Louise Gluck’s poem “The Mountain” begins, ”My students look at me expectantly.” Of course, this creates expectation in the reader. What do the students (and reader) expect? The next line clarifies; the question must be, What is the life of the artist?

"The life of art is a life
of endless labor."

By forcing “endless labor” into the next line using enjambment, the poet denies the students a short and easy answer. “Their expressions hardly change.” The students are still eager but perhaps don’t quite understand what the speaker is saying. The speaker jokes that the students might need to “know/ a little more about endless labor.” The lines stay relatively short until the speaker enters the world of myth.

Elaborating on the life of the artist in the next six lines, the speaker helps her students to understand the life of an artist by telling them about Sisyphus, who was “doomed to push/ a rock up a mountain.” The six enjambed lines about Sisyphus create the feeling of a line that just keeps going and going, just as the rock must keep going and going up the mountain, no matter how many times it falls back down. There is no end. This is the life of the artist; it is one of endless striving toward art. The speaker tries to reassure the students that there is joy in being Sisyphus, despite the fact that Sisyphus never reaches the top. But then she asks, “Why do I lie/ to these children?” There is something the speaker is not being explicit about, and the children know it.

"They aren’t listening."

They are aware that something is missing in the speaker’s words. So, in another short line, the poet produces three words, “So I retract,” leaving “the myth” hanging in the next line. She must tell the students honestly that the life of the artist is “hell” because the artist is “obsessed with attainment.” The artist lied; there is no joy in being Sisyphus. The artist is tired of that rock always rolling back down the mountain and having to start over again and again. The artist fiercely wants to be on top.

". . . he is obsessed with attainment,
That he perceives as the summit
At that place where he will live forever,
A place about to be
Transformed by his burden."

The artist wants to reach the top because at the top of the mountain the artist is transformed. “He will live forever”; the poet’s words will live on, giving the poet immortality. Not only is the poet transformed but the landscape is as well. How? The rock, made of her words, is no longer something to struggle against; it is art itself, and this art transforms the landscape. The mountain symbolizes the world’s art, and her creation has now added to the collection of Art, both changing the world and also adding to her own glory.

So which image do we believe? The artist as Sisyphus, struggling every day with no end in sight? Or the artist as Glorious, reaching the top of Art Mountain, adding her own mark upon that mountain, no longer encumbered by the struggle?

The answer lies in the irony of the final lines. The hands are “free,” no longer burdened by the rock but also impotent, no longer creating art. Can the hands of the poet ever be free? Can the poet ever rest? Or will the poet always be searching for that next rock in order to carry it up yet another mountain, again and again? And thus the poem turns in on itself, returning to the bottom of the mountain, the beginning of the poem, with students waiting to hear the answer. The poet confronts “the steep/ face of a mountain,” desperately wanting to stand free at the top of the mountain, a mountain that grows bigger and bigger with every accomplishment. And so she must do the only thing she can: she starts to climb.