The Full Text of “Gretel in Darkness”
The Full Text of “Gretel in Darkness”
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“Gretel in Darkness” Introduction
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Louise Glück's “Gretel in Darkness” (first published in her 1975 collection The House on Marshland) explores trauma through the lens of the fairy tale "Hansel and Gretel." The Gretel of this poem is tormented by horrific memories of the witch she murdered in order to rescue her brother. Her father and brother refuse to acknowledge her suffering, preferring to believe that life has returned to normal—and thus abandoning Gretel to her own pain. Written in edgy, jolting free verse, "Gretel in Darkness" evokes the claustrophobia and isolation of trauma.
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“Gretel in Darkness” Summary
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We're living in the world we hoped for. All the people who wanted to kill us are dead themselves. At night, I can still hear the witch's screams coming through a windowpane made of sugar. God blesses us. I see the witch's tongue as it withers and evaporates in the oven...
Now, far away from any women or even the mere memory of women, in our father's little house, we can rest and are well fed. So why can't I forget what happened? My father locks the door and keeps danger away, and it's been years since my experience with the witch.
Nobody else remembers what happened. Even you, Hansel, look at me on summer afternoons as if you're going to leave me, as if none of the terrible things that happened to us ever happened. But I murdered the witch to save you. I can see menacing trees, and the towers of the shining oven...
At night, I reach out to you, Hansel, for a hug, but you aren't there. Am I the only one dealing with this? I hear spies whispering in the quiet, Hansel; we're still in the witch's cottage, and the dark forest and the terrible fire are real.
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“Gretel in Darkness” Themes
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The Persistence of Trauma
“Gretel in Darkness” explores the complexities of life after the happily-ever-after ending of a fairy tale. The poem’s speaker, Gretel (of the fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel”) is tormented by her memories of her ordeal in the witch’s cottage, where she shoved the witch into a burning oven to save herself and Hansel from being devoured. As Gretel grapples with this terrible reality, the poem implies that just because a horrific trauma is in the past doesn’t mean it’s gone.
In the first stanzas, Gretel lays out her situation: the witch is dead, she and her brother Hansel are safe, and they’ve gotten everything they hoped for. But right from the start, the reader gets the feeling that not all is well. Despite the fact that Gretel and Hansel are living in “the world we wanted,” vivid images of the witch’s grisly death shoot through that world like arrows.
Reflecting on her new circumstances, Gretel realizes that though her father has made a protected, fortified home for them, nothing seems truly safe there. Gretel and Hansel have been removed from immediate danger, yet even in this stark, isolated safety, Gretel can’t just move on from the terrible things that have happened to her. The trauma of her experience in the forest has left her in a constant state of fear.
Gretel’s predicament is made even worse by her family’s failure or refusal to understand what she’s going through. Hansel seems to have willfully forgotten what happened in the witch’s cottage—perhaps because he wasn’t the one who pushed the witch into the oven. Gretel feels his forgetfulness as an abandonment. He’s leaving her all alone with her memories, which remain vivid and physical: she remembers the witch’s burning kiln and the dark forest in threatening detail, even imagining the trees “armed” like soldiers. This suggests her trauma is exacerbated by her inability to work through it, or even discuss it, with anyone else.
When Gretel wonders, “Am I alone?” her question is at once poignant and threatening. She is alone in the sense that she’s been abandoned by Hansel; she’s not alone in the sense that she feels the vengeful presence of the person she’s killed, hovering around her like a host of “spies.” Guilt is thus part of the equation here too; though Gretel killed the witch in order to save herself and Hansel, she still feels a terrible responsibility for having committed murder.
Gretel wants to reach out for real comfort but can’t find any. In her mind and in her heart, she’s still right back in the moment of her trauma, which can’t be dispelled by simply pretending it’s not there. The gruesome fire and the dark forest remain more real to her than all of the efforts her family have made to deny these memories or shut them out.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-24
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Misogyny and Repression
Claiming they’re trying to protect Gretel, the male characters in “Gretel in Darkness” ignore and deny Gretel's pain. In doing so, they also reject Gretel herself in a deeper and more insidious way, failing to recognize that she, like the witches and the evil stepmothers they intend to protect her from, is a woman—complicated, self-aware, and, indeed, capable of harm. The poem implicitly critiques the sexism that underlies paternalistic concern for women, subtly revealing how such efforts are often rooted in misogyny and a denial of women’s full humanity.
