1

Love in Moonlight (Louise Glück): Analysis

Speaker: the gardener

Addressed to: unclear

The poem begins with a meditation on the difficulties of being emotionally vulnerable with another person, that is
‘baring the soul’ to another person. This leads the speaker to reflect on the nature of the human soul and its links to
the beautiful moonlit scene that she perceives outside.

1. Line-by-line analysis

Lines 1-2

❖ The gardener begins by emphasising the vulnerability of a person revealing their troubles to
someone else. The gardener takes a grim view of this practice, equating the ‘baring’ (line 3) of the
heart and soul to ‘[forcing one’s despair]/on another person’ (lines 1-2). ‘Forces’ is an emotionally
charged word and implies that the person to whom one is unburdening oneself will only feel
inclined to take on this despair if it is forced upon them. Thus, the gardener’s attitude to a person
bearing their soul may be said to be one of intolerance.
➢ The theme of mental illness is often present in Glück’s work. In The Wild Iris, the first overt
reference to it is in Matins 1, where the gardener has a conversation with her son regarding
how ‘depressives’ see the world. It is possible that the gardener’s unforgiving attitude
towards the unburdening of one’s despair stems from her own experience as a mentally-ill
person. Perhaps she has lost friends because they found her need for support - her ‘forcing’

Donatella du Plessis
 2

of despair - unbearable. Perhaps the gardener has had despair ‘forced’ upon her before, and
was unable to cope with another person’s despair as well as her own.
➢ It is interesting that the gardener should use the possessive pronoun ‘his’ when discussing
both men and women: ‘Sometimes a man or woman forces his despair’. Maybe the gardener
considers unburdening oneself to be an inherently masculine act, or perhaps it is the concept
of despair itself that she finds to be masculine.

Lines 3-4

❖ The gardener clarifies that ‘a man or woman [forcing] his despair/on another person’ is that ‘which
is called/baring the heart, alternatively, baring the soul -’. The gardener’s description of this
‘forcing’ of despair as something ‘which is called1/baring the heart’ suggests that what she calls
force is accepted as ‘baring the heart’ by everybody else. With the repetition of the word ‘baring’
(‘baring the heart, alternatively, baring the soul’), the speaker conflates heart and soul into a
single concept. The somewhat clichéd nature of the popular phrase ‘heart and soul’ may also
indicate the speaker’s dislike of the vulnerability of confessing to another person.
❖ Line 4 is written in parenthesis, which gives it a conversational quality as the speaker makes
interjections into her own speech. The parenthesis, however, also serves to make the line seem
shocking. At first glance, ‘meaning for this moment they acquired souls’ seems to suggest that
human beings do not have souls, and/or that souls can be ‘acquired’ like groceries. In the context
of the rest of the poem, however, it is more likely that the speaker is suggesting that human love
and human souls are the same thing, and that one cannot exist without the other. In listening to
and loving another person, one acquires a soul.

Lines 5-8

❖ The poet juxtaposes the vulnerability and risk of ‘baring the soul’ with the serene scene taking

1
My italics.

Donatella du Plessis
 3

place in the world outside. It is ‘a summer evening’ (line 5) and despite the ‘[forcing] of despair’
taking place, it remains beautiful.
❖ ‘A whole world/thrown away on the moon’ (lines 5 to 6): the moon is a symbol of transcendence,
transformation, and, because of its association with the tides, cyclical changes. In declaring that a
‘whole world [is] thrown away on the moon’, the speaker draws our attention to the moon’s ability
to transform an everyday scene into something lovely.
❖ The speaker elaborates on this ability by describing how banal things and occurrences such as
‘buildings or trees, the narrow garden/where the cat hides, rolling on its back in the dusk’ (lines
7-8) are transformed into ‘groups of silver forms’ (line 7). In moonlight, everything seems to
become mysterious and magical.

Lines 9-10

❖ The gardener provides further details about how moonlight

transforms ordinary things into things of beauty.
➢ Delicate flowers like ‘[rose]s’, or hardy ones like ‘coreopsis’
(pictured), so different from each other in the daytime, look
similarly extraordinary in the light of the moon.
➢ Banal, man-made structures objects such as ‘the gold dome of
the capitol’ (the building that houses American state
legislatures) are also rendered beautiful by moonlight.
❖ The speaker states that these objects and buildings are ‘converted
to an alloy of moonlight, shape/without detail, the myth, the
archetype, the soul’ (lines 10-11).
➢ According to Merriam-Webster, an alloy may be defined as ‘a substance composed of two or
more metals, or of a metal and a nonmetal intimately united usually by being fused together
and dissolving in each other when molten’. The speaker of the poem creates a metaphor,
stating that in being bathed in moonlight, the buildings, trees, animals and flowers that she
observes are ‘converted to an alloy of moonlight’.

