The Seven Ages: Bold and Masterful Poems on Death, Metamorphosis, and Embracing the Inevitable

by Louise Glück

The Seven Ages was written during a ten-week period in the summer of 1999.

The fierce, austerely beautiful, and visionary voice that has become Glück's trademark speaks in these poems of a life lived in unflinching awareness. Many of the poems in this collection bear the familiar features of Glück's earlier work, returning to themes of nature and the classical narratives that explain the phenomena of the world around us. Like Ararat, Glück's fifth book, this collection explores the hazards and pleasures of the domestic sphere and the family with an eye to the demonic. As in The Wild Iris, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993, and Vita Nova, imagination supplants both empiricism and tradition in these poems. Unlike her past work, many of these poems inhabit the realm of dreams, moving backward in time to an eidetic, unrecoverable past and ahead to an as-yet unrealized future. "Earth was given to me in a dream/ In a dream I possessed it."
In these poems, Glück is wry, dreamlike, idiomatic, undeceived, unrelenting.

This new transparent mode, although charged by the indelible imagery and exact phrasing her readers will recognize, represents an ecstatic departure from her previous work.

Genres: Poetry, The United States Of America, Nobel Prize, American, Literary Fiction, Female Authors, 21st Century

80 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2001

About the author

American poet Louise Elisabeth Glück served as poet laureate of the United States from 2003 to 2004.

Parents of Hungarian Jewish heritage reared her on Long Island. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and later Columbia University.

She was the author of twelve books of poetry, including: A Village Life (2009); Averno (2006), which was a finalist for The National Book Award; The Seven Ages (2001); Vita Nova (1999), which was awarded The New Yorker's Book Award in Poetry; Meadowlands (1996); The Wild Iris (1992), which received the Pulitzer Prize and the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America; Ararat (1990), which received the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress. She also published a collection of essays, Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry (1994), which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction.

In 2001, Yale University awarded Louise Glück its Bollingen Prize in Poetry, given biennially for a poet's lifetime achievement in his or her art. Her other honors include the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Sara Teasdale Memorial Prize (Wellesley, 1986), the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1993 for her collection, The Wild Iris . Glück is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award ( Triumph of Achilles ), the Academy of American Poet's Prize ( Firstborn ), as well as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Anniversary Medal (2000), and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts.

In 2020, Glück was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal."

Glück also worked as a senior lecturer in English at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, served as a member of the faculty of the University of Iowa and taught at Goddard College in Vermont. She lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and teached as the Rosencranz writer in residence at Yale University and in the creative writing program of Boston University.

Reviews

[Henk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Aging, childhood and the life not lived. Powerful in its universality
Orderly, and out of long habit, my heart continues to beat.
I hear it, nights when I wake, over the mild sound of the air conditioner.
As I used to hear it over the beloved’s heart, or
variety of hearts, owing to there having been several.
And as it beats, it continues to drum up ridiculous emotion.

So many passionate letters never sent!
So many urgent journeys conceived of on summer nights,
surprise visits to men who were nearly complete strangers.
The tickets never bought, the letters never stamped.
And pride spared. And the life, in a sense, never completely lived.
And the art always in some danger of growing repetitious.

Why not? Why not? Why should my poems not imitate my life?
Whose lesson is not the apotheosis but the pattern, whose meaning
is not in the gesture but in the inertia, the reverie.

Desire, loneliness, wind in the flowering almond—
surely these are the great, the inexhaustible subjects
to which my predecessors apprenticed themselves.
I hear them echo in my own heart, disguised as convention.

Balm of the summer night, balm of the ordinary,
imperial joy and sorrow of human existence,
the dreamed as well as the lived—
what could be dearer than this, given the closeness of death?
Summer Night

This bundle is close to my favourite of Louise Glück Ararat.
Taking a more personal approach, The Seven Ages is a 4.5 stars bundle for me, containing many impressive poems that speak best for themselves:

The same night also produced people like ourselves.
You are like me, whether or not you admit it.
Unsatisfied, meticulous. And your hunger is not for experience
but for understanding, as though it could be had in the abstract.
- Moonbeam

I caution you as I was never cautioned:

you will never let go, you will never be satiated.
You will be damaged and scarred, you will continue to hunger.

