This poem by Louise Gluck details a teacher/artist's struggle to describe an artist's life to her students. The tone of the poem suggests that she herself struggles with desire to make art, to make a difference, to add her own burden to the mountain.
My students look to me expectantly.
This teacher knows the influence of her advice on her students. She is worried about answering correctly. 'Expectantly' implies a sort of a naivety in her pupils.
I explain to them that a life of art is a life/ of endless labor. Their expressions/ hardly change; they need to know a little more about endless labor.
The line breaks are important here. Not only is art is hard, it is your whole life. For this reason, the narrator breaks the line after life, so the reader takes a pause before finishing the sentence with "of endless labor". Because her students have yet to experience this hardship, they require the narrator to explain herself further.
So I tell them the story of Sisyphus, /how he was doomed to push/a rock up a mountain, knowing nothing/would come of this effort/ but that he would repeat it/indefinitely.
This is an interesting take on the myth of Sisyphus. It implies that Sisyphus willingly undergoes this endeavor, rather than it merely being a punishment. She likens his efforts to the sacrifices of an artist.
I tell them/there is joy in this, in the artist's life,/that one eludes/ judgement, and as I speak/ I am secretly pushing a rock myself,/ slyly pushing it up the steep/ face of a mountain
The narrator reveals what we perhaps knew all along- that she herself is a struggling artist. She encounters much judgement, possibly from herself. There is a disconnect as she gives this advice. She doesn't agree with it herself. She perhaps sometimes does not feel the joy involved in carrying this burden.
Why do I lie/ to these children? They aren't listening,/they aren't deceived, their fingers/tapping at the wooden desks--
The students are becoming restless. The narrator believes it is because they can sense that she does not believe her own advice. The narrator toes the balance between telling them what they want to hear and telling them what they need to hear.
So I retract/the myth; I tell them it occurs/in hell, and that the artist lies/because he is obsessed with attainment,/that he perceives as the summit/at that place where he will live forever,/a place about to be/transformed by his burden: with every breath,
Instead of using a loose ancient metaphor, the narrator ties her advice to an imaginary artist. She is still distancing herself in the example, but rooting it much closer in truth. While Sisyphus was in the underworld, the artist lives in a less amicable hell. Unlike Sisyphus, whose troubles will amount to nothing, the artist hopes that he can make a contribution. He hopes that by the time he reaches the top of the mountain, he can "transform it with his burden."
I am standing at the top of the mountain./Both my hands are free. And the rock has added/height to the mountain.
The narrator is no longer distancing herself in her examples. She is the artist. She carried a burden. The world is better for it. The mountain is higher because of it.
Louise Gluck’s poem “The Mountain” begins, ”My students look at me expectantly.” Of course, this creates expectation in the reader. What do the students (and reader) expect? The next line clarifies; the question must be, What is the life of the artist?
"The life of art is a life
of endless labor."
By forcing “endless labor” into the next line using enjambment, the poet denies the students a short and easy answer. “Their expressions hardly change.” The students are still eager but perhaps don’t quite understand what the speaker is saying. The speaker jokes that the students might need to “know/ a little more about endless labor.” The lines stay relatively short until the speaker enters the world of myth.
Elaborating on the life of the artist in the next six lines, the speaker helps her students to understand the life of an artist by telling them about Sisyphus, who was “doomed to push/ a rock up a mountain.” The six enjambed lines about Sisyphus create the feeling of a line that just keeps going and going, just as the rock must keep going and going up the mountain, no matter how many times it falls back down. There is no end. This is the life of the artist; it is one of endless striving toward art. The speaker tries to reassure the students that there is joy in being Sisyphus, despite the fact that Sisyphus never reaches the top. But then she asks, “Why do I lie/ to these children?” There is something the speaker is not being explicit about, and the children know it.
"They aren’t listening."
They are aware that something is missing in the speaker’s words. So, in another short line, the poet produces three words, “So I retract,” leaving “the myth” hanging in the next line. She must tell the students honestly that the life of the artist is “hell” because the artist is “obsessed with attainment.” The artist lied; there is no joy in being Sisyphus. The artist is tired of that rock always rolling back down the mountain and having to start over again and again. The artist fiercely wants to be on top.
". . . he is obsessed with attainment,
That he perceives as the summit
At that place where he will live forever,
A place about to be
Transformed by his burden."
The artist wants to reach the top because at the top of the mountain the artist is transformed. “He will live forever”; the poet’s words will live on, giving the poet immortality. Not only is the poet transformed but the landscape is as well. How? The rock, made of her words, is no longer something to struggle against; it is art itself, and this art transforms the landscape. The mountain symbolizes the world’s art, and her creation has now added to the collection of Art, both changing the world and also adding to her own glory.
So which image do we believe? The artist as Sisyphus, struggling every day with no end in sight? Or the artist as Glorious, reaching the top of Art Mountain, adding her own mark upon that mountain, no longer encumbered by the struggle?
The answer lies in the irony of the final lines. The hands are “free,” no longer burdened by the rock but also impotent, no longer creating art. Can the hands of the poet ever be free? Can the poet ever rest? Or will the poet always be searching for that next rock in order to carry it up yet another mountain, again and again? And thus the poem turns in on itself, returning to the bottom of the mountain, the beginning of the poem, with students waiting to hear the answer. The poet confronts “the steep/ face of a mountain,” desperately wanting to stand free at the top of the mountain, a mountain that grows bigger and bigger with every accomplishment. And so she must do the only thing she can: she starts to climb.
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