“Talked to by Silence”: Apocalyptic Yearnings in Louise Glück's The Wild Iris

Abstract

is easy, sir he said, obtain a suitable place, a garden, in which one can work without interference and grow with seasons. There can't be too many opportunities left any more. --Jerzy Kosinski, Being There In an interview given more than twenty years ago, Louise Gluck said: I've [...] felt temptation of Absolute as a danger; mysticism, spirituality out of which [...] my best poems will come, has in some ways to be fought. I tried--try--to introduce and reintroduce earthly, because my orientation is always toward eternal [...]. It has a powerful hold over me [...] absolute, eternal, immutable--that condition which does exist in physical world. (Descending Figure 119-20) And in her 1994 Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry, Gluck remarks: The impulse of our century has been to substitute earth for god as an object of reverence. This seems an implicit rejection of eternal. But religious mind, with its hunger for meaning and disposition to awe, its for path, continuum, unbroken line, for what is final, cannot sustain itself on matter and natural process. (21) Since beginning of her career, this craving for that which is immutable, caught in grip of the earthly, temporal, has been an obsession for Gluck. And in cast[ing] about for those situations, or myths, that will answer to that craving, Gluck has found some of her most memorable poems (Descending Figure 119). If anything, such an obsession, such a craving, has become more insistent in Gluck's work as time has gone on, and, I would argue, this obsession comes to climax in her Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Wild Iris (1992), where mutable and immutable merge in three powerful and visionary apocalyptic sequences. The Wild Iris is an extremely risky book. Essentially it consists of a trialogue of voices--God, poet, and flowers in poet's garden. The flowers provide a kind of arena and act as a kind of referee for between two primary protagonists, poet and God. The natural cycle of life, death, and resurrection in a garden thus becomes literal ground for and frame upon which this is carried out, while plants and flowers (pathetic fallacy with a vengeance) actively participate in discussion. The dominant dialogue, however, is carried on between divine and human protagonist/antagonist, and this dialogic discussion/ debate is stressed through structure of book, which is almost equally divided between two voices of these speakers. The itself centers on impossibility of any resurrection beyond human, earthly realm as in a garden. The poems spoken by poet-protagonist are best described--perhaps inevitably so given terms of setting and identity of antagonist--as prayers (or anti-prayers), and they are explicitly associated with Divine Office of canonical hours. Seven poems are titled Matins and ten Vespers. It is interesting that both matins, first of canonical hours, and vespers, penultimate hour in Divine Office, are prayers prayed in twilight hours. These two sequences, then, suggest beginnings and ends, ends and beginnings, placed in contexts of times in which natural illumination, literal light, is diminished, blurred, or blotted out. Brought together in such twilit times, these prayer-poems evoke typical apocalyptic time of a not yet, even if it is also a time prescient with what is nevertheless an inevitable end--an end vivid in vision but one that, paradoxically, one must survive. As I have suggested elsewhere, One of paradoxes of apocalyptic mode is that it is bound up with questions of temporality in general and [. …