All Hallows (Honouring The Dead) by Nobel Laureate (2020) Louise Glück

All Hallows

Even now this landscape is assembling.

The hills darken. The oxen

sleep in their blue yoke,

the fields having been

picked clean, the sheaves

bound evenly and piled at the roadside

among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:

This is the barrenness

of harvest or pestilence.

And the wife leaning out the window

with her hand extended, as in payment,

and the seeds

distinct, gold, calling

Come here

Come here, little one

And the soul creeps out of the tree.

- From The House On Marshland (1975)

***

Notes:

All Hallows – all saints’ day, related to Halloween. Honouring all saints, and all Christians who have died and gone to heaven

Hallow – honour as holy, saint or holy person

Sheaf - a bundle of grain stalks laid lengthways and tied together after reaping

Cinquefoil - a widely distributed herbaceous plant of the rose family, with compound leaves of five leaflets and five-petalled yellow flowers. Also, an ornamental design of five lobes arranged in a circle

***

All [of her poems] are characterized by a striving for clarity. Childhood and family life, the close relationship with parents and siblings, is a thematic that has remained central with her. In her poems, the self-listens for what is left of its dreams and delusions, and nobody can be harder than she in confronting the illusions of the self. But even if Glück would never deny the significance of the autobiographical background, she is not to be regarded as a confessional poet. Glück seeks the universal, and in this she takes inspiration from myths and classical motifs, present in most of her works

- Anders Olsson, Chairman of the Nobel Committee

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