Gretel’s father and brother attempt to lock danger and pain out of their house, but in doing so they also lock out Gretel’s emotional reality. Their motivations have more to do with fear than kindness. There’s thus a double meaning in Gretel’s observation that her father “bars harm from this house”: he’s trying to protect her physically, but he’s also refusing to see or hear that Gretel is traumatized.
Gretel also remarks that she and Hansel are safe from “women’s arms” in this house. The women who endangered her are her evil stepmother and the witch—but she, of course, is also a woman. In keeping out dangerous female influence, Gretel’s father is also keeping out a big part of Gretel herself: the tormented part of her that needs to come to terms with having committed murder.
Gretel is thus alone in a world where all women are perceived as dangerous. The poem doesn't say that Gretel is now far from the "witch" or "wicked step mother"; it uses the blanket "women." This reads like a rejection of women—their embrace and even their "memory"—altogether, and by default a rejection of Gretel herself.
Hansel, meanwhile, is deep in denial of everything that he and Gretel went through. The poem associates him with “summer days” and daylight; he withdraws from and refuses the “darkness” that Gretel suffers in, even though she’s traumatized because she was trying to save his life. Hansel and his father thus force Gretel to carry the burden of pain all by herself, under the guise of chivalrously caring for her. Guilt and rage are passed down from woman to woman, the poem suggests, and can't be relieved so long as they are denied and ignored by men.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-24
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Gretel in Darkness”
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Lines 1-3
This is the ...
... are dead.Before diving in, a quick recap of "Hansel and Gretel," the Grimm fairy tale that the poem is playing with:
- Hansel and Gretel live with their poor woodcutter father and stepmother. Insisting that the children are too costly to feed, the stepmother convinces the woodcutter to abandon them in the forest.
- Later, lost and hungry, the siblings come across a house made of gingerbread and other sweets. They're lured inside and then imprisoned by the owner of the house, a witch who intends to fatten Hansel up and eat him.
- Before the witch can follow through on this wicked plan, however, Gretel outwits her and pushes her into a fiery oven. The witch burns up, the stepmother dies, and Hansel and Gretel live happily ever after.
Like many fairy tales, this is a dark story, filled with poverty, child abuse, cannibalism, and horrific death via oven. "Gretel in Darkness" latches onto this, well, darkness, and opens with unease. "This is the world we wanted," full stop, could be the beginning of a poem about fulfilled wishes—a happily-ever-after poem. But already the reader has a sense that this wanted world isn't all it was cracked up to be.
Part of the clue is in the past tense: the world "we wanted" is not the same as the world "we want." Another hint is in the use of the end-stopped line, which brings the thought to a swift, dull close. It's worth remembering the title of the poem, too: the reader knows that the speaker is the Gretel of fairy tale fame. "Darkness" doesn't seem to be suiting her.
The unease of this first line only deepens in lines 2 and 3, where Gretel elaborates on the nature of this wanted world she lives in. "All who would have seen us dead / are dead" is hardly a joyful celebration of life: Gretel's world is permeated with death, and it seems it's kill or be killed here. The enjambment of this sentence drives this point home. Line 2 could be the beginning of a very different kind of sentence, maybe "All who would have seen us dead... realized the error of their ways, apologized, and moved to a different forest!" But again, grim reality lands with a thump in line 3 with the repetition of the word "dead." Enjambment and diacope set this unpleasant surprise up like a dark joke.
Speaking of set-ups: there's a hint of menace in the strong alliteration on /w/ sounds here ("world we wanted"), which will come to a climax in the rest of line 3. All of those /w/ sounds build up to the arrival of a nasty character: the witch.
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Lines 3-6
I hear the ...
... . . . -
Lines 7-12
Now, far from ...
... it is years. -
Lines 13-16
No one remembers. ...
... it never happened. -
Lines 17-18
But I killed ...
... that gleaming kiln— -
Lines 19-21
Nights I turn ...
... Am I alone? -
Lines 21-24
Spies ...
... fire in earnest.
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“Gretel in Darkness” Symbols
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The Witch
In fairy tales (and culture more generally), women are often associated with love, nurturing, gentleness, and beauty—which is often why the villains in fairy tales are wicked witches and stepmothers; their coldness and cruelty is meant to be a chilling subversion of traditional femininity. Witches thus often symbolize anxiety about femininity and motherhood, and the same is true in this poem. What could be creepier than a good, kind, sweet, beautiful person who turns out to be secretly murderous? A witch who lives in a tempting candy cottage is an especially potent symbol here: sweetness literally conceals malice in the story of "Hansel and Gretel."
