1.

Louise Glück once ended a poem, "Open my room, trees. Child's come." This nostalgia for flourishing apart from others, this nature-huddling, the little head-pat of "Child's come"—yes, charming; but it composes the only charming moment in her volumes—of which now, as of the Fates, there are three.

Glück's importance lies more and more in her stringency, which is an earnest of her truthfulness and courage. Her poetry is rock-bottom hard and final yet marked by a sentience next to clairvoyance, and subtle surprise, and strong beauty. Into the midst of the usual fumbling wellmeant "delightful" efforts of the poetry of any age, poems like hers must come as a liberating rout of everything would-be, tepid, maundering, arbitrary.

What has grown upon her, insidiously and strengtheningly, is an "infamous calm." Any more of it, you think, and she will turn to stone; any less and hell will break loose. In "Phenomenal Survivals of Death in Nantucket," an early poem, this calm is the spiritual aftermath of epileptic seizures: "Past what you hear in a shell, the roar,/ Is the true bottom: infamous calm." This is however the last we hear of it: the rest is incorporation. This calm is a being beside oneself even after the storm of ecstasy clears; survival on the other shore. Because it expects nothing, there is no undermining it; it is what Beckett's characters would die to have. Measuring the treacherous variability and, worse, radical insufficiency of life, it recognizes (unforgivingly) the relativity of life to something else, of which mortality is the mere sign. Just to be alive, normally conscious, is to violate the absolute and to love is to be ransacked by whatever wants to return to it—it feels like death. Glück's poems are full of a fated denial, timberline bleak, as if nothing were ever intended to root in the ramshackle shale of this world.

In certain poets the sense of deprivation runs so deep it has abducted them; there is no calling them back. Some seem to have been nabbed by the Father's "No." Evidence of male violence dots Glück's poems like scraps of clothing dropped behind to leave a trail. In Firstborn (1968), her first and most acid book, men are vicious, carnivorous; their hands swarm. A typical husband drives "into the gored / Roasts, deal[s] slivers in his mercy." Another's erotic murmurings lurch across his wife's brain. And still in Descending Figure men are wound-givers ("And then it didn't matter / which one of you I called, / The wound was that deep"). Yet here, at least once, a man is corroborative and that is "Happiness":

Look at your face, you say
holding your own close to me

to make a mirror.
How calm you are. And the burning wheel [the sun]
passes gently over us.

In her mercy she here deals only a sliver of Lear's pro-Manichaean "You do me wrong to take me out o'the grave: … I am bound / Upon a wheel of fire." There are détentes.

Each of her volumes ends with a Father's "No." "Lamentations," the shaky mythological sequence at the close of Descending Figure, concludes with a callously ascending figure:

And from the meaningless browns and greens
at last God arose, His great shadow
darkening the sleeping bodies of His children,
and leapt into heaven.

How beautiful it must have been,
the earth, that first time
seen from the air.

At the end of The House on Marshland (1975) the male has evidently left the speaker behind with their son, of whom this exquisite palm reader says,

I wait to see how he will leave me.
Already on his hand the map appears
as though you carved it there,
the dead fields, women rooted to the river.

The name of the poem: "The Apple Trees." After the mundane Fall of birth, the Fall for this poet is sexual: men branching into women, women rooted and bearing, men taking off and getting the view. Or simply being out of it: at the end of the first book, Caesar, Father of his empire, "Snores on his perch above the Senate." "The wolf," notes the terrific opening, "takes back her tit…." Mater natura abandons men to their own devices.

Another grudge: the phallic male can thumb a ride back to the absolute; the woman (the true Manichean) must wait it out. "… always to go to women / and be taken back into the pierced flesh: / I suppose memory is stirred." (Molly Bloom: "… theyre all mad to get in there where they come out of.") The vicious ones nail themselves in. As for the Father, he has already gone on. What is a Father? Freud asked. Dead, he answered. Perhaps the Father merely disappears behind what he represents: rule, space, Law, all delimitations, including language—for the Father, so Jacques Lacan argues, founds the relation of signifier and signified. In verse the poet may wish to follow his route but her lines switch back and down and back and down again and only leave her on the same side of language, out of breath.

