In honor of poet Louise Glück, a fellow attendant of Sarah Lawrence who passed on just two weeks ago, I’d like to offer my awe and interpretation of one of her earlier poems:

Love Poem

There is always something to be made of pain.
Your mother knits.
She turns out scarves in every shade of red.
They were for Christmas, and they kept you warm
while she married over and over, taking you
along. How could it work,
when all those years she stored her widowed heart
as though the dead come back.
No wonder you are the way you are,
afraid of blood, your women
like one brick wall after another.

“There is always something to be made of pain.” In this opening line, Louise encapsulates the central, universal struggle that accompanies the title word of the poem: love. There is often love, or something as worthwhile, where there is pain.  She gives us the image of a knitting mother, automatically eliciting nurture and care, the amount of unsung tenderness that goes into crafting handmade scarves for someone. This is love, and so are all other pictures of color and setting that Louise writes: “every shade of red.” along with a mention of Christmas, the ideal time to be warmed by somebody’s hands, or what their hands have made. The subject remains an unknown “you” throughout Love Poem. One can imagine that Louise is addressing a lover or ex-lover. Maybe an unrequited love. 

The poem shifts after its fourth line, where more melancholic connotations overpower the warm, lovely nostalgia Louise initially built with her words. It’s as if the poem begins to resent itself. We no longer see the mother as a romanticized figure, quietly knitting clothes to protect her child from the winter. Now we learn of the repeated marriages her child has witnessed, her widowed heart. “How could it work,” poses a question the poet already knows the answer to. Louise blames her lover for their intimate struggles just as much as she blames their past, their traumas, the pain that made their love, and the pain carried from their mother’s love. 

Lines seven and eight are poignant of grief, as Louise so swiftly evokes the nature of hopelessly waiting for someone who has already gone. The mother stores her widowed heart, knowing it will not be shared with anyone, and that she will not open herself to love again. The “you” of the poem does the same. “No wonder you are the way you are, / afraid of blood, your women / like one brick wall after another.” The poem’s close is particularly striking in its word choices: blood and brick walls. “afraid of blood,” perhaps alludes to the subject’s unwillingness to dig past the surface of a potential love affair, to uncover and work through these obstructive patterns. The penultimate line’s break may be acknowledging the subject’s preference for women who are similar in this aspect: “afraid of blood, your women”

Boundaries and brick walls seem almost synonymous in this context; with every woman this person begins to love, another wall goes up, pushing them further away from the possibility of ever being known or knowing somebody. I love this poem because, despite this, the poet dissects her subject with 11 lines of words and 93 syllables, leaving them utterly defenseless. Does she know this person better than they know themselves? Is love just psychoanalysis? Is poetry?

Thank you for your words, Louise Glück. Rest in love.