The Full Text of “Witchgrass”
The Full Text of “Witchgrass”
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“Witchgrass” Introduction
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Louse Glück's "Witchgrass" first appeared in her 1992 book The Wild Iris, a collection in which personified plants talk (and sometimes talk back) to a gardener. This poem's speaker is the titular "Witchgrass," a hardy plant that some gardeners consider a weed. But calling plants weeds, this witchgrass objects, is a lot like calling people witches: it's just a way to unfairly blame them for feelings that aren't their fault. This witchgrass is confident that it will outlive and outlast any gardener who dares tar it with a "slur." This witty poem explores both the power of nature and people's habit of dealing with pain by scapegoating, finding a way to "blame / one tribe for everything" to avoid facing their own "failure."
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“Witchgrass” Summary
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Something unwanted (the witchgrass of the poem's title) enters the world, crying, "chaos! chaos!"
"If you hate me so much," this witchgrass says, "you shouldn't bother to name me. Why does your language need another insult, another way to scapegoat one group for everything that goes wrong?
"You and I both know," the witchgrass continues, "that if you only believe in one god, you only need one enemy.
"And I'm not that enemy. I'm just a way for you to avoid dealing with what you see happening in this flowerbed: a small, perfect example of failure. Nearly every day, one of your beloved flowers dies. You can't handle that until you lash out at whatever caused this death—in other words, at whatever hasn't died, and whatever just so happens to be stronger than the plants you prefer.
"Your favorite things were never meant to live forever. Why would you face up to that, however, when you can keep on as you always have? You grieve your losses and you blame someone else, always these two things at once.
"I," the witchgrass declares, "don't need your approval to go on living. I was here long before you and your garden were, and I'll still be here when all that's left is the sun, the moon, the ocean, and the field.
"I will be the field."
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“Witchgrass” Themes
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Fear and Scapegoating
“Witchgrass” explores the human impulse to find a scapegoat to blame for their fears and frustrations rather than dealing with them directly. The poem’s speaker is the witchgrass of the title—a plant many might call a weed. This personified witchgrass objects to being tarred with such a “slur,” insisting instead that it's not a gardener's "enemy." It’s only because gardeners fear their inability to protect and preserve their precious roses, the witchgrass observes, that witchgrass gets labeled as witchy and cast out as “unwelcome.”
Indeed, the gardener’s “hat[red]” for the witchgrass, the plant coolly observes, has a lot to do with their inevitable “failure” to keep their flowers alive. “One of your precious flowers / Dies here almost every day,” the witchgrass tells the gardener. It’s because the gardener can’t stop this from happening—because they can’t do a thing to stop death, decay, and “disorder”—that they unfairly turn against the witchgrass. The witchgrass is different from the flowers the gardener prefers, and the gardener thus demonizes it as something “unwelcome,” a representative of “disorder” that they can blame for the fact that they don’t have total control over what happens to their lovely flowers. The gardener can’t bring themselves to “mourn[],” the witchgrass says, without “laying blame”—and always seem to choose to “blame one tribe for everything.”
Symbolically, this gardener’s attitude toward the witchgrass suggests a broader frightened, rigid approach to the world. When people get scared about their inability to control the world around them and preserve what they love, Glück's poem suggests, they often look for a scapegoat to blame for their fear so they don’t have to face it head-on. People (and plants) that don’t fit into conventional ideas of what’s desirable or correct are typically the first victims of such scapegoating.
It's no coincidence that Glück chooses witchgrass in particular as her speaker here. The word “witch” raises associations with the infamous 17th-century witch hunts in which innocent people (most often women, but not always) were accused of witchcraft, made scapegoats for a small and vulnerable community’s fears. Being witchgrass, like being a witch, means being tarred with a “slur” that allows the people around you to believe it’s their right to persecute you.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-32
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Nature vs. Humanity
While this poem offers many symbolic readings, it can also be taken as a more literal depiction of humanity’s futile struggle against the ways of nature. The poem’s speaker, the weedy witchgrass, looks with a coolly contemptuous eye on the gardener who “hate[s it] so much” that they’ll do anything to get rid of it. The gardener’s efforts, the witchgrass observes, will ultimately prove futile: there’s no holding back nature’s power for long.
