The Mystery (Criticism)

Criticism

What Do I Read Next?

• Louise Glück edited the edition of the popular series The Best American Poetry 1993. She selected poems by thirty poets whose work had not appeared in the series previously, as well as poems by seasoned veterans. John Ashbery, Billy Collins, Tess Gallagher, Denise Levertov, and Gjertrud Schnackenberg were among her choices.
• One of the most well known confessional poets, Anne Sexton was plagued with mental illness most of her life, eventually committing suicide in 1974. Diane Wood Middlebrook’s 1991 account of her life and suicide, entitled Anne Sexton: A Biography, is a comprehensive look at Sexton from a variety of angles: confessional poet, depressed woman, therapy patient, and elusive wife and mother.
• Rex Stout’s mysteries, featuring the eccentric detective Nero Wolfe and his sidekick Archie Goodwin, are some of the most popular tales of that genre. Stout wrote for over four decades, beginning in the 1930s, and his “golden” period is considered by mystery fans to be the early 1960s. Three big sellers from this period include Too Many Clients (1960), A Right to Die (1964), and The Doorbell Rang (1965).
• While there are many versions of Dante Alighieri’s Vita Nuova, a recent translation by Mark Musa, published in 2000, is one of the most readable for students not already familiar with the work. Vita Nuova is a collection of thirty-one poems set alongside a prose narrative celebrating and pondering the subject of love. Musa’s translation includes a critical introduction and explanatory notes.

Beginning with the third stanza, Glück falters into complaint and self-pity. The line “Fearless heart, never tremble again” reads as though the poet has suddenly slipped into the Romantic Age, speaking to her own organ of sentimentality and, thereby, drawing upon the most cliché of addresses. The notion of a despairing woman’s heart falling under the “shadow” of her lost love’s “narrow palm” is trite, imploring the reader to feel as sorry for her as she feels for herself. But the moaning does not end there. While the language of the next stanza at least returns to the twentieth century, the subject remains self-pity, with helplessness thrown in for more dramatic effect. In saying, “My life took me many places, / many of them very dark,” Glück implies that she was not in control of where her life “took” her. Instead, she went from place to place, or from event to event, “without [her] volition,” as though she was unable to make a conscious decision regarding her own life. Lest the reader should still not quite get the point, Glück emphasizes her total helplessness by comparing herself to a baby in a stroller, being pushed “from behind,” completely at the mercy of powers other than her own. Or so it seems to the poet, if to no one else.

Not all confessional poets, including Glück, resort to the shallow tune of self-pity in the majority of their work. Most can make their points and let their feelings be known by relating personal events and thoughts with simple, unaffected language and even brutal honesty. Honesty, brutal or otherwise, is preferable to triteness and literary sap. Toward the end of “The Mystery,” Glück attempts to regain some composure by watering down the pathos with a sudden change of attitude. She claims abruptly, “And yet I saw amazing things.” Instead of comparing herself to a “fishlike baby,” she calls herself “an eager student” — a much more compelling description than one that attempts to evoke pity. But the poet does not reveal what “amazing things” she saw, only that they relate metaphorically to Nero Wolfe mystery stories and literally to the puzzles she has encountered in her personal life. This declaration is intriguing, but it is not enough to save the poem. Glück still alludes to her position as “clinging” and to her sentiment as self-accusatory. She seems to try to overcome her own helplessness in the end and, yet, she is also still figuring out who she is and what her “purpose” is. The reader, then, is left with the sense that the poet’s vulnerability and feebleness are still very much intact and that she is not particularly determined to put them aside. Here, a psychologist’s notion of “learned helplessness” is all too attractive to the poet, perhaps gaining her the attention she feels she needs.

The genre of confessional poetry is a delicate one in regard to what constitutes good and bad examples of this type of verse. On one hand, critics need to keep in mind that the very nature of confessional writing is just that — to confess something, and that generally means something personal. With that in mind, is it fair to attack a poet who has had the guts (or gall) to expose deeply personal thoughts, many of which are controversial, embarrassing, sexual, or even shameful? Perhaps the answer lies in looking at the flip side to subject matter: style. Subject matter is only as good as its presentation. Poets can address feelings of helplessness and vulnerability without using the language and images of self-pity. The first two stanzas of “The Mystery,” for instance, portray a melancholy scene, one in which the speaker offers straightforward description of her setting that may make the reader feel sorrow or sadness without being told to. That’s the key. Good presentation paints a vivid picture for the reader to consider and respond to as the writer desires, if the picture is not muddied with pathos and sentimentality.

Source: Pamela Steed Hill, Critical Essay on “The Mystery,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.

Adrian Blevins

Blevins is an essayist and poet who has taught at Hollins University, Sweet Briar College, and in the Virginia Community College System. In this essay, Blevins contends that there is an unfortunate gap between Glück’s rhetorical and poetic arguments in her poem.

