The Glass Essay

The Glass Essay” is a long poem by Anne Carson. Carson is an award-winning, widely published poet, essayist, translator, artist, and professor from Canada. She published “The Glass Essay” in her 1995 book Glass, Irony and God. Like much of Carson’s work, the poem upends genres. It mixes prose and poetry, canonized literature and contemporary culture, and criticism and confessional. What informs the poem is the modern tendency to blend form and style and transgress traditional literary categories. As a scholar of Ancient Greece, a fair amount of Carson’s work focuses on mythological Greek figures. In “The Glass Essay,” Carson plays with the myth of Emily Brontë, the English author of the classic Victorian novel Wuthering Heights (1847). Carson’s poem touches on love, desire, suffering, and captivity. The poem is a notable addition to Carson’s oeuvre. The 2006 version of The Norton Anthology of English Literature anthologized a selection of “The Glass Essay.”

Poet Biography

Anne Carson was born in Toronto in 1950. Her father was a banker, and his job forced Carson and her family to move frequently around the country. Books provided Carson with a sense of stability. Growing up, Carson wanted to be like the Irish writer and wit, Oscar Wilde. Her admiration of Wilde, along with a high school teacher, pushed her to learn and study the Greek language and culture. She continued her education at the University of Toronto, where she earned a Ph.D. in 1981. She has described her love for Ancient Greek culture as intrinsic, and she has taught Greek and other courses at colleges and universities throughout Canada and the United States for over 30 years. Her first marriage ended in a divorce, and her second marriage is to the artist Robert Currie. In 2020, Carson retired from teaching but not from writing.

A prolific writer, Carson has published criticism, translations, plays, poetry, verse novels, essays, a comic book, and work that generally crosses the boundaries of literary genres and mediums. Carson published her first book of criticism, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay, in 1986. She followed up her meditation on desire with a collection of poems, Short Talks (1992), and in 1995, she published Glass, Irony and God, which featured her extended poem “The Glass Essay.” In 1998, Carson published Autobiography of Red—a verse novel that turned the Greek myths about Geryon and Hercules into a modern-day romance. Autobiography of Red won the A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry that same year. In 2001, her book about a strained marriage, The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, won several awards, including a T.S. Eliot Prize in 2001. Other notable works by Carson include Nox (2010), which unfolds like an accordion, Float (2010), a collection of disparate chapbooks that come in a box, and the comic book The Trojan Women (2021).

Poem Text

Carson, Anne. “The Glass Essay.” 1994. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

In the first section, entitled “I,” the speaker focuses on herself. It is 4 a.m., and the speaker is awake because she is thinking about an ex-romantic partner named Law. Looking at herself in the bathroom mirror, the speaker announces that she is visiting her mother tomorrow. In the next section, “SHE,” the speaker takes the train to her mother’s house. Her mother lives alone on a moor. For company, the speaker brings “a lot of books” (Line 15), including The Collected Works of Emily Brontë.

Since the speaker is now at her mother’s moor, she is worried she is “turning into Emily Brontë” (Line 21). In the next section, “THREE,” the speaker, her mother, and The Collected Works of Emily Brontë are at the kitchen table. The speaker quotes a passage from Wuthering Heights in which a character is “hanging a litter of puppies” (Line 40). Meanwhile, the mother talks to the speaker about the weather, taxes, the town hairdresser, and the speaker’s psychotherapist.

The speaker sees a psychotherapist, Dr. Haw, to help deal with the loss of Law. The mother suddenly observes, via a rhetorical question, that the psychotherapy is not helping the speaker get over Law. The speaker replies, “Dr. Haw says grief is a long process” (Line 83). The mother is unmoved by Dr. Haw’s words, and she “frowns” (Line 84).

In the next section, “WHACHER,” the speaker thinks about what Emily meant by the word whacher in her poem, “Glenenden’s Dream,” which starts with the line, “Tell me, whether, is it winter?” However, Emily wrote whacher instead of whether. The speaker connects the word to Emily’s fabled life. According to the speaker, Emily “whached eyes, stars, inside, outside, and actual weather” (Line 98). She also “whached the bars of time, which broke” (Line 99). For the speaker, whached means something similar to whacked.

Next, the speaker tells about Emily’s solitary life; she did not have friends, sex, a spouse, a salary, or children, and she was not religious. Quoting a note from Charlotte, the speaker concludes “brushing the carpet” (Line 114), exploring the moor, and whaching left Emily at peace.

On the other hand, Emily’s poems are “concerned with prisons”' (Line 150). As the speaker walks through her moor, she thinks about the different meanings of imprisonment. She also thinks about Law. “When Law left, I felt so bad I thought I would die,” (Line 208) says the speaker. To cope, the speaker meditated, which brought her visions of her naked soul. She labeled the visions Nudes.

