Responsibility in Louise Glück’s “Vespers”

Louise Glück’s poem “Vespers” (37) emphasizes the disconnect between humans and their creator, God. This disconnect manifests in how both parties fulfill their physical and emotional responsibilities to their creations, with humans nurturing theirs and God neglecting his own.

The most consequential difference in adherence to responsibility comes with the physical. The poem’s opening line establishes God’s neglect towards humans. The speaker comments on his “extended absence,” demonstrating God’s literal distance from her while suggesting that he once existed with or at least met the speaker.  He leaves the speaker to feel the cruel intention behind his neglect by introducing himself to her and then subsequently abandoning her. As God continues to ignore his physical responsibilities, the speaker communicates frustration that she is left to freeze while God provides warmth to other parts of the world. She asks God to withhold the heavy rains and cold nights she is constantly subject to while “other regions get 12 weeks of summer” (12). God’s absence and imposition of cold weather not only harm the human speaker but also her creations, the tomatoes, which she tends to with more physical care than she herself receives. This difference in regard highlights the cruel perception that the speaker has developed toward the subject, God.

In God's long and intentional absence, the speaker feels burdened with an “assignment” (4) to care for plants on earth. She has done her best to fulfill this task through physical labor and her “use of earth” (2) to “grow tomatoes” (6-7). Unlike the humans who were created and subsequently abandoned by a divine being, the speaker’s plants rely on frequent physical maintenance to continue their growth. By gardening and taking care of the plants, the human speaker shows far more consistent care for her creations than God does. It could also be argued that God should bear more responsibility than the speaker does, seeing that “all this belongs to [him]” (11) and that the speaker only cared for the plants after being granted permission from God. Seeing this, the speaker criticizes God for his selective sense of responsibility and argues that she alone is more deserving of the “return on investment” (13) because she is the one who “planted the seeds” (12) and maintained the plants until God’s provision of heavy rain and cold nights caused them to die.  Despite exerting extreme physical effort to maintain the garden, she receives no fulfillment and continues to be ignored by God. This testimony from the speaker points out God’s unpleasable nature and helps the poem segway from discussing God’s physical absence to his emotional neglect.

Halfway through the poem, the speaker shifts from discussing the implications of God’s physical absence to expressing resentment at the difference between their emotional investments towards Earth. In a single winding sentence, the gardener provides a cathartic affirmation of her hard work, despite the death of the plants. She was the one who planted the seeds, it was her eyes that “watched the first shoots like wings tearing the soil” (13), and her “heart broken by” (14-15) the disease that formed as a result of the cold and dark conditions provided by God. Here, the reader can feel the emotional and physical effort put forth by the speaker through the descriptions of shoots tearing through soil, similar to the physical breaking or tearing of muscles. Furthermore, this run-on sentence functions as an expression of the speaker’s pent up frustration, from planting the seeds to watching them grow into plants and feeling heartbreak at their untimely deaths, she feels that the deaths occurred through no fault of her own. The disease itself affirms the speaker’s belief in her blamelessness. The speaker uses the disease as  proof of her own innocence regarding the demise of her creations. The description of “the blight, the black spot so quickly multiplying” (14) corresponds with the symptoms of Blossom End Rot, a disease among tomatoes caused by “fluctuations in a plant’s water supply” (Kemble). While the speaker’s earlier description of endless rain provided by God accounts for these fluctuations, it doesn’t explain why she continued her work despite knowing that the conditions were unsuitable for life.

Despite the speaker’s best efforts to thrive in the absence of God, she cannot find salvation. As a result, she develops a pessimistic view of God for not allowing her to succeed without him. This pessimism can also be interpreted from the poem’s title, “Vespers.”  Critic William V. Davis argues that every poem in The Wild Iris that is titled “Vespers” can be viewed as an evening prayer to God, and associates the timing of the prayer with cynicism, being “obsessively repetitive” and largely “inconclusive” (Davis 49). In the same way that Davis interprets “Vespers” to be inconclusive and repetitive, the speaker sees her task as impossible to execute yet continues to try anyway.

As the poem goes on, the speaker’s separation from God becomes more evident when she states that she cannot understand his intentions and doubts that he has “a heart, in our understanding of/ that term” (16-17), that she cannot interpret God’s actions as anything other than cruel and unempathetic. The speaker attributes this cruelty to God’s fundamental difference from her as a divine being. God, who knows everything, is “immune to foreshadowing”(19) and therefore unable to understand the intense helplessness she feels at the first sight of winter, of the “red leaves of the maple falling” (21). To her, the changing seasons signify death and starvation, but God’s immortality makes him insusceptible to such fears. Where the speaker feels sorrow at the disease of her plants, she feels God remains unchanged at the suffering of his human creations. To her, he is not emotionally invested.

In “Vespers” (37), Glück uses the motif of red maples to symbolize strength. However, their meaning varies throughout The Wild Iris as a whole.  For example, in “Lamium,” they serve as an obstacle between the speaker and God. Unlike in “Vespers,” Lamium’s speaker is a plant. Much like the poem, however, the speaker has adapted in response to a lack of nurturing from a higher being. In “Lamium,”  the red maple tree serves as an obstacle that receives God’s favor and is able to grow and prevent sunshine from reaching the plant due to its leaves that “grow over it, completely hiding it” (Lamium 6). The difference in Glück’s portrayal of maple trees, one being favored by God and the other being the first victim of his neglectful winters, demonstrates the detrimental universal effects of God’s abandonment on all of Earth’s living creatures. This aligns with American literary critic Tony Hoagland’s commendation of Glück’s use of varying speakers, which he believes liberates The Wild Iris from being told from “the singular locked perspective of the sufferer” (Hoadland 39).  Shifts in perspective are used to transcend individualism and acknowledge the wider commonality between living beings: suffering. By mentioning the great maple tree, the speaker of “Vespers” (37) points out the cruel irony of living under this God, that even those who he favors still suffer, that he unleashes indiscriminate suffering. In a final act of comparison between themselves and God, the speaker ends the poem by stating that “I am responsible/ for these vines” (22-23).

Through imagery, structure, and connections to other works, “Vespers” (37) emphasizes the distance between the speaker, a gardener, and God. The poem ends with the Gardener unable to understand God’s intentions and labeling him cruel, using God’s silence as proof that he does not care enough to intervene and correct her. After all, a vesper is an evening prayer to God, and by the end of it, the speaker’s prayers for good weather, empathy, and a show of heart go unanswered. As far as she is aware, she is responsible and God is not.

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