Unbearable Birth: Natality in Louise Glück’s Averno

Abstract

This essay argues for the importance of the overlooked theme of natality in the poetry of Louise Glück. In its guise as mortality, human finitude causes pain through the permanence of death; in its guise as natality, finitude can also be an occasion for wonder at the unlikely chance of having been born, and the contingency and possibility for beginning something new associated with natality by Hannah Arendt and others. In Glück’s work, the theme of natality comes across in poems concerning pregnancy, birth, infants, children, and mothers. Several of her poems feature a hybrid identification as child and as mother, a hybridity that enables the apprehension of natality and that leads to a mode of poetic speech that originates in, and is imbricated with, listening as an alternative to knowing. This essay examines some of Glück’s earlier poetry in these terms before turning to her 2006 volume Averno, which retells the myth of Persephone. Undeniably preoccupied with death, Averno is, I argue, equally concerned with birth, mindful that human finitude itself is double or hybrid. Although many poems cast Demeter as a smothering, possessive mother, Averno, at key moments, takes into account a mother’s perspective as well as a child’s. This hybrid identification gives rise to the emergence of an unexpected lyric voice that both listens and sings.

This essay argues for the importance of the overlooked theme of natality in the poetry of Louise Glück (1943–2023). Natality, the existential condition of having been born, as much as its counterpart mortality, or the inevitability of death, shapes Glück’s approach to human finitude, one of her enduring subjects. Natality implies not only birth as a beginning in the abstract but also the conditions of birth—it implies mothers and babies, pregnancy and infancy, and the ways these conditions of a person’s beginnings permeate her ongoing existence. This is the arena of psychoanalysis, but thinking about natality in philosophically inflected ways offers an alternative, or complement, to psychoanalytic paradigms.1 For Hannah Arendt and thinkers who follow her, natality implies potentiality, the capacity for the emergence of the new. In Arendt’s terms, “with each birth something uniquely new comes into the world,” and “action as beginning corresponds to the fact of birth[;] it is the actualization of the human condition of natality” (Arendt 1998, 178); in Timothy Harrison’s gloss, for Arendt, the “possibility for historical and political novelty is grounded in the existential fact of birth and the uniqueness of each new human life” (5). At the same time that it opens onto unpredictable futurity, paradoxically, natality links us to a unknowable past. For Anne O’Bryne, drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy, natality inscribes in us a connection with “the immemorial…understood as the non-experience that is the ground—or non-ground—of experience”, that which “lies beyond experience and memory but nonetheless reverberates through our being” (O’Byrne 2010, 109). I began thinking about natality in Glück through her 2006 volume Averno, centered around the myth of Persephone and Demeter. Glück’s poetic improvisations on the myth invite an approach through the lens of natality, a condition her poems suggest is best grasped from a dual, or hybrid, perspective of child and mother, Persephone and Demeter, having been born and having given birth (or being able to imagine it). In this essay, I look first at Glück’s early poems of pregnancy and motherhood, then turn to natality in Averno. In closing, I suggest that there is a connection between Glück’s ability to sustain a dual perspective through hybrid identification with the positions of child and of mother and her evocation of lyric voice as (in poet Mary Ruefle’s words) a kind of “singing about listening” (Ruefle 2012, 77).

1. “There Is a Soul in Me”: Glück’s Early Poems of Natality

Throughout her career, Glück writes poems about mothers and children, pregnancy and birth. But not for Glück, the visceral physicality of her exact contemporary Sharon Olds (b. 1942), nor the politically charged feminist writing about lived experiences of motherhood written for which poets, like Alicia Ostriker, Adrienne Rich, Lucille Clifton, and Audre Lorde, are known. Glück does not write the “mommy poem” that emerged in the last decade of the twentieth century and first decade of the twenty first (Burt 2010, n.p.); she does not write a full volume of mother poems, and the stylistic innovations she makes from volume to volume are not overtly tied to motherhood as a subject matter. Writing as the child of a mother, Glück learns from John Berryman and Robert Lowell, as well as her contemporaries, Frank Bidart and Robert Hass.2 Writing as a mother, she takes up and transmutes the legacy of Sylvia Plath’s implicit linking of pregnancy with haunting or possession. Glück probes pregnancy, birth, and a mother’s perspective on her child and a child’s on her mother, not in order to break new poetic ground, rescue a psychological or sociological experience from neglect, or break taboos, but to ask how having been born, and having given birth, shape what it means to be a human—a question with intellectual and spiritual, as well as affective and sociohistorical, dimensions.3 Further, in her work, natality is imbricated with a relationship to poetic voice that involves listening as well as speaking, forgetting as well as remembering, and the emergence of something meaningfully new, which, at the same time, has deep affinities with what has gone before.

