Gjertrud Schnackenberg: love and loss

 Lacrimosa dies illa

(What weeping on that day)

Gjertrud Schnackenberg (whom I’ll call GS), equipped with superb technical skill, intellectual depth and ambitious themes, is one of the best contemporary American poets. She is now 72.

The daughter of a history professor at Pacific Lutheran University, she was born in Tacoma, Washington in 1953, and graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1975.  Friends described her as a femme fatale, a beautiful Nordic fairy princess.  She had charm, gifts, sensitivity, contentment, fine clothes and good taste.  Men stood up and stared when she entered the room.

The facts about her early life are obscure.  GS married the poet Paul Smyth (1944-2006), who had been her professor at Holyoke.  Born in Boston, he graduated from Harvard and was married three times, finally to GS.  Their marriage lasted for about four years and probably ended because he was unfaithful, a frequent cause of divorce in the days when professors habitually slept with their harem of students.

Like the earlier generation of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath in 1959, GS and her friends treated themselves to drinks at the fashionable Ritz Hotel in downtown Boston.  But she had no boyfriend.  Early in 1983 she suddenly, surprisingly and dramatically told several friends, “I can’t see you anymore.  I have no time for you.  I’m in a relationship with Joseph Brodsky.  I’m mad about him.  I must be available all the time.  Or be completely alone.”

Brodsky teaching at University of Michigan, c. 1972

There’s been no discussion in print of their affair or its abrupt end, except for brief references in Robert McPhillips’ The New Formalism (1997) and the DLB, 282 (2003), nor any explanation of why it has remained secret.  But GS wrote five deeply moving love poems that commemorate their relationship and its aftermath.  In 1981, Brodsky (1940-96) was teaching at Holyoke, GS’ alma mater, and they most likely met there or in Cambridge.  Short, red-haired, freckled and bald, he looked like a sickly proletarian, but was extremely flirtatious and habitually embraced women when he met them.

Denounced by the Soviets as a poetical “parasite”, Brodsky had a tragic Russian-Jewish background.  He suffered pain and showed courage during his eighteen months of hard labour in the Arctic, 350 miles north of Leningrad, and during his forced deportation in 1972 and separation from his elderly parents and children.  He had severe heart disease and his self-destructive smoking threatened an early death.  He could be insolent, arrogant and boorish, cynical, offensive and pitiless.  But he’d won the admiration of Anna Akhmatova in Russia and W. H. Auden in New York, and was the darling of the New York Review of Books.  He had a charismatic personality and poetic genius, and (unlike Auden) would win the Nobel Prize in 1987.  In 1991 he won a MacArthur Award and became U.S. poet laureate.  I asked Brodsky if he’d met Robert Frost, and in a letter of February 11, 1995 he replied, “I did not meet Frost on his visit to Russia.  At the time of his sojourn in my home town I was behind bars.”

Used to being courted, GS was now rejected.  It’s hard to understand how Brodsky could bear to lose so lovely and so gifted a woman, but he left her in the early 1980s.  In Paris in the late 1980s he met the exquisitely beautiful Maria Sozzani (born 1950), an Italian-Russian translator, and married her in September 1990.  Brodsky and GS resembled the equally brilliant poets and tragic lovers Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath.  Both these beautiful women were abandoned by their men, though GS eventually recovered and Plath did not.

GS’ five love poems appear in the third section of The Lamplit Answer (1985) and follow the noble tradition of laments for lost love.  In Sir Thomas Wyatt’s poignant “They flee from me that sometime did me seek” (1535), his lover’s naked, eager-to-please and ecstatic sexuality is suddenly transformed into bewildered and intolerable agony:

When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,

And she me caught in her arms long and small [thin];

Therewith all sweetly did me kiss

And softly said, “Dear heart, how like you this?”

It was no dream: I lay broad waking.

But all is turned, thorough my gentleness,

Into a strange fashion of forsaking.

Lord Byron’s “When we two parted” (1817) is a concise expression of miserable loss.  She betrays and forgets him; he quietly laments.  His silence and grief would remain, like a stake in his heart, even if he met her many years later.

In secret we met—

In silence I grieve,
That thy heart could forget,
Thy spirit deceive.
If I should meet thee
After long years,
How should I greet thee?—
With silence and tears.

