an elongated spring

Louise Glück's The Seven Ages is 6 x 8.8 x 0.2 inches & 78 pages long.

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You must steel yourself for an astonishing high-low convergence, but I learned about Louise Glück via a Tinder profile I saw in Chicago in the summer of 2017. By way of all autobiographical information, this heat-seeking stranger simply wrote: “The Sensual World” by Louise Glück

I know I acquired The Seven Ages (the 2002 collection that contains this poem) the next afternoon, because I didn’t have tons to do that summer. I’d just quit a magazine job and I was starting grad school in the fall. I wrote a handful of kicky, short articles about bread and musicians—but mostly I biked around, read, and maintained a private, pensive mood.

I can’t remember if I matched with the person whose most salient trait was a Louise Glück poem. And, at risk of stealing my personality from a Tinder profile of an unknown digital stranger, “The Sensual World” has became a most precious poem of my whole heart. It’s very romantic and elemental and assured about its correctness about what it can’t know. It’s wise and ferocious. I can’t tell if it’s resigned.

Like hoards of us, I admire how Glück writes about the passage of time and the sublime indifference of nature. Right now, I feel like I’m living through the mid-Atlantic’s most extended spring. It’s going on and on. It’s an experience I only want described by Louise Glück.

I want the elongated spring version of “Solstice,” from The Seven Ages:

Or the beginning of “Quince Tree”:

Alright, have you waited long enough for “The Sensual World”? Well waiting is important, as you’d know if you’d read those two poems, but here it is, arriving at last: