Parable of the Hostages by Louise Glück
"Parable of the Hostages" by Louise Glück is a poem set during the Trojan War, exploring the inner conflict faced by Greek soldiers as they contemplate the end of the war. As they sit on the beach, the soldiers grapple with the desire to return home to their families versus the allure of staying in the excitement of war. The poem reflects on themes of longing, the nature of duty, and the complexities of human desire, suggesting that the thrill of battle may serve as a distraction from deeper existential questions. The soldiers recognize that their valid excuse for being away—engaging in war—contrasts sharply with the triviality of seeking mere diversion. Despite their resolve to leave, they find themselves captivated by the beauty surrounding them, akin to the enchanting but perilous call of sirens. This internal struggle leads them to feel like hostages to their own desires and the seductive pull of the world around them, raising questions about how to navigate love and beauty in a chaotic existence. The poem ultimately captures the profound tension between the responsibilities of life and the temptations of experience.
On this Page
Parable of the Hostages by Louise Glück
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1996 (collected in Meadowlands, 1996)
Type of work: Poem
The Work
Set during the Trojan War, this poem describes “The Greeks sitting on the beach wondering what to do when the war ends.” The speaker states that they do not really want to go home to their relatively mundane lives after the excitement and unpredictability of fighting at Troy.
Still, the soldiers realize that their “excuse for absence” will not be accepted because fighting a war is considered a better reason to stay in a place away from home than is “exploring one’s capacity for diversion.” Nevertheless, they do miss their families “a little.” They begin to wonder: “What if war is just male version of dressing up, a game devised to avoid profound spiritual questions.”
The soldiers feel not only the call of war but also the call of the world and its beauty, like “an opera beginning with the war’s loud chords and ending with the floating aria of the sirens,” or mermaids, who, with their beautiful, haunting voices, lured men to their doom. The temptation to stay in Troy is so strong that they calculate ten years as the time needed to get back to Ithaca. Hopelessly, the Greeks are hostages, “already enthralled,” some by “dreams of pleasure, some by sleep, and some by music,” and the longer they delay their journey, the more tightly they are caught in the “insoluble dilemma” of “how to divide the world’s beauty into acceptable and unacceptable loves.”
Bibliography
Diehl, Joanne Feit, ed. On Louise Glück: Change What You See. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005.
Dodd, Elizabeth. “Louise Glück: The Ardent Understatement of Postconfessional Classicism.” In The Veiled Mirror and the Woman Poet: H. D., Louise Bogan, Elizabeth Bishop, and Louise Glück. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992.
Harrison, DeSales. The End of the Mind: The Edge of the Intelligible in Hardy, Stevens, Larkin, Plath, and Glück. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Upton, Lee. Defensive Measures: The Poetry of Niedecker, Bishop, Glück, and Carson. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2005.
Upton, Lee. “Fleshless Voices: Louise Glück’s Rituals of Abjection and Oblivion.” In The Muse of Abandonment: Origin, Identity, Mastery in Five American Poets. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1998.