The fairy-tale witch in this story also has an unspoken twin: the stepmother who originally insisted that Hansel and Gretel should be thrown out into the woods and left to starve. The witch is left to take on the full symbolic anxiety that these two women represent, an anxiety surrounding female power and its corruption.
Gretel, the one surviving woman in this story, is left to deal with that power on her own. After all, she, too, has proven herself cunning and capable. She, too, has committed murder—a killing of necessity, but clearly an act that weighs on her conscience nonetheless. Perhaps this is because it suggests some shared trait between herself and the women who failed her, and perhaps because it has revealed her own darkness. In killing the witch Gretel has taken on immense guilt and trauma; on a symbolic level, this might suggest the way that such suffering is passed from one woman to the next in a world that denies their power and humanity.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Line 3: “I hear the witch's cry”
- Line 6: “Her tongue shrivels into gas . . .”
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Fire
Fire plays a complicated symbolic role in "Gretel in Darkness." Fire saved Gretel and Hansel from the witch, but fire is also a major image of Gretel's own torment. Her memory keeps taking her back to the hideous sight and sound of the witch burning to death; the "fire in earnest" closes the poem, reiterating the continued metaphorical burning in Gretel's mind.
Fire's ability to burn, consume, and transform is thus symbolic of the suffering at the heart of the poem. It's as if Gretel is burned up by her trauma as the witch was burned up in the literal flames of the oven. The fact that the witch died in her own oven—the oven in which she would have cooked Hansel—is also symbolically relevant here. Gretel, in burning the witch, also metaphorically puts herself into her own oven—burning up her innocence, her peace of mind, and replacing it with suffering.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Line 6: “Her tongue shrivels into gas . . .”
- Line 18: “the spires of that gleaming kiln—”
- Line 24: “that black forest and the fire in earnest.”
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Locked Doors
The locked door of Gretel's family's hut is, in theory, a way of keeping safe. But the danger that Gretel faces can't be locked out by a physical door—and the locking may even be doing more harm than good.
Unfortunately for Gretel, her male family members seem to believe in both literally and symbolically barring doors. The barred door of the hut is also the barred door of their memories and their sympathy—their way of locking up the capacity for empathy and comfort. Hansel and the father have shut out the whole incident with the stepmother and the witch; in doing so, they're also locking out Gretel, who can't banish her own experience to oblivion and thus is forever separated from her family.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 11-12: “bars the door, bars harm / from this house,”
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Night and Darkness
As the poem's title would suggest, darkness is important here. It symbolizes the weight of Gretel's trauma and guilt, which envelop her "years" after the incident with the witch. Notice how the "witch's cry" comes through "the moonlight"—that is, at night. Gretel also turns to her brother at night for comfort, for this is when the traumatic memories come through the most sharply.
If darkness represents Gretel's ongoing trauma, then it makes sense that Hansel is associated with "summer afternoons." Hansel seems to have totally moved on from what happened, and thus is free of the symbolic darkness that surrounds his sister. Thus when she wants comfort from him at night, he isn't there; she must wade through her darkness, her pain, alone.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 3-4: “I hear the witch's cry / break in the moonlight”
- Lines 13-15: “Even you, my brother, / summer afternoons you look at me as though / you meant to leave,”
- Lines 19-20: “Nights I turn to you to hold me / but you are not there.”
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“Gretel in Darkness” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Alliteration
"Gretel in Darkness" is as dense with alliteration as a forest with trees. In this poem of terror and trauma, that alliteration helps to evoke Gretel's claustrophobia. Walls of matched sounds spring up around her, trapping her in her terrible memories.
The alliteration here often points out associations between words, drawing Gretel's mind helplessly back to her horrific experience in the witch's cottage. In the third stanza, for instance, alliteration on the /k/ sounds of "killed" and "kiln" lead Gretel back to the fact, never directly stated in the poem, that she killed the witch by burning her alive in her own oven. (See the entry on assonance for more on these linked words.)
