This is such an equivocal spring poem, which suits my mood entirely. Flowers are blooming here in this beautiful part of the world, while whole cities are reduced to rubble in others.
But here is this young couple planting peas in their garden. Since they’re young, it’s as if no one’s ever done this before.
I notice that the poem is spoken by a much older person. She says she couldn’t do this again, and can hardly bear to look at it. This lovely spring poem starts off right away with this! The speaker can hardly bear to see such innocence, such hope. She knows so much that the couple doesn’t yet know. They don’t yet have perspective. They can’t see themselves.
Nevertheless, their moment is wonderful, the pale green hills, the flowers, the light rain. Their little lovers’ quarrel about when to stop planting is somehow solved by her touching his face. Her finger leaves an “image of departure” on his cheek. Dirt, yes, but also what we know — nothing lasts. Yet, at their age, they “think “ they are free to overlook “this sadness.”
There’s so much sadness (as well as joy, we assume) to come, but not yet. For them, of course, eventually, but also for everyone. Yet when we’re young, we overlook that. It’s spring. In fresh dirt, the grass is still thin, the crocuses are blooming. No one has ever lived this life before. That’s how I felt at that age — that my life was entirely new and original.
I don’t know what else to call this poem but “equivocal,” but it’s not exactly that. The joy and renewal is all true. It’s there. And so is the sadness the older speaker knows about. It’s not as if one negates the other.
Louise Glück (pronounced Glick) has won nearly every award possible for a poet, especially for one who was never comfortable with fame. She published 14 books of poetry, winning the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Bollingen Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets.
In 2016, President Barack Obama presented her with the National Humanities Medal in a White House ceremony. When she won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2020, the committee said they wished to honor her “unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”
Her New York Times obituary tells us that “Louise was an intensely intellectual child. In her Nobel lecture, she recalled one evening, when she was about 6 years old, staying up late debating with herself what the ‘greatest poem in the world’ was and unable to decide between the two finalists: ‘The Little Black Boy,’ by William Blake, and ‘Sewanee River,’ by Stephen Foster. (After much back and forth, Blake won.)”
Louise grew up in Long Island. Her father was a businessman and a frustrated poet who, among other things, helped invent the X-Acto knife. Her mother was a homemaker. Louise struggled as a teenager with anorexia, which made it hard for her to attend college, but she did take classes at Sarah Lawrence and Columbia University. She was working as a secretary, writing at night, when her poems began being published in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and The Nation. She took at teaching job at Goddard College, and later at Yale and at Stanford.
I have loved and admired Glück’s poems since I first read them years ago. My favorite of her books is “The Wild Iris,” which I’ve taught a number of times. Her poems are short and seemingly simple, but they go breathtakingly deep.