Published: August 01, 2009 08:57 pm      

On Poetry: Growing tomatoes up north

In this poem from her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Louise Glück imagines the voice of a gardener speaking to someone who must be God. (Vespers is an early evening worship service.) I love this poem, and the book it comes from, for its unusual vision as it wrestles with complicated questions of love and responsibility.

Glück begins with what's probably a reference to the biblical parable of the talents, in which God gives differing amounts of money to three servants, expecting a return on his investment. The speaker is like the third servant, who is able to show no results and is consequently thrown into "darkness." All this might seem quite serious, but it turns out to be tomato plants we're talking about! So, we lighten up. But then we see the great struggle of the speaker to grow tomatoes with cold nights, drought and not enough summer (I think of growing tomatoes in northern Michigan….) — it's all more serious than we thought.

Who owns the tomatoes? God, supposedly, but the speaker planted them and worried over them, tried to keep them alive. The plant is the speaker's heart, broken by blight. The speaker finally gets really mad. How can God have a heart in the way we understand it if he doesn't discriminate between the living and the dead? How can he even begin to understand the terror of not knowing how things will turn out? Is this a "religious" poem? More, I'd say, a poem that profoundly touches the paradox of human intelligence and helplessness, bound together.

Vespers

In your extended absence, you permit me
use of earth, anticipating some return on investment. I must report
failure in my assignment, principally regarding the tomato plants.
I think I should not be encouraged to grow
tomatoes. Or, if I am, you should withhold
the heavy rains, the cold nights that come
so often here, while other regions get
twelve weeks of summer. All this
belongs to you: on the other hand,
I planted the seeds, I watched the first shoots
like wings tearing the soil, and it was my heart
broken by the blight, the black spot so quickly
multiplying in the rows. I doubt
you have a heart, in our understanding of
that term. You who do not discriminate
between the dead and the living, who are, in consequence,
immune to foreshadowing, you may not know
how much terror we bear, the spotted leaf,
the red leaves of the maple falling
even in August, in early darkness: I am responsible
for these vines.

-- Louise Gluck, from "The Wild Iris," HarperCollins, 1994

Fleda Brown is professor emerita, University of Delaware, and past poet laureate of Delaware.