Your body will age, you will continue to need.
You will want the earth, then more of the earth–
Sublime, indifferent, it is present, it will not respond.
It is encompassing, it will not minister.

Meaning, it will feed you, it will ravish you,
it will not keep you alive.
- The Sensual World

Now that the world begins
to shift and eddy around us, only now
when it no longer exists.
It had become the present: unending and without form.
- Stars

Our lives were stored in our heads.
The hadn’t begun; we were both sure
we’d know when they did.
The certainly weren’t this.
- August

And he said, “Because I am like you,
therefore I recognize you. I treated all experience
as a spiritual or intellectual trial
in which to exhibit or prove my superiority
to my predecessors. I chose
to live in hypothesis; longing sustained me.

In fact, what I needed most was longing, which you seem
to have achieved in stasis,
but which I have found in change, in departure.
- The traveller

We stared out, starved for knowledge,
and we felt, in its place, a substitute:
indifference that appeared benign.

Solace of the natural world. Panorama
of the eternal. The stars
were foolish, but somehow soothing. The moon
presented itself as a curved line.
And we continued to project onto the glowing hills
qualities we needed: fortitude, the potential
for spiritual advancement.

Immunity to time, to change. Sensation
of perfect safety, the sense of being
protected from what we loved—

And our intense need was absorbed by the night
and returned as sustenance.
- Screened porch

[Alan]

Another succulent collection. It’s so clear that I’m a bigger fan of Glück’s later work. The images are harder hitting, sharper, more evocative.

Poems I enjoyed:
- Fable
- Youth
- Exalted Image
- Reunion
- The Traveler

Here is The Traveler, complete with its Sylvia Plath vibes:

At the top of the tree was what I wanted.
Fortunately I had read books:
I knew I was being tested.

I knew nothing would work–
not to climb that high, not to force
the fruit down. One of three results must follow:
the fruit isn’t what you imagined,
or it is but fails to satiate.
Or it is damaged in falling
and as a shattered thing torments you forever.

But I refused to be
bested by fruit. I stood under the tree,
waiting for my mind to save me.
I stood, long after the fruit rotted.

And after many years, a traveler passed by me
where I stood, and greeted me warmly,
as one would greet a brother. And I asked why,
why was I so familiar to him,
having never seen him?

And he said, “Because I am like you,
therefore I recognize you. I treated all experience
as a spiritual or intellectual trial
in which to exhibit or prove my superiority
to my predecessors. I chose
to live in hypothesis; longing sustained me.

In fact, what I needed most was longing, which you seem
to have achieved in stasis,
but which I have found in change, in departure.”

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the ninth collection by the 2020 Nobel Laureate – generally less mythological (or biblically) inspired than many of her previous collections (or her next one) and much more back to being autobiographical.

In its concentration on family dynamics and on major life events it reminded me more of “Descending Figure” and “Ararat”.

The sense of the collection for me was of someone looking both back to and forward to the different stages of life. Some poems set in childhood have a sense of life having not properly begun, others set later that its most significant events have already occurred and some that perhaps life is at its peak (typically when with a lover – “The Destination”, “The Balcony” and “Eros”).

Overall I found this a good but not excellent collection.

Some excerpts from poems

I returned to these days repeatedly
convinced they were the centre of my amorous life

So that a few hours could take up a lifetime

A few hours, a world that neither unfolded or diminished
that could, at any point, be entered again -
(The Destination)

I was not prepared: sunset, end of summer. Demonstrations
of time as a continuum, as something coming to an end

(The Sensual World)

This is why you were born: to silence me
Cells of my mother and father, it is your turn
to be pivotal, to be the masterpiece

(Mother and Child)

What follows the light is what precedes it;
the moment of balance, of dark equivalence

… why should we look either forward or backward?

