Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

In Louise Gluck's "Aubade," the reader is taken on a journey of desire, reflection, and the ache of unfulfilled needs. Unlike traditional aubades, which focus on lovers parting at dawn, this poem magnifies an eternal sense of yearning, both physically and emotionally, through the symbol of a gull flying above a city.

The poem commences with an awakening, "I heard you waking me again," as if the speaker is roused from a state of obliviousness or maybe even a dream. This awakening is not to a blissful morning-after but to witness "that bird, flying / so strangely over the city." The gull is a poignant symbol: a sea bird misplaced in a city landscape, looking for something-perhaps "the blue waste of the sea"-that isn't there. Its presence serves as a metaphor for displaced desires and dislocated souls. This choice of avian imagery is striking; a gull is not often associated with majesty or romance, but rather with commonality and even nuisance, thereby adding layers of complexity to the poem's thematic concerns.

As the gull "skirts the suburb, / the noon light violent against it," the poem captures the violence of suppressed or unmet desires. The harsh light is not just a physical attribute of the environment but seems to magnify the bird's-and by extension, the speaker's and her lover's-unfulfilled needs. The bird's hunger mirrors the hunger of desire: "I feel its hunger / as your hand inside me," blending the literal with the emotional in a stark juxtaposition.

The cry of the gull is deemed "common, unmusical," hinting that the fundamental cries-of the bird, of human yearning-are inherently plain, perhaps even animalistic. There is a raw quality to this acknowledgment, a stripping away of the poetic or romantic illusions often associated with love or lust. This unvarnished truth is what lends the poem its power: "Ours were not / different. They rose / from the unexhausted / need of the body."

The final lines of the poem focus on a "wish to return," perhaps to the moment before parting, before the realities of the day set in. The "ashen dawn" symbolizes both an ending and a beginning, a boundary space where wishes and reality blur. The scene is unresolved: "our clothes / not sorted for departure," as if in that chaotic state, there exists the potential for both staying and leaving, for both fulfillment and perpetual yearning.

In "Aubade," Gluck masterfully uses the symbol of the gull to delve into the complexities of desire, both fulfilled and unfulfilled. The beauty of this poem lies in its honesty, its willingness to look closely at the common, unmusical aspects of life and find there a narrative that resonates with the universal human experience. The gull's eternal search for the sea becomes the reader's quest for understanding the insatiable needs and wishes that propel us through our own lives.

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