Women of her generation expect one another to write polemically of men. They are less free than a Marianne Moore, an Elizabeth Bishop, a Stevie Smith to speak of anything they please, freer to say what they think about being women. There has been a narrowing as well as the application of a burning glass. Yet the glass burns women, too. In Glück the moody criticism of the Father is a minor third above the tonic struggle against the Mother.

Where the Father, marking off, minces himself into the lines of a ruler, the Mother—that "inescapable body"—is oceanic. She tries to keep one here. "Come … Come to Mother"—she is lure and lair. "Come here" calls the wife with her gold seeds in "All Hallows," in what Helen Vendler admirably pinpoints as an "evil fairy-tale voice," "Come here, little one"; "And the soul creeps out of the tree." Our true mother is nature, which is too kind to require us to be born. But, surrendered to the other mother, we gradually learn "Distance at [her] knee," and better so: in Firstborn "My mother / Had the skewers in her hands," notes a young woman home for Thanksgiving. "I watched her tucking skin / as though she missed her young." What is a fussy yes yes yes when No has been heard? It is the absent Father that one needs—"O pitiful," Glück says of the female primeval forest, "so needing / god's furious love."

Better, in his absence, to be "masculine" than "feminine," for the masculine is already a withdrawal, a partial absence. Nothing is more saving than a mind set like a house of crystal amidst the vegetable jungle of the instincts. True, "For My Mother," in The House on Marshland, looks back with regret on "the absolute / knowledge of the unborn." It pictures the world as the wrong womb: "A marsh / grows up around the house. / Schools of spores circulate / behind the shades, drift through / gauze flutterings of vegetation." The cloying vegetable random seminal voluptuousness, the decadent fleshly flutterings, convey a horror of the sexual and organic; even the womb, then, may not be far enough back. But it is too late not to be conceived at all. Only intelligence can set one free.

"The woman who fights against her father," writes Jung in "Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype," "still has the possibility of leading an instinctive, feminine existence, because she rejects only what is alien to her. But when she fights against the mother she may, at the risk of injury to her instincts, attain to greater consciousness, because in repudiating the mother she repudiates all that is obscure, instinctive, ambiguous, and unconscious in her own nature." (We will find this repudiation brilliantly restaged in "The Sick Child.") Beginning with The House on Marshland Glück has shown both the "lucidity, objectivity, and masculinity" of "a woman of this type" and her "tardily discovered maternal quality" (a quality entirely lacking in Firstborn). So we find her siding compassionately with the mothers of "The School Children," in whom the maternal is wide-awake, drying up, a prison. The mothers have dutifully and protectively sent their children off to the first day of school with "late apples, red and gold"; and now they "shall" (it is almost a command) "scour the orchards for a way out, / drawing to themselves the gray limbs of the fruit trees / bearing so little ammunition." The maternal has left them aging as if to match the gray limbs and, since they have given so much of themselves to their children, with fewer, not more abundant, resources. The apple not of propitiation but of discord and disobedience must be their ammunition. Yes, it is "late" and how desperate they are to escape motherhood. If they are less essentially remote from the children than the teachers who "shall instruct them in silence," it is not entirely by choice.

On balance, the Mother who lies mysteriously near the origin of life—too near—is more terrifying than the Father who perhaps mysteriously transcends it. The Father wounds, but the Mother represents the woundable.

In turning toward the Father, however, Glück hardly knows what she finds. What to make of an unilluminated Absence? Projecting denial into psychology, history, the physical, and the metaphysical or following the light of what extinct star? she sometimes glosses the absence as a withholding, as if he were merely snoring on his perch above the garden. God? "Who knew what he wanted? / He was god and a monster." "Who knew …": often her imagination seems to have forgotten everything it may once have known about otherness except that it exists, like a bright vacancy in the corporate air.