(Solstice)

Two of my favourite poems related to an exploration of Faith and belief – the first on “Ancient Texts”, as I saw it, the mystery of prayer (and the meaning of unanswered prayer), and which opens

How deeply fortunate my life, my every prayer
heard by the angels

I asked for the earth; I received earth, like so much
mud in the face.

I prayed for relief from suffering; I received suffering.
Who can say my prayers were not heard? They were

translated, edited—and if certain
of the important words were left out or misunderstood, a crucial

article deleted, still they were taken in, studied like ancient texts.
Perhaps they were ancient texts, re-created

in the vernacular of a particular period.
And as my life was, in a sense, increasingly given over to prayer,

so the task of the angels was, I believe, to master this language
in which they were not as yet entirely fluent or confident.

The second “The Empty Glass” looks at how we deal with fate (or providence) and includes this excerpt (with an ending that is perhaps the only classical allusion in the collection):

Well, it all makes for interesting conjecture.
And it occurs to me that what is crucial is to believe
in effort, to believe some good will come of simply trying,
a good completely untainted by the corrupt initiating impulse
to persuade or seduce—

What are we without this?
Whirling in the dark universe,
alone, afraid, unable to influence fate—

What do we have really?
Sad tricks with ladders and shoes,
tricks with salt, impurely motivated recurring
attempts to build character.
What do we have to appease the great forces?

And I think in the end this was the question
that destroyed Agamemnon, there on the beach,
the Greek ships at the ready, the sea
invisible beyond the serene harbor, the future
lethal, unstable: he was a fool, thinking
it could be controlled. He should have said
I have nothing, I am at your mercy.

[julieta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Una belleza, el primero que leo de Glück, además con traducción de Mirta Rosenberg, una de mis poetas favoritas. Lo leí hace tiempo, y esta vez lo encuentro más cercano, va de la infancia a la vejez y de vuelta, el tema de la edad, y como los recuerdos van ocupando el espacio, a lo que no le diste importancia una vez, después la tiene.

[el · Rating 3 out of 5]

wikiHow to Induce Existential Dread

Method 1: read this book

if i was, in a sense / an obsessive staggering through time, in another sense / i was a winged obsessive, my moonlit / feathers were paper.

[Adriana Scarpin · Rating 4 out of 5]

From a Journal

I had a lover once,
I had a lover twice,
easily three times I loved.
And in between
my heart reconstructed itself perfectly
like a worm.
And my dreams also reconstructed themselves.

After a time, I realized I was living
a completely idiotic life.
Idiotic, wasted –
And sometime later, you and I
began to correspond, inventing
an entirely new form.

Deep intimacy over great distance!
Keats to Fanny Brawne, Dante to Beatrice –

One cannot invent
a new form in
an old character. The letters I sent remained
immaculately ironic, aloof
yet forthright. Meanwhile, I was writing
different letters in my head,
some of which became poems.

So much genuine feeling!
So many fierce declarations
of passionate longing!

I loved once, I loved twice,
and suddenly
the form collapsed: I was
unable to sustain ignorance.

How sad to have lost you, to have lost
any chance of actually knowing you
or remembering you over time
as a real person, as someone I could have grown
deeply attached to, maybe
the brother I never had.

And how sad to think
of dying before finding out
anything. And to realize
how ignorant we all are most of the time,
seeing things
only from the one vantage, like a sniper.

And there were so many things
I never got to tell you about myself,
things which might have swayed you.
And the photo I never sent, taken
the night I looked almost splendid.

I wanted you to fall in love. But the arrow
kept hitting the mirror and coming back.
And the letters kept dividing themselves
with neither half totally true.

And sadly, you never figured out
any of this, though you always wrote back
so promptly, always the same elusive letter.

I loved once, I loved twice,
and even though in our case
things never got off the ground
it was a good thing to have tried.
And I still have the letters, of course.
Sometimes I will take a few years’ worth

to reread in the garden,
with a glass of iced tea.

