Cottonmouth Country

Dear Mrs. White, 

Life has been kinda crazy with homework and me being sick that one week, so I'm very sorry my blogs haven't been up to date. I'm playing catch up this week; I promise I'll be on top of things from now on :)

Cottonmouth Country

By Louise Gluck

Fish bones walked the waves off Hatteras.

And there were other signs

That Death wooed us, by water, wooed us

By land:  among the pines

An uncurled cottonmouth that rolled on moss

Reared in the polluted air.

Birth, not death, is the hard loss.

I know.  I also left a skin there.

Since it was short, I just posted the whole poem up on here. :)

The first time I read this poem, the feeling I got from it was a sort of eerie, depressing, and dark feel (probably because it mentions fish bones and Death -- all reasonable to give off such a feeling.) But the more times I read it, the more my feelings turned towards a sort of dissatisfaction.

"An uncurled cottonmouth that rolled on moss

Reared in the polluted air"

I found this to be one of the main lines in which I thought the Gluck was dissatisfied. The way she describes this place seems very unattached and she uses words that aren't words you would say to describe a place you love. (polluted air ... uncurled cottonmouth... etc.)

This poem is an octet, with no set rhyming scheme. I believe Gluck did this because she really only had one main thing to say, and she wanted to be blunt about it.

When Gluck mentions, "Birth, not death, is the hard loss" notice this is the second time she mentions "death" but does not capitalize the second use of it. Perhaps this was unintentional, but I think because the first mention of Death referred to the place, she capitalized it to show emphasis on how she much she regretted living there. The second mention of death is more of just emphasising the opposite birth.

Birth, not death, is the hard loss.

Birth is also something one can't control, and it's deemed a miracle. For Gluck to say otherwise makes the poem more striking, and it shows how unhappy she was living in the cottonmouth country. She's explaining how, if given the choice, she would not choose to live there and die somewhere else.

This poem is really depressing, and I didn't really like it too much just because I pictured her whining about how she didn't like where she lived. And she tried too hard to be creative. Cottonmouth is a snake, and she finished the poem saying, "I know. I also left a skin there" to show change.