In Natality and Finitude, Anne O’Byrne traces philosophy’s engagements with natality back to the first century B.C.: Lucretius reasoned that we have nothing to fear from death by asking us to think about all of the time that had elapsed before we were born as the “mirror” of that time to come when we are no more: “Do you see anything fearful in it?” (Lucretius quoted O’Byrne 2010, 2). In Anne O’Byrne’s gloss, “we are finite by virtue of the end we will meet when we die, cutting us off from the great expanses of time that will follow, but also by virtue of the beginning we had when we came into the world, when the irruption of our birth put an end to the ages of eternity before, transforming those ages into the time when we were not yet” (2). O’Byrne approaches natality via philosophers, including Heidegger, Arendt, and Nancy, probing “the metaphysics of finite existence opened by the natal (existential) question ‘Why was I born?’” and also drawn, by her own account, by “the lively anarchic impulse into which natality taps” (60). O’Byrne emphasizes four consequences of natality: first, natality gives us a “syncopated temporality”, resulting from our having been born before we can know ourselves: “we are always running to catch up with ourselves, always struggling to make sense of the fact that we already are” (137). Second, in Arendt’s sense, birth is inextricably linked to our potential for beginning something new. Third, we are embedded in plurality, in a world of others, initially those who knew us before we knew ourselves: “My birth … is the condition for all my experience but is itself an experience only for others, that is, for my mother, essentially and in the first instance, and for the father and family and others who stand in relation to me as I arrive into the world” (41). And fourth, in a secular context, we do not have meaning given to us but make meaning as we go. O’Byrne’s emphasis on wonder that the world and ourselves exist; on the spiritually charged search for the ground of being and the need to create meaning out of what is found; on the “immemorial” within us; and on the way “the unreachable origin” each of us seeks “turns out to be no obscure abstraction but rather the bare—but still enigmatic—fact of my birth” (104) chime with Glück’s poetic evocations of natality and help to probe the philosophical work that happens in Glück’s poetry.

In Glück’s early work, pregnancy and motherhood are frequently cast in mythic terms, bringing myth’s aura at once of familiarity and of mystery. “Nativity Poem” and “The Magi” recount the birth of Christ. “Lamentations” evokes Adam and Eve’s recognition “that they were the mother and father, / there was no authority above them” (Glück 2012, 140). “All Hallows” recalls a folk or fairy tale as “the wife lean[s] out of the window / with her hand extended”, full of

      seeds

distinct, gold, calling

Come here

Come here, little one

And the soul creeps out of the tree (59)

—a child summoned like a spirit or fairy. In “For My Mother”, whose title promises autobiographical immediacy, the personal quickly gives way to the mythic and metaphysical: “my father”, says the speaker,

      closed

your eyelids with

two kisses. And then spring

came and withdrew from me

the absolute

knowledge of the unborn[.] (62)

That knowledge appears “absolute” because it is inaccessible; to be born is not to know what came before. In “Gemini”, pregnancy is an incarnation, strange and wondrous: “There is a soul in me /… asking/ to be given its body//…/ asking/to be given blue eyes/ a skull matted//with black hair/ that shape/ already formed & detaching” (78). “There is a soul in me” recalls Plath’s “Elm”: “I am inhabited by a cry” (Plath 2004, 28); do “soul” and “cry” belong to the speaker or to another? “[F]ormed & detaching” captures the in-between status of the unborn child, a not-yet-separate, detached being, but “already” a “shape” within the womb.

By her own account, biographical chance played a role in Glück’s approach to the subject of natality. In her essay “Death and Absence”, she explains that the death in infancy of her older sister formed a psychic backdrop for her earliest years: “The dead sister died before I was born. Her death was not my experience, but her absence was. Her death let me be born. I saw myself as her substitute” (Glück 1994, 127). When her younger sister was born, she continues, this proved her inadequacy (Ararat includes several poems featuring competition between the two living sisters). This family dynamic, understood “as articulate insight” from the time of her late adolescence (when she underwent psychoanalysis), “did not become the material of poetry”, Glück writes, “until, at thirty, I had a child of my own. The wild, protective, terrified love I felt for my son—that maternal love which, in being obsessed with protection, is obsessed with harm—transformed itself… into an act of mourning”, resulting in the poem “Descending Figure”, published in the 1980 volume of that name, a poem Glück describes as “saturated with a mother’s grief and fearfulness and a haunted child’s compulsive compensation” (127). Of the three poems that make up “Descending Figure”, the first and third explicitly feature a child speaker whose sister has died, while the second imagines a painting of a mother holding a child who is dying. None of the poems directly inhabit the mother’s perspective, yet Glück’s experience as a mother, by her account, enabled her to write them.4 The hybridity of the poet’s identification turns the condition of being “haunted” to one of listening—for the mother to call home the dead sister: “Why was she never called? / Often I would let my own name glide past me/ though I craved its protection”; for the lost infant’s “voice”: “Now, if she had a voice, / the cries of hunger would be beginning”—and one of singing: “I should go to her; / perhaps if I sang very softly [] …” (Glück 2012, 108). The child’s magical thinking, which perhaps attempts to reanimate the dead child, becomes the singing of the poet in this poem of implicitly hybrid identification.