The poem’s gardener is desperate to preserve their “precious flowers,” the witchgrass snorts—but these carefully cultivated, delicate blooms “die every day.” The witchgrass, meanwhile, is “sturdier” than any such coddled flowers. More than that, it’s older and more persistent: “I was here first, / Before you were here,” it informs the gardener, and it will still “be here when only the sun and moon / are left, and the sea, and the wide field.”
The witchgrass, in other words, is the natural state of things, the “real world” that the gardener tries fruitlessly to control in their perfect, manicured flowerbed. In a world untouched by human meddling, the witchgrass will not only remain here when the flowers (and the gardener!) are long gone, it will “constitute the field”: it will take over and engulf the whole space the gardener is now trying to manage, becoming the field it now simply grows in.
The witchgrass’s brash confidence here expresses nature’s overwhelming power. The best humanity can do against nature, this poem suggests, is to hold it at bay for a little while, trying to manage it or give it shape. But nature is older, stronger, and more patient than humanity, and it will inevitably conquer and overwhelm all human efforts to control it, fight it, or repress it.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-39
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Witchgrass”
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Lines 1-3
Something ...
... calling disorder, disorder—“Witchgrass” begins by describing a mysterious and undesirable "Something" coming "into the world" and bringing chaos with it. The opening stanza consists of a single sentence spread across three lines through enjambment, which creates a sense of building anticipation as this eerie picture slowly unfolds:
- The first line consists of just one suspenseful word: “Something.” Like a closed door in a horror movie, this word feels unnerving precisely because it’s mysterious. That “something” could be anything.
- The mood of unease continues into the next line. This “something,” the speaker goes on, “comes into the world unwelcome.” This is a suspicious and perhaps dangerous “something,” then—or at the very least, it’s a something that people feel is suspicious and dangerous.
- That’s because, as the third line at last reveals, this something enters the world “calling disorder, disorder.” Whatever this something is, then, it’s a force of mayhem.
The epizeuxis on “disorder” in line 3 feels almost like a parody: where a judge cries “order, order” to bring an unruly court to heel, this “something,” crying “disorder, disorder,” only wants to stir up chaos. Perhaps the epizeuxis also makes this cry sound like a chant or a spell. That’s a fitting effect, considering the poem’s title: “Witchgrass.” “Witchgrass” will be a poem about a plant that a lot of gardeners would call an “unwelcome” weed. But it will also be a poem about what people consider witchy, dangerous, uncanny.
Louise Glück will tell the witchgrass’s tale in free verse. That means there’s no regular meter or rhyme scheme in this poem. Instead, the stanzas use a spiky, unpredictable shape, a choice that (as readers will soon see) suits this poem’s spiky, unpredictable speaker.
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Lines 4-10
If you hate ...
... tribe for everything— -
Lines 11-20
as we both ...
... of failure. -
Lines 20-26
One of your ...
... your personal passion— -
Lines 27-32
It was not ...
... the two together. -
Lines 33-39
I don’t need ...
... constitute the field.
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“Witchgrass” Symbols
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The Witchgrass
The personified witchgrass might be read as a symbol for anyone who gets ostracized for not fitting into a narrow system of thought or behavior. It’s humanity’s old way, this poem suggests, to “blame one tribe for everything,” pushing fears about “disorder” and chaos onto one scapegoated group or another.
“If you worship one god,” the witchgrass coolly tells the repressive gardener, “you only need one enemy.” This line suggests that the gardener is narrowly focused on one idea of what’s good and right—and that having such a rigid idea of how the world should be also means making an enemy of those who don’t conform to such standards, “blam[ing] one tribe for everything.” In this poem, that means the gardener values only “flowers” and wants nothing to do with other plants. But symbolically speaking, this way of seeing the world could clearly apply to people, too.