The absence is at once a gap and a limit. There is no way around it, no way out from woe, neither in life, which is confronted by it, nor in death, which represents it. Pity the dead, for they miss life; pity the living, for being unborn is the supreme good. Of drowned children Glück says in the lead poem of Descending Figure.

… death must come to them differently
so close to the beginning.
As though they had always been
blind and weightless. Therefore
the rest is dreamed, the lamp,
the good white cloth that covered the table,
their bodies.

In an earlier stanza and even this one the soothing tone and rhythm form almost an argument for drowning. But "blind and weightless"? It is denial, refuse it:

And yet they hear the names they used
like lures slipping over the pond:
What are you waiting for
Come home, come home, lost
in the waters, blue and permanent.

"Blue and permanent"—the hesitations!

Similarly, what should one desire, life in the body or life above it? In "Messengers," in The House on Marshland, the deer, however magically they may "drift into the open / through bronze panels of sunlight," grow older, autumn comes and, standing still, they wait in their rusting cages of shrub for messengers—messengers like the geese flying over the black marsh water at the beginning of the poem; for above this stalled world is a mobile one. Because the deer are earth-bound they too, though so "beautiful," are eventual victims of a metaphysical impatience with what is "saddled with flesh"; and as human consciousness finally finds release from the flesh through contemplation, "like the moon / wrenched out of earth and rising / full in its circle of arrows," it slays the deer, "until they come before you / like dead things … / and you above them, wounded and dominant." Feminine regret for the murder of flesh, masculine triumph over flesh—again, hesitation. Glück writes as one who loves the earth, where gravity (as in the young) approaches grace and where mobility (if only through art, the bronze panels) may coincide with permanence—but longs even more for something unspecifiable and preternatural. A marvel that her pen should hold so steady—in strength, beauty, poise—even as she writes on the tortured line between gnosticism and agnosticism, idealism and sensory enchantment.

Her vision is a poet's vision—groping, contradictory, excessive, obstinate, arresting, revealing. Hunger and more hunger is her burden. In Descending Figure she hears it in a girl's stark laugh:

They cross the yard
and at the back door
the mother sees with pleasure
how alike they are, father and daughter—

I know something of that time.
The little girl purposefully
swinging her arms, laughing
her stark laugh:

It should be kept secret, that sound.
It means she's realized
that he never touches her.
She is a child; he could touch her
if he wanted to.

It should be kept secret but pain will out, anger too. Or a precocious descending figure fetches her dead sister part way back from Hades:

The "gold, magnetic light" of this life, its mothers' calls, do not prevent it from being the place where we defer to the gods:

And the past, as always, stretched before us,
still, complex, impenetrable.

How long did we lie there
as, arm in arm in their cloaks of feathers,
the gods walked down
from the mountain we built for them?

As for the body, its very "language" is "hunger." Of a gull's call Glück says in "Aubade,"

I feel its hunger
as your hand inside me,

a cry
so common, unmusical—

Ours were not
different. They rose
from the unexhausted
need of the body

fixing a wish to return:
the ashen dawn, our clothes
not sorted for departure.

"… fixing a wish to return"—can she not say to what? Again she seems to suffer from a metaphysical amnesia, as if birth had deprived her of her native gnosis and left a bewildering nostalgia.

Excessive ("unexhausted") and deficient, always outside Origin, this for her is life at the sub-gnostic "bottom," life that cannot find its way up in the darkness, laughs its stark laugh, is never called to the gold magnetic light nor being of little faith has sorted its clothes for departure.

2.

Descending figure—moving sculpture. "There is a sort of poetry where painting or sculpture seems as if it were 'just coming over into speech'" (Pound). If a statue could think: infamous calm.

Even The House on Marshland was serenely moulded, the poems moving as if in a spell. Here, through her enchanted cast of speakers, Glück affected to be one of the slow to learn and the slow to leave the earth, one of the slow, the hypnotically slow, to speak. Honey of generation, honey on the lip had betrayed her honey-heavy heroines; honey like dream-bait poured from her vials. She caught us:

And always on the tray
a rose, and always the sun branded on the river
and the men in summer suits, in linen, and the girls,
their skirts circled in shadow … Last night
I dreamed that you did not return.
Today is fair. The little maid filled a silver bowl
shaped like a swan with roses for my bedside,
with the dark red they call Brennende Liebe,
which I find so beautiful.