There is sometimes a noticeable gap between what a poet states to be the truth and what her language indicates to be the truth. This gap has to do with the ability of language to communicate feeling through rhythm and music and can be either an intentional strategy or the result of an actual disconnection between thought and feeling. In some poems, this gap creates ambiguity or irony or both: if a poem tries to express an idea or feeling that its language does not support or impose, the reader might experience the pleasure of irony, which is the pleasure of the jolt of a collision of opposites. Such a gap between what a poem says it says and what a poem’s language implies it says might also suggest that the poet means not necessarily what she says, but more than she says. This strategy can contribute to a poem’s ambiguity, or its ability to live in two opposing worlds simultaneously. Yet, sometimes, a gap between what a poet says and what her language implies she means can undermine a poem’s power since it suggests that what the mind thinks is not exactly what the heart feels.

“The Mystery” comes toward the end of Louise Glück’s eighth book, Vita Nova. Vita Nova is a sequence about “the painful reconstruction of the self after divorce,” as the American poet and critic Kate Daniels says in her 1999 commentary in the Southern Review. While much of Vita Nova describes the speaker’s grief in the wake of the loss of love — a grief she admits in “Aubade,” saying she “thought [she] couldn’t survive” — many poems in Vita Nova try to get at the new life suggested in the book’s title by attempting to move away from this emotion toward an expression of pleasure in having survived a seemingly fatal emotion. In the book’s last poem (which, like the book’s first poem, is called “Vita Nova”), the speaker says, “I thought my life was over and my heart was broken. / Then I moved to Cambridge.” Thus concludes Glück’s sequence: the speaker, adopting a variety of mythical personas, moves from the unbearable to something like a state of wonder at having lived through the unbearable. Glück’s overuse of the declarative sentence and paucity of image and music are more useful to her articulation of the numbness of grief than to her articulation of being “a creature of light” in “The Mystery.” That is, there is a gap in “The Mystery” between Glück’s rhetorical and poetic arguments that is neither ironic nor pleasantly ambiguous.

First, the poem’s structure undermines its rhetorical claim by concentrating too much on the cause of the speaker’s grief, rather than on the “light” that comes in its wake. “The Mystery” moves forward by way of a series of loose associations. In the first stanza, the speaker describes herself as “a creature of light,” reinforcing this declarative or discursive idea with images of light-colored objects. In the poem’s third and forth lines, the poet states, for example, that “the roses [in California] were hydrant-color” and that a “baby rolled by in its yellow stroller.” This opening suggests that the speaker has moved away from “the world [that] shattered” in the poem “Formaggio,” for just one example: the light-colored images suggest that the speaker has begun to step into the new life that is the book’s pledge. As the poem progresses, Glück moves backward from this notion of vibrant light to a memory of “the very dark” “places” her life took her, and in so doing undermines the poem’s main premise.

The speaker tells us in the second stanza that she “sat in a folding chair / reading Nero Wolfe for the twentieth time.” This confession suggests that the speaker is occupied with distracting herself, rather than with embracing the new life that is hers to claim. She says that the mystery “has become restful,” and then makes an abstract statement about the nature of the innocent that can apply to both the characters in the Nero Wolfe mystery and in Vita Nova itself. This focus on the unnamed innocent, and on the idea that “time moves. .. backward / from the act to the motive / and forward to just resolution” might be meant to describe the shape of “The Mystery” itself, but it serves only to point to the idea that someone is innocent and someone is guilty — a notably dark sentiment. In the third stanza, the speaker shifts in point of view, addressing herself when she says: “Fearless heart, never tremble again.” This turning point seems promising at first since it suggests that the speaker has realized that her sorrow will no longer attempt to destroy her. But the images that follow — if they can be called images — are far too vague to be convincing. Those images about “the only shadow in the narrow palm’s / that cannot enclose you absolutely” that are not “like the shadows of the east” are extremely obscure — they are private references that Glück does not bother to make public.

In the fourth stanza, the speaker says that life is always “pushing from behind, / from one world to another.” Again, this image is promising, since it implies that we are moving from grief to another emotional state. The speaker claims in stanza four that this movement “from one world to another, like the fishlike baby” is formless and “entirely arbitrary.” Although it’s possible that the world is formless and arbitrary, the image of the baby counters this argument, since a baby is a fairly reliable “form” of nature. In other words, stanza four is illogical: it makes a discursive statement that its ornamental image plainly negates.

In stanza five, the speaker realizes that “the passionate threats and questions, / the old search for justice, / must have been entirely deluded.” What does it mean to suggest that threats and questions and a search for justice are deluded? Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that the person who makes the threats and asks the questions and searches for justice is deluded? Doesn’t the speaker’s unwillingness to implicate herself imply that she is unwilling to face the truth that her journey in Vita Nova is supposed to supply? While these lines suggest that a change has taken place in the speaker — that she’s able to stand with the world by thinking the past is arbitrary and unjust, rather than reasonable and fair — their declarative nature undermine the energy that such a realization would imply. In other words, in addition to its lack of logic, stanza five is too abstract and too lacking in music to be compelling. It reads more like philosophy than poetry.