Similarly, the /f/ sounds in "far from," "father," and "forget" in the second stanza emphasize Gretel's dilemma: though her father wants her to believe that she's far from all harm, she still can't forget what happened, and the alliterative link between these words helps to suggest Gretel's difficulty in fitting her father's reality together with her own deeply-felt experience of the world.
Back in the first and second stanzas, alliteration on /w/ sounds draws a sinister connection between "women" and "witch"—a connection that ties Gretel herself into a legacy of female murderousness. Those /w/ sounds also spring up densely in the very first lines, so that the "world we wanted" and "all who would have seen us dead" are linked to these dangerous witch-women. The linkage of sounds here supports Gretel's feeling that, though the external danger is apparently gone, the internal danger is as present and real as ever. Escape, it turns out, isn't so easy.
Where alliteration appears in the poem:- Line 1: “world we wanted”
- Line 2: “would”
- Line 3: “witch's”
- Line 4: “sheet”
- Line 5: “sugar,” “God”
- Line 6: “shrivels,” “gas”
- Line 7: “far,” “from,” “women's”
- Line 8: “women,” “father's,” “hut”
- Line 9: “we,” “hungry”
- Line 10: “Why,” “forget”
- Line 11: “father,” “harm”
- Line 12: “house”
- Line 14: “look”
- Line 15: “leave”
- Line 17: “killed”
- Line 18: “kiln”
- Line 19: “Nights”
- Line 20: “not”
- Line 21: “Spies”
- Line 22: “stillness”
- Line 23: “still”
- Line 24: “forest,” “fire”
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Allusion
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Apostrophe
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Assonance
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Caesura
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End-Stopped Line
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Enjambment
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Personification
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Repetition
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Sibilance
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Asyndeton
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"Gretel in Darkness" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Shrivels
- Armed
- Firs
- Spires
- Kiln
- Earnest
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(Location in poem: Line 6: “shrivels”)
Withers and shrinks.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Gretel in Darkness”
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Form
"Gretel in Darkness" is built pretty regularly, consisting of four stanzas, each with six lines. While the stanza lengths are consistent, the poem's use of free verse helps to evoke Gretel's inescapable trauma. Within those repeating sestets, all kinds of metrical madness break loose. The poem's lines use varied and unpredictable stresses, halting enjambments, and choppy caesuras to keep the reader off-balance.
The shape of the poem thus resembles Gretel's experience. Gretel's shocking, disorienting, unmanageable experience of pain and fear (reflected in the irregular meter) is at odds with four solid stanzas, as regular in number as the walls of a cottage.
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Meter
"Gretel in Darkness" is written in free verse, so it doesn't have a regular meter. However, it does use strong rhythms to evoke Gretel's unshakable fear.
For a good example, take a look at lines 21-24:
Am I alone? Spies
hiss in the stillness, Hansel,
we are there still and it is real, real,
that black forest and the fire in earnest.Here, stress falls hard on the words that Gretel insists on. In line 23, the strong beats of "there still" and "real, real" emphasize Gretel's claustrophobic fear and hopelessness: the events at the witch's cottage are not just "real," they're "real, real."
Moments like this stand in contrast with more flowing rhythms in the passages where Gretel describes the deceptive normality of her life now. In the second stanza, for instance, the stresses fall into a gentle evenness, leveling out to a steady iambic trimeter by line 9:
Now, far from women's arms
and memory of women, in our father's hut
we sleep, are never hungry.But Gretel breaks in on this calm rhythm with an insistent question, leaning hard on her first word:
Why do I not forget?
Rhythm, in this poem, sets up a contrast between Gretel's calm surroundings and the horrors of her inner world.
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Rhyme Scheme
"Gretel in Darkness" uses free verse, so there isn't a regular rhyme scheme here. However, there are a few subtle moments of rhyme and slant rhyme that help to weave together the poem's themes.
For example, check out the second stanza, where "arms" in line 7 rhymes with "harm" in line 11. This is a quiet effect; the rhyming words are separated by enough lines that the reader might not even notice them. But by subtly linking "women's arms" and "harm," the speaker evokes the trauma she's suffered at the hands of her stepmother (who first insisted that Hansel and Gretel be thrown out into the woods) and the witch. "Women's arms," which in another context might suggest motherly or romantic love, here only bring danger.
The slant rhyme between "hut" and "forget" in the same stanza has a different effect, creating a feeling of incomplete or broken connection. Here, the safety of the "hut," whose door is securely locked, can't make Gretel "forget"—and the slight mismatch of the sounds helps the reader to understand that Gretel feels displaced and alienated in this house that's meant to keep her safe.
