Hope even when life feels uncertain
Dispatch from Writing with the Seasons - October 2023
Welcome to this short dispatch from ‘Writing with the Seasons’. If you’re not already a premium subscriber, you can sign up here to enjoy our essays and audio courses as they unfold season by season.
Things feel tough at the moment, the news full of much grief and loss. So I offer you a short poem by Louise Glück (1943–2023), who recently passed away. Glück was US Poet Laureate and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature.
I love Glück’s collection The Wild Iris, which follows the seasons, from spring to summer. She explores gardens as metaphors and takes on the persona of different flowers: snowdrops, daisies and more. The poems are full of depth and insights on what it is to be human, what it is to form relationships, what it is to see hope even when life feels painful and uncertain.
Glück’s work often express the quiet beauty and sadness of nature, of life. When so much seems unbearable, there can also be resilience.
Snowdrops
Do you know what I was, how I lived? You know
what despair is; then
winter should have meaning for you.
I did not expect to survive,
earth suppressing me. I didn't expect
to waken again, to feel
in damp earth my body
able to respond again, remembering
after so long how to open again
in the cold light
of earliest spring—
afraid, yes, but among you again
crying yes risk joy
in the raw wind of the new world.
Read more Louise Glück poems in The Paris Review. Writing with the Seasons is brought to you by Write & Shine, a programme of morning writing workshops and online courses. Autumn artwork by Meg Harriet.