"Snowdrops" by Louise Gluck | when you do not expect to survive

Do you know what I was, how I lived? You know

what despair is; then

winter should have meaning for you.

I did not expect to survive,

earth suppressing me. I didn't expect

to waken again, to feel

in damp earth my body

able to respond again, remembering

after so long how to open again

in the cold light

of earliest spring—

afraid, yes, but among you again

crying yes risk joy

in the raw wind of the new world.


In Snowdrops, Gluck turns to the metaphor of winter to express the state of emotional pain that feels nearly physical, that ends up inhabiting our bodies. Pain is bone-cold. It hardens the inner life. And fear freezes the animating river of our lives, until we feel we might as well be dead.

There are seasons in our lives when so much seems lost, unbearable, incurable, unfixable—when we feel we’ve made a mess of this or things have made a mess of us.

She reveals this inner state, “not expect[ing] to survive,” feeling buried. Dead. Not “expect[ing] to waken again.” And yet, like the iris or crocus or snowdrop, there is this resilience even in the coldest soul that senses somehow that what is buried can press through the ice and snow and taste even the “cold light of earliest spring.” She points to Easter even through the pain of Good Friday and the long waiting of Holy Saturday. Joy isn’t summoned. It may not even feel possible, and yet, somehow, there’s something in us that dares to “risk,” despite all we know and otherwise might feel—“joy / in the raw wind of the new world.”