We’re now past Easter and well into spring. For this third Sunday night poetry night selection riffing on “love, death, and the changing of the seasons,” here’s a poem about the changing of the seasons, which (in the Christianity-influenced Western tradition) is also a poem about death and resurrection. It’s by Louise Glück, who wrote the second poem I posted in this series, “The Triumph of Achilles”; this one is titled “The Wild Iris,” and is written in the voice of the flower:
At the end of my suffering there was a door. Hear me out: that which you call death I remember. Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting. Then nothing. The weak sun flickered over the dry surface. It is terrible to survive as consciousness buried in the dark earth. Then it was over: that which you fear, being a soul and unable to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth bending a little. And what I took to be birds darting in low shrubs. You who do not remember passage from the other world I tell you I could speak again: whatever returns from oblivion returns to find a voice: from the center of my life came a great fountain, deep blue shadows on azure seawater.
I originally planned to have this be my final post in this series. But since April is National Poetry Month, I’ll celebrate with two more Sunday night posts after this one.
If you’d like to read more
- Poetry Foundation: A biography of and selected poems by Louise Glück.
- Internet Archive:
- The First Four Books of Poems, by Louise Glück. This collects Glück’s first books of poems: Firstborn, The House on Marshland, Descending Figure, and The Triumph of Achilles.
- Ararat, by Louise Glück.
- The Wild Iris, by Louise Glück. The poem “The Wild Iris” is the first one in the book.
- Meadowlands, by Louise Glück.
- Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry, by Louise Glück. Glück’s first book of essays on poetry.
- Bookshop.org:
- Poems 1962-2012, by Louise Glück. This collection does not include Glück’s final two books of poetry, Faithful and Virtuous Night and Winter Recipes from the Collective.
- The Wild Iris, by Louise Glück.
- American Originality: Essays on Poetry, by Louise Glück. Glück’s second book of essays on poetry.
- Other:
- Glück was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2020. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic she delivered her Nobel lecture in writing, later recording it in 2023, a few months before her death at the age of 80.