I am not entirely sure I understood Louise Glück’s The Seven Ages. It is deeply interior, and built around summer—as a season, and as a concept—and, well, I’ve never much cared for summer. But though it was originally published in 2002, there are moments that feel almost frightfully prescient, and, in the midst of summer musings, there are sparks of intense beauty.
Glück’s “Civilization,” like many of the poems in The Seven Ages, demands more than one reading to be understood. But even at a glance, in this world of propaganda and “fake news,” this ode to the truths we don’t want to hear is stark and startling. Difficult truths, Glück writes, “offended what remained in us of the animal,” and “Therefore the ones who spoke were exiled and silenced, / scorned in the streets.” But hating the truth, according to Glück, doesn’t actually make it go away: “But the facts persisted. They were among us , / isolated and without pattern; they were among us, / shaping us—”
The grim ode to the dangers of false information turns suddenly brighter here, as she writes:
In which the facts themselves were suddenly / serene, glorious. They were among us, / not singly, as in chaos, but woven / into relationships or set in order, as though life on earth / could, in this one form, be apprehended deeply / though it could not be mastered.
Which, let’s face it, is a beautiful thought! Although not, after these past several years, one I really see as possible.
The poems of The Seven Ages are strange, sometimes frightful, sometimes beautiful, but all of them will need more than one go to be fully understood.
Essentially a Nerd 