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Here Was One
No. 17
Grant Hodges
October 23, 2023
The Evening Star
Dear Reader,
The most recent American Nobel laureate in Literature, Louise Elisabeth Glück (1943-2023), died on October 13th. During the course of her 55-year writing career, Glück published 14 volumes of poetry, as well as several essay collections, chapbooks, and even a novel. In addition to the Nobel Prize, Glück won virtually every domestic award for her work, including the Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, a National Book Critics Circle Award, and the prestigious Bollingen Prize.
Much of Glück’s poetry involves precise, compressed lyrics that touch on themes related to death, and how it can lead to a fuller appreciation of life. This week’s piece is her short poem, “The Evening Star.”
Background
“The Evening Star” first appeared in the January 2006 edition of Poetry. There’s little publicly available background on the origins of the poem, but formally it consists of seven short stanzas, of two-to-four lines each, in which the speaker describes her experience seeing the planet Venus in the night sky.
The Evening Star
By Louise Glück
Tonight, for the first time in many years,
there appeared to me again
a vision of the earth’s splendor:
in the evening sky
the first star seemed
to increase in brilliance
as the earth darkened
until at last it could grow no darker.
And the light, which was the light of death,
seemed to restore to earth
its power to console. There were
no other stars. Only the one
whose name I knew
as in my other life I did her
injury: Venus,
star of the early evening,
to you I dedicate
my vision, since on this blank surface
you have cast enough light
to make my thought
visible again.
What It Offers
Glück wrote this poem in her mid-60s, and it’s difficult not to identify her as the speaker and read the metaphor of the evening star as her increasing awareness of her own mortality. She even calls the Venus’s light “the light of death[.]”
But despite the dark setting, Glück reminds us that this light restores the earth’s “power to console.” Like Stevens, Whitman, Mueller, and so many others, Glück’s speaker sees redemption in death, as a bringer of meaning to life (the earth) and to her own art (the thoughts made visible on the blank surface of the page). So rather than despair about the coming night, she praises the star, dedicating her vision (the poem itself) to the only one “whose name I knew[.]”
Maybe, with Glück’s passing, we can do the same, and—rather than mourn— acknowledge the splendor of existence that her starlight revealed.
*****
What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.