Glück’s account of her natal story, inextricably bound up with that of her lost sister, brings elements of natality into sharp focus. First, juxtaposing the two poles of finitude, the death of an infant puts birth and death into stark proximity: as “Lost Love” from Ararat says of the sister, “She was born, she died” (211). Second, the sister’s death colors the immemorial for Glück: again, “Her death was not my experience, but her absence was. Her death let me be born” (Glück 1994, 127). The notion of being a “substitute” calls into question the uniqueness of birth: as O’Byrne writes, even if we do not believe in a Christian God who “calls each of us into life”, we may nonetheless retain from that belief the conviction, central to the philosophical valences of beginning in Arendt, that “I was not born to replace anyone, and I too am irreplaceable” (O’Byrne 2010, 86). Third, what Glück calls “wild, protective, terrified … maternal love” can provoke a kind of hybridity or duality—experiencing that love while finding it “appalling”—that can feel—to borrow a word from a later poem to which I will return below—unbearable. Yet as Rozika Parker argues, maternal ambivalence—the coexistence of intense love and hate for their children on the part of mothers—can be “a source of creative insight” (Parker 1997, 21); the same may be true for the dual perspective on maternal love that Glück describes. Glück’s account of her developing relationship to the “material” of her natal circumstances, as well as the poems themselves, suggest that the capacity to hold at one time the perspectives of mother and child is for her linked to the difference between “articulate insight”, on the one hand, and “poetry”, on the other. Eric Griffiths suggests that “writing is an act of supplication to an imagined voice” (Griffiths 1989, 12). The fairy tale “wife”’s summons to the infant “soul” in “All Hallows” and the child’s imagination of her dead sister’s “voice” in “Descending Figure” give concrete form to this “supplication” and inflect it with questions around natality, birth, and motherly love.

“Descending Figure”, Glück writes in “Death and Absence”, “means … to study maternal love” (Glück 1994, 127). This “study” would continue in later volumes. Ararat (1990), a self-consciously confessional sequence evoking family dysfunction and the legacy of having been a child, rejects the mythic and oracular in favor of staging a plain-spoken, seemingly directly personal voice. Most of its poems narrate family dynamics from the perspective of the child, but several position the speaker as a mother. “Brown Circle” (Glück 2012, 222) confesses, “I don’t love my son/ the way I meant to love him”: the resolution to let her son grow and flourish in his own way has given way to an intense, even destructive scrutiny, which the speaker is unable to hold in check:

I thought I’d be

the lover of orchids who finds

red trillium growing

in the pine shade, and doesn’t

touch it, doesn’t need

to possess it. What I am

is the scientist,

who comes to that flower

with a magnifying glass

and doesn’t leave, though

the sun burns a brown

circle of grass around

the flower. Which is

more or less the way

my mother loved me.

The poem ends with a declaration of intent that undercuts itself, ending on a note of resignation to the “helpless” repetition of familial patterns:

I must learn

to forgive my mother,

now that I’m helpless

to spare my son.

Here, thematically, the hybrid mother–child perspective does not “help” to break cycles or patterns, to love in the way one intends; the dual perspective on protective mother love yields only a sense of its “appalling” nature and consequences. The title’s brown circle is the circle of lifeless dirt around the child-flower, but also the so-called vicious circle, or cycle, that the speaker cannot break free from.

The comic timing of lines like the poem’s opening:

My mother wants to know

why, if I hate

family so much,

I went ahead and

had one

or the wry dissonance of the casual phrase “more or less” against the totalizing nature of the mother’s (both mothers’) love, offer the relief of humor. In this poem and across Ararat, there is a pleasure in experiencing the lively character of the speaking voice, a vibrancy that paradoxically consists in its capacity to bring to life a speaker attracted to flat, bleak certainties and that conveys something quite different from what that speaker says. As Jane Hedley writes, “Throughout [Ararat], ‘I’ll tell you something’” (the opening line of its second poem) “is implicit in [the speaker’s] stance and tone of voice, in her syntax and the rhythms of her speech” (Hedley 2005, 4), animating the volume with energy and urgency, and directly implicating us both in the conversation and in the “human condition” (6) that is its subject.

But there is one poem in Ararat addressed, not outward to the reader, but to another person within the volume’s familial world: in “Child Crying Out” (Glück 2012, 232), the speaker as mother steps back from the scrutiny confessed in “Brown Circle” and acquiesces to the limits of what she can know about her child. The content of her poetic speech acknowledges that she does not know her child’s “thoughts” and “dreams”, but as poetic speech that originates in an act of hearing (as its title implies), the poem honors even as it suppresses what the cries arouse in her—the desire to fix, to assuage, and to know.

