Louise Glück’s “Messengers”
with discussion by Henri Cole
You have only to wait, they will ½nd you.
The geese flying low over the marsh,
glittering in black water.
They ½nd you.
And the deer–
how beautiful they are,
as though their bodies did not impede them.
Slowly they drift into the open
through bronze panels of sunlight.
Why would they stand so still
if they were not waiting?
Almost motionless, until their cages rust,
the shrubs shiver in the wind,
squat and leafless.
You have only to let it happen:
that cry–release, release–like the moon
wrenched out of earth and rising
full in its circle of arrows
until they come before you
like dead things, saddled with flesh,
and you above them, wounded and dominant.
–“Messengers,” from The First Four Books of Poems by Louise
Glück. Copyright © 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976,
1977, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1985, 1995 by Louise Glück. Reprinted
by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
© 2014 by Henri Cole
doi:10.1162/DAED_a_00257
HENRI COLE, a Fellow of the
American Academy since 2010, È
an award-winning American poet
and Professor of English at Ohio
State University. He is also poetry
editor for The New Republic. His
poetry collections include Touch
(2011), Pierce the Skin (2010), Black-
bird and Wolf (2007), and Middle
Terra (2003), which was a ½nalist
for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.
96
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Louise Glück’s ½rst book, Firstborn, era
rejected eighteen times before it was pub-
lished. Or was it twenty-eight times?
And there was an interval of seven years
before her second book, The House on
Marshland, was published by Ecco Press
In 1975. But when it appeared, it was clear
that a commanding new voice–classically
restrained, yet emotional–had arrived. It
was the late 1970s, and I was still a graduate
student, reading Elizabeth Bishop’s Geog-
raphy III, Seamus Heaney’s North and Field
Work, John Ashbery’s Self-portrait in a Con-
vex Mirror, and Robert Hass’s Praise–they
were game-changers, pure.
* * *
Today, the poems in The House on Marsh-
land do not seem to me so much austere
as essential utterances in which every-
thing ornamental has been stripped away.
The lines are made of simple Latinate
sentences, sometimes with suspensions,
sometimes with dashes and ellipses . . .
revealing a writer’s hunger for a listener.
Also, the endings of the poems seem to
move outward like the mouth of a river,
instead of stopping abruptly, like a knife
against a board. Though there are echoes
of Rilke and James Wright’s To a Blossom-
ing Pear Tree–also, Sylvia Plath (in partic-
ular the harsh Ariel) and the Robert Lowell
of Life Studies–the dangers of imitation
(is there any greater danger for a poet than
drowning in another’s glorious style?)
have somehow been surpassed.
* * *
In The House on Marshland, there are just
thirty-½ve short poems, and the section
titles–“All Hallows” and “The Apple
Trees”–convey Glück’s love of the earth,
O, to put it another way, her preoccupa-
tion with death. Family life, the conundrum
of marriage, maternal love, childhood–
these are some of Glück’s early subjects.
In her poems, life seems continually to be
mirrored in the passing of the seasons.
The self (or should I say the soul?) awak-
ens inside a body, like a flowering plum
tree, which will fade as autumn comes.
* * *
I ½rst read Glück’s poem “Messengers”
in Antaeus, the international literary mag-
azine (edited by Daniel Halpern), Quale
sadly ceased publication after twenty-
½ve years in 1994. But during the inter-
vening decades, the poem has not lost its
intensity for me, or its beauty. Set near a
marshland, it begins:
You have only to wait, they will ½nd you.
The geese flying low over the marsh,
glittering in black water.
They ½nd you.
And the deer–
how beautiful they are,
as though their bodies did not impede them.
Slowly they drift into the open
through bronze panels of sunlight.
The second-person point of view (you you
you) gives the feeling of experience (even
the protagonist’s own experience) being
commented on from a distance–in the
most reduced terms–as if it is occurring
in a myth where we get the haunted
(almost posthumous) commemoration
of experience. There is no ½rst-person
narrator revealing the events of her life.
Invece, the tone is matter-of-fact, dis-
embodied, but strangely triumphant, pure.
The deer seem to have meaning for the
speaker, who asks: “Why would they
stand so still / if they were not waiting?"
Like the deer, is Glück waiting for some-
thing? Has her body impeded her? Is this
why she envies their instinctual grace,
stepping through “bronze panels of sun-
light” like ½gures on a medallion? I won-
der now to what degree a deer is a female
image–for surely femaleness calls up
something in us that is different than
maleness. Is Glück speaking about the
complicated relationship she had with
Henri Cole
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143 (1) Inverno 2014
97
Does Glück long for the same preternatu-
ral grace and strength that she observes
in the deer as they step through bronze
sunlight like ½gures on a painted screen?
* * *
Forse, because it is a longing that can
never be satis½ed, she will make some-
thing durable from language instead,
though “Messengers”–like all of Glück’s
poems–does not comfort or placate the
reader. It ends on a note of ungrati½ed
spiritual hunger. But for the reader there
is nobility in recognizing this state, E
pleasure in seeing it digni½ed through
lingua. Her poems could be said to be
influenced by an aesthetic in which beauty
is always imperfect, impermanent, or in-
complete, and in which only three simple
realities are acknowledged: nothing lasts,
nothing is ½nished, and nothing is perfect.
The soul (or consciousness) must ques-
zione, undergo, and choose, but there is
never an easy resolution. Instead there is
a turning away.
For all of us trying to make something
durable from language–who are not
drawn to the prettiness of our utterances,
or their melodic flourishes; who are
attracted to a kind of fatal truthfulness;
and who seek in poems a voice whose dis-
tilled vocabulary demands only one lis-
tener (like a conch shell pressed against
an ear)–Louise Glück is a liberator.
On Louise
Glück’s
“Messengers”
her own body as an anorexic? Though I
don’t know the answer to this, I’m drawn
to the noncircumstantial content of the
poem–to the symbolic rather than the
biographical–and to the story which
feels intimate and heroic.
* * *
Then the camera pans out, and we see a
little more of the landscape:
Almost motionless, until their cages rust,
the shrubs shiver in the wind,
squat and leafless.
Glück is not a poet of metrical fluency.
Invece, there is a plainness in her poems
that has an archaic quality. And Glück is
not a poet of elliptical fragmentation–
she goes deeper. With her simple vocabu-
lary, dramatic juxtapositions, and subtle
pacing, the poems seem to be more in
conversation with Blake, Yeats, and Eliot,
illuminating what all art must, quelli
human subjects that she identi½es as
“time which breeds loss, desire, and the
world’s beauty.”
* * *
Near the end of “Messengers,” there is an
invocation to the reader that reframes the
½rst line of the poem, “You have only to
wait, they will ½nd you.” Glück says:
You have only to let it happen:
that cry–release, release–like the moon
wrenched out of earth and rising
full in its circle of arrows
until they come before you
like dead things, saddled with flesh,
and you above them, wounded and
dominant.
After the mind engages with the landscape
and the deer, the poem strives to move
toward some fresh idea. Are the grazing
deer emblems of pure spirit that do not
seem to be detained by anything physical
–as we humans are detained by our
“wounded” and “dominant” bodies?
98
Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Scienze
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