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“Gretel in Darkness” Speaker
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The poem's speaker is Gretel from the well-known fairy tale "Hansel and Gretel." The younger sister to Hansel, Gretel saves herself and her brother from being eaten by an evil witch by shoving said witch into an oven. This all happens before the poem begins, and is context that the poet expects the reader to already know.
Gretel has a big problem that is also a virtue: she, unlike her brother and her father, can't deny reality. Tormented by gruesome memories of the witch's death, Gretel can't live the normal, secure life her family wants her to accept.
Gretel is tortured, but she also has courage. In this poem, she speaks directly to her brother Hansel, who's deep in denial of the trauma they've been through together. While she can feel that her suffering isolates her from Hansel, she can't just pretend that everything is fine. In the last lines of the poem, Gretel's insistence that "it is real, real" demonstrates both her helplessness and her power. She can't get away from the memories of the murder she committed and the abuse she suffered, but she does have the strength to put them into words.
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“Gretel in Darkness” Setting
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"Gretel in Darkness" takes place in a world that contains two worlds. There's the anxious safety of the family hut, where the doors are locked against all danger, but pleasant summer days still come. This is the physical world, where Gretel's body lives. But there's also the world of the witch's cottage in the dark forest, where Gretel's mind is trapped. It's this world that feels real to Gretel, and it's a nasty one, full of death-shrieks and hissing spies. Even the trees there are menacingly "armed," ready to grab or to attack. The horrors of Gretel's internal world are forever at odds with the security of her external world, and they make the external world itself into a mockery of comfort.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Gretel in Darkness”
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Literary Context
Written in the 1970s, Louise Glück's The House on Marshland (in which "Gretel in Darkness" first appeared) emerged from an experimental poetic landscape marked by feminist themes and revolutionary conviction. The intersection of the personal and the political is clear in "Gretel in Darkness," in which one woman's trauma exemplifies a deeper struggle: Gretel's male family members, in denying and repressing her experience (and treating all female influence as dangerous), only traumatize her further.
The House on Marshland was Glück's second collection, and reveals her interest in exploring trauma and suffering through myth and folklore. For instance, her later October reads the September 11th attacks through the lens of Greek mythology. Her contemporaries Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter share her interest in retold and reimagined fairy tales, and like her also examine these old stories from a feminist perspective. Her poetry's rich, condensed, vivid language also shows the influence of earlier American poets like Emily Dickinson.
Over the course of her long and successful poetic career, Glück served as the Poet Laureate of the United States and won both the Pulitzer Prize and a Guggenheim fellowship.
Historical Context
The marks of a number of troubled historical eras appear in "Gretel in Darkness." Written in the 1970s, the poem is influenced by second-wave feminism and its fight for women's equality in all areas of life, as well as its rejection of male-dominated institutions and cultural practices. Such feminist thought is reflected in a reading of Gretel's suffering as due in part to male repression. Gretel is traumatized by murderous women, but is also herself a murderous woman: anger, guilt, and trauma are inherited, the poem suggests, moving from woman to woman, and will endure so long as men deny and ignore their existence.
But there are also hints here of an earlier trauma in the poem's witch, whose hideous death in an oven might bring to mind the victims of the Holocaust. Glück, born in 1943, was the granddaughter of Hungarian Jewish immigrants, and while she herself was too young to fully understand the last years of World War II as they unfolded, the horrors of that time were fresh as she was growing up.
The freedom and revolutionary ferment of the 60s and 70s in America emerged, in part, in response to the traumas of World War II, and the reactionary conservatism that followed it. "Gretel in Darkness," with its interest in the persistence of trauma—and the necessity of speaking it—fits right in with Glück's historical moment.
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More “Gretel in Darkness” Resources
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External Resources
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Poems Out Loud — Louise Glück herself reads a selection of her poetry.
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Hansel and Gretel — The fairy tale that inspired this poem.
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Little Red Riding Hood — For another poem that tackles a classic fairy tale from a woman's perspective, check out our guide on Carol Ann Duffy's "Little Red Cap."
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In the Poet's Own Words — Hear Glück talk about her work in this 1982 interview.
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Glück's Life and Work — A short biography and links to more of Glück's poems from the Poetry Foundation.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Louise Glück
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