Sherry Chandler

If the Welby is a little oversweet, if it coats the teeth a little, like drinking sugared tea, then I offer a bit of Louise Glück’s Averno (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006) to cleanse the pallet. The passage is from a long poem called “October:”

4.

The light has changed;
middle C is tuned darker now.
And the songs of the morning sound over-rehearsed.

This is the light of autumn, not the light of spring.
The light of autumn: you will not be spared.

…

The songs have changed, but really they are still quite beautiful.
They have been concentrated in a smaller space, the space of the mind.
They are dark, now, with desolation and anguish.

And yet the notes recur. They hover oddly
in anticipation of silence.
The ear gets used to them.
The eye gets used to disappearances.

You will not be spared, nor will what you love be spared…

So, it seems to me, has the mood of our country changed in a mere two centuries. We have grown up and now must face the implications of what we are and what we will become.

Averno gets close and personal with Persephone. The poems realize her condition. Not allowed to participate fully in either world, not allowed to have either love, Persephone can be neither fully alive nor fully dead. She personifies the human condition. To Glück, that condition looks, not like a cycle of rebirth, but like a horror show of revenants.

They say
there is a rift in the human soul
which was not constructed to belong
entirely to life. Earth

asks us to deny this rift, a threat
disguised as a suggestion—
as we have seen
in the tale of Persephone
which should be read

as an argument between the mother and the lover—
the daughter is just meat.

— from “Persephone the Wanderer”

Writing in The New Criterion, William Logan says (and I apologize that this review seems to have disappeared into subscription-required space):

The tense, overwrought poems in Averno, nervous in their very syllables, are striking additions to one strain of the American psyche—if there were a Goddess of Anxiety, Louise Glück would be the temple priestess. Her recent books have drawn their mysteries from the Greek gods to a degree even Freud might not have anticipated. For a woman who bears the “horrible mantle/ of daughterliness,” there’s no more desirable origin myth than Persephone’s. Should the psychiatrists of the future need a Persephone complex, they’ll have to pay Glück royalties.

…Glück’s poems inch forward, phrase by weary phrase, line by doomed line, as if it killed her to write each word.

Possibly, it did. The book is full of death.

Or, as a friend put it more succinctly, Glück is “gloomy.”

All of these statements are true, and I do not always follow every line of every poem. Sometimes I see self pity. Sometimes I find myself thinking “Okay, you need to get over yourself.” In a few places, I get to Logan’s “…the success of Averno is that the reader isn’t tempted to laugh too often.” And perhaps all of us are guilty of self-pity, self-importance, silliness when we look at death.

But, maybe because this is my first real experience of Glück, there is something in this gloom that appeals to me now, that feels like looking straight at death with no exit into faith, hope, sentiment, or even beautiful language. When the poems hit, they hit hard.

Averno is a small crater lake in Italy. The ancient Romans thought it was the entrance to hell. Glück’s poems let me look through that gateway from a fairly safe distance. And then I can get up and go about my life.

Back on April 20, I posted about Amelia Welby, one of Kentucky’s early 19th century poets. Here is another of her famous poems:

The Rainbow

I sometimes have thoughts in my loneliest hours,
That lie on my heart like the dew on the flowers,
Of a ramble I took one bright afternoon,
When my heart was as light as a blossom in June;
The green earth was moist with the late fallen showers,
The breeze fluttered down and blew open the flowers,
While a single white cloud to its haven of rest,
On the white wing of peace, floated off in the west.

As I threw back my tresses to catch the cool breeze,
That scattered the raindrops and dimpled the seas,
Far up the blue sky a fair rainbow unrolled
Its soft tinted pinions of purple and gold.

‘Twas born in a moment, yet, quick as its birth,
It had stretched to the uttermost parts of the earth,
And, fair as an angel, it floated as free,
With a wing on the earth and a wing on the sea.

How calm was the ocean! How gentle its swell!
Like a woman’s soft bosom it rose and it fell;
While its light sparkling waves, stealing laughingly o’er,
When they saw the fair rainbow, knelt down on the shore.
No sweet hymn ascended, no murmur of prayer,
Yet I felt that the spirit of worship was there,
And bent my young head, in devotion and love,
‘Neath the form of an angel that floated above.

How wide was the sweep of its beautiful wings!
How boundless its circle! how radiant its rings!
If I looked on the sky, it was suspended in air;
If I looked on the ocean, the rainbow was there;
Thus forming a girdle, as brilliant and whole
As the thoughts of the rainbow that circled my soul.
Like the wing of the Diety, calmly unfurled,
It bent from the cloud and encircled the world.

There are moments, I think, when the spirit receives
Whole volumes of thought on its unwritten leaves,
When the folds of the heart in a moment unclose
Like the innermost leaves from the heart of a rose.
And thus, when the rainbow had passed from the sky,
The thoughts it awoke were too deep to pass by;
It left my full soul, like the wing of a dove,
All fluttering with pleasure and fluttering with love.

I know that each moment of rapture or pain
But shortens the link in life’s mystical chain;
I know that my form, like the bow from the wave,
Must pass from the earth and lie cold in the grave;
Yet, oh! when death’s shadows my bosom encloud,
When I shrink at the thought of the coffin and shroud,
May Hope, like the rainbow, my spirit enfold
In her beautiful pinions of purple and gold.

— Amelia Welby