On Friday, October 13th of this year, legendary poet Louise Glück passed away in Cambridge, MA. She was 80. She wrote beautiful poems. She captured the world in words and stanzas and phrases and rooms in ways few people can. She peeled back the layers of her existence and examined the raw skin underneath and wrote it in words we could read. She translated her experiences for readers. Her craftsmanship earned her the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature.
We’ve gathered around Glück before on her examination of snowdrops, and we will inevitably gather around her work again. But now, I want to gather around a poem of Glück’s that my friend sent me to mark—and announce—her passing.
You can read the poem below or listen to me read it by clicking play above.
Garment
by Louise Glück
My soul dried up. Like a soul cast into fire, but not completely, not to annihilation. Parched, it continued. Brittle, not from solitude but from mistrust, the aftermath of violence. Spirit, invited to leave the body, to stand exposed a moment, trembling, as before your presentation to the divine— spirit lured out of solitude by the promise of grace, how will you ever again believe the love of another being? My soul withered and shrank. The body became for it too large a garment. And when hope was returned to me it was another hope entirely.
Poems often read as autobiographical. It’s difficult to separate the piece of work from the person writing it, especially since the craft of poetry often lends itself to exploring personal experiences. Yet, under the visible iceberg of the narrator we see in the poem exists a much deeper, bigger, broader poem that they keep off the page. A poem is equal parts what is on the page and what is hidden. Sometimes I look at the white space between stanzas as a void, a place where the poet chooses to redact information.
In the first line, Glück creates a version of herself. She writes herself into the poem, a woman with a soul dried up. We know nothing of the real Glück, but this version of her has a soul that sat by a fire too long, lost all of its water and lifeblood, and shriveled up—a husk. What she leaves off the page: what caused the withering of the soul. We only see the results of some violence inflicted upon the narrator. This is a poem about aftermath.
“To recapitulate: the source of art is experience, the end product truth, and the artist, surveying the actual, constantly intervenes and manages, lies and deletes, all in the service of truth” — Louise Glück, from her essay “Against Sincerity”
The first stanza describes the emptying of the soul, and what a beautiful metaphor Glück uses, of something being dried next to a fire and becoming brittle from the “aftermath of violence.” While we, readers, will never know the violence this Glück experienced, we know her soul is raw: “exposed a moment, / trembling as before / your presentation to the divine—.” Glück expertly weaves between images; first, a hollowed-out soul, then its fear and vulnerability, likened to what one might feel when bared in front of a god or other divine being.
In the midst of all of this pain, Glück asks, “how will you ever again believe / the love of another being?” To me, this line is a punch in the gut. For the entire poem, the narrator dances around the violence they experienced, but for just a moment they crack open their soul and you peek inside and learn that the narrator was hurt by someone they loved. In the midst of all of this pain, her soul withers. This soul that was once full and nourished shrinks, and the body around it feels like a loose garment that no longer fits.
This was the intention of the poem. The title, “Garment”, foretells this feeling, and provides an image that allows the reader to experience it. And while the garment is loose now, there is a hope that it can be filled out again, a different hope than the one of promised love. I think the last stanza is what separates Louise Glück from other poets. I think most poets would have ended the poem with the line, “The body became for it too large a garment.”
But Glück, with her expertise and fluency of poetic language, knows that the garment will eventually be filled out, that time passes and the soul that withered will be whole again. In the final stanza, the narrator briefly describes a future version of herself. The suffering she experienced outside of the poem ended, and hope was returned to her. She changed and evolved. In the aftermath of violence, she healed. Glück ends the poem with an opening—a small glimpse—of who this new Glück is:
“And when hope was returned to me
it was another hope entirely.”
Glück, your ability to see and distill the world into art as beautiful as this will be missed.
If you enjoyed this poem… you can read more of Louise Glück’s poetry here, or listen to her read her own work here.
If you want to learn more about Louise Glück… you can read her obituary here or learn more about her life and work here.
If you want to try writing poetry… try taking a line from this poem and building a poem from that. Take a piece of Louise Glück and write a poem for/from her.