In the poem’s sixth stanza, the speaker returns to the poem’s initial premise, saying that she “became almost radiant at the end. clinging to these simple mysteries / so that [she] might silence in [herself] the last accusations,” which she tells us in the poem’s final stanza is the universal question, “Who are you and what is your purpose”? That is, the structure of the “The Mystery” is a spiral: it moves from the end result of being “a creature of light” backwards to the formless and arbitrary darkness of grief, then forward again to being “radiant at the end” and wishing at last to “silence. .. the last accusations.” It begins and ends in the idea that the speaker is “a creature of light” — looking at the darkness of grief from the survivor’s point of view. A spiral’s very shape suggests a predominate middle, while the speaker claims that the “light” at the beginning and ending of her poem is her focus. That is, the poem’s shape or structure undermines its claim.

“The Mystery” is made up of nine declarative sentences, one imperative sentence, and one question that begins as a declarative sentence. The declarative sentence can help poets achieve something like an “authority of voice,” since it is by nature emphatic. That is, people who make statements sound confident. “I became a creature of light,” ending on a period, is far more emphatic — far more sure of itself — than “I became a creature of light”? It is also important to note that the declarative sentence, when it is used unsparingly, is very flat — it allows for very little musical inflection and intonation. Glück’s use of the declarative sentence in “The Mystery” is not as effective as it is in some of the other poems in Vita Nova partly because the statements Glück makes in this poem are not supported or reinforced by images or music, and partly because the statements, as we have seen, are slightly illogical. The effectiveness of images to reinforce statements can be seen in the poem’s first stanza, where the poem’s only true images reside. The speaker’s claim that she became “a creature of light” is reinforced, in other words, with images of “hydrant-color” roses and the “yellow stroller.” The claims later stanzas make are not reinforced in this way. As seen in stanza four, the speaker commands herself “never [to] tremble again,” but there are no images or music to help us believe that this command will be heard. Although the imperative sentence in this stanza is very emphatic, and though that tone is reinforced by a predominance of end-stopped lines, the stanza’s vagueness — its lack of clarity — undermines the command’s emphatic tone, suggesting again that the speaker is not as convinced of her emotional state as the poem claims. It’s also worth noting that the empathic nature of the declarative and imperative sentences undermine the muted music in this stanza and in others: the repeated /w/ sounds in “shadow,” “narrow,” and “shadow,” in other words, are hard to hear because of how very flat a series of declarative or imperative, end-stopped lines will sound.

Praising the Greek poet Sappho’s “Seizure” in a recent issue of The American Poetry Review, the American poet and critic Joe Wenderoth remarks:

In poetic speech, the subject has always implicitly suffered a blow, and this blow has opened up a chasm between herself and the loved scene; while it in some sense represents a dramatic impotence, this chasm nevertheless births a new power — or, it is perhaps better said, causes a new deployment of the same power. Instead of residing in an ability to make her way through the world, the poet’s power is shifted toward an ability to stand in, to stand with, the world, which no longer offers a through.

It is interesting to note that Glück also has a poem called “Seizure” in Vita Nova and that it is placed in the book right before “The Mystery.” Glück’s “Seizure” ends: “And yes, I was alone; / how could I not be?” and so gets at a fundamental truth the loss of love should teach, which is that we are never lost as long as we are alive. In so doing, it reveals that in some poems in Vita Nova, Glück does communicate that her power has “shifted toward an ability to stand in, to stand with, the world.” Yet Glück’s “Seizure,” like Sappho’s, uses a complex of images from the natural world and varied sentence type to counter the heavy weight of this lesson with the beauty of exuberant, rather than flat, language. The same can be said for the final “Vita Nova” in Glück’s book. Although the last lines — “I thought my life was over and my heart was broken. / Then I moved to Cambridge” — are as declarative as many lines in “The Mystery,” they are countered in the poem with the speedy excitement in lines like, “Blizzard, / Daddy needs you; Daddy’s heart is empty, / not because he’s leaving Mommy but because / the kind of love he wants Mommy / doesn’t have, Mommy’s / too ironic — Mommy wouldn’t do the rhumba in the driveway.”

“The Mystery” may attempt to capture the uncertainty of a person trying to forge a new life from the jagged remains of the old, but its very uncertainty, the lack of resolve or reckoning in the poem’s language, obscure any sense that the speaker has progressed into this “new life.” The poem crumbles under the weight of its own flat tone and lack of music, and the reader is left feeling that the poem is an unfinished work — that the speaker is more interested in convincing herself that she need “never tremble again” than she is in showing the reader any insight into the human psyche’s ability to overcome the loss of love.

Source: Adrian Blevins, Critical Essay on “The Mystery,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.

“Subject matter is only as good as its presentation. Poets can address feelings of helplessness and vulnerability without using the language and images of self-pity.”