"Telescope," by Louise Glück

As in many of Louise Glück’s poems, the action of the poem resides in the pulse of the speaker’s thought, their turns of phrase, and conclusive logic. We are privy to a mind in the process of understanding the relationship between interior and exterior worlds, and, as if by magic, this singular voice suddenly becomes familiar, becomes our own. “Telescope,” from Averno, is no exception. The poem’s insistence on and preoccupation with “you” gives the poem a familiarity and startling sense of immediacy. The second person is used a total of twelve times in the poem. In the first stanza alone it occurs five times (four times in the first two lines), and gradually trickles to once per stanza. The initial flurry in the opening lines establishes the reader’s participation in the fictional setting through ownership and intimacy, and by the time we encounter the crisp image of the night sky at the end of the first stanza, we are seduced into the poem.

            The logic of the first stanza is continued in the next two stanzas, though its effect is compressed and intensified through compelling word placement. Each “you” occurs at the beginning of the line, is the beginning of a sentence, and is accompanied by an active verb, making each utterance forceful. The use of the second person is more decisive and discriminatory here, more confident that “you” truly are in a place where “human life has no meaning” than the speculative first stanza suggests. By placing “you” at the beginning of the line, subjective experience is emphasized, which heightens the drama of the poem, and we are carried to the rhetorical climax of “their immensity.” The stars and “you” have been unified for a moment through sight, though only the “you” is changed.

Confronted with what seems unfathomable, the poem turns again, this time towards the individual. The second person opens up, becomes more inclusive, pluralized, and now functions in a revelatory way. We are surprised to find we are “in the world again,” are calmed that we “realize afterward,” and are made wiser when we “see again.” Through a sophisticated use of the second person, Glück has taken us from an intense, nighttime reverie, back to earth, where we are compelled to rediscover our earthly reality and our relationship to it.  

While the second person pulls us into the poem, the way the lines are broken help shape our experience. Since the poem is not organized in a metrical or syllabic way, what occurs at the end of each line becomes crucial. Here is the first stanza:

There is a moment after you move your eye away

when you forget where you are

because you’ve been living, it seems,

somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky.

One sentence is broken into four lines, yet each line has a “natural” voice. Slight pauses at the end of the first and second lines establish a wistful tone that we immediately recognize and connect with. Each line is also a complete syntactic unit that is easily heard, understood, and broken at a normative turn of syntax. There are no wild dislocations to jar or shock the reader, just the placidness that comes with a quiet, introspective experience.  

            That is not to say there isn’t still surprise. There are several moments when a line break surprises, the first being between lines three and four, where the added weight of the comma builds anticipation into a longer pause. The moment our eyes reach the end of the line we are caught in suspense, because where we’ve “been living” hasn’t been resolved yet, and we expect a poetic answer. When we discover it is “somewhere else,” it is the sheer simplicity of the answer that surprises, because the poem primed our expectations with the line break. Yet our expectation is eventually satisfied with the off-hand “silence of the night sky,” and we are rewarded with a precise (though not exact) image of our location.

            While many of the line breaks in this poem have a hard ending, usually from punctuation or syntax, there are moments when the breaks are more fluid:

            You realize afterward

            not that the image is false

            but the relation is false.  

In this moment of realization the speaker’s words, yearning for an answer, speed through the first line and into the next, pushing us along until we come to an abrupt stop with “false.” Faced with the first part of this hard truth, there is a pause before beginning the final line of the stanza. By the end of the last line, we achieve a sense of resolution that comes with realization. Yet, we have experienced two realizations over the span of a single break. We are compelled to unify them because so much emphasis is placed on the conjunction at the beginning of the last line, but we need to be conscious that even these two ideas, though related, like you and stars, are separate.

Even though the second person and line breaks have provided motion, interest, and a process for discovery, the poem’s conclusion is often regarded as lonely or depressing, and quiets us with the acceptance of a hard truth. It is easy to see why this effect is often perceived: we are, after all, on a cold hill when we take apart our telescope, and the focus of our realization is falsity. The final line break in the poem emphasizes the distance between “away” and “each,” and finally, we are struck by what seems to be an insurmountable distance with the final line.  Compared to the relative proximity of the stars and the escapism they provide, the cold hill doesn’t seem to be quite as interesting or provide any necessary reprieve from the pressures of earth.

However, the mood of the poem is not as cold as that. To be sure, I wouldn’t say the poem is a feel-good, heart-warming expression of joy, but it has a realism that toes the line of pessimism yet doesn’t quite cross it. If this poem is one person understanding the world, as much lyric poetry is, we can view this poem as a crucial moment in understanding that complexity: sometimes there is a need to reexamine our preexisting notions, to recognize them as false so that we may move forward in a new direction. In this case, the metaphor isn’t false, but isn’t exactly helpful. While the metaphor is beautiful, and is a partially true expression of life, viewing the stars and participating in their inhuman life doesn’t translate to an earthly life, even if that life has been reduced to the “things” in the final line. Coming to terms with all of this is understandably difficult. Yet defining the world in negative terms offers only a partial answer. The poem opens the possibility to define the world in the affirmative, to find a more accurate “relation,” but also the possibility for another poem. Maybe one that gets it right.