Summary
In the fourth poem entitled "Vespers" in the collection, the human speaker addresses a divine figure and describes lyric moments in a garden. The first line is a direct address: "I don't wonder where you are anymore." The speaker declares that the deity is situated in the garden, and another character is introduced: John. The deity is in the dirt, holding John's green trowel.
In the next part, the speaker describes the way John gardens. For fifteen minutes, he works with an intense effort, and then he spends fifteen minutes in "ecstatic contemplation." Sometimes the speaker works beside John doing what she calls the "shade chores." These include weeding and thinning the lettuces.
At other times, the speaker sits on a porch near the upper garden and watches "until twilight makes / lamps of the first lilies." All this time, peace never leaves John. But for the speaker, peace rushes through her. This is compared to "bright light through the bare tree," and differentiated from the "sustenance the flower holds."
Analysis
The prayer poems in The Wild Iris, in which a human speaker (a gardener) addresses the divine, are given the same names. They are either called "Matins" (referring to morning prayers) or "Vespers" (which are evening prayers). The "Vespers" are situated in the second half of the book. In the fourth "Vespers" poem, the speaker's address to a deity not only showcases beautiful lyric moments, but offers a complex portrayal of a relationship by describing the different ways in which the speaker and a character called John experience peace.
In the first line of the poem, the speaker declares, "I don't wonder where you are anymore." This implies that she did wonder at God's presence in the past. But at this point in the collection, her faith is unshaken because she can situate the deity in the garden "where John is." John is a character who appears in several poems in this collection as the husband of the speaker. John is the name of Glück's former husband, but just as one should not equate a speaker with the poet, one should not assume that a character in a poem fully encompasses the entirety of someone's life.
The use of a semicolon between the phrases "You're in the garden" and "you're where John is" relates these two clauses. It creates a certain kind of logic in which it is only natural that a divine figure would be situated in the garden alongside John. It is unclear whether the following line is referring to John or to the deity, but it is likely both. It reads, "in the dirt, abstracted, holding his green trowel." To be "abstracted" is to be unaware or lost in thought. But when applied to the image of a divine figure occupying space in the garden, it takes on an artistic quality. American poet Peter Streckfus calls Glück's poems "sculptures of belief," and speaks on the way that she engages with "shapes of inner relation" in her work. This shape-making is apparent in "Vespers" (#4).
The speaker then describes the way John gardens: he spends fifteen minutes working with an intense outpouring of energy, and then spends fifteen minutes in "ecstatic contemplation." Ecstasy is an overwhelming feeling of happiness, but it also refers to a mystic transcendence. Likewise, the word "contemplation" has religious connotations as a practice of becoming actively aware of the divine. As throughout the collection, the garden takes on religious symbolism: it is an Eden.
In the fifth line, the speaker describes how she sometimes works with John, doing what she calls the "shade chores." This could refer to work that is done in the shade, where the sun won't fall on the gardener. This work is further explained: the speaker does the weeding and thins out the lettuce plants. But "shade chores" could also symbolize that the speaker works in John's shadow, which creates a drama between the two.
Other times, the speaker says, she sits on a porch "near the upper garden" and watches John work. She remains here "until twilight makes / lamps of the first lilies." The repetition of the /l/ creates a liquid sound, adding to the beauty of this lyric moment. In these instances, the speaker is in a distant, removed space that is situated above John as she takes on the role of an observer. But the sense of conflict between the two remains, as expressed in the following lines that differentiate the way the couple experiences peace. Peace never leaves John, but it "rushes through" the speaker, which already is a kind of contradiction—the movement of peace is not generally described as quick or forceful.
The speaker says that peace rushes through her "not as sustenance the flower holds / but like bright light through the bare trees." A flower's sustenance gives an impression of something organic and sweet, like nectar. But the speaker's peace is compared to bright light through bare trees, which is a starker description. Bare trees usually symbolize winter, though nothing in this poem indicates that it takes place in winter. Though light is described in a beautiful way earlier in the poem (with the lilies becoming lamps), light that is too bright is capable of blinding a person. Therefore the peace that the speaker feels has an edge of something (perhaps danger or restlessness) to it. The plosive alliteration of the /b/ in "bright" and "bare" is not quite as intense as a repeated /p/ would be, but it still adds emphasis.
This poem is significant in that it uses a contradiction to portray the threads of relationships between the speaker and John, and between the speaker and her own sense of peace. Though peace nearly always carries a positive connotation, Glück's portrayals of peace in "Vespers" (#4) make a gesture toward conflict. Not only do John and the speaker experience peace differently, but the speaker's own experience of peace is somewhat unsettling.