Returning to Emily, the speaker notes Charlotte’s dramatic preface to Wuthering Heights. Charlotte calls Emily “stronger than a man, simpler than a child” (Line 233). She labels the novel “a horror of great darkness” (Line 245). The speaker then thinks about the histrionic relationship between the novel’s two main characters, Heathcliff and Catherine. She wonders what holds them together and apart.

Returning to her life, the speaker describes her last encounter with Law. He tells her he “doesn’t want to be sexual” (Line 282), yet the speaker takes off her clothes anyway. Looking back, the speaker is “appalled” (Line 294) by her behavior. The speaker and Law spent the night touching, singing, and talking in their “made-up language” (Line 303). They “tried to fuck” (Line 306) but Law cannot get sexually excited. However, the speaker “came / again and again” (Lines 307-08), feeling so ecstatic that she seems to be looking down at herself and Law as the “lines harden” (Line 313) between them. The speaker remembers that Law left in the morning, and her thoughts return to the present.

Next, the speaker enters her mother’s quiet kitchen. Although her mother eats little, the fridge is “crammed” (Line 324). The speaker takes a yogurt and thinks about one time she heard girls singing a harsh May Day song. “Girls are cruelest to themselves” (Line 339), the speaker states. She uses Emily as an example. Reportedly, when she was six, Emily encouraged her father to whip Branwell. At 14, she supposedly cauterized herself after a rabid dog bit her.

The speaker then pivots to the cruelty of Heathcliff, whom she calls “a pain devil” (Line 360). The speaker wonders where Heathcliff’s “sexual despair” (Line 373) comes from, and what Emily meant by “iron man” (Line 384) in a poem she wrote in 1839.

In the next section, “LIBERTY,” the speaker further contemplates the painful end of her relationship and explicates on the Nudes. She describes some of the Nudes in detail. They are violent and disquieting, featuring thorns and a “hellish contraption” (Line 447). Dr. Haw asks why the speaker does not just look away. The speaker cannot come up with an answer, so she stops discussing the visions with her therapist.

The speaker then turns back toward Emily, her poems about jail and liberty, and Charlotte’s thoughts on Emily’s work. About Emily’s poems, Charlotte said it was not “at all like the poetry women generally write” (Line 513). The speaker says her favorite part of The Collected Works of Emily Brontë is the section that shows Charlotte’s alterations to Emily’s verse. One edit involves the word prison.

An acrimonious conversation over breakfast starts the “HERO” section. The speaker’s mother castigates the speaker for keeping her drapes open at night and then attributes rape to the purportedly revealing bathing suits in the Sears Summer Catalog. The speaker and her mom then visit her father, who has Alzheimer’s disease and lives at a hospital 50 miles away from her mother’s house.

Every week, her mother visits her father. “Marriage is for better or for worse” (Line 622), her mother says. The speaker remembers being less empathetic as her father began his decline. Hearing her father—a “former World War II navigator!” (Line 640)—struggling to speak made the speaker “merciless” (Line 641). At the hospital, the mother gives him grapes. The speaker reflects on the photo of his “World War II air crew” (Line 703) taped to her fridge.

The penultimate section, “HOT,” starts with a stressful dream about an older woman. The woman controls her house “by a system of light bulbs” (Line 732). Unable to turn the light bulbs on, the woman “creeps out of bed” (Line 737) and whispers, “I want to be beautiful again” (Line 744). The dream and the ex-partner make the speaker angry and “want to curse” (Line 755). “Emily Brontë was good at cursing,” says the speaker (Line 761). To prove her point, the speaker excerpts Brontë poems that showcase a variety of curses. The speaker wonders why Emily sounded so angry in her poetry and speculates about her sex life or lack thereof.

The last section, “THOU,” zeroes in on Emily’s mysterious relationship with an entity named Thou. This Thou was “full of stranger power” (Line 830) and had a voice that came “out of the night wind” (Line 831). Thou and Emily push the speaker to consider the “basic rules of male-female relations” (Line 841). She remembers her father commenting on her mother’s legs and hearing her mom talking on the phone about how “a woman would be just as happy with a kiss on the cheek” (Line 859).

Returning to Emily and Thou, the speaker excerpts the poem “I’ll Come When Thou Art Saddest,” where Emily is Thou and is “speaking not as the victim but to the victim” (Line 887). The poem makes the speaker realize the extent of Emily’s loneliness and the depth of her own anger. The speaker wonders if the Nude visions are her Thou. The speaker details additional Nudes. Soon, the visions stop. “No nudes. / No Thou,” says the speaker (Lines 987-88). Quite unexpectedly, Nude #13 appears. Neither the speaker’s body nor another woman’s body, the Nude’s body contained the “body of us all” (Line 1019). This Nude represents everyone.