The Gold Lily

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The Gold Lily

Louise Glück 1992

Louise Glück’s “The Gold Lily” is the penultimate poem in Glück’s sixth book of poetry, The Wild Iris (1992), a volume for which Glück received the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. The Wild Iris is composed of poems partly inspired by Glück’s avocation as a gardener. Most often, there are three voices in The Wild Iris: those of flowers speaking to humans, humans speaking to God, and God speaking to humans. In “The Gold Lily,” the flower speaks to humans or, possibly, to God. As the gold lily dies, it asks to be saved by the one who raised it, but one who is helpless to fulfill the request.

At the same time the poem gives voice to a voiceless creature, a flower, it also, as an extended metaphor, gives voice to the human subject on the eve of death, a creature unavoidably wasting its voice pleading with a Being who cannot hear, does not listen, cannot help, or is not there at all. As such, the poem speaks to the inevitable in nature and to strength and weakness in the face of perhaps life’s greatest fear: death. In its own small way, “The Gold Lily” is a preparation for death, a poem attempting to confront one’s mortality and eternal end through tragic words shared with those who can hear and might listen: one’s readers and oneself.

Author Biography

Louise Glück was born April 22, 1943 in New York City, and was raised, along with her sister, on Long Island. From an essay, “Education of the Poet” in her prose volume Proofs and Theories (1994), we know that both of her parents “admired intellectual accomplishment” and nurtured the children’s every tendency or talent. Glück’s mother went to Wellesley and her father into business, though he wanted to be a writer. As for the poetry she began writing, Glück had to please her mother, a woman who taught her daughter by age three to read and know the Greek myths. In 1962, Glück attended Sarah Lawrence College, and she studied at Columbia University from 1963-66 and from 1967-68, during which time her teacher and mentor was poet Stanley Kunitz, a Pulitzer Prize winner. Twice married with a son (Noah) by her first husband, she is presently married to prose writer and teacher John Dranow. In their spare time, the couple gardens. Since the early 1970s, Glück has taught at numerous universities across the country: Goddard, Columbia, the universities of Virginia, Iowa, Cincinnati, California at Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, and Berkeley. Presently she teaches at Williams College in Massachusetts and has six books of poetry to her name. The Wild Iris (1992), from which “The Gold Lily” was taken, won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize in 1993. This was only the most recent in a long string of fellowships and awards: the Academy of American Poets (1966), the Rockefeller Foundation (1967), the National Endowment of the Arts (1969, 1979, 1988), the Guggenheim Foundation (1975 and 1987), and several others.

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]

Poem Summary

Lines 1-7

It might be easier to read this poem if these lines are understood as one long sentence. The sentence’s dependent clause begins at the beginning and ends with the word, “ribs.” The main clause then continues the sentence on line seven with the words, “I call you.” Also helpful might be understanding that the first word in the poem, “As,” can be replaced by “since” or “because” to get virtually the same meaning. The lily is the speaker in this poem, a flower that is “dying” or, more accurately, wilting, since the lily plant is classified as a perennial, one which returns year after year. The lily blossom can be imagined as a kind of mouth uttering this lament, the poem, in the face of imminent death. The flower says that once it wilts and falls to earth it will not survive to bloom again (“be summoned,” presumably by god or human). Flowers “die” because they do not sprout—do not become “a spine only” with dirt stuck to its “ribs,” do not push themselves out of the ground.

Lines 7-8

This line can be written out in prose as “I call you, father and master,” with the comma being crucial. Without it, the sentence would designate a naming rather than an address to a specific subject. “Father and master” could refer to either human or deity, although the word “raised” in the final line suggests the flower is calling a human gardener. At any rate, by this point, readers are confronted with a talking, dying blossom calling upon a kind of parental figure.

Lines 8-10

In prose, this line would read, “All around, my companions are failing, thinking you do not see.” These other companions are probably lily blossoms who also seem to believe in some deity. The word “failing” has at least two interpretations: dying and losing faith in the master/father. Like Job of the Bible’s Old Testament, the lilies are being “tested” by death—tried to see if they can retain their faith even in the face of death. The colon that precedes the line has a double function: it not only serves its normal function to direct attention to something, but it serves to break the line in much the same way that a period would.

Lines 10-12

“How / can they know you see / unless you save us?” asks the flower, pleading with its maker to prove the maker exists by saving the flower, or to show that the maker understands that the flower is dying by saving it. The flower’s logic is similar to that utilized by a human supplicant: if the master does not save them, the flowers will not believe the master can see or understand them, nor will the flowers believe that the master is powerful. We never find out if this logic works on its auditor, but we can imagine.

Lines 13-15

This line ends with a question mark. Lilies die in late summer, usually around August, and so “twilight” functions doubly: it signals the end of life and the end of day. “Child” refers to the lily. In these lines, it seems as if the lily is becoming more and more desperate, somewhat excusing the master for silence, thinking he might be too far away to hear.

Lines 15-17

The last utterance, “Or / are you not my father, / you who raised me?” signals even graver desperation than the question just before. Whereas previously, the lily thought the father was too far away to hear, the lily now wonders if the master is actually its father at all. The lily thinks it might be mistaken in praying to the master. “The Gold Lily” appears at the end of The Wild Iris, a fitting place for a late-summer bloom and a dying plant (the book begins with the early-blooming iris). The “Gold” of the title “The Gold Lily” seems ironic or tragic; gold is the color of immortality and yet the flower is dying. Furthermore, there is tragedy in the state of affairs of the lily calling upon a gardener to save it, since the gardener is impotent to do so. If God is the entity the lily calls, then here, too, we have tragedy, since God does not appear to interfere with the life-and-death cycle in nature.