Such writing is a charm, a serious encroachment.

The beauty of these poems was instant, helpless. But it was not cheap and even forebears, influences, dissolved in it. Absolute, it subdued everything to itself. The perfect cleanliness of the phrasing, the graceful syntax, the sorrowing subdued tone exposed the ordinary stammering world as a deception. Seriously slow and weighted, seductively turned, equitable, freestanding, the poems yet seemed profoundly absorbed with their own impenetrable interior. Like Sirens some of them made you want to follow them inward, down.… You had to strap yourself to your chair.

By contrast Firstborn had been like quick deft daubings on a canvas. It altogether lacked the cool mystery of the undisclosed; it was hot dramatic surface. Yet after Lowell and after Plath as it was, it proved studied where all had been at risk. An obnoxious adolescent's sharp eye lit on things remorselessly: "… outside, dozing / In its sty, the neighbor's offspring / Sucks its stuffed monster, given / Time." "The crocus spreads like cancer"—spoken with a defector's malice. Out came the Plath stop: "You / Root into your books," "You do your stuff." Out came the Lowell: "They're both on Nembutal, / The killer pill." Out the Berryman: "Love, you ever want me, don't." But it was virtuosity on an electric organ, the floor did not shake and pour (as in Lowell and Plath) toward the Falls ahead.

Yet a few lines heralded the essential plainness of Descending Figure, above all "Birth, not death, is the hard loss," which also broached her inchoate gnosticism. The interruptive House on Marshland was but little digressive. Its ornament proved chastely limited; besides, the figurative—as with the mothers scouring the orchards for a way out—simply and hallucinatingly asserted itself as the real. You did not pause to distinguish; all was dream; it had to be some other world that was true. "What do you think of, lying so quietly by the water?" asked the speaker in "The Pond" as she gazed down. "When you look that way I want / to touch you, but do not, seeing / as in another life we were of the same blood." She thus spoke to herself as the other that all know themselves to be—as when one catches oneself looking back from a mirror before comprehending who it is. Otherness swamps the paper boats of the poems, much of it erotic. The treacherous otherness that love reveals, a new awareness that has all distance in it, in which intimacy too is mythified, had crept up on her imagination, overcoming it like a sweet gas. The erotic is so like a birth—or is it a death? It takes one fearfully and sweetly beyond known, safe, tired limits. Firstborn had been an outsider's study of insiders (parents, lovers) or of other outsiders (the cripple in the subway, the lady in the single, etc.) but now the speaker is inside more than she can understand: "… death / also has its flower, it is called / contagion, it is / red or white, the color / of japonica— / You stood there, your hands full of flowers. / How could I not take them / since they were a gift?" Love, you ever want me … death, you ever want me … paralyzing, this dilemma, if not for the somnambulism.

Toward all this one finds in Descending Figure a ferocious hardening. Now she treats death rudely: simply, don't. Gone is the miasma of eroticism. The love poems (still her staple) contain no preternatural nipple, no violable flesh. Some things can be said against them (for one she seems stuck on the genre: is she still looking for salvation in love?) but not that they are soft:

And pain, the free hand, changes almost nothing.
Like the winter wind, it leaves

settled forms in the snow. Known, identifiable—
except there are no uses for them.

The new style is an attack of purity. A severe wind has cleared out every patch and drop of dreaminess. "Hard light, clear edges"—the verse is Poundian. There is no ground, all is figure, stark. In "Phenomenal Survivals of Death in Nantucket" Glück had said: "My first house shall be built on these sands, / My second in the sea" but after choosing marshland she chose rock. Just as her Aphrodite is what men desire against desire,

On a hill, the armless figure
welcomes the delinquent boat,
her thighs cemented shut, barring
the fault in the rock,

so an armless welcome is what she now wants from poetry—and what her poems give.