And I feel, sometimes, part of something
very great, wholly profound and sweeping.

I loved once, I loved twice,
easily three times I loved.

[ciel · Rating 5 out of 5]

i wanna be your bowl of fruits louise

[alex. · Rating 4 out of 5]

*existential screaming*

i enjoyed re-reading this and having the opportunity to mark my own copy

[António Jacinto · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excelente, como todos os que ela escreveu. mas este, melhor.

[Christy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had this stanza posted from "Ripe Peach" in my office for years:
"There was a time/Only certainty gave me/any joy. Imagine-/
certainty, a dead thing."
This is but one example of the wise and beautiful poetry that is Louise Gluck's "The Seven Ages".
Speaking of the separation of body and soul in the poem, "Mitosis":
"But at some point the mind lingered./It wanted more time by the sea, more time in the fields/gathering wildflowers."
Or "The Muse of Happiness": "And darkness delayed by the season./So that it seems/part of a great gift"

[Edita · Rating 5 out of 5]

Then it's daylight again and the world goes back to normal.
The lovers smooth their hair; the moon resumes its hollow existence.
And the beach belongs again to mysterious birds
soon to appear on postage stamps.

But what of our memories, the memories of those who depend on
images?
Do they count for nothing?

The mist rose, taking back proof of love.
Without which we have only the mirror, you and I.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this collection Louise Glück shifts between looking back into her past, particularly her childhood, and looking forward, anticipating aging and death. These themes and thoughts are universal to humankind, yet Glück maintains a piercingly personal voice--intensely perceptive and devoid of melancholy. She slides between the dreamed and the lived, the remembered and the perceived, uncertainty and hope--occasionally finding refuge in recollected minutia and the certainty and solace of ritual.

Some of my favorites include:
The Seven Ages
Moonbeam
The Sensual World
Stars
Youth
Decade
Quince Tree
Fable
The Muse of Happiness
Ripe Peach
Saint Joan

[tegan · Rating 5 out of 5]

i know a piece of writing is something special if a line is so startlingly resonant that i immediately tear up... doesn’t happen a lot but this rly hit the spot tonight

“we had only a few days, but they were very long,
the light changed constantly.
a few days, spread out over several years,
over the course of a decade.

and each meeting charged with a sense of exactness,
as though we had traveled, separately,
some great distance; as though there had been,
through all of the years of wandering,
a destination, after all.
not a place, but a body, a voice.”
—the destination

“i loved once, i loved twice,
and even though in our case
things never got off the ground
it was a good thing to have tried.
and i still have the letters, of course.
sometimes i will take a few years’ worth
to reread in the garden,
with a glass of iced tea.”
—from a journal

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent collection by Gluck. I'd probably rate it 5 stars, but there's a stretch of poems that sounded more like journalling at the beach while on anti-depressants than the top drawer poetry surrounding this group. They're not bad, but the rest collection is playing for bigger stakes. An awareness of aging (Gluck is 50) and growing sense of her own mortality. Many of these poems are just so well done. Below is an excerpt for a favorite:

"And it occurs to me that what is crucial is to believe
in effort, to believe some good will come of simply trying,
a good completely untainted by the corrupt initiating impulse
to persuade or seduce—
What are we without this?
Whirling in the dark universe,
alone, afraid, unable to influence fate—"

from "The Empty Glass" by Louise Gluck

[sophie esther · Rating 3 out of 5]

"The terrible harrowing story of a human life,
the wild triumph of love: they don’t belong
to the summer night, panorama of hills and stars."

