Louise Glück’s Sacred Invitation: a Reflection on Nature and the Voice of God in The Wild Iris
I received The Wild Iris, Louise Glück’s 1992 poetry collection, as a birthday present. Glück, who died this past September, was a prolific American poet and essayist. A former U.S. Poet Laureate, she was also the recipient of many other accolades, including the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature. Though The Wild Iris came highly recommended, I admit that had it not been a gift from someone I love and respect, I would have abandoned it after reading the first few poems. The severely direct, astringent style, combined with the predominance of the second voice, seemed to leave little room for nuance or interaction. Then, in the last few pages, I encountered ‘September Twilight’ and ‘Sunset’, and something provoked me. As I re-read the poems, it dawned on me–perhaps belatedly–that throughout this collection, Glück has the daring to speak, quite plainly, from God’s perspective.
Rendered with a spare elegance, Glück’s voice of God intertwines with the beauty and violence of the natural world. As we read in ‘Harvest’: ‘Look at you, blindly clinging to the earth / as though it were the vineyards of heaven / while the fields go up in flames around you…’ Glück’s un-simplistic verse invited me to a deeper, more nuanced appreciation of nature, while concurrently rattling the cage of my metaphysical assumptions. Indeed, The Wild Iris was a re-education in nature poetry, both in its role in elucidating the intrinsic value of the natural environment, and in how it illuminates the interplay between nature, the Divine, and the poet (or reader).
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Almost definitionally, well crafted nature poetry is never just about nature. Alfred Lord Tennyson’s ‘The Splendor Falls’ points heavenwards in its exuberance at the beauty of lakes and mountains, but with its repeated refrain (‘dying, dying, dying’) reminds us of the transience of even the most perfect sunset. In ‘The Road Not Taken’–arguably the foremost American nature poem of the twentieth century–Robert Frost conveys, in image and sense, an experience of autumn in a New England forest. The poem also provides a profound exploration of the experience of choice, of consequence, of irrevocability as ‘way leads on to way’. Frost addresses the futility, tempting though it is, of asking ‘what if?’ We are reading the poet’s life, and our own.
Another American nature poet, Mary Oliver, explores the metaphysical quality of nature in many of her poems, including ‘Clapp’s Pond’: the forest-bound pond, and the doe ‘glittering with rain’, is still present with her even when she is ‘three miles away’, hours after she has left. In the same way, God is eternally now, eternally present.
Consistent with this encompassing tradition of nature poetry, encountering the sacred through nature is the dominant theme of The Wild Iris. The ‘birdsong, scent of lilac in early spring, scent of summer roses’ we encounter in ‘Vespers’ may be ephemeral, but they are also a means of divine interaction. Glück expresses the voice of God through the natural cycles of flourishing and decline, her poems not ignoring nature’s occasional severe mercies. The blossoms in ‘Vespers: Parousia’ are no longer colourful, but broken and ‘old, old, a yellowish white’.
Glück refuses to reduce the natural world to an unthreatening pastel painting that I might find in my doctor’s office. God is not a tame golden retriever. Indeed, there is a recurring texture of divine frustration throughout the collection, a sense of God and people not being ‘on the same page’. In ‘Retreating Wind’, the divine voice says pointedly ‘I gave you all you needed: / bed of earth, blanket of blue air…Your souls should have been immense by now, / not what they are, / small talking things’.
God’s exasperation, as manifested by Glück, is similar to that which a parent experiences towards a well-loved child. One of the last poems in the collection, ‘September Twilight’, gives full vent to this frustration–‘I’m tired of you, chaos / of the living world’–but then concludes by referring tenderly to the reader (and to people in general), as God’ s ‘vision of deepest mourning’. Children can be, at once, a parent’s greatest joy and profoundest aggravation. But they are always an object of intense love.
The Wild Iris elucidates nature as a means of articulating this divine affection. While not shallow or cheap, God is also not capricious, and is always reaching out to us. ‘Clear Morning’ explores this pattern of nature as a means of divine communication:
…observing patiently
the things you love, speaking
through vehicles only, in
details of earth, as you prefer,
tendrils
of blue clematis…
I would be remiss if I did not also mention that engaging with the metaphysical through Glück’s nature poetry lent a new dimension to the importance of environmental conservation. If we heedlessly despoil a forest, we not only deprive ourselves of natural beauty and the psychological respite of a quiet walk in the woods: we also muffle the voice of God. Perhaps this is the unstated (or at least understated) impetus behind the increasing urgency of ecological concerns, but this is a topic to be more fully explored in a different essay. Suffice it to say for now that The Wild Iris invites the reader into a deeper contemplation of God, and a correspondingly deeper appreciation of the natural world.
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The French Priest and spiritual writer Father Jacques Philippe said that ‘in nature we can recognize an imprint of God’s love.’ The Wild Iris explores this imprint, present both in nature’s beauty, and in its inescapable severities. Certainly, Glück’s incisive poems challenge trite notions of God, and asked me, again and again, to question my own sacred paradigms. Unsettling as this was, ultimately this collection left me with an abiding–if not simplistic–sense of divine patience and affection, a sense perhaps best captured by the last stanza of ‘Sunset’:
And yet your voice reaches me always.
And I answer constantly,
my anger passing
as winter passes. My tenderness
should be apparent to you
in the breeze of the summer evening
and in the words that become
your own response.
Jonathan Cooper‘s poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in various publications including Thin Air, New Plains Review, Amethyst Review, Poetry Pacific, Spindrift, and The Charleston Anvil. He lives in Vancouver, Canada.
Amethyst Review 