Few manifestoes could be so profoundly sympathetic yet so intrinsically perverse, yet again so disarmingly poised, so indifferent to what anyone thinks of it, at the same time so modest, as "The Deviation":

It begins quietly
in certain female children:
the fear of death, taking as its form
dedication to hunger,
because a woman's body
is a grave; it will accept
anything. I remember
lying in bed at night
touching the soft, digressive breasts,
touching, at fifteen,
the interfering flesh
that I would sacrifice
until the limbs were free
of blossom and subterfuge: I felt
what I feel now, aligning these words—
it is the same need to perfect,
of which death is the mere byproduct.

Thus she directs us to the blood spot in the egg, the mark of violence that is also the mark of creation.

Routing the terror implicit in its inception the new style here examines itself as both "case" and triumph; the explanation carries no apology. One does what one has to do; no "nerves," no grimaces. Infamously calm the word "form" gradually takes over and where else does it know better what needs to be done? "Diet on the denominative," it advises. "Little difference as there may be between diet and die, there is one." It is accomplished: the poem contains so little blossom that when a metaphor appears one lights on it hungrily—though "a woman's body / is a grave; it will accept / anything" is both too shocking and too like form (autopsy) to gratify except as insight. So apart from "blossom" itself it is left to the six learned words—"dedication," "digressive," "interfering," "subterfuge," "aligning," and "byproduct"—to serve as subtle points of interest: fleshless figures.

Free of meter's "contract" (John Hollander), its physiological and emotional "herd commonness" (Christopher Caudwell), the verse stands off from us, from the body, from death, from life. "We know nothing and can know nothing but the dance," Williams says in Paterson V, "to dance to a measure / contrapuntally, / Satyrically, the tragic foot." But Glück sidesteps the tragedy implicit in pleasure—what Oscar Wilde meant when he said, "Pleasure. One must always set one's heart upon the most tragic." No foolish tapping, nodding; none of the innocence and vulnerability of life heading toward its own destruction such as makes death (as Susan Sontag says) haunt photographs of people.

What is behind all this? Pleasure, which in the first place created the reality-principle to protect it. "Form," Glück says solemnly and Death is to turn away from the austere word in disappointment. But the form of the poem itself is precisely an erotic body. A poem lives only so long as it likes the way it feels and moves, narcissistically refers to itself at every point. "The Deviation" wants, and gets, some of the same things a human body demands—rhythm, repetition, change, self-enlargement, climax. And resolved "to die only in its own way," as Freud said of the organic body, it too moves pleasurably toward the "reinstatement of an earlier condition."

Above all it exacts for itself repetition-plus-variation—the repetition without which, as Kierkegaard said, the universe itself would cease to exist. With the "death of God," Foucault notes in "Language to Infinity," language finds itself headed toward death "and to stop this death which would stop it, it possesses but a single power: that of giving birth to its own image in a play of mirrors that has no limits." God or no, poetry has always yearned for its own mirror-infinity and the self-imaging of language here takes, to begin with, familiar forms. With its lines the poem claims over and over a certain space, as an animal repeatedly marks a territory as its own. (The lineation is at the same time a kind of self-stroking.) Then certain phonemes iterate one another fondly, attentively, like birds answering calls from other parts of the wood. The musing almost elegiac long i in "quietly," "lying," "night," "digressive," "I," "sacrifice," and "aligning" is a notable instance, as is the f that (as the saving link between flesh and form?) begins or ends so many syllables, forming a net so flexible and fine the ear hardly knows it's caught. The long a's add ripeness (but are discretely few). Then too "touching," loving to hear itself, recurs and "feel" brings "felt" back to life. And in each of the pairs "blossom and subterfuge" and "soft, digressive," an ascetic Latinate word beds down with a soft and blossomy Anglo-Saxon word.

