In her poetry collection entitled Meadowlands, Nobel Prize winner Louise Glück explores experiences of marriage and family life, weaving together stories of a contemporary marriage with stories of the marriage of Penelope and Odysseus of The Odyssey. “Telemachus’ Kindness,” one of 46 poems that comprise the book, captures Telemachus as an older adult reflecting back on the hardships he and his family experienced during his father’s absence from Ithaca. The retelling both gives new depth and insights into the story of The Odyssey while also conveying Glück’s own unique messages about marriage and family life.

New Insights

“Telemachus’ Kindness” is a first-person account that begins with Telemachus acknowledging the pity he took on himself before he realized that the kinds of struggles he faced were not unique to him. At the time of the original story, the Trojan War had concluded just ten years earlier leaving many families without fathers. The experience of having a grieving mother and a father away at war was a common one and Telemachus goes as far as to call hardships like these “the general rule.” He concludes that family matters like these are a binding force among the people of Ithaca and even more broadly, among humanity. Glück thus depicts the circumstances Telemachus was in not as unique or particularly devastating, but as common to both the people of his time as well as to all of humanity.

This perspective is a radical shift from the original story, giving it a new meaning  and changing the way the poem’s reader may think about and appreciate the events and characters of the story. While Homer builds heroic narratives around the characters and events of the epic, Glück reduces them to common and even universal experiences. In her poem, Telemachus is also the one to do so, displaying maturity and wisdom in his reflection of the events of his past in a way Glück believes his future self would. He looks back on what had occurred through an empathetic lens that relates his own difficult experiences to others’.

In her poem, Glück also provides readers with a glimpse into Telemachus’s future. Despite the large role Telemachus plays in the early books of the original story, this is something Homer does not include in the final moments of The Odyssey. Glück paints Telemachus as thoughtful and wise which differs greatly from the depictions of him throughout the original epic as a naive and immature young man. This contrast provides an idea of how Telemachus matured after the events of The Odyssey and leaves readers with a more satisfying ending to Telemachus’s story.

Glück’s Distinct Messages

The Odyssey plays an important role in Glück’s poetry by acting as a familiar narrative she can elaborate on and incorporate her own ideas into. The reader’s familiarity with the story allows them to take both what they already know about the original epic and its themes of family and overcoming hardship and incorporate that into the new perspective Glück shares. 

Glück reveals her most distinct message about marriage in the poem when she examines Penelope and Odysseus’s lack of consideration for each other during their time apart. Through Telemachus’s reflection she explains each person’s lack of sympathy for the other’s unique hardships brought on by the circumstances they found themselves in. For Penelope this is a lack of compassion for Odysseus’s struggles during his time away from Ithaca and for Odysseus, this is his ignorance of Penelope’s courage through the difficult time his absence brought on.

Glück’s use of The Odyssey in her poetry as well as her take on Telemachus’s reflection thus serves to draw more direct connections between messages about marriage and family life that can be drawn from The Odyssey and those that can be examined in more modern times. By writing from Telemachus’s perspective looking back on the events that took place in The Odyssey, Glück effectively reframes the original story to fit her distinctive messages. More specifically, she expresses that experiences like Telemachus’s are universal and that, in marriage, spouses may become so consumed in their own experiences that they fail to consider their partner’s.