Louise Glück's Obsession With Children and Death
Andrea Townsend

            Figure is replete with the themes of childbirth, children, and death. Ironically, most of her poems in this collection dealing with birth and children are rather bleak, often alluding to impending Louise Glück's book of poetry Descending death. Four poems in particular, "The Fear of Birth," "Pieta," "The Sick Child," and "For My Sister," deal with the relationship between children and death. The poems include recurring images of life as dark, cruel, or nightmarish, and hints of birth as the beginning of a cycle ultimately moving towards death.

Childbirth as Death

            Two of Glück's poems, "The Fear of Birth" and "Pieta" primarily present the idea of birth as the beginning of a cycle towards death. Glück's poems about childbirth lament birth into this horrid world, and the outlook on life is not pretty; childbirth, and life in general, are depicted as bleak and cruel.
            "The Fear of Birth" is one of five poems in a set entitled "The Garden." This poem ambiguously pictures both literal birth and the rebirth of the speaker. She wonders why her body is "sprung back" into this life and if the fear "will be the same again." The speaker's body "could not content itself / with health," assuming the protection of the mother's womb or the health of some former state of mind (if it is, indeed a rebirth), and is thus flung into the cruel living world of pain and death.
            The entrance into the world is in itself a surreal experience, at once revealing the decay and nightmarish qualities of life. As the speaker enters, she hears at first "One sound. Then the hiss and whir / of houses gliding into their places." Decay is evident in this place "without immunity," for the bodies of animals are "leafed through" by the wind. This world is portrayed in a very surreal manner, for, almost as if in some strange nightmare, a shrub "walks stiffly out of the dirt, trailing the twisted signature of its root," while a tulip appears as a "red claw." In this light, the world appears as a bleak place, a place of death and sickness, for it is metaphorically referred to as "a field without immunity." The world is a place where loss is a given, for it is written in the last stanza: "And then the losses, / one after another, / all supportable." This fear of birth can justifiably be stated as a fear of death. A life of pain, loss, decay, and vulnerability can only lead, ultimately, to death.
            Another poem suggesting birth as the beginning of a cycle toward death is the more straightforward and religious "Pietà." The poem is about the night of Jesus Christ's birth. In the poem, the Baby Jesus is not yet born; the baby is still in its mother's womb, "Under the strained / fabric of her skin." The Virgin Mary is very protective of this unborn child and is very attentive to its every sound and movement because she knows it is special: "She listened, / because he had no father." Mary knows the infant wants to remain inside her protective womb, and the Baby Jesus, unborn yet full of divine insight, knows that the living world is a horrible place, a land full of cries of despair and pain, of "roughhousing" and mistreatment. The world is nightmarish, and this child is to be delivered into it by the light of a star which is "shining steadily in its dark context."
           The most obvious foreshadowing of Christ's imminent death, however, is the title of the poem: "Pietà." A pietà is any depiction of the Virgin Mary supporting and mourning the dead body of Jesus Christ. This title is ironic, for the poem concentrates on the night of Christ's birth, before His actual delivery, in fact. Presenting the idea of a mother mourning her dead son before the child is even born forces one to see birth as synonymous to death. Birth is both the beginning of the downward spiral into one's ultimate death and death itself, for once one is released from the protection and health of the womb, the dangers and horrors of the world "without immunity" will ultimately destroy the once perfect being.

Childbirth as Death

           Two poems, "The Sick Child" and "For My Sister," are part of a set of three entitled "Descending Figure," which deal primarily with the death of small children, not focusing on childbirth as the previous two have done. While Glück's poems about childbirth seem to lament birth into this horrid world, her poems about the death of children lament the sadness of death itself. Since neither living (birth) nor death brings about any sort of consolation to Glück, one cannot help but wonder what she sees as the reason for being - if she sees any purpose in life at all.
           "The Sick Child" gives a story behind the illness of a child depicted in a painting in the Rijksmuseum in Antwerp, Amsterdam, for as the mother holds the sick child in her arms, she "stares / fixedly into the bright museum." The mother in the painting seems to note to herself that the child will die by springtime, and this is an important contrast, for spring is generally thought of as a time of reawakening, rebirth, and life. Realizing how quickly spring will come, the mother thinks to herself that it is "wrong, wrong / to hold her - / Let her be alone, / without memory." It is almost as if the mother is denying herself the comfort of loving the child as her own, because the child will die so soon, and it will no longer be hers. The mother sees this short life as one so brief that no memory should be attached to it. This idea is sharply contrasted to the concept of the other paintings in the museum, which contain the everlasting images (or memories) of children who have lived in the past. These painted children who find eternal life through their depictions in art seem distraught by this other once happy, once living child's death, for they are "terrified, scraping the dark / paint from their faces."
           This poem distinguishes between the death of a living child and the immortal children depicted in paintings. The children in the paintings fear no death, for they were once made immortal by some long-ago artist who painted their images as memories. These children look with horror upon the sickness and decay of the living, mortal child who will leave no impression upon the memories of others. Even the mother of the sick child seems to deny herself the memory of taking care of a child who will have such a short existence. Life is brutal, and the slow death of the sick one takes its toll on the mother and terrifies those who formerly knew no death (the painted children), proving to them the cruelty and darkness of mortal life.
           Another poem which provides a sad and grotesque outlook on the death of a child is "For My Sister." In this poem, the sister of the speaker is dead. The dead sister is obviously an infant, for the image of the crib, a simile for her casket, is used often, and it is stated that she "will not learn to speak." The baby sister may have died suddenly, for it is as if she is still trying to be alive, even in her death: "Far away my sister is moving in her crib. / The dead ones are like that, / always the last to quiet." Ironically, she and the other dead babies are slow to "quiet" (meaning to be still, to settle) and yet "they will not learn to speak" and they have no voices. For the child to have a voice at all, it would have to be alive. The speaker, assuming the dead baby did have a voice, and was thus alive, says "the cries of hunger would be beginning." This line states the misery of life, and so the child will receive no peace in either life of death. The infant would be crying for food to stave its hunger in life, and yet it remains unstill in its death crib, its grave.
           A grotesque element of the poem is the speaker's fantasizing of going toward the infant, singing to it. The lines are as follows:

I should go to her;
perhaps if I sang very softly,
her skin so white,
her head covered with black feathers. . . .

This seems grotesque, because although the lines are presented as a mental image, a dream, of pampering a living baby, one cannot help but think of the speaker singing to this dead infant with "skin so white" and a "head covered with black feathers." The white skin is reminiscent of the deathly pale of a corpse and the black feathers are as the dirt and decaying flesh of the corpse in the ground. These images of death and of the living person's obsessions with it are bleak. The unquiet dead babies, "uncertainly pressing against the wooden bars" of what they assume is still their crib, is unsettling.

Conclusion

Glück presents the reader with the idea of death as terrifying, as in "The Sick Child," and as grotesque in "For My Sister." Her fear of death is evident throughout these two poems as well as in the poems about birth - "The Fear if Birth" and "Pieta." She gives the reader no consolation, for it is as if our births, our lives, are the mere pathways toward imminent death, and death itself will be terrifying, bringing no more peace than we found in life. A. Poulin, the editor of the anthology Contemporary American Poetry, writes in Louise Glück's short biography: "To be human is to love, to long, to suffer, and to know you will die" (685). This states so well what Glück's poetry is all about, especially those poems published in Descending Figure. To know one will die is what these four poems are particularly about, and she makes sure her audience knows they will die, and it will be neither pretty nor peaceful.

Works Cited

Glück, Louise. Descending Figure. New York: Ecco Press, 1980.

Poulin, A. Contemporary American Poetry, 6th ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996.