None of this redoubling is flaunted, for what is flaunted will be snatched away. Where its own pleasure is concerned, the poem is poker-faced. Subtle too is the way it offers itself as both written and spoken, composed and spontaneous. Glück is a wizard at poising informality. When she says, "What I feel now, aligning these words," is she speaking or writing? She is speaking of writing while writing her speaking. The writing throughout opens into speech, the speech stabilizes itself as writing, and the words in question bring this to the surface momentarily. We see that speech and writing escape their respective limits in one another, look to one another for energy or support, relate to one another in infinite circularity.

Further, with "aligning these words" the poem proves established enough to gaze on itself and in a mirror that is nothing but itself. Hoisting itself up deftly by its own bootstraps, it discovers itself on its own ground, safely removed from death.

Hence the justified assurance of the close. Where in "Edge" Plath had sickeningly rhymed "perfected" with "dead," here "death" is shoved to the side as a byproduct and "byproduct" is misaligned with "perfect" so as to seem all the more what it is. The need to perfect leads to death (doing anything leads to death) but on a road facing away from it. Perfection, which is chosen and which chooses to be choice, is the antithesis of death, which "will accept / anything." "The Deviation" is perfect and knows it.

3.

Glück's two earlier manifestoes (one per volume and each oblique) looked emulatively toward photography. Take "Still Life" in The House on Marshland. Here the photographer ("Across the lawn, in full sun, my mother / stands behind her camera") is privileged over the people being photographed: "Not one of us," Glück says with apt awkwardness, "does not avert his eyes." Only the photographer is spared the embarrassment of "face." She is brought outside herself by her medium (her medium becomes her insides). Photographing the photographer with her poem Glück in turn stands in "full sun." The place of plenitude is paradoxically the hidden position. Being seen displaces one from being; being is seeing.

Nonetheless, the photograph takes the picture of the photographer. Her decisions—of will, solicitude, taste, reticence—are in it. In her first two volumes Glück may resort to masks, but still the photograph goes off with her soul. Now she shows herself without fear but herself as a god, impersonal with the "power to expose the underlying body." She shows us herself looking, considering, as if she were an X-ray technician in her own poem. But she is not nearly so clinical as it may at first seem. Her way of seeing is, precisely, like a photographer's, "both intense and cool, solicitous and detached" (Sontag); it is informed by spirit, and impelled by heart. The photographer conceals a good Samaritan crossing the road to bring humanity where it seems needed. The hard and proficient manner is creative; it profoundly attends.

Despite its defences against innocence, her rhythm is where her poetry is most sensitive. No less supple than firm, it delineates in a plastic way without failing to space words out gravely, giving most of them a fitting emphasis and distinction. Though it keeps to a dependency-inducing even keel, the rhythm takes the impression of things, responds to them warmly, stirs us because it has itself been stirred by what it contemplates. It becomes the calm soul of what is said. This is equally true of the syntax, which feels as intently inward as it is classically dispassionate. And within its usual elegant serenity it is well varied, beautifully balancing as it goes.

In the movement the passing is elevated into beauty:

Public sorrow, the acquired
gold of the leaf, the falling off,
the prefigured burning of the yield:
which is accomplished. At the lake's edge,
the metal pails are full vats of fire.
So waste is elevated
into beauty …

Typical here are the bowing heads of what might as well be called the trochees ("Public sorrow"), the balanced pairing of falling and rising duple rhythms ("gold of the leaf), the musing spondees ("So waste"), the not infrequent slack line-endings. These imposingly blend with the formal words—"Public," "sorrow," "acquired," "prefigured," "accomplished," "elevated"—and with the solemn syntax. Set on the frail column of "which is accomplished," the large capital of noun phrases in particular makes us feel a weight as of sorrow. And in the indecisive transactions of art even this weight, although free of dream, lies on us as a beautiful burden, a luminous resignation.

Yet the poetry simultaneously resists resignation. Glück's poems arise from protest; the only thing they are at peace with is themselves. Even infamous calm is a rebuke to the violence of its own birth—an unforgiving rejection. Yet on rare, wonderful occasions the calm buckles. Indignation stirs in the tone, ruffles the syntax. An instance of the first: the poem ending "She is a child; he could touch her / if he wanted to." The language piques with the hurting realization, uniting author and child. Something deep and beyond pacification has been roused.