The opening lines establish that this poem is spoken by the adult speaker to her sleeping son: “You’re asleep now, / your eyelids quiver./ What child of mine/ could be expected to rest quietly …?” The speaker recognizes that her vigilance does not give her access to a totalizing knowledge of her child: she can see that “you’ve pushed the covers away”, but “As for your thoughts, your dreams—// I’ll never understand/ the claim of a mother/ on a child’s soul”. She recognizes that his cry is not “the soul exposing itself”, a “mistake” she made “in love”: “But not with you, / even when I held you constantly. / You were born, you were away”. At the same time, the poem’s own plain, direct language and its act of address—the child is asleep, perhaps unhearing, but capable of waking up, of growing up, of later reading the poem—belie the speaker’s conclusion that “The soul is silent./ If it speaks at all/ it speaks in dreams.”5 More important than this reflection about the soul is the address to the child as “you”, an address which sees and speaks his independent being, before he can say “I”.

The speaker’s capacity to recognize his separate subjectivity rests on a duality or hybridity. The mother sees the child as incapable and dependent, in need of care and guidance, as not a fully developed person (emotionally and physically); but, at the same time, she sees him a person, who although developing—incomplete, we might say, temporally—is also whole, bounded, separate from her, with his own “thoughts”, “dreams”, and “soul”. In psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin’s terms, the mother of a newborn feels an “intense mixture of his being part of herself, utterly familiar”, and, at the same time, “utterly new, unknown, and other” (Benjamin 1988, 14). The mother, as it were, confronts natality’s paradoxes experientially: she “link[s] the newborn’s past, inside her, with his future, outside of her, as a separate person” (13). In O’Byrne’s words, “insofar as I was anticipated, expected, and had a place prepared for me in the life and the world of my family, I was known before I was…. And yet…we never are wholly known, and the gap between knowing—on the part of whomever—and being is where poiesis happens”, poiesis as our “creaturely…creativity” within “a life of growth and transformation” (O’Byrne 2010, 132). Even as she attests to the “expect[ation]” of similarity—“What son of mine/could be expected/to rest quietly…?”—the mother in “Child Crying Out” recognizes that his cry does not expose his soul; her “claim” on that soul is not affirmed by the cry (when he was an infant, she recalls, “Whatever those cries meant, /they came and went/… whether I was there or not”). Her poem’s title names his cry, his speech, but does not describe or translate it. The poem does not mention that cry after the title (it does not begin “You cry out”, for example). The cry is heard only in and as the response to it on the part of the mother: her observation of the sleeping child, and her speech to him in the form of the poem. Rejecting the paradigm of lyric as the cry of an infant, the poem frames poetic speech not as a child’s cry, but as a mother’s hearing; the hybrid perspective yields a dual model of poetic speech, which has its origin in an act of listening.

The hybridity Glück described with respect to “Descending Figure”—her own experience as a mother offering new access to the immemorial condition of her sister’s death—suffuses three poems about the sister who died, the mother’s loss, and the child speaker’s perception of that loss: “A Precedent”, “Lost Love”, and “Lullaby.” This mini-sequence within the longer sequence of Ararat resembles “Descending Figure” in its childlike tonalities. “Lost Love” imagines the “sister’s body” as “a magnet. I could feel it draw/ my mother’s heart into the earth/ so it would grow” (Glück 2012, 211). “A Precedent” evokes the pathos of the mother’s anticipation of her first child’s birth: “In the same way as she’d prepare for the others, / my mother planned for the child that died”; “Because death hadn’t touched my mother’s life, / she was thinking of something else,/ dreaming, the way you do when a child’s coming” (210). “Lullaby”, the third in the sequence, attempts to puzzle out natality and mortality, implicitly asking, what is the relationship between the soul and the body or “matter”? Between birth and death, and between death and sleep? Is there an “other world” from which we arrive and to which we go when we die? Can a “mother’s arms” protect “the integrity of the soul”? The voice of the child grants these unanswerable questions a simplicity and an almost playful quality; her analogies feel both inventive and intuitive:

It’s the same thing, really, preparing a person

for sleep, for death…

$$

But

The dying are like tops, like gyroscopes—

they spin so rapidly they seem to be still.

Then they fly apart: in my mother’s arms,

my sister was a cloud of atoms, of particles—that’s the difference.

When a child’s asleep, it’s still whole.

The moments of odd logic when the speaker tries to explain what cannot be explained culminate in imagining death as a kind of freedom from the body’s constraining, singular “form”:

The soul’s like all matter:

why would it stay intact, stay faithful to its one form,

when it could be free?

O’Byrne writes that “Natality is my having been thrown into the world and given a spatial existence in the form of a body. Yet I am never quite at one with this body” (O’Byrne 2010, 111). On the other hand, “the soul is only itself when it is affected from the outside”, that is, in the first instance, by the mother (O’Byrne 2010, 112). “It is necessary and impossible”, writes Jean-Luc Nancy, “for the philosophizing subject to know itself as having its self in another—it its mother” (Nancy 1993, 25). Pregnancy is not the subject of “A Lullaby”, but the poem figures the mother as a holding environment—“in my mother’s arms,/ my sister was a cloud of atoms, of particles”—one that failed to stabilize, to make or keep “whole”, the soul-matter of the child who died.

