Summary
This poem is written from the perspective of Gretel, one of the children in the fairytale Hansel and Gretel. The general plot of this tale revolves around a brother and a sister who are abandoned by their parents and left in the woods, where they find a woman living in a house made of candy. When the woman turns out to be a witch determined to eat them, Gretel tricks her into climbing into a hot oven. "Gretel in Darkness" takes place after the events of the fairytale, when the children are safe again. The speaker acknowledges this by saying that "we"—she and her brother—now live in the world they previously hoped for. Their enemies, who wanted to kill them, are dead themselves. Still, Gretel feels haunted: she hears the witch's screams, coming through a windowpane made out of sugar. Gretel admits that this fate was deserved, noting that God rewards (and by extension punishes) behavior. The witch's tongue, she says, shrivels up in the heat until it turns to gas.
Analysis
One of the most important things to pay attention to in this stanza is the speaker's use of tense. The poem's first sentence is "This is the world we wanted." Here, Gretel she speaks in the past tense. This subtly suggests that, though she once wanted nothing more than safety and the demise of her enemies, this may not be what she wants anymore. But the stanza's final sentence, "Her tongue shrivels into gas..." uses the present tense. When describing this vivid, horrific detail, she uses the present tense, as if the act of violence she committed against her enemy is ongoing. As a whole, these two sentences—the first and last lines of the stanza—exemplify the speaker's internal conflict. The first is a firm, even harsh attempt at self-persuasion. It ends with a period, as if the speaker is attempting to end the conversation then and there, leaving no room for argument or nuance. However, it's clear that her effort at self-persuasion isn't successful. After all, look at the last line of the stanza. It's not just that Gretel returns to the memory of killing the witch with clear discomfort, even regret—she also ends that sentence with an ellipse. Ellipses signal that her thought is left incomplete. Therefore, along with the use of present-tense in the sentence, the punctuation mark that ends us tells us that Gretel's thought is ongoing, inconclusive, and therefore haunting. The first and last lines of the stanza, though they contradict each other, are also established as parallels. They both have seven syllables in a poem where line length is varying and inconstant. They are also both end-stopped lines (meaning they end with a punctuation mark), and they each consist of exactly one full sentence.
Meanwhile, the three middle lines of the stanza are messier on a stylistic level. While the first and last lines illustrate the two poles of Gretel's experience, exemplifying triumph and trauma, these three middle lines show the struggle as she navigates those poles. Glück uses enjambment to create lines that leave us in uneasy suspense, or else to squeeze opposing ideas into a short space. For instance, the line "All who would have seen us dead" is ominous, communicating only that many people wished the speaker dead. Only in the following line do we learn that the sentence ends "are dead," assuring readers that the speaker's enemies, though numerous, are no longer. In the line "of sugar: God rewards," Glück uses a colon to divide and parallel two juxtaposed ideas. The image of sugar is sweet and childlike, while the phrase "God rewards," in this context, is frightening, evoking punitive, uncontrollable power. These enjambed lines, where ideas are split and muddled across line breaks, are like a glimpse inside the conflicted space of the speaker's mind.