Themes

Death

In “The Gold Lily” a flower pleads with a higher being, human or god, to be saved from dying. The Brahmanas, a series of Hindu prose pieces on ritual, say that gold equals immortality. In other traditions, gold is a symbol of light and, therefore, life, as in the golden appearance of Apollo and, later, the gold emanation, or halo, of Jesus. Lilies symbolize, among other things, purity and surrender to the grace of God. If the symbology of gold and lily are combined, we might come up with the idea that purity and surrender to God’s grace is rewarded with immortality. The gold lily of Glück’s poem, however, seems destined for anything but immortality; it appears not about to live forever, but to die despite its apparent sinlessness and surrender to the will of its father and master. As the flower approaches death, the realization that it is dying and will not be reborn next spring drives it to ask for rescue. But even this pure, innocent, helpless flower will die, unhelped by gardener or God. This is the inherent cruelty of existence, when life is betrayed by death.

Natural Law

Natural law states that in order for there to be life, there must also be death. Despite the human symbolism of gold and the lily mentioned above, nature appears to be unaware of purity, innocence, and immortality as relevant factors to the question of what lives or dies. And though the lily plant is a perennial that is often able to reappear year after year thanks to its bulb, a particular blossom appears only once. Specifically, the flower must die so that the fruit can be born and so that the plant, through the fruit’s seed, might reproduce and diversify its species. In this way, a variety of plants with an assortment of attributes stand a better chance of surviving when their environment becomes unfavorable. Therefore, an underlying aspect of natural law is that individual flowers must die in order to make way for the fruit that bears seeds that will be dispersed and ensure the adaptation and survival of the species. In sum, then, the blossom not only decays into soil that nourishes plant and animal life in general, but the blossom dies and becomes part of the nutrients on which the parent plant feeds. Glück’s lily, however, seems unwilling to be sacrificed for the life of its parent, its kind, or of life in general. The lily can only see death, not the hope of rebirth. While the positive aspect of death can be inferred, it is uncertain whether it is implied.

Strength and Weakness

Confronted with death and natural law is the individual, a flower whose symbolic meaning residing in the terms “gold” and “lily” cannot save it from the inevitable. The lone individual against the largest forces in life represents the most difficult test of one’s strength. The flower’s questions become more plaintive as its desperation intensifies. First, it attempts to appeal to the master’s vanity: “How / can they know you see / unless you save us?” This characterizes the master as needful of earth’s worship of heaven—of a lower life form to flatter a higher one. When the question goes unanswered, the flower poses another: “In the summer twilight, are you / close enough to hear / your child’s terror?” Where before the master was considered vain, now it is approached as a creature who pities the suffering of its subjects. When again there is no answer, the supplicant wonders whether it is even directing its pleas to the correct party. Perhaps this is both the height of despair and the beginning of the descent into acceptance of death and helplessness. This slope into courage and strength could be variously characterized as a final agnosticism or deism in which one is inured to the idea that, while there may have been a God of creation, there is no God to prevent death. And if this God is instead construed as a human gardener, the situation will be similar: the gardener can bring about the conditions for life but cannot save the plants it raised. The gardener-god then somewhat ably represents the God of deism who is able to bring about (not create) life, but is powerless in the face of death.

Topics for Further Study

Try writing your own flower poem or small prose piece from a religious voice: Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Islamic, etc. In order to do an effective job you will have to research the religion you choose, and most importantly, how in that religion salvation is attained. A day of inclass readings from a variety of well-known and obscure religions should make for an interesting experience in religion and poetry.
Gluck uses a talking flower. What might be the concerns of another part of a plant? Attempt to write a poem from the viewpoint of a leaf, a stem, roots, etc., of a specific plant. To do an effective job you should familiarize yourself with the botany specific to your topic.
Gluck construes the gardener or God of the lily as male. Investigate religious traditions where primary deities are female and then attempt to answer the question: Why is the master of “The Gold Lily” male?

Style

“The Gold Lily” has little or no alliteration, consonance, or assonance; it has no stanzas, and its lines do not begin with capital letters as in traditional poems. Most important, the poem has no rhyme nor syllabic or accentual meter. The term describing this latter absence is “free verse,” a now common contemporary form, whose “free” means free of meter and free to take a unique or individual form relevant to the poem’s content. Modern use of free verse is usually attributed to Ezra Pound (1885-1972) who in 1912 wrote that poetry should be composed “in the sequence of a musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.” Because there are endless ways to turn a line into a musical phrase, it might be difficult for the reader to hear the line the way the poet does unless the reader attends a reading or listens to a recording. Free verse opened up such a panorama of possibility for the poet that critic Edward Storer went so far as to declare that “every man’s free verse is different.” While free verse was thought free, it was, according to its adherents, supposed to uniquely serve or form itself around the poems’ meaning or content. However, Pound himself said that “Whether or not the phrases followed by the followers [of free verse] are musical must be left to the reader’s decision. At times I can find a marked metre in ‘vers libres,’ [free verse] as stale and hackneyed as any pseudo-Swinburnian, at times the writers seem to follow no musical structure whatever.” While it seems that Glück falls into the latter category, she has done something interesting with form in terms of line breaks.