2. “I Think I Can Remember / Being Dead”: Natality in Averno

A mother’s relationship to a child who has died is at the heart of the myth of Persephone and Demeter. While Ararat rejects the mythic and oracular in favor of staging a plain-spoken, seemingly directly personal voice, Averno (2006) (Glück 2012) reclaims the mythic mode, retelling the Persephone story across several poems and evoking elements of the myth (winter and spring, mothers and daughters) throughout the volume. The myth sets a mother’s love against the power of death: can Demeter persuade Zeus to allow Persephone to return from the underworld? If we see Hades as the figure who initiates Persephone into sexuality, or as the husband who competes with the mother for possession of her, it becomes a story about a daughter’s agency, or lack of agency, within the psychic and social structures that bind her. Averno explores both possibilities and investigates the implications of the intersection of the two, as when Persephone attempts to name Hades: “Death, husband, god, stranger” (Glück 2012, 532). Many moments attest to the volume’s determination to face death—for example, in the title poem, the central figure, whose “sixty years” match approximately Glück’s at the time she was writing Averno’s poems, speaks of the desire “To raise the veil./ To see what you’re saying goodbye to” (542). Yet I would argue that its primary concern is not with death but with finitude, with “just not being…/ hard as that is to imagine” (489), a state that not only follows death but also precedes birth.6 As I read it, the finitude the volume explores is inflected with not only mortality but also natality, and natality, even as it brings with it the entanglements of dependence, guilt, and “compensation” (“Death and Absence”), nonetheless also opens cautiously onto the “hope” that the volume warily seeks—in the words of “October”, “as though it were the artist’s/ duty to create/hope, but out of what? what?” (Glück 2012, 498).

We can see these intersecting concerns in “Prism”, an uneven poem in twenty numbered sections, which, at times, mines a familiar Glückian vein of Freudian comedy:

“You girls”, my mother said, “should marry

someone like your father.”

$$

That was one remark. Another was,

“There is no one like your father.” (506)

Here, and in other poems (notably “Fugue” and “Blue Rotunda”), memory, childhood, and the crucible of the family take center stage, evoked in knowingly psychoanalytic terms (sometimes with an edge of parody: “Well, we are here to do something about that./ (In a German accent)”, 516). The binds of family and social structures represent a truth about human experience and growth. But they are not the only truth; a sense of ourselves as subjectivities contemplating the object world can be just as experientially true:

The self ended and the world began.

They were of equal size,

commensurate,

one mirrored the other.

“Prism”’s opening evokes the self’s emergence in this key, rather than in a scene of bodily, socially situated birth:

1.

Who can say what the world is? The world

is in flux, therefore

unreadable, the winds shifting,

the great plates invisibly shifting and changing—

2.

Dirt. Fragments

of blistered rock. On which

the exposed heart constructs

a house…

……………….

3.

As one takes in

an enemy, …

one takes in

the world[.](505)

The poem’s opening seems to deny the others, first and foremost, the mother, who enable and condition birth; in O’Byrne’s terms, although “others’ experience of my arrival constitutes a world that is undoubtedly and specifically my world from the start, I am as yet incapable of claiming it as such” (O’Byrne 2010, 42). Glück’s visually awkward notion of the “exposed heart” building a house on a rocky shore suggests an attempt to ground (dirt, rock, tectonic plates) the self in the natural, or elemental, world rather than the social world. This attempt, while eliding one truth of natality, is true to another. Although “we owe our existence to others”, O’Byrne writes, “those others are nevertheless not the ground of our being”; while “none of us could have come to be without all our forebears”, nonetheless, “before I came to be, there was nothing about those ancestors or their world that determined that I should be. I could very well never have come to be. Our surprise that we are is a version of the astonishment we feel in the face of creation, the astonishment Wittgenstein sees expressed in the phrase ‘I wonder at the existence of the world’” (O’Byrne 2010, 7).

“Prism” begins with just such a sense of “wonder”, moves through the way that the self is conditioned—in particular, the way girls’ development is conditioned by the myth of romantic love—and ends by reclaiming wonder in the context of love, which the poem has worked to reframe and demythologize. Setting the scene as “A night in summer”, the final section repeats from the opening the line “The great plates invisibly shifting and changing”, then zooms in on “lovers sleeping in each other’s arms”, to conclude,

We are, each of us, the one who wakens first,

who stirs first and sees, there in the first dawn,

the stranger. (Glück 2012, 511)

As the word “first” occurs three times over two lines, the lovers become Adam and Eve, newly created; each is the “first” human to see the other for the first time.7 “Prism” joins natality as conditioned and natality as undetermined, natality as inextricability from relations, and natality as creation or beginning.