[m]

Recently I’ve been seeing a lot of talk about girlhood and the shared experiences of growing from a little girl into a woman, or more often, growing physically while still being a little girl, stuck with a body you would rather not have. The way people talk about it usually isn’t relatable to me, girlhood is spoken of as something beautiful when it was nothing but violent for me, or every girl becomes a martyr, destroyed. These poems gave an old photograph of myself: a hunched over, frowning, mantis of a girl, shrinking. Glück writes about how it feels to be a child, naïve but aware that something is coming for you, something you can somehow already feel the weight of despite not knowing what it is; she writes, to me, about how it feels to be a depressed child, watching time pass you by, watching your family, seeing your fate in your mother. It wasn’t comforting in the least, but it felt like me, and for that I am grateful I found it.

Two things I’ve been thinking about recently that I found traces of in this book:

1. It’s back to school season, I’m back home and I have nothing to do in this heat but go to cafes in nearby malls, and so I’m constantly caught in between floods of parents with their young children buying new bags, uniforms and stationery. I graduated high school two years ago, and the first year since graduating I didn’t want to waste a single thought on the past years of my life, I would have wiped them from my mind if I could. Enough time has passed now for me to be able to stomach the thought of these things again, and the first one that crossed my mind was that life has moved on without me. This time of year that once revolved around me (and my brother) passes by me unnoticed (until I was in the midst of it again) and, is just as unnoticed by my parents, that used to make a whole party of the thing. They’ll never have to worry about it again, and I won’t either, unless I have kids one day.

2. I see so, so much of myself in girls around the age of 12, all stringy with bad posture and strange outfits. I can see that their mother still picks out most of their clothes, and I can see where they try to alter it so it matches a specific style that’s trending right now. The sight of them honestly depresses me, I know that they think everyone is staring at them (I know it sounds like I do, but really it’s nothing more than a glance), they think the world revolves around them even though they may not want it to, and they think everyone laughing at them in some way. They walk a distance behind their family and try to hold themselves confidently, but are often unable to. I cant tell them they’ll be okay, that they’ll eventually be the girl they’re currently dreaming to be, and even if I were to do that, I know the future is so far away and is no consolation for the state they’re in. I know it’s worse for them now than it is for me, with social media and everything, and girls their own age that probably look exactly how they wish they did because their parents are less strict. I wish I could give every girl a hug, I wish I could give the girl I was a hug, or an older sister.

[Angelina · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first poetry collection by Glück - I admit I hadn’t heard of her until she won the Nobel prize this year. I liked this more than I expected and will definitely read more of her work.

Stars

I’m awake; I am in the world-
I expect
no further assurance.
No protection, no promise.

Solace of the night sky,
the hardly moving
face of the clock.

I’m alone — all
my riches surround me.
I have a bed, a room.
I have a bed, a vase
of flowers beside it.
And a nightlight, a book.

I’m awake; I am safe.
The darkness like a shield, the dreams
put off, maybe
vanished forever.

And the day—
the unsatisfying morning that says
I am your future,
here is your cargo of sorrow:

Do you reject me? Do you mean
To send me away because I am not
full, in your word,
because you see
the black shape already implicit?

I will never be banished. I am the light,
your personal anguish and humiliation.
Do you dare
send me away as though
you were waiting for something better?

There is no better.
Only (for a short space)
the night sky like
a quarantine that sets you
apart from your task.

Only (softly, fiercely)
the stars shining. Here,
in the room, the bedroom.
Saying I was brave, I resisted,
I set myself on fire.

[Manuel Gil · Rating 5 out of 5]

Os últimos 10-15 poemas son MARABILLOSOS

[lena · Rating 5 out of 5]

"orderly, and out of long habit, my heart continues to beat."

[kathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

i originally bought this after reading "August." i especially liked ancient text ("I asked for the earth; I received the earth, like so much / mud in the face"); from a journal ("And I feel, sometimes, part of something / very great, wholly profound and sweeping." feels like she leaves room to laugh at yourself, that maybe she's half laughing at herself - "So much genuine feeling! / So many fierce declarations / of passionate longing!" - but laughing because it yes, it does feel genuine, it is genuine, & the hilarity in that; no? us tiny earnest things); the destination; study of my sister; the empty glass (What do we have to appease the great forces?); quince tree ("You, in your innocence, what do you know of this world?"); fable (2nd one); aubade; screened porch ("The stars / were foolish, but somehow soothing").