If this poem of seventeen lines were written out in prose, it would be clearer that there are two statements at the beginning of the poem—the first ending with a colon and the second a period—and three questions at the end. But we know that this is a poem and not a prose piece, because Glück has broken the sentences into short segments, the longest being only ten syllables and six accents (line 6). So how has Glück broken these lines? In three ways: two lines are heavily end-stopped (lines 12 and 17), eleven lines are lightly endstopped (lines 1-4, 6-9, 11, 14, and 16), and four lines are enjambed (lines 5, 10, 13, and 15). To better understand line breaking, it is probably helpful to think of line breaks as not so much one thing or another, but as happening along a continuum: from enjambed to lightly end-stopped to heavily end-stopped. Enjambed lines end with no punctuation so that the meaning continues on the next line; lightly end-stopped lines end with a pause marked by a comma or no punctuation; and heavily end-stopped lines end with a period or question mark. Lightly end-stopped lines, in almost all cases in “The Gold Lily,” make sense alone and in conjunction with the next line. In this way, the lightly end-stopped line combines the traits of the heavily end-stopped and enjambed lines. If we are apt to say that “form follows function,” then we might explain that the preponderance of lightly end-stopped lines fosters a staccato pace—a motion somewhat unsure about pausing or moving forward, a pace that is mildly confused as to which way to proceed. This, it seems, is an impeccable kind of line to suit the flower’s faltering and its questioning about whether to keep asking for help or to stop as it moves inevitably toward its end.

Historical Context

Religion

If it is granted that two themes in “The Gold Lily” are death and the hope to be saved/salved by a deity who is unnamed and nondenominational, then it is fitting to begin this history with religious information on Americans. While an overwhelming percentage of the U.S. population in 1990 defined themselves as Christian (46 million alone being Roman Catholic), a substantial 24 million were non-Christian, and the majority of these—13 million—claimed no religion at all. Also comprising the category of non-Christian, 1.1 million people identified themselves as agnostic and 6,000 called themselves “deists.” Deism is a belief system vaguely construed as a “natural theology,” or a belief that God created the universe but then bowed out from all influence and intervention. The lily of Glück’s poem might be characterized as somewhat characteristic of the a-religious attitudes of some 14 million Americans in that the blossom does not seem to believe in life after death, and because under pressure from the onset of death, such a-religionists can be driven to reconsider religion and God.

International Affairs

August of 1991 marked the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union and heralded the quick declarations of independence by many of the countries of Eastern Europe that where formerly held together by the military might of the Soviet’s powerful central government. This was a relief to many Americans for whom it signalled an end to the Cold War, a state of affairs that had led the postwar United States into an anticommunist frenzy resulting in, among other things, the executions of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg as communist spies; the McCarthy hearings staged to publicly root out communists from the American government; the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba; the Korean War; and the Vietnam War. But while the end of the Cold War signalled an era of peace to most Americans, it liberated ethnic groups previously held together by the Soviets to fight for control of what they considered their historical territory. This was the year Yugoslavia exploded in ethnic fighting, a complicated civil war that as of 1999 was not wholly stilled.

In addition to the ethnic and political conflicts of Eastern Europe, a battle broke out in the Middle East between Iraq and Kuwait over oil prices and debt. On August 2, 1990, Iraq invaded and began

Compare & Contrast

1992: Bosnia and Herzegovina secede from Yugoslavia. The siege of Sarajevo begins and “ethnic cleansing” becomes a new phrase for genocide.
1999: The new terrain of battle in the former Yugoslavia is Kosovo where Serbians stage attacks on ethnic Albanians. When NATO threatens with air strikes Serbia gradually, and temporarily, withdraws its forces.
1992: William Jefferson Clinton is elected President of the United States in an electoral college landslide: Clinton earns 380, as compared to President George Bush’s 168, votes.
1999: President Clinton is impeached and then acquitted for lying to a grand jury about an extramarital affair with Monica Lewinsky, a former White House intern.
1992: Off La Coruña, Spain, the Greek tanker Aegean Sea hits rocks in a storm, breaks apart, and catches fire; the resulting oil slick contaminated some sixty miles of coastline.
1998: Several American diesel truck companies are together fined a total of one billion dollars for rigging trucks so they cannot be detected spewing unlawful amounts of heavy pollutants into the air.

annexing Kuwait. While this posed some threat to American dependance on Middle-East oil, an even bigger danger was Saddam Hussein’s threats against Saudi Arabia, an even larger oil-producing country. With access to oil jeopardized, the United States, on August 6, began Operation Desert Shield to protect Saudi Arabia, all the while pressuring Iraq to leave Kuwait through sanctions and a multinational military buildup. Iraq continued its threats with its own buildup of troops along the Saudi-Iraqi border to the point that President Bush readied the United States for a possible attack on Iraq. Toward that end, he assembled 750,000 international troops. Many of these forces and weapons, drawn from Western Europe, would not have been available had not the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union been given its high-profile accord to the war plans of its former enemies. On January 15, 1991, Bush won Congressional approval to lead coalition forces into Iraq with the largest air attack in history. By the end of February, with ground troops having finished off what planes had begun, Iraq suffered some 100,000 civilian and military casualties. Humiliated, Iraq took its revenge by releasing large amounts of crude oil into the Persian Gulf that killed plant and animal life on an immense scale. In addition, Iraqis set fire to an estimated 1,000 of Kuwait’s oil wells, causing black rain over an extensive area. These fires were not put out for five months. But Iraq was not the only side responsible for environmental disaster. Coalition bombing of nuclear and chemical plants released toxic substances into air, ground, and water. Perhaps for the first time, people paid serious attention to the impact of war upon nature.

