I am thoroughly enjoying these autumn evenings reading Louise Glück’s Meadowlands (1996). Her poems weave the story of Penelope, Odysseus, and Telemachus into the life of a childless, contemporary couple mired in a strained relationship.
They share moments of generosity and pettiness, love and hurt, vindictiveness and remorse, neediness and aloofness, blended with instances of care and tenderness.
The poem Quiet Evening is particularly striking. I keep returning to read the final stanzas.
More than anything in the world
I love these evenings when we're together,
the quiet evenings in summer, the sky still light at this hour.
So Penelope took the hand of Odysseus,
not to hold him back but to impress
this peace in his memory:
from this point on, the silence through which you move
is my voice pursuing you.
Is this moment of loving tenderness tainted with hints of manipulation?
In a true moment of loving freedom, the lover would not seek to impress anything that would follow or haunt the beloved. The loving gesture would just be; it would be freely given, without further expectation.
Penelope and Odysseus were not that way. We don’t know, from Homer’s Odyssey, how their parting was, so Glück imagines it. But we know about their reunion. She mistrusted him when he returned and probably suspected what he was up to when he hadn’t yet returned. She tested him in Ithaca. And he wasn’t trustworthy or transparent. He told her his story in the way that suited his interests.
The lovers in Glück’s poem are not that way either — not freely giving and caring. They are messily human. And yet, in their messy humanity they could share the imperfect beauty of a quiet evening together.
Daniel G. Campos 