The incomparable example is the little masterpiece "The Sick Child," subtitled "Rijksmuseum":

A small child
is ill, has wakened.
It is winter, past midnight
in Antwerp. Above a wooden chest,
the stars shine.
And the child
relaxes in her mother's arms.
The mother does not sleep;
she stares
fixedly into the bright museum.
By spring the child will die.
Then it is wrong, wrong
to hold her—
Let her be alone,
without memory, as the others wake
terrified, scraping the dark
paint from their faces.

Terrific the shift of tone with "then it is wrong, wrong," beyond praise the judgment that here was the place to employ once again the intensifying epizeuxis (Gr. "fastening upon") mechanically used in Firstborn. Out of cool description flares realization and out of narrative, urgent homily. One who had seemed but a tourist in the museum is transfigured on the spot into an intimate of the world of a particular painting, flushed and partisan in her humanity. Or should one praise first the way the placid rhythm—eternally tranquil—is shattered by the word "die," or the perfect limpidity of each word in its place, up to the end, or the frightening darkness and oil-like density of scraping the dark / paint from their faces?—an image beyond calculation, an instance of the purest finding.

The poem is—in Pound's phrase—of the "first intensity," meaning it does so well some of the things poetry is best suited to do that not a hundred other works in other mediums could usurp it. Besides, it unfolds and yet again unfolds to meditation, proving exquisitely complex. Of especial interest are two intermeshed conflicts: the subtextual one between language and paint and the dramatic one between the two strong women.

Language here protests the peace of pigment. Instinct with time and motion as it is, what choice does it have? All but few syllables squirm with phonemes active as maggots. Language is vital, it germinates, it proliferates. It rushes into the future like faith, like a compulsion. Here, with its too-active nature, it naively enters the painting to animate it with its own animation, its own assumption of the identity of the signifier and the signified. At the first gentle touch of the words the scene wakes from its long sleep in time and pigment; it is brought flush with the hour painted on it. With "is ill," the present tense erupts, immediately introducing mortality. Then "By spring the child will die"—as an inference from the mother's fixed stare—opens the future even as it fatally closes it. In its spatial mercy the painting had kept the child alive in perpetuity, then language with its running toward death cruelly makes her begin to die.

Language attacks the fixity, the aesthetic fatedness of the scene as if it were not too late to change it. The child will die, but movingly the poet acts to minimize the anguish she must feel at parting, by seeking to deprive her of any deeper attachment to the life she must so soon relinquish: the sweeter the comfort now, the bitterer the parting later. The exhortation "Let her be alone" is borne on the buoyant element of language-in-time beyond any sense of its own futility and falls on the painted scene with a force meant to alter its moral composition. The poem credits language absolutely. What it says, is. It has claimed the mother is conscious, it has even overheard her thoughts. Let her listen, then. Let her learn.

The painting is a noun, the poem a verb. The first is not a process but totally intransitive; it lullabies its own content. Passive, satisfied with itself, it hangs there, through. Where is the painter in the painting? Translating the scene into words the poet knows where she is, she is in the words and she cannot bear to keep silent as if she were not. Why should she? Language puts her at the helm of what it pirates. By comparison to her words the painting sacrifices energy, activism, acumen, rectitude, the greatest kindness and the severest renunciation. The painting is surrender; the poem, combat. Pigment is foreclosure; language, opportunity. The painter exercises a permissive negative capability; the poet, moral passion.

Could any action be at once more tender and more harsh than the speaker's attempted intervention? Her logic is shocking only in being extreme, carrying compassion (that good thing) so far beyond its sweet accustomed bounds as to make it terrible as passion. What we hear is the free, decisive voice of an outsider. The speaker, luckily for her, is not the mother. But neither is she a moral philosopher: she is, rather, a character in a work: and struck by the costs of pleasure, knowing something of them, she raises a resonant cry of objection. The moment is dramatic.

