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Poet: Louise Gluck
Poem: Nostos
Volume: Meadowlands
Year: Published/Written in 1996
Comment 1 of 1, added on March 9th, 2006 at 6:33 PM.
Gluck employs the Greek word, "nostos," meaning going home for this poem about memory. Through her mind's eye she muses about an apple tree that had been in the yard forty years before, about the meadows behind the tree, the crocus in the grass, and the spring flowers in her neighbor's yard. After Gluck questions whether or not the tree actually flowered on her birthday, she states, "Substitution of the immutable for the shifting, the evolving. Substitution of the image for the relentless earth." The poet understands that "We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory." That which we believed to be true, that we knew to be true, has been irrevocably altered by time and the inexorable changes that have taken place are the "shifting, the evolving, . . .the relentless earth." What is left is nostos, our memory of home and the nostalgic feeling that comes when we do return home. But truth? Ah, that is bound up in memory.
Geri Bloch from United States
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Comments
Gluck employs the Greek word, "nostos," meaning going home for this poem about memory. Through her mind's eye she muses about an apple tree that had been in the yard forty years before, about the meadows behind the tree, the crocus in the grass, and the spring flowers in her neighbor's yard. After Gluck questions whether or not the tree actually flowered on her birthday, she states, "Substitution of the immutable for the shifting, the evolving. Substitution of the image for the relentless earth." The poet understands that "We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory." That which we believed to be true, that we knew to be true, has been irrevocably altered by time and the inexorable changes that have taken place are the "shifting, the evolving, . . .the relentless earth." What is left is nostos, our memory of home and the nostalgic feeling that comes when we do return home. But truth? Ah, that is bound up in memory.
Geri Bloch from United States