Critics of GS’ love poems have been astonishingly obtuse.  Robert Richman in the New Criterion (October 1985) completely misunderstood the quality and meaning of the poems: “The author has chosen to include a small group of rather lackluster confessional works.  These poems largely fail, not because they are confessional, but because they are quite simply inferior in quality.  Some of them, addressed to an absent lover, could be the ordinary scribbles of any love-struck undergraduate.”

Christina Davis in the Boston Review (June 1, 2001), entirely missed the powerful confessional element: “Schnackenberg’s work is distinguished by her consistent resistance to the confessional and all its trappings.  While she began her career with an elegiac sequence for her father, she has never returned to outright biography.”  In fact, the confessional poets—Robert Lowell, John Berryman and Sylvia Plath—had a strong influence on her poetry.  The first part of her first book, Portraits and Elegies (1982), was a tribute to her late father.  The love poems in The Lamplit Answer are intensely personal.  The poet J. D. McClatchy was infinitely more perceptive when he observed, “The Lamplit Answer is a book that shines throughout with a luminous craft, and wise reflective sense of culture and its claims on human feeling.”

The poems in The Lamplit Answer become clearer, and take on a deeper interest and meaning, when we know that her secret unnamed lover is Joseph Brodsky.  Her lover’s lament both expresses and transcends the pain of rejection.  “Complaint” adopts the genre of Shakespeare’s “A Lover’s Complaint” (1609).  The lament for lost love in English poetry is usually male, but GS now speaks with a woman’s voice.  The once solid and melting (Russian) snow, repeated seven times, is a symbol of her lost love.  She’s heartbroken and doesn’t know how to reach him; he loves her, not in life but only in her dream.  She remembers his hand stroking her hair, and in the last stanza she symbolically punishes and mutilates herself for loving him too much and losing him forever:

And close my eyes, since he is blind to me.

Since he’ll not hear me, then I’ll be deaf too.

And draw my hair into a set of strings

I’ll take a scissors to.

The last line, like her lavish blonde hair, is cut short.

The six-part structure of “Sonata”—Overture, Exposition, Development, Recapitulation, Cadenza and Coda—is an intense love poem about the effect of his absence and loss of her love.  She’s angry about his (perhaps permanent) departure; her life lacks meaning without him; since her whole life revolves around him, the real world scarcely seems to exist when he’s not with her; she needs him to interpret her Freudian dream; and she hopes they will finally join like two harmonious themes of the sonata (or the two halves of Plato’s perfect being).  In the most emotional lines she states, “My heart detests, reviles, denounces, loathes / Your absence with a passion like a furnace.”  She insists, even begs him to come home, but doesn’t have much hope that he will return.

“Paper Cities” spring up from pencil points and books, and seem as imaginatively alive as real cities. Throughout this poem GS identifies with the mirror image of her own love affair, the intermittent and ultimately unhappy liaison of the French writers Gustave Flaubert and Louise Colet.  Despite all the precious letters they exchanged, they eventually severed their relations.  Colet demanded more attention and emotional response; Flaubert wanted more solitude and artistic freedom.  Like Louise, GS can’t recapture her lost lover.  She also identifies with saints and martyrs—Clare, Denis, and Agatha who “carries her torn breasts on a plate”. By contrast, GS once saw the shadows of his hand when he touched her breasts.  Her namesake Trude Stein called nipples Tender Buttons.  In the end, however, her inevitable fate “is written on paper” and her “world is crushed.”

“Snow Melting” repeats, more effectively than “Complaint”, the image of melting snow and lost love.  She does not describe her lover’s feelings, but precisely explains her own:

We’ve reasons, we have reasons, so we say.

For giving love, and for withholding it

I who would love must marvel at the way

I know aloneness when I’m holding it.

She gives love, he withholds it, and she imagines herself holding solitude in her arms.  In this poem she expresses the dominant love theme: her passion, his absence; her loss and loneliness: “Here, left with this alone, and at a loss / I hold an alien and [a] vacant face.”  She alludes both to Blaise Pascal’s pensée on the mysteries and miseries of love, “The heart has its reasons that reason doesn’t know,” and to Arthur Rimbaud’s self-estrangement, “I is another.”