“Should the psychiatrists of the future need a Persephone complex”, quipped William Logan (2006) when reviewing Averno, “they’ll have to pay Glück royalties”. In psychoanalytic thought, Freud’s Oedipus complex names the male child’s hidden desire to kill his father and marry his mother; it speaks of belatedness, the substitutive quality of adult love (modeled on love for the parent), and, in Toril Moi’s compelling revisionary reading, of finitude in its guise as (the fear of) castration (Moi 2004). The Electra complex is, in one sense, its complement, addressing the derivative nature of the girl child’s heterosexual desire (as in Glück’s “Eros” 1980 (Glück 2012, 125)). Logan’s “Persephone complex” may refer to the seemingly pathological relationship between a possessive mother and submissive daughter Glück evokes in some of the volume’s most memorable lines: Persephone “has been a prisoner since she has been a daughter”; “the daughter’s body / doesn’t exist, except / as a branch of the mother’s body / that needs to be / reattached at any cost” (Glück 2012, 503, 553). Just as the Oedipus complex speaks to a version of finitude (covering over, in Moi’s terms, several existential conditions, including mortality, sexual difference, and our separation from others, by the mystified notion of “castration”), the Persephone complex of Averno, I suggest, speaks of the intersection of finitude with natality. In Glück’s retellings, the story combines questions of sex and death with those of birth and maternal love. Glück’s prismatic reimaginings of the Persephone myth across Averno reveal how the story asks not only, does a child belong to her mother? Can a daughter claim a self and a life outside of the grasp of mother and of husband? But also, how can we fathom finitude, accounting both for the death’s finality and birth’s opening onto the unexpected and the undetermined? What allows these questions to emerge and to enrich one another turns out to be a hybrid identification, the capacity to see at once from the perspectives of mother and of child.

This hybrid perspective emerges explicitly only in the volume’s last poem, and even there, as we will see, it can be difficult to credit. Throughout the volume, mothers have been a problem—as in the lines quoted above, or Persephone’s desire to shake off “the horrible mantle / of daughterliness … cling[ing] to her” (531), or the conviction that “the earth /is run by mothers, this much / is certain” and that “the tale of Persephone/… should be read // as an argument between the mother and the lover— / the daughter is just meat” (503, 553). In “Prism”, as we have seen, the unconditioned self, “commensurate” with the world it contemplates, comes into conflict with constraining social structures and expectations, for which the mother is the mouthpiece: “You girls… should marry someone like your father”. The lens of natality helps us, however, to see this conflict less as an opposition and more as a paradox, by offering a perspective from which the conditioned and the undetermined are two sides of the same bare fact of having been born. Natality also opens up an alternate perspective on Averno’s stern admonitions against seeing in seasonal rebirth an analogy for human resurrection, its conviction that the “return” of “Spring” is “a dream / based on a falsehood: / that the dead return” (553). From the viewpoint of mortality, Persephone’s return as or with spring is a “false” promise of resurrection after death. But if we consider natality, we can see that, even as spring’s recurrence denies death, it also denies birth, if to be born is to be unique and irreplaceable. Persephone’s return every spring robs her of natality as uniqueness, positioning her as a substitute for her own lost self (a formulation resonant with Glück’s account of feeling she was born to replace her sister8). Yet Demeter’s grief attests to her daughter’s singularity, “As a god, she could have had / a thousand children” (552), but the story depends upon Persephone’s being the only one.

Unlike Demeter, who “remembers everything” (as we will see below), the earth does not remember. A farmer whose field of wheat was burned (perhaps by a mysterious young girl) discovers as much in “Averno”:

After the first winter, the field began to grow again.

But there were no more orderly furrows.

………………………………..

Nature, it turns out, isn’t like us;

It doesn’t have a warehouse of memory.

The field doesn’t become afraid of matches,

of young girls. It doesn’t remember

furrows either.

$$

For the farmer, this realization is “terrible”:

he understood that the earth

didn’t know how to mourn, that it would change instead.

And then go on existing without him. (547)

This “terrible” truth suggests a surprising corollary: the consolation of the Persephone myth lies not only in Persephone’s return but also in Demeter’s desire for that return. Although the volume frames Demeter as culpably possessive, it also suggests that her grief and her protective love answer a human desire to believe we are (in words from “October”) “necessary to the earth” (494).

