Springtime and Freshness in Louise Gluck's "The Garden"

Louise Gluck focuses many of her poems around gardens and garden imagery. It seems like she is obsessed with life cycles, the malleability of the earth, and the absolute heart-wrenching sadness that has the ability to exist around so much fecundity and fertility. In "The Garden", it is the dawn of a new romantic relationship, something ordinarily so sweet and exciting to begin. The poet can observe this freshness existing in a quiet gentle madness ("look at her, touching his cheek/to make a truce"); the poet has clearly been there, in the throes of unique there's-no-one-else-like-us love, and cannot say a word to put an end to where her own projections think their relationship is heading. Her use of an em dash at the end of five of her stanzas aid in the image of the poet sitting by herself just slightly out of sight and her observations are spilling out in a painful reminiscing. Gluck is not being cagey with this poem. She presents an observation and she presents how unbearable it is to watch, but she is not attempting to trick the reader in any capacity. Rather, she uses the beauty of springtime colors- hills of pale green, purple crocus- and juxtaposes them with the darkness of the dirt, the "clouded" flowers, like they are about to be caught in the middle of a storm that they do not wish to acknowledge. It's the spring of their relationship but storm clouds are rolling in. It's the happiest time of the year, and it is pathetic to view.