“Love Letter” uses the witty trisyllabic end rhymes and slangy diction in Byron’s Don Juan to hide her pain.  She addresses him as “Dear love” and “Beloved”, can’t bear to hear his emphatic goodbye, and laments the lost love of the poet who has a strong foreign accent and mispronounces words.  He’s a great lover, and she misses his sex as well as his presence: “you make me come / And come and come innumerable times. . . . [I] fantasize / That we’re between the sheets, your brilliant eyes / Open on me and, bang, we have it made.”  Her wit recalls Theodore Roethke’s “You be the sickle and I the rake, / And what prodigious music we would make.”

But her love is irrational and self-destructive: “I love you for no reason whatsoever.” She emphasizes her solitude, drinks to relieve her pain, quotes Keats’ fatalistic line, “Till love and fame to nothingness do sink,” and insists, “Without you my life can go to hell.”  She’s lost the will to live and signs off with a cunning possessive.  Wittily rhyming her familiar name with “beauties,” she pleads with him to “not forget this constant love of Trude’s.”  It’s possible that, like Louise Colet, her pleas for help, remembrance and reciprocal love, her mournful crying, clinging and impossible demands, finally made Brodsky abandon her for other women.  After GS married for the second time, she omitted the intensely intimate and revealing “Love Letter” from her book Supernatural Love, Poems 1976-1992 (2000) to obliterate this painful affair from her past.

Brodsky didn’t dedicate any poems to GS and she has not been identified in his work.  But I believe that in To Urania (1988), the first book he published after the end of their affair, he devoted part of one poem and an entire love poem to her.  In “Café [i.e.Caffé] Trieste: San Francisco,” he notes the woman’s blonde hair, enigmatic personality, stylish clothes and poet’s sensitivity to sound that closely match her qualities, and her speaking “read” backward to express an endearment:

Your golden mane!  Your riddle!

The lilac skirt, the brittle [slim]

Ankles!  The perfect ear

Rendering “read” as “dear.”

The poems of GS and Brodsky both mention the pre-Socratic philospher Parmenides and the comic mispronounciation of words.  The 6th of Brodsky’s “Twenty Sonnets to Mary Queen of Scots” expresses, like GS,  the anguish of lost love and remembrance of sexual delight.  He also offers witty puns on dental and testicular “fillings” and anguished “feelings.”  Toxic lead is not used for dental fillings, but he imagines that the heavy metal would pull him down to her:

I loved you.  And my love of you (it seems,

it’s only pain) still stabs me though the brain.

The whole thing’s shattered into smithereens. . . .

I loved you with such strength, such hopelessness!

The very thought of her inspires his heated “bloodstream fire . . .

Which melts the lead in fillings with desire

To touch—“your hips,”  I must delete—your lips,

which would be more than any man could bear.

GS soon found consolation for her lost love in real life as well as in poetry.  Robert Nozick (1938-2002), a professor of philosophy at Harvard, had been married and had two children.  In a letter to me of March 2, 2010, after GS had signed a number of her books and mentioned Sylvia Plath, she asked if I were acquainted with a neighbour: “You may know my late husband’s dear daughter, Emily, who lives in Kensington.”

Nozick in 1977

In the Harvard Gazette (May 6, 2004) colleagues wrote that in l985 Robert [who was, like Brodsky, Jewish and considerably older than GS] read while standing in the Harvard Bookstore The Lamplit Answer.  [He must have wondered, and later discovered, to whom the love poems were addressed.]  His quest to meet the author led to his marriage to GS in 1987 and to their notable, intensely shared life of art, philosophy, writing and travel.  Two settings played a key part in nearly every year of the fifteen years of their marriage and his life.  One was the urban world of Italian art, architecture and sculpture; the other was the rough and pristine geography of Idaho, whose Alpine meadows and lakes they inhabited for a full month each August.  GS dedicated A Gilded Lapse of Time (1992), “To My Husband, Robert.”  Most of her book Heavenly Questions (2010) portrays her response to his death.  Her traumatic break with Brodsky, like the deaths of her father and husband, inspired her most deeply felt poetry.

Jeffrey Meyers has published Manic Power: Robert Lowell and His Circle (1987), Robert Frost: A Biography (1996) and Robert Lowell in Love (2016).  The Biographer’s Quest appeared with Mercer University Press in April 2026.

A Message from TheArticle

We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout these hard economic times. So please, make a donation.