The two poems titled “Persephone the Wanderer”, one near the beginning and one at the end of Averno, put pressure on the Persephone myth, interpreting it with an avid desire to order, to pin down, to know, a desire that finally gives way, in both, to a singing that seems to listen for what cannot be known. A narrating voice calls the poems “versions”, refers to other “scholars”, and interprets the myth. Rosanna Warren calls this “an outside, orchestrating, probing intelligence, a metanarrator” (Warren 2008, 108); as Ann Keniston notes, its “tone of argumentation” revitalizes an “overly familiar” story (Keniston 2008, 182). At times, however, this voice does not so much probe as deflect—the relieved “problems of sexuality need not/trouble us here” draws attention to this tendency (Glück 2012, 552)—or attempt to stamp a single interpretation upon a polyvalent story, staging the speaker as the knowing expert who tells us how the story “should be read”, instructing that the myth consists of “Three parts: just as the soul is divided, / ego, superego, id”, and stipulating that “You are allowed to like/no one, you know. The characters / are not people./ They are aspects of a dilemma or conflict” (502). The poems stage a tension between the didactic, prescriptive voice, and a richer and stranger voice that emerges as though via the “rift” of which the poems speak: “They say / there is a rift in the human soul / which was not constructed to belong / entirely to life” (504). Averno’s title names a crater lake in southern Italy, “regard by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld” (487). But we might think not only of a rift opening onto the world of the dead, but also of the rift through which a child emerges into the world—metaphorically from another world, literally from its mother’s body. In the Persephone poems, snow—“White of forgetfulness”—suggests the blankness of the immemorial, located in this rift. Winter is Persephone’s blind spot: “Unlike the rest of us, she doesn’t know / what winter is, only that / she is what causes it”. The whiting out frustrates the didactic narrator but enables access to the “rift” and the “song” that emerges from it to end the poem:

       Where

the rift is, the break is.

$$

Song of the earth,

song of the mythic vision of eternal life—

$$

My soul

shattered with the strain

of trying to belong to earth—

$$

What will you do,

when it is your turn in the field with the god?

“Where / the rift is, the break is”, with its awkward repetition of the verb “is” ending both clauses, draws attention to the moment of reading, the lyric “now”, which coincides with the didactic voice falling silent, and the poem listening to, or for, the incantatory evocation of two songs “Song of the earth, / song of the mythic vision of eternal life—” which breaks off and then restarts with the emergence of a new and different “I” (“My soul shattered”) and a newly immediate “you”, which reaches outward from the text into the reader’s present and future with the final question, or challenge. Like the red (read) poppy in The Wild Iris, this speaker “speak[s]/ because [she is] shattered” (271), a shattering among whose many referents we might include the breaching of bodily boundaries and the emergence of two souls from one (sole) in birth.

“In the second version”, the scholarly voice tells us, in the volume’s final poem, also called “Persephone the Wanderer”, “Persephone / is dead” (552). The seemingly definitive turn toward death—“She is dead, the dead are mysteries”—gives way in the third stanza to a contemplation of another mystery, birth:

We have here

a mother and a cipher: this is

accurate to the experience

of the mother as

$$

she looks into the infant’s face. She thinks:

I remember when you didn’t exist. The infant

is puzzled; later, the child’s opinion is

she has always existed, just as

$$

her mother has always existed

in her present form. Her mother

is like a figure at a bus stop,

an audience for the bus’s arrival. Before that,

she was the bus, a temporary home or convenience.

The child’s comically self-centered view captures a natal commonplace: in Alison Stone’s words, “When I think of the long swathes of time that elapsed before I was there, I can feel…perplexed. How could I ever not have been there? When I try to grasp this past time, I surreptitiously presuppose that I was already there perceiving it”—as if from a bus window (Stone 2019, 65).

Perhaps because we have each been a child, perhaps because (in Jennifer Banks’s words) we have “no common sentence about birth” (Banks 2023, 23), critics have found it surprisingly difficult to attend without blame to “the experience / of the mother” in these lines. Uta Gosmann helpfully frames Averno as psychoanalytic in how it “conceive[s] of the human psyche” as “extending far beyond the consciously accessible facts of life” (Gosmann 2012, 180) and asks us to “remember death” via “an appeal to our poetic memory” (179). While her chapter on Averno contains many useful insights, Gosmann’s reading of this key moment brings to light the difficulty in grasping the hybrid identification I have been arguing is crucial to the volume’s philosophical work: the difficulty in seeing the mother’s perspective alongside the child’s. Glossing the lines “I remember when you didn’t exist”, Gosmann asks, “Does the mother remember her life before the child was born?” That neutral question leads quickly to others that imagine harm to the child: “Does she threaten the baby, insinuating that its existence is precarious? Does she assert her dominance by reminding the child that her memory reaches beyond its existence?” (201). It was Gosmann’s reading of these lines that led me to begin to think about the question of natality in Glück. I found myself protesting: could not the mother’s statement stand not as a threat, but as an expression of wonder—you did not exist, and now you do; you were born; once you were not here, and now you are? The mother’s ability to remember when the child did not exist underlies her ability to experience—with any number of possible emotional inflections—the child’s appearance as the addition of something new to the world. Gosmann elides the humor and the partiality of the child’s point of view in the line about the bus stop and the bus and takes the word “cipher” to indicate “the mother’s lack of relationship” to her daughter (185). But what mother, what parent, has not seen her or his child as, in part, a mystery? “A mother and a cipher” could equally describe the speaker and her son in “Child Crying Out” (“As for your thoughts, your dreams—”). Later in the poem, we learn that Demeter, petitioning Zeus to get Persephone back, “remembers everything”:

For example, her daughter’s

birth was unbearable, her beauty

was unbearable: she remembers this.

