Reading poetry can be a sort of random search and a cataloguing process. Pick up a book of poems, and read. A poem might hit. When the poem hits, catalogue it somehow. Then note why it was meaningful. It will have struck a chord because it aligned to some emotional moment in one’s life.

Then there is reading poetry as a search for the expression of a certain feeling. Say I have a certain feeling: a feeling of abandonment for example. I can start searching out poems that express that feeling well.

I recently read Louise Glück’s poem, “The Garden”, which appears in the “Wild Iris” collection. I had picked up the book in the random search reading modality. But then, today, I decided I wanted to look for poems on abandonment, and it just so happened to relate. The poem probably put abandonment on my mind, but it also randomly aligned to an emotional moment.

The poem describes a couple in an argument. They are a young couple, and the relationship is new: “the great difficulties have never as yet/been faced and solved”. The poem’s penultimate stanza describes the woman touching the man’s face, “even here, even at the beginning of love,/her hand leaving his face makes/an image of departure.” The hand’s gesture represents unconscious knowledge that the relationship will end. The woman in the poem uses this gesture to calm the man by putting the argument in perspective of the larger picture. They should enjoy the time together, put aside minor disagreements, so that inevitable loss will be softer.