The witchgrass might also symbolize nature itself: a force older and more powerful than any human being, and sure to outlast humanity, too. As the witchgrass puts it: "I was here first [...] And I'll be here when only the sun and moon / are left." The witchgrass's drawling confidence in its own persistent power mirrors nature's effortless triumph over humanity's attempts to subjugate or control it.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 1-10: “Something / comes into the world unwelcome / calling disorder, disorder— / If you hate me so much / don’t bother to give me / a name: do you need / one more slur / in your language, another / way to blame / one tribe for everything—”
- Line 15: “I’m not the enemy.”
- Lines 24-26: “whatever is left, whatever / happens to be sturdier / than your personal passion—”
- Lines 33-39: “I don’t need your praise / to survive. I was here first, / before you were here, before / you ever planted a garden. / And I’ll be here when only the sun and moon / are left, and the sea, and the wide field. / I will constitute the field.”
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The Gardener
The gardener in this poem becomes a symbol for humanity, especially for people's nervous attempts to bring order to their lives and to give themselves the illusion that they have some power over nature. The poem’s gardener is a narrow-minded sort, a person who can only see the value of their “precious flowers” and treats anything that isn’t those flowers as a weed and an “enemy.” But their flowerbeds only reveal their “failure." Their flowers inevitably die, and they can’t keep the witchgrass out of the beds forever. They thus end up scapegoating the witchgrass, treating it as the cause of all their gardening woes.
This, the witchgrass says, is a “paradigm / of failure,” a perfect example of the way that humanity’s inability to fully manage its environment plays out. Human beings love to believe that they have control—and when anything forces them to confront the fact they don’t have perfect control, they find someone else to blame for it, preserving the illusion of power. The gardener’s attitude here mirrors that habit. Gardening, in this poem, means behaving (foolishly and falsely) as if you can always bend the world to your will.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 15-26: “I’m not the enemy. / Only a ruse to ignore / what you see happening / right here in this bed, / a little paradigm / of failure. One of your precious flowers / dies here almost every day / and you can’t rest until / you attack the cause, meaning / whatever is left, whatever / happens to be sturdier / than your personal passion—”
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“Witchgrass” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Personification
Like many of the poems in Glück’s collection The Wild Iris, “Witchgrass” is spoken by a personified plant. Here, that plant is the weed known as witchgrass, which comes to embody everything that’s spiky, defiant, powerful, and persistent about nature.
The poem’s scornful witchgrass isn’t impressed by the gardener who called it “witchgrass” in the first place. This “slur,” the plant observes, is just the gardener’s way of dealing with their own inability to keep their “precious flowers” alive. The gardener scapegoats the witchgrass because they don’t have the strength to “mourn[]” without “blaming,” without choosing someone to accuse of causing their difficult feelings.
The fact that Glück chooses to personify witchgrass in particular to make this point helps to suggest a symbolic reading of the poem as well: this witchgrass may represent scapegoated people. People who get called “witches” are also being tarred with a “slur” that labels them fair game for persecution.
The witchgrass isn’t just a victim, however. It also has an unruffled confidence, a contemptuous understanding of the gardener’s weakness, and a certainty that it will one day “constitute the field” it’s currently being weeded out of. In all these qualities, it gives voice to a force much bigger than humanity: the force of nature itself, which was here “long before” people were and will be here “long after,” too.
Finally, personification gives the poem a note of self-deprecating humor. Glück was an avid gardener and the poems in The Wild Iris were inspired by her meditations on her own garden. This portrait of a weed sassing back at the frustrated human trying to beat it down suggests a poet-gardener reflecting with humility on her own ultimate powerlessness in the face of nature.
Where personification appears in the poem:- Lines 4-6: “If you hate me so much / don’t bother to give me / a name:”
- Line 15: “I’m not the enemy.”
- Lines 33-39: “I don’t need your praise / to survive. I was here first, / before you were here, before / you ever planted a garden. / And I’ll be here when only the sun and moon / are left, and the sea, and the wide field. / I will constitute the field.”
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Enjambment
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Repetition
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Assonance
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"Witchgrass" 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.
