sharif adds, also ‘that we aren’t dead yet’.Footnote ²⁹⁴ The wild iris knows both these things, life and death, the heights of spring and the lows of winter. Its voice comes to us as ‘a voice from the mountaintop’ and as ‘a voice from the well’.Footnote ²⁹⁵ That was how Glück, with help from Dickinson, described poetry. Limón used a similar metaphor when she claimed that poetry ought to show us the well but also offer a ladder out of it:

Peace and stillness ‘around the edges of an otherwise eclipsed light’: Limón’s words reflect the luminous darkness of ‘The Wild Iris’ and of Leonard Cohen: ‘There is a crack, a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in’.Footnote ²⁹⁷ Or, in the case of ‘The Wild Iris’, that’s how the iris gets out. Cohen’s ‘Anthem’ in turn recalls the words of Staretz Silouan, the Russian orthodox monk also known as Silouan the Athonite: ‘Keep your mind in hell, / and despair not.’ Silouan’s words open Gillian Rose’s Love’s Work, her book about love and suffering. There is a form of unhappiness, Rose wrote in Love’s Work, linked to our unwillingness to suffer: ‘the unhappiness of one who refuses to dwell in hell, and who lives, therefore, in the most static despair’.Footnote ²⁹⁸ In a poem in Ararat titled ‘Saints’, Glück wrote of a grandmother who was ‘cautious, conservative: / that’s why she escaped suffering’ and set this grandmother against the aunt who’s ‘escaped nothing’. This aunt loses people she loves to the sea but ‘Still, she won’t experience / the sea as evil’.Footnote ²⁹⁹ To suffer, Kierkegaard says, is to be courageous, and to be courageous one must, like Abraham, not leave out ‘the distress, the anxiety, the paradox’. To remember, Kierkegaard goes on to say in Fear and Trembling, ‘that only the one who was in anxiety finds rest, that only the one who descends into the lower world rescues the beloved, that only the one who draws the knife gets Isaac’.Footnote ³⁰⁰

That was also what Rilke had urged in his Sonnets to Orpheus. In an address at Williams College a year after the publication of The Wild Iris, Glück repeated Rilke’s old advice: do not be afraid to suffer. As in all her other discussions about suffering, Glück was interested in how we all have to go through periods of sadness and grief and desperation, periods which demand endurance and test our patience – not in how suffering overlaps with injustice and inequality. She encouraged her audience not to choose ‘flight from despair’ and cautioned, as she would of poets in ‘The Culture of Healing’ six years later, not to choose the easy, the consolatory, the triumphant.Footnote ³⁰¹ Yet while she knew that despair and suffering can be great teachers, she was careful not to romanticise suffering and not to be seen as encouraging it. She was aware, as she made clear in a 2005 interview, that the belief in ordeal ‘seems to fetishize a propensity for suffering that may be serving other, more damaging purposes’.Footnote ³⁰² In her address as in her poetry, which is filled with despair but never desperation, Glück took an approach to suffering that was pragmatic, defiant, and a little tragic. ‘The question’, she told Williams students, ‘isn’t whether or not you will suffer. You will suffer. At issue is the meaning of suffering, or the yield’. She praised work ‘done through suffering … through the involuntary relinquishing of a self’ and urged them to accept and embrace despair.Footnote ³⁰³ To embrace despair, she made clear, means to fight against it, not to capitulate even when we know that the only outcome is defeat.

The opposite of suffering, Glück said in her address, echoing Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Rilke, and anticipating Rose, is fear:

In this passage, Glück could easily have been summarising her poem ‘The Wild Iris’. The iris does not live its life on the surface and is not intimidated by depth. What might look to us like passivity turns out for the iris to be a form of action and testament to its fortitude. It does not welcome suffering, but it is also not afraid of it. Letting go of suffering, Glück told us, is easy; what we need to learn is the holding on, and that’s exactly what the iris does, it holds on. It doesn’t, however, let go of life. Even if the outcome might be defeat, it refuses to capitulate.

The wild iris is able after a long winter to spring to life yet again. The white lilies in the concluding poem might or might not. At the end of a book that featured searching questions about suffering, lilies and poem observe ‘a man and woman make / a garden between them like / a bed of stars’. By contrast to the language of the iris that has risen from the depth of winter at the book’s opening, the lilies speak in language that is far less definite or assured: ‘it / could all end, it is capable / of devastation’. The white lilies know all too well that ‘All, all / can be lost’, just as we know that burial is next for the lily seeds. To the lily speaking, however, it doesn’t matter ‘how many summers I live to return’ as long as it felt the ‘two hands / bury me to release its splendor’.Footnote ³⁰⁵ In a short untitled poem from August 1914, translated by Hamburger, Rilke wrote about how lovers live their lives:

To live and to love is to know that we will suffer again and again. To live and to love is to lie down – and look up – again and again.