She remembers Persephone’s

innocence, her tenderness—

Gosmann reads these lines as evidence of the mother’s “envy” (202). But again, could we not read them as “accurate / to the experience/of [a] mother”, for whom the physical pain of birth may feel “unbearable” and whose overwhelming, “terrified… protective” love for her child (in the words of “Death and Absence”) might render the child’s “beauty”, “innocence”, and “tenderness” unbearable as well?9

Demeter’s memory, grief, and longing for her lost child lead her to bargain with Zeus for Persephone’s return:

if Zeus will get her back,

winter will end.

$$

Winter will end, spring will return.

The small pestering breezes

that I so love, the idiot yellow flowers—

Who is “I”? Just as a new voice emerged at the end of the first “Persephone the Wanderer” to say “My soul shattered…”, here, near the end of the second, an “I” we are not prepared for speaks. The didactic voice quickly returns to analyze and interpret the myth:

       If

Persephone “returns” there will be

one of two reasons:

$$

either she was not dead or

she is being used

to support a fiction—

At this point, the didactic voice breaks off, as if giving way to the “fiction” it has named:

I think I can remember

being dead. Many times, in winter,

I approached Zeus. Tell me, I would ask him,

how can I endure the earth?

$$

And he would say,

in a short time you will be here again.

And in the time between

$$

you will forget everything:

those fields of ice will be

the meadows of Elysium. (Glück 2012, 554)

As at the end of the first “Persephone the Wanderer”, in these closing lines, event takes precedence over narrative. And “fiction” becomes not a lie or “falsehood” but a staging that captures both desire and a kind of truth. In The Wild Iris (as in Herbert, Hopkins, and others), the seasons offer a resonant, powerful analogy for survival through and out of emotional and creative dormancy. But in Averno, what is figured by dormancy is not primarily experiences of despondency, depression, grief, or creative drought. Averno is concerned instead with the immemorial: the time before birth and after death. These we do not experience or know; “fiction” is our only means of access.

The “fiction” of the final lines of the second “Persephone the Wanderer” includes the dialogue with Zeus, a dialogue that feels both unexpected (the volume has centered on Demeter, Persephone, and Hades) and overdetermined. Zeus is the father figure who breaks the mother–child dyad; he is an authority or creator god petitioned by poetry of prayer. Among many possible echoes of other poets, here, I hear the closing quatrain of Emily Dickinson’s “God made a little Gentian–” (Fr 520, Dickinson 1999), in which a flower attains its “ravish[ing]… Purple” color only “just before the snows”:

The Frosts were her condition–

The Tyrian would not come

Until the North–invoke it–

Creator–Shall I–bloom?

“[J]ust not being” is “hard … to imagine”, whether no longer existing in the future or not having existed in the past (Glück 2012, 489). Asking “how can I endure the earth?” or “Creator–Shall I–bloom?”—offers an alternative to that blank imagining. The former question recalls the latter (and others like it); the lyric “I” that says “I think I can remember / being dead” carries with it poetic echoes (of posthumous voices in Dickinson, among others); that is, what and how it “remembers”. This “I” emerges, as at end of the first “Persephone the Wanderer”, through a “rift” in the didactic narrator’s analysis, a “break” in her knowing stance, as if—like the mother in “Child Crying Out”—the poem stops trying to know and begins to listen. We might say that, as an alternative to knowledge, listening opens onto the immemorial. The “ability to listen… has something to do with the secret of human existence” for Mary Ruefle, who locates the original experience of hearing without understanding in the womb, where the unborn child “perceive[s] through sound an outside world it has absolutely no experience of, no concept of, and no perception of except through sound” (99, 75).

“I used to think I wrote”, Ruefle muses, “because there was something I wanted to say. Then I thought, ‘I will continue to write because I have not yet said what I wanted to say’; but I know now I continue to write because I have not yet heard what I have been listening to” (Ruefle 2012, 77). Glück’s poems about natality, birth, and the relationship between mothers and children listen for and to what they cannot know. While Averno strives to face death, that impulse is part of a more capacious (and no less difficult) reckoning with finitude and the immemorial. Not only does finitude devastate through the fact the dead do not return; it also, in its guise as natality, enlivens and surprises: “Life’s natal character marks it as shot through with newness and contingency” (O’Byrne 2010, 47); the “lively anarchic impulse into which natality taps” may be “the vital source of our creativity” (60). Averno and Glück’s earlier poems about pregnancy, birth, and maternity suggest that grasping finitude in its dual character of mortality and natality requires imaginatively inhabiting, in turn, the hybrid perspective of child and of mother.