- Disorder
- Slur
- Ruse
- Paradigm
- I will constitute the field
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(Location in poem: Line 3: “calling disorder, disorder—”)
Chaos, confusion.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Witchgrass”
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Form
“Witchgrass” is a dramatic monologue, a poem written in the voice of a particular character. Specifically, it's spoken in the voice, not of a person, but of the titular witchgrass, a fast-growing plant that a gardener would call a weed. This witchgrass objects to that “slur,” seeing it as just a way for an order-obsessed gardener to “blame / one tribe for everything.”
Written in 39 lines of free verse (with no rhyme scheme or meter) divided into seven irregular stanzas, the poem uses a wild, wandering shape that suits its subject matter. The personified witchgrass, declaring its disdain for narrow-minded gardeners who can’t deal with “disorder” and loss, speaks in a fittingly uncontained and uncontrollable voice.
The different lengths of the poem’s stanzas also help to pace the poem, setting up moments of drama. The last two stanzas of the poem, for instance, change shape dramatically:
- In the second-to-last stanza, the speaker uses six lines (and three sentences) to declare that they will outlive and triumph over both the garden and the gardener, enduring when “only the sun and moon / are left, and the sea, and the wide field.”
- The final stanza is just one line and one sentence long: “I will constitute the field,” the speaker proclaims. This declaration of certain victory lands with even more weight because it’s so short and compact.
The poem’s shape thus helps to create the witchgrass’s scornful, cool, defiant voice.
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Meter
This poem is written in free verse, so it doesn’t use a regular meter. Instead, the speaker uses changing line lengths and stanza shapes to give the poem its unpredictable rhythm. The first stanza provides a good example:
Something
comes into the world unwelcome
calling disorder, disorder—The one-word first line here starts the poem on a startling note of uncertainty: the word “something” on its own feels strange and suspenseful. The enjambment—“Something / comes into the world unwelcome”—also helps the word to hang there mysteriously for a moment. The final line of the stanza uses epizeuxis to turn “disorder, disorder” into a strangely rhythmic battle cry, or a chant, or a spell: this disorder sounds pretty well-organized and intentional!
Taken all together, the rhythms of the first stanza feel surprising and perhaps a little sinister. This first description of the witchgrass presents it as a force of chaos, and the jolting enjambment and unpredictable rhythms make it clear that the poem will likewise feel uncontainable and unruly.
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Rhyme Scheme
There’s no rhyme scheme in this free verse poem, which keeps things feeling surprising and unpredictable. However, one moment of internal rhyme meaningfully links two words. This arrives in the second stanza:
don’t bother to give me
a name: do you need
one more slur
in your language, another
way to blame
one tribe for everything—The subtle internal rhyme here links naming to blaming, underscoring the speaker’s point: calling something a “weed” or a “witch” is just a way of judging it, labeling it as something unwanted. There’s nothing inherently weedy or witchy about this grass. It’s only the gardener’s “slur[s]” that frame it as an “unwelcome” intruder rather than a part of the natural world like any other. Choosing words that rhyme to make this point, Glück makes the connection between names and accusations feel all the more emphatic.
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“Witchgrass” Speaker
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The poem’s speaker is the titular “Witchgrass” itself, a weed objecting to the way that the human world treats it. Even the names “weed” and “witchgrass” suggest this plant’s problem:
- A “weed” is only a plant growing where a gardener doesn’t want it.
- The word “witch,” likewise, is often simply a term for a woman behaving as her society (and perhaps the men of that society in particular) don’t want her to.
Being a weed and being witchgrass, this speaker objects, merely mean not conforming to some narrow-minded gardener’s idea of how things should be. These names are “slur[s]” meant to paint the witchgrass as something useless and unwanted. But as the witchgrass points out, it was “here first,” before any gardener came along and decided that flowers were the only thing allowed in this plot of land. Confidently, it also declares that it will win when the gardeners and all their flowers are gone: “I will constitute the field,” it declares.