Environmental Woes

Meanwhile, back at home, the environment was becoming increasingly hostile to animal and plant life. The World Wildlife Foundation reported that the conditions of air, water, forests, and wildlife had worsened. The Bush Administration refused to sign a bill calling for a 40-percent increase in vehicular fuel efficiency, and while auto emissions had been cleaned up earlier and a 1990 Clean Air Bill passed, gains were continually being undone by the increase in the number of vehicles on the road. The Great Lakes, the Environmental Protection Agency acknowledged, were being poisoned by toxic wastes and the “stresses” of 425 oil spills and 75 chemical spills every month and needed to be cleaned up. Because, even by 1990, there were still no laws protecting national forests, the northern spotted owl became the focus of forest protection. With the government’s declaration of the spotted owl as an endangered species, environmentalists rallied around the bird as a way to protect the forest through the back door of protecting the owl’s forest habitat. The Forest Service responded by unveiling a plan to cut its harvest of trees from 12.2 billion board feet to 10.8 billion board feet by 1995. As if the prognosis on the environment were not bad enough, the World Resources Institute ventured the opinion that by 2010, one quarter of the species of all plant and animal life present in 1985 would be extinct.

Critical Overview

“The Gold Lily” is one of the last poems in Louise Glück’s sixth volume of poetry, The Wild Iris. The work garnered favorable reviews and, in 1993, received the Pulitzer Prize. While there is an abundance of criticism and reviews on the book, few have singled out “The Gold Lily” for specific discussion. What follows is a survey of some of the criticism that applies to the book, but can also be applied to the poem. Judith Kitchen had this to say in Georgia Review: “The poems of The Wild Iris are intellectual, wholly realized within the rational mind, and yet they depend not only on an intimate knowledge of nature but also on a respect for (and passionate love of) the natural world.” In other words, in the poems about flowers, Glück displays a knowledge of both horticulture and iconography.

In Poetry, Henry Taylor remarked on the double voice of the plants throughout Glück’s book: “In poems mostly titled by the names of plants, other voices address existence and divinity. On the face of it, the poems are in the voices of plants, but it is somehow unfair to leave it at that: could a poet of Glück’s gifts truly expect us to suspend our disbelief so far above the rocks? Say rather that the device is a trope, that the poet’s voice imagines assorted vegetable conditions.”

Finally, there is veteran critic Helen Vendler who remarked in The New Republic on the three different voices employed in Glück’s book: “[The Wild Iris] is really one long poem framed as a sequence of liturgical rites: the flowers talk to their gardener-poet; the poet, who is mourning the loss of youth, passion and the erotic life, prays to a nameless god ... and the god, in a very tart voice, addresses the poet. As the flowers are to their gardener-poet, so is she to her gardener-god; the flowers, in their stoic biological collectivity, and their pathos, speak to her, sometimes reproachfully, as she speaks, imploringly to her god.”

Criticism

Jhan Hochman

Jhan Hochman’s articles appear in Democracy and Nature, Genre, ISLE, and Mosaic. He is the author of Green Cultural Studies: Nature in Film, Novel, and Theory (1998), and he holds a Ph.D in English and an M.A. in Cinema Studies. In the following essay, Hochman acknowledges the effectiveness of “The Gold Lily” as a work of art, but objects to the metaphor of the flower as human.

“The Gold Lily” is surely a poignant look at death. Using a flower to represent both itself and the human being, Glück portrays an individual overwhelmed by the process of dying. First, the flower-as-flower, pleading to be saved, is an effective image because Glück carefully keeps out all references to what is strictly cultural, namely, specific religions or gods. The only demarcation accorded to the being with whom the flower pleads are the words “father,” “master,” and “you who raised me.” This is as it should be, for a Christian or Jewish flower, say, would have seemed absurd, Glück already running the risk of absurdity by employing a talking flower, and one talking to its god/God no less. Second, the flower as metaphor for a human works to the extent that both flowers and humans appear once in life and then die. Third, there is a viable parallel between a flower appealing to a human gardener as a person might appeal to a God, especially the God who created the Garden of Eden. And last and least, the image works to the extent that a dying flower is a cultural symbol of loss, one indicating both the mortality of life and love. The dying flower usually represents waning romance, but in “The Gold Lily” there is no representation to the extent that the flower itself suffers from loss because its own “love” appears thrown away on a powerless, pitiless, or nonexistent maker.