Donatella du Plessis
 4

■ ‘Converted’ is a scientific term, as is ‘alloy’. This makes the beautiful scene seem
alchemical. Alchemy is the mysterious, often magical, transformation of one thing into
another, completely different, thing. During the Middle Ages, alchemy was a ‘science’
that sought to convert ordinary metals into gold. Through the transformative power of
alchemy, it was believed that banal metals could be induced to change their very
nature and change into gold. In the context of this poem, the buildings and plants are
not converted to gold, but into ‘an alloy of moonlight’. This is extremely abstract and
the speaker’s exact meaning is unclear. However, we may reasonably deduce that the
speaker is arguing that moonlight possesses the power to change the fundamental
nature of both living and non-living objects.

Lines 10-14

The speaker explores the meaning of the ‘alloy of moonlight’ which changes the fundamental nature of
both living and non-living objects. She describes this as:

shape
without detail, the myth, the archetype, the soul
filled with fire that is moonlight really, taken
from another source, and briefly
shining as the moon shines

❖ Thus, moonlight for the speaker represents a number of grand, fundamental concepts. The moon
has its own mythology and its own archetypes. According to Merriam Webster:

● ‘Archetype: the original pattern or model of which all things of the same type are
representations or copies.

Donatella du Plessis
 5

● Archetype has specific uses in the fields of philosophy and psychology. The ancient
Greek philosopher Plato, for example, believed that all things have ideal forms
(aka archetypes) of which real things are merely shadows or copies. And in the
psychology of C. G. Jung, archetype refers to an inherited idea or mode of thought
that is present in the unconscious of the individual. In everyday prose, however,
archetype is most commonly used to mean "a perfect example of something’.
❖ In the Western tradition, the archetype represented by the moon is the Divine Feminine, as well as
the world of dreams. Whether this is what the speaker in the poem is referring to, or the works of
Plato or Jung, what is certain is that for the speaker, the myths and archetypes are linked to the
human soul in that they fill it with fire.
➢ Fire is at the heart of the most primal version of humanity. The source of light and heat, fire
represents the most fundamental needs of humanity. According to the speaker, the soul is
‘filled with fire that is moonlight, really, taken/from another source’. The alliteration of ‘filled’,
‘fire’ and ‘from’ emphasises the importance of fire.
■ Fire is also a common metaphor for human inspiration, and it is this that humanity
feels when in contact with the moon, and its myths and its archetypes. The speaker
takes care to point out that the moonlight/fire is not necessarily the product of the
moon itself, but is ‘taken from another source’, which could suggest the existence of
God or the Divine. Thus, there is a distinct link to the Divine to be found in the
moonlight that transforms ordinary objects in this poem and is the source of human
inspiration. Despite its intensity, this inspiration is brief. The speaker describes this
‘fire’ as ‘briefly shining as the moon shines’ (lines 13-14). Therefore, these moments of
transcendence on moonlit nights are as brief as the thoughts and dreams that they
may inspire.
■ The way in which moonlight is presented here is very abstract. The speaker
acknowledges this when she describes the ‘alloy of moonlight’ as being a
‘shape/without detail’ (lines 11-14). Thus, the link between humanity, the Divine and

Donatella du Plessis
 6

the divine fire (i.e. moonlight) is so complex that it cannot be described in ordinary
terms.

Lines 14-15

After speaking of the spiritual, transcendental and visionary power of moonlight, which ‘[fills] the soul
with fire’ (line 12), the speaker confronts the physical makeup of the moon: it is made of ‘stone’. The
speaker does not accord great importance to the fact that the moon is made of rock, stating instead that
‘stone or not,/the moon is still that much of a living thing.’ This means that while the moon may be
made of stone, its significance to mankind, its transformative power and its links to the Divine mean that
it is a ‘living thing’, rather than a rock that is cold and heartless.

2. Form, Rhyme and Meter

❖ This poem is in free verse. It therefore exists without the constraints of form, meter and
rhyme scheme, allowing the poet to prioritise imagery.
❖ There is a great deal of enjambment in the poem. This mirrors the fluidity of moonlight and of
the poet’s thoughts as they move from one image to another.

3. Themes
❖ Love and relationships
❖ The human soul’s relationship with the natural world and the inspiration to be found there.

Coreopsis image by Jarmila from Pixabay

Thumbnail image here.

Donatella du Plessis