Symbolically, the talking witchgrass might speak for anyone who doesn't fit into restrictive conventions and stereotypes—but perhaps especially unconventional women. But this isn't neat, easy, one-to-one symbolism. The witchgrass also simply embodies the power of nature and its wild "disorder."
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“Witchgrass” Setting
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The setting of "Witchgrass" is dreamlike and vague. Readers know the poem is taking place in a field where a gardener is trying to beat back the growth of “witchgrass,” a plant they consider a weed and don’t want crowding out their flowers. Beyond that, the poem could take place anywhere and in any time. That’s part of the point: the gardener’s fear, scapegoating, and desperate hunger for control, the poem hints, turn up all across human history.
The speaker—the witchgrass itself—takes a longer view than the gardener does. The gardener’s efforts to quell its growth, it declares, won’t make any difference in the long run. When “only the sun and moon / are left, and the sea, and the wide field” (and the gardener is long gone), the witchgrass will still be there. In fact, by then it will “constitute the field” (or be the whole field)—a line that suggests that weedy “disorder” is the natural state of the world, not the artificial order represented by the gardener’s regimented flowerbeds.
While the poem’s setting suggests a timeless struggle, the witchgrass’s ultimate certainty that it will prevail also feels defiant. A wild, natural “disorder,” in this poem, ultimately wins out over nervous human efforts to control and manage and arrange.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Witchgrass”
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Literary Context
The American poet Louise Glück (1943-2023) first published "Witchgrass" in her 1992 collection The Wild Iris, which won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize. This collection explores some of Glück's most characteristic themes. Divided into poems spoken by flowers, poems spoken by a gardener, and poems spoken by the voice of an omniscient God, the book looks at the relationship between nature, humanity, and the divine.
In this poem, Glück might be seen as an inheritor of the Romantic tradition. 19th-century Romantic poets like William Wordsworth and Emily Dickinson venerated nature as a force offering deep wisdom, consolation, and joy. Here, nature also offers humility: the witchgrass mocks those officious, judgmental gardeners who try to oppress it, warning them that nature will always outlast their efforts to organize, tidy, and control.
Perhaps, then, this poem might also be read as part of a growing 20th- and 21st-century tradition of environmental poetry in which writers explore humanity's combative or destructive relationship with nature—and nature's ultimate victory. (Simon Armitage's "Chainsaw vs. the Pampas Grass," for instance, similarly portrays a battle of man vs. grass in which the grass emphatically wins.)
Glück published her first book in 1968 and became an important and influential poet: she served as the U.S. Poet Laureate from 2003-'04, and in 2020, she won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Historical Context
The Wild Iris, the collection this poem comes from, draws on Glück's own experiences as a writer and a gardener. The book follows a year in the life of a garden based on Glück's own Vermont backyard (though it could also be an every-garden, an archetypal place where humanity lives in harmony with nature—or tries to). And like plenty of poets before her, Glück saw her garden as a mirror for a whole range of human experiences.
Here, Gluck gives voice to a plant often considered a weed: witchgrass is a persistent, prolific, and sometimes invasive species. Perhaps she pokes a little fun at herself in this dramatic monologue. The witchgrass's disdain for the gardener trying to turf it up suggests that humility (and perhaps a self-deprecating sense of humor) was one of the lessons Glück learned in her garden.
The witchgrass's vision of a post-humanity world inhabited only by "the sun and moon [...] and the sea, and the wide field" might also reflect a growing climate of environmentalist concern in the 1990s (when Glück published this poem). Humanity, in this poem, might try to control the forces of nature, but it certainly won't outlast them.
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More “Witchgrass” Resources
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External Resources
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to Glück reading the poem aloud.
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A Brief Biography — Read the Poetry Foundation's short overview of Glück's life and work.
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An Interview with Glück — Read an excerpt from the Paris Review's interview with Glück.
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Glück's Obituary — Read an obituary for Glück to learn more about her influence and legacy.
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Glück in Conversation — Watch a short excerpt of a conversation between Glück and the novelist Colm Tóibín.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Louise Glück
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