Now then, I do not want to spoil the party I have just briefly joined—the one raising a toast to this poem and the book, The Wild Iris (1992) from which “The Gold Lily” comes and which won the Pulitzer Prize—because it might make me look the crank. But I feel the need to voice some objections to what, even by my own standards, is an effective work of art. For this reason: an effective work of art is sometimes an ineffective tool for looking at and dealing with the world. In other words, art isn’t everything. And so, the upcoming objection is not about the poem’s technique, which is impressive, nor about the poem’s sentiment, which appears to me properly tragic. My objection entails the nature of the metaphor: flower equals human. First, let me try to understand Glück’s metaphor before I proceed to criticize it. Glück’s metaphor works because in the Western imagination, a flower is often synonymous with a plant, in other words, flower equals plant. And second, the metaphor works because a flower looks somewhat like an organ of speech in that many flowers have what looks like an opening resembling a mouth as well as petals that look like materialized figurations of uttered or shouted speech. So perhaps Glück should be excused for merely tapping into Western tradition and appearances. But I cannot wholly excuse her because the metaphor is misleading, and for the rest of this essay, I would like to plead my case.

While I do not want to promote strict adherence to the views of science, neither do I want to ignore them. So let me begin by stating that the metaphor, flower equals human, is inaccurate. Flowers are the sexual organs of a plant, most often bisexual because comprised of both pistil (female) and stamens (male). The flower is no more the plant than the vagina and ovaries are the woman or the penis and testicles are the man. Furthermore, the idea of talking sexual organs usually provokes laughter, undoing the poignancy of a flower appealing to a higher power on the eve of death. And if supplicating sexual parts are absurd, the idea of sexual parts that die is misleading. Genitals lose their effectivity, not their life. Flowers are more comparable to other parts of the plant like root, stem, leaf, and fruit than they are a synecdoche for a whole plant that lives or dies. One might say that Western humanity, as far as certain flowers are concerned, is overly fixated on genitals, mistaking the sexual apparatus for the whole plant. On the other hand, mistaking the flower for the plant might also be, unfortunately, understandable. Certain plants are only allowed to flower before they are cut and sometimes killed, as if their life was only useful as a pubescent creature and didn’t exist except for the swelling of its sexual organs. There is even an explanation for so many men seeing women as nothing more than the sum total of their sexual parts: visual and textual representation often highlights these parts—wet lipsticked lips and accentuated breasts and pelvic areas—without saying much else about the represented subject. Perhaps, then, there is an accurate parallel between human and flower: as society “understands” and reduces some plants to flowers, men “understand” and reduce some women to genitalia. And thus this rule: Beware the man bearing flowers.

What Do I Read Next?

The Ohio Review put out a special issue (number 49) in the mid-1990s called Art and Nature: Essays by Contemporary Writers, a series of wide-ranging essays, some of which are written by poets such as Hayden Carruth, Charles Simic, and Stanley Plumly.
Susan Griffin’s 1978 work, Woman and Nature, discusses how certain aspects of nature and culture have come to be gendered either male or female.
Rudolph Otto’s The Idea of the Holy (1923) attempts to write about the nonrational or suprarational in the depths of what Otto calls “divine nature.” The book has a Christian slant.
Keith Thomas’s Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility is a virtuoso study of Britain’s regard and treatment of nature, especially as it progresses from a nature that should be exploited to a nature deserving of care and preservation. This study is relevant to conceptions of nature in the United States.

There is one other general objection to the metaphorical complex of flower equals human in the “The Gold Lily,” and that is the relationship between the flower and the higher being to whom it appeals. While this being could be a god, it is more likely that the “father and master” is the gardener, since the flower calls him, “you who raised me.” As gardeners raise flowers, the gardener best qualifies here as “master” of the flowers. This is a problem because it promotes the age-old analogy that as God is to humans, so are humans to nature: superior to animals, plants, and elements with rights to control and manipulate according to whim and desire. For even if the flower is apt to mistake the gardener for its father-god, are we not authorized to make the same mistake? To Glück’s credit, though, the lily, by the end of poem, begins to suspect that the gardener is neither god nor father and cannot save it. In fact, if we understand the usual use to which a garden is put, the gardener is, as often

“... [T]he gold lily should have realized it was lucky enough to have reached maturity in the ground, to have survived the keen edge of the shears and the narrow tomb of the vase.”

as not, less a god or father to his plants than a killer or attacker/pest. At least this is so when it comes to harvesting certain parts like leaves, roots, and flowers, and of course, the whole plant (on the other hand, harvesting fruit appears to be doing the plant’s will as much as our own). With this in mind, the gold lily should have realized it was lucky enough to have reached maturity in the ground, to have survived the keen edge of the shears and the narrow tomb of the vase.

Finally, we come to what is most curious about the flower’s relationship to the higher being in this poem: the fact that the human or god is gendered male (“father and master”). This is most curious, because Glück is both a woman and a gardener. To give Glück credit, the reason for gendering the ascendant figure male might have been to increase its ambiguity and therefore generality; that is, a male figure is more ambiguously or ambivalently both human and God. If Glück had gendered the ascendant figure female, there would have been the ambiguity between human and mother nature or earth mother. While this might seem perfectly acceptable, mother nature, as she is usually imagined, is not petitionable for salvation from death. God is the being selected to do that job. Still, could not Glück have refrained from gendering the gardener at all, merely referred to the gardener with the pronoun “you”? While I cannot explain Glück’s choice of a male overseer and therefore run the risk of misreading her poem, her choice would seem to reinforce not only God as male, but humanity as “man.” Further, the flower, though bisexual, will more likely than not be read as female, since flowers are traditionally gendered female: there is a woman’s flowery clothing and jewelry, a woman’s genitalia represented by a flower, and women themselves metaphorized as flowers—specifically, Mary’s association with the rose and the lily.