The costs of pleasure: the healthy children will of course suffer these too. Their night-breathing might as well have betrayed them from beyond the lit area of the painting, so unexpected is their inclusion; they are brought into being by the poet's desire to insist on the costs. True, they could not be more skillfully linked to the painting than they are by the metaphor "scraping the dark / paint from their faces." It is as if here the painting had taken advantage of their sleep, which is as recessed from time as it is, to re-implant itself as a canvas. But to no good; in the same figure the poet rouses the children from an eternal rest and in a long, unprotective sentence exposes them to the harsh light of growing up. The tense of "as the others wake" sidles toward presentness, as if they were waking even now in blind terror fantasies fearful as the night-gum that glues children's eyelids together. 'They must struggle for truth, which is strength, light.' As she looks at the painting, the strongest and clearest of seers knows this last with a passion. And the mother staring fixedly into the bright museum—perhaps she knows it too.

But what keeps the children in the dark if not her kind of mothering? As one given to overcoming fear, the speaker is riled by one who hushes it. She seems to square up to the mother, to return her stare. Do you not see, she challenges, that what you protect you weaken? Comfort de ludes—the stark lines themselves proclaim it. The child in the poet protests not only having been thrown upon the world and so deprived of "absolute / knowledge" but then being held back by a fierce compassion from regaining knowledge, however bleak and relative. It is the mother the children must scrape from their faces, her smothering and blinding love.

Everything in the poem is disputed, or disputes itself. The museum is a maternal chamber, sheltering the painting—but also the well-lit arena from which the poet looks at it with a god's power to expose its underlying body, and the space back into which the mother (as if nobly suffering the knowledge of death) stares no less fixedly. Then the stars, all but Bethlehem-sweet in the frigid peace of the hour—at the same time, cold and untouchable above the wooden chest with its warm earthliness and its intimate space (as Bachelard would say after Rilke). Subliming the domestic into the cosmic, the line-up of chest and stars is exhilarating. But this perspective is an illusion. Yes, pleasure deceives. The only trustworthy light is a severe one.

The basic dispute, the source of all the others, is over the value of pleasure, hence of life itself. On the one hand life attaches us to it so strongly that death rises as a horror. How subtly precious life is, and not least its family romance. Yet because pleasure necessarily entails its opposite, pain, how one must stand up to one's weakness for it. The ambivalence is unrelenting, wracking.

The total situation, as I see it, is this: into the space left empty in the painting by the father (there are no male symbols, even), a powerful caring voice, full of both truth and love, enters and puts to rights an appalling imbalance, countering softness with severity. The voice, to recur to Jung, is lucid, objective, and masculine, and at the same time maternal.

In "The Sick Child" a vehement tone develops like something untoward, something not expected to be in the photograph. The analogy between poetry and photography (never secure) breaks down and the poem enters, as was said, into drama. Another instance of dramatic tone, this time acerb from the start, is "Rosy," deploring a friend's or relative's abandonment of a dog "on three legs: now that she is again no one's, / she pursues her more durable relationships / with traffic and cold nature, as though at pains / to wound herself so that she will not heal… what death claims / it does not abandon. / You understand, the animal means nothing to me." Linger too long by the poem and it bites tears from your eyes. A few other moral (mortal) swats. But always intensity, and often solicitude. "… it is wrong, wrong": all her most memorable poems bear this inscription. However gentle they may be, they impugn. Objection to being placed in the site of wounds is their inspiriting element.

Apart from her determined and wholly realized perfection and her clear-eyed terrible strength (which both detects pain and makes it back off) Glück is notable for her "furious love," given in the absence of God's. The glamour of being a visionary, if only a negative one, means less to her than befriending a sick child, or a girl whose laugh is give-away stark, or a dead sister without other playmates, or a three-legged dog back in the streets. "Thirty," she tolled in "For My Mother"; thirty-eight … her years may tally up to a minus but they have led to more than compensatory creation. They have made her tender toward the senselessly deprived, they have given her humanity.