so much of this deals with the idea of powerlessness in the face of time, but interestingly, memory is something held onto in the face of this powerlessness (does she have some faith in memory? idk; but having recently read a bunch of wislawa szymborska & having my anxieties w/r/t forgetting picked and prodded at, i found some comfort in lines like "She was being stored in my head, as memory / like facts in a book" - memory reads as a small consolation for being unable to control time...)

i find this is all the poets i read lately, maybe bc it's all there is or maybe bc i'm looking for it, but tldr: time passes and you rarely get what you want, but there's comfort to be had anyway.

"Balm of the summer night, balm of the ordinary,
imperial joy and sorrow of human existence,
the dreamed as well as the lived-
what could be dearer than this, given the closeness of death?"
-Summer Night

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

MOre Louise & she's closer to the lens here it's a crispness I entirely appreciate. Also the use of form in this collection wades elsewhere it's quite distinct from my previous two. Anyway I started poetically dribbling toward the end so either a gear shifted Louise changed or brain surrendered.

Favourites littering that direction Memoir (Rimbaud I'm after you) Saint Joan (!!! holy moly Louise please) Aubade & Summer Night in such proximity but Stars and Solstice too. While the other two I've met carry their motifs the poems speak among themselves here in different ways they're not motifs so much as iterations through etymologies conceptual plasticity just gentle modulation.

I think I'm going to unpack this more when my brain is awakerer

[Mads P. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was a little bored with this at first, but the last ten or so poems were amazing. I especially like the poem "Eros" which conveyed that being present in the moment is the ultimate sensuality.

The poems about childhood, "Time" and "Unpainted Door" were poignant.

"Ripe Peach" about the mind taking joy in possibility was also brilliant. It also touched on being present in the moment.

I so identify with the themes that keep coming up in Gluck's poetry. I've read most of her books now. Wild Iris is still by far the best, but this one definitely had some gems.

[Mina Widding · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jag tyckte om att vistas i den här poesin. När jag läser den högt tar jag in den i min egen kropp. Någonstans stod det att den var mörk och handlade mycket om döden. Men jag tycker den handlar om liv, att leva. Barndomsminnen, reflektioner, betraktelser av livet. Men jo, man känner att det är en äldre poet som skriver, med mycket liv levt.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

yes, i read this because of conversations with friends... and i loved it!

"waves of despair, waves of hopeless longing and heartache.
waves of the mysterious wild hungers of youth, the dreams of childhood.
detailed, urgent; once in a while, selfless.

all different, except of course
the wish to go back.
inevitably
last or first, repeated
over and over-"

[Erika · Rating 4 out of 5]

Läste lite för snabbt, lite för forcerat med ett öga på lånets förfallodag och på den andra biblioteksreservationen av en Glücksk bok som överraskande ramlat in på samma gång. Vill läsa om i lugn och ro i framtiden.

[Blair · Rating 5 out of 5]

The third collection I've read by Glück, and as much as I admired the other two, this one resonated with me the most.

[Angela]

Perfection. What a joy it was to enjoy these poems in the early morning, before the chaos of the day. There's something about Glück's poetry that is heartbreaking and heart-mending all at once.

[Alex Johnson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Louise Gluck has a sparse and striking writing style. Her poems are deceptively simple but her ideas reach much beyond those bonds. My favorite poems were those in the collection where I said, "I have No idea what this means but I love it." Overall, I think I just didn't get the theme of this work. It seemed to build on past works rather than being contained between the two covers. However, I'd most certainly read everything she writes.

[Iulia Kyçyku · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love Louise Glück's work, her poems are introspective, profound and very touching. However, this book was a little too philosophical and explanatory for my taste. It is worth reading, some poems are wonderful, but I feel I mostly enjoyed it rationally rather than emotionally - and that's not what I look for in poetry...

[Tarneem Maitham · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.8
I missed poetry.