“The Gold Lily” may not look or read like a conventional nature poem in the Romantic vein, because Glück seems to try to get inside the “mind” of the flower—to empathize with its otherness and the way it might suffer. But, while what the flower says is poignant, it is primarily so in terms of the flower serving as a metaphor for human suffering in the face of death. Otherwise the poem is wholly conventional in what the flower says and how the flower and its “master” are conceived. While the term “conventional” might not be a criticism in and of itself, it is when the term refers to notions promoting continued misunderstanding, or understandings better off abandoned. In this conventional poem, the flower almost disappears under the cultural avalanche of conventional symbolism, of a conventional relationship between nature and culture, and lost or abandoned knowledge of botany. In the end, Glück’s flower may talk, but what it says is only too human.

Source: Jhan Hochman, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1999.

Sharon Kraus

Sharon Kraus is a poet who teaches creative writing, literature, and poetry at Queens College, CUNY. In the following essay, Kraus examines how “The Gold Lily” achieves its strong, emotional effect.

“The world is complete without us,” Louise Glück has written in her prose discussion of American poetry, and this is an “[i]ntolerable fact.” “The Gold Lily” is a poem that, like so many of Glück’s poems, attempts to respond to that fact, by uttering a kind of prayer in the midst of heartbreak.

“The Gold Lily” is the penultimate poem in Glück’s Pulitzer Prize-winning sixth volume of poetry, The Wild Iris. Glück wrote every one of the 54 poems in this book within a ten-week period, and this unusual method of composition may contribute to the book’s strikingly cohesive approach (in fact, some readers, among them the eminent critic Helen Vendler, regard the book as “one long poem”). The Wild Iris is composed of a series of prayers, spoken by an assortment of characters: domesticated and wild flowers speak to the gardener-poet, the gardener-poet speaks to the god she regards as “her” gardener, and that gardener-god replies with his (this is very much a male, paternal god) version of events.

The implicit motif that organizes “The Gold Lily,” and indeed the book as a whole, is the story of Adam and Eve. For Glück, the significant aspects to explore in that story are their fall; their exile from Eden; and their subsequent (postlapsarian) roles as male and female in a fraught relationship with each other and with their god. Yet Glück tells not the story of those first humans but our story: The voices speaking in these poems are contemporary ones, with contemporary concerns. In “The Gold Lily,” a poem that serves as a partial ending for this story, we hear a creature conscious of being abandoned to face death alone. The form of the poem seems to be a modern version of a petition (a type of prayer asking God for something we desire, for ourselves, or for others: e.g., Jesus petitioned God in the Garden of Gethsemane that the cup of suffering might pass from him), and it might be argued that the most important element in a petition is the voice. Certainly the voice of this poem is its most distinctive feature.

Glück herself defines voice as “style of thought,” as opposed to what she terms “style of speech,” which, in its habitual turns of phrase, tics, and refrains, is conventionally regarded as voice. Rather, the voice in this poem reveals its speaker’s mind: clipped, terse syntax conveys to us the agonizing effort it costs this speaker to address the “father,” and this state of emotional pain is produced by the speaker’s discovery, already achieved before the poem’s opening, of the father’s unavailability.

The opening lines deliver a shock, in their stark statement and unflinching gaze—“As I perceive / I am dying now”—and set the tone that the rest of the poem will unpack. Notice the plainness of the language. There are only two adjectives in the poem (“raw” and “summer”), which is indicative of a remarkable paring down of detail. The poem has no preamble. Instead, we begin at the moment of crisis: the speaker is dying. The situation unfolds: this particular dying is slow enough to allow contemplation of the vast unknown.

There are a few features to this voice that are especially revealing: the diction is extremely blunt and simultaneously precise without being cerebral. And the pauses, marked by line breaks, work as a counterpoint to the syntax of these sentences, to slow the voice’s delivery and emulate a thinking process, a verbalized logic.

The syntax of the first sentence, which comprises more than half of the poem’s 17 lines, requires that we read it as an abbreviated litany, in order to make sense of it: “As I perceive / I am dying now,” “[As I perceive / I] will not survive the earth,” “[As I perceive / I will not] be summoned out of it again.” This concision is striking, because it demonstrates the speaker’s self-denial; the speaker does not allow herself such rhetorical flourishes as an actual litany. The poet could have chosen, after all, to write a series of short declarative sentences but instead left traces of a litany (a sequence of lines each beginning with the same phrase) to suggest the impulse and the speaker’s rejection of it. This is a significant feature of the speaker’s character and helps us understand the complexity of the speaker’s response to being abandoned: there is terse anger, yes, but also self-rejection.

The speaker further emphasizes that self-rejection in the following lines: “not / a flower yet, a spine only, raw dirt / catching my ribs.” The description is both unflattering (the poem’s title might lead another poet to refer to lavish, fragile petals, for example) and quietly self-compassionate. The speaker has not yet reached her prime yet, has not opened into the fullness of her life yet (notice also the word “raw” hinting retrospectively at the last vestiges of a naive youth), and already knows how evanescent that life will be, and that she will lose it. The lines bear a suggestion of tragedy, which is both painful and terribly ordinary.

Moreover, this initial sentence sets up the speaker’s humble position in the cosmic order. The earth is ancient (it will survive, as it always has), and our speaker is small and without power: if she is not “summoned,” she must relinquish life. The poet’s decision to use the grammatical passive voice reinforces that echo of powerlessness, and the diction balances that echo with a suggestion of courtliness, in the word “summoned,” to achieve an effect of simultaneous restraint and grief.

