Gretel in Darkness

Louise Glück is among the most lauded poets in the American canon. Glück’s writing is often surgically precise in terms of formal craft, and reveals a deep emotional complexity. She addresses sadness, mourning, trauma, and individual suffering metaphorically through the natural world, mythology, autobiographical events, or universal truths. She is known for alluding to cultural myths and personas in her work, some of which appear in “Gretel in Darkness” through the perspective of young Gretel from the fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel.” Her poem “Gretel in Darkness” first appeared in the 1975 collection The House on Marshland and investigates a form of PTSD through the lens of fairy tales.

Poet Biography

Louise Elisabeth Glück (1943-present) is an American writer who has published numerous books of poems and essays. Her debut, Firstborn, arrived in 1968, and since then she has gone on to publish a total of 13 poetry collections, forming an impressive body of work. Among her many distinctions, Glück has received a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1993), the Bollingen Prize (2001), served as the US Poet Laureate (2003-2004), and earned a National Book Award (2014), along with a National Humanities Medal (2015). After receiving the illustrious Nobel Prize in Literature in 2020, the judges commented that she writes with an “unmistakable poetic voice… with austere beauty [that] makes individual existence universal.”

Glück’s mother is of Russian Jewish descent, and her paternal grandparents were Hungarian immigrants who moved to New York City for more opportunities. It’s said that Glück’s father wanted to be a writer but never fulfilled his dreams.

Born in New York City and raised on Long Island, Glück’s roots in the East Coast as the child of Eastern European immigrants runs deep. As a youth, Glück battled anorexia and was unable to attend college as a full-time student. Instead, she attended part-time poetry courses at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University but never completed a full degree, despite going on to have a prolific literary career.

The Wild Iris (1992) is perhaps her most well-known book. The collection addresses grief, sorrow, and renewal through a series of poems that revolve around gardening and post-divorce recovery. Currently, she is a professor at Yale University and lives in Cambridge, MA.

Poem Text

Glück, Louise. “Gretel in Darkness.” 2002. San Jose State University.

Summary

Written in the first-person persona of Gretel from the children’s fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel,” this poem documents the fear, trauma, and repercussions that Gretel must confront after killing a witch to survive in the Black Forest. The story takes place after the events of the well-known fairy tale, in which a child-eating witch traps Gretel and her brother Hansel in a candy house. In most children’s versions, the two siblings escaped unharmed. But in Glück’s darker rendition, Gretel confesses that she “killed for [Hansel]” (Line 17), and the poem revolves around her coping with this trauma of survival.