The word “ribs” in this sentence is both strange and sensual, and works to locate more precisely the speaker’s situation. Literally, the image recalls the papery surface of the iris bulb’s top, breaking through the surface of the soil. Where so much of the language is transparent, “ribs” is unusual and, in its strangeness, suggests with exquisite economy the character of Eve, who was born of Adam’s rib. Such a suggestion helps us understand the address that follows: this “father and master” is no mere secular being; he is linked to the Old Testament God, who banished Eve and Adam from Eden and from immortality, and sent them to their difficult, finite lives. In “The Gold Lily,” we hear a speaker

“... ‘The Gold Lily’ does not allow itself an easy bid for compassion. The poem’s internal logic forces us to think that the wish cannot be fulfilled....”

calling on this entity of ultimate power, in the certainty of that entity’s ability to wrest her and her companions from death, if only he were willing.

And yet the speaker does not cry out, pleading, to be saved. This voice, not precisely self-effacing, but instead denying herself the opportunity to argue for her own interests, speaks on behalf of her companions, only later including herself among them (in the “us” of line 17). Again, we encounter the speaker’s complex thought process: the speaker, in ultimate despair, is struggling to be honorable, to not beg.

The speaker would not beg, in fact, merely to be saved. Instead, the speaker’s implicit charge against this father is more layered, intimate, and exact. She wishes to be seen, to be heard, to be noticed. Perhaps also to be cared for and cherished, but the speaker, significantly, denies herself this logical extension. To be seen would be enough. Moreover, she is not even expressing this wish directly. Our speaker pointedly leaves herself out, as noted above. The first of the three questions with which the poem ends does not say “How / can we know you see” [emphasis added], it says “How / can they know you see.” Her companions might be convinced by the miraculous sign (of being saved from death) that the god indeed sees them, but, the lines suggest, she has no such high expectations—of being seen. Importantly, the syntax of this question accords greater weight to being seen than to being saved. Our speaker’s feelings of abandonment hinge on the unsatisfactory relationship with her god, more than with the prospect of imminent death.

The poem gains a tone of bitter irony, perhaps most clearly in this first of the three questions, from the speaker’s mix of yearning and self-rejection. If the father and master being addressed were simply a human being (and not introduced into the poem as, at least on a symbolic level, divine), the speaker’s wish to be acknowledged might seem an altogether reasonable one and all the more plaintive for not being fulfilled. But “The Gold Lily” does not allow itself an easy bid for compassion. The poem’s internal logic forces us to think that the wish cannot be fulfilled, because the entity being addressed is, after all, a god and necessarily not present in the ways the speaker might desire. By choosing to reveal the gardener’s divine identity, the speaker is stern with herself, as well as with this rejecting god, so like a modern-day absent father, who on another level of the poem is indeed a mortal human, the gardener-poet.

The speaker’s despair drives her to abandon at last the posture of self-denial. In the final two lines, she moves toward identifying herself more explicitly, by referring to herself, in the second person, as someone with a rightful claim on her god: “your child” (line 15). The transparency of the language has lulled us (e.g., “In the summer twilight”), so the word “terror” is all the more unsettling, while also mellifluous because it is knitted into the line by the consonance of the preceding word, “summer.” Despite the despair that drives her to declare herself, the speaker’s self-denial falls away in stages: it is not until the “me” of the final line that the “child” of line 15 is grammatically identified. Thus the poem’s last word, “me,” seems even more naked and daring a self-assertion. Desperate need, the speaker reveals to us, has driven her to put herself forward so boldly. Out of this urgency, she makes her claim, using the possessive pronoun for the first time (“my father”) in addressing the one from whom she wishes so much and so little.

The power of “The Gold Lily” derives from the tension of conflicting emotions. The voice utters its petition, not in a pleading tone but in one of harrowing grief mixed with anger, yet as we have seen, this explosive mix is contained by iron self-restraint, even self-denial. The penultimate image, “are you / close enough to hear / your child’s terror?” suggests the sound of a small child weeping in terror, a sound that is haunting because the terror is never soothed; the cries continue, reverberating. And the poem’s final question, which is a rhetorical one, and thus has a surprisingly hostile edge, intensifies the depiction of the speaker’s grief to an unsustainable pitch. The speaker has given up all hope of winning her god’s care or recognition, we realize. She has posed a rhetorical question, one that does not have an answer, because she cannot have an answer. In the midst of an unfurling field, she has cried out in her loneliness, and she knows that she will not be answered.

Source: Sharon Kraus, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1999.

Helen Vendler

In the following excerpt, Vendler reviews The Wild Iris, Glück’s volume of poetry that includes “Gold Lily.”

Louise Glück is a poet of strong and haunting presence. Her poems, published in a series of memorable books over the last twenty years, have achieved the unusual distinction of being neither “confessional” nor “intellectual” in the usual senses of those words, which are often thought to represent two camps in the life of poetry. For a long time, Glück refused both the autobiographical and the discursive, in favor of a presentation that some called mythical, some mystical.

The voice in the poems is entirely self-possessed, but it is not possessed by self in a journalistic way. It told tales, rather, of an archetypal man and woman in a garden, of Daphne and Apollo, of mysteriously significant animal visitations. Yet behind those stories there hovered a psychology of the author that lingered, half-seen, in the poems. Glück’s language revived the possibilities of high assertion, assertion as from the Delphic tripod. The words of the assertions, though, were often humble, plain, usual; it was their hierarchic and unearthly tone that distinguished them. It was not a voice of social prophecy, but of spiritual prophecy—a tone that not many women had the courage to claim.

It was something of a shock, therefore, when Glück’s recent book Ararat turned away from symbol to “real life,” which was described with a ruthless flatness as though honesty demanded a rock-bottom truth distilled out of years of reflection. In that book Glück restrained her piercing drama of consciousness, and reined in her gift for poetic elaboration. It was clear that some sort of self-chastisement was underway.

Now, reversing course, she has written a very opulent, symbolic book, full—of all things—of talking flowers. The book is really one long poem, framed as a sequence of liturgical rites: the flowers talk to their gardener-poet; the poet, who is mourning the loss of youth, passion and the erotic life, prays to a nameless god (in Matins and Vespers, many times repeated); and the god, in a very tart voice, addresses the poet. As the flowers are to

“Louise Glück is a poet of strong and haunting presence.”

their gardener-poet, so is she to her gardener-god; the flowers, in their stoic biological collectivity, and their pathos, speak to her, sometimes reproachfully, as she speaks, imploringly, to her god. The god has a viewpoint both lofty and ironic, and repeatedly attacks the self-pity or self-centeredness of the poet. These are dangerous risks for a late twentieth-century poem to take, but Glück wins the wager of her premises. The human reader, too, is placed in “this isthmus of a middle state” (Pope) between the vegetatively animate world and the severe spiritual world, and shares the poet’s predicament.

She is here returning to an earlier sequence of hers called “The Garden,” which rewrote the myth of Eden. As The Wild Iris progresses, we see that Eden has collapsed. The opening mood of the book reflects the absolute pointlessness of living when one can think of nothing to hope for. Despair prompts the liturgical addresses to the god (seven Matins by day in the first half of the sequence, ten Vespers by night in the second half). Most of the other titles in the sequence are names of flowers, beginning with the wild iris and ending with the silver lily, the gold lily and the white lilies.

Glück links herself in these flower-poems to her two chief predecessors in using flowers as images of the soul, George Herbert and Emily Dickinson. In spiritual deprivation, the soul is like a bulb hidden underground. In spring, it finds its season of flowering and renewal....

And how does the story end? It has several endings. One is the poet’s; she blossoms in spite of herself (the last Vespers). Three are the god’s: the tender “Sunset,” the stern “Lullaby” and the pitiless “September Twilight,” as the god erases his work. Two are poems spoken by a single flower: “The Silver Lily” reassures the poet about the end, while “The Gold Lily” is full of terror and abandonment. Finally “The White Lilies” offers a colloquy between two lovers, as one calms the fear of the other with the old paradox that temporal burial is the avenue to imaginative eternity....

These old reciprocals—burial and permanence, mortality and eternity—are lyric standbys. But Glück’s white lily, unlike Dickinson’s and Herbert’s flowers, will not rise from its “mold-life” except on the page.

What a strange book The Wild Iris is, appearing in this fin-de-siècle, written in the language of flowers. It is a lieder cycle, with all the mournful cadences of that form. It wagers everything on the poetic energy remaining in the old troubadour image of the spring, the Biblical lilies of the field, natural resurrection. It depends, too, on old religious notions of spiritual discipline. It is pre-Raphaelite, theatrical, staged and posed. It is even affected. But then, poetry has a right to these postures. When someone asked Wallace Stevens’s wife whether she liked his poems, she answered, “I like Mr. Stevens’s poems when they are not affected. But they are so often affected.” And so they were. The trouble lay, rather, in Elsie Stevens’s mistrust of affectation. It is one of the indispensable gestures in the poet’s repertory.

Source: Vendler, Helen, “Flower Power,” in New Republic, May 24, 1993, pp. 35—8.

Sources

Chevalier, Jean, and Alain Gheerbrant, The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, London: Penguin, 1996.

Glück, Louise, Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry, Hopewell, NJ: The Ecco Press, 1994.

———, “Voices.” American Poetry Review, May/June 1993, p. 19.

Kitchen, Judith, “The Woods Around It,” Georgia Review, Spring 1993, pp. 145-59.

Muske, Carol, “The Wild Iris,” The American Poetry Review, January-February 1993, pp. 52-4.

Spellenberg, Richard, The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Wildflowers, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988.

Taylor, Henry, “Easy Listening (Part II),” Poetry, May 1993, pp. 96-110.

Vendler, Helen, “Flower Power,” The New Republic, May 24, 1993, pp. 35-8.

For Further Study

Bramwell, Anna, Ecology in the 20th Century, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989.

Bramwell examines the origins of and ideas behind the growth of the ecological movement, from 1880 to the present day.

Merchant, Carolyn, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution, San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983.

Women and nature have an age-old association. Common to both is an egalitarian perspective that Merchant explores in her history.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, The Essential Rousseau, New York: The New American Library, 1974.

This book is a compendium of works by one the most prominent deists in history. The volume includes the following: The Social Contract, Discourse on Inequality, Discourse on the Arts and Sciences.

Shepard, Paul, Man in the Landscape: A Historic View of the Esthetics of Nature, College Station, TX: Texas A & M University Press, 1991.