Glück was a poet I was lucky enough to start following long before she became the US Poet Laureate, and later the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her poems are at their best when exploring feelings of nostalgia (Midsummer manages to be a beautiful set of memories of teens getting frisky in the summertime) melancholy, or both (Meadowlands, my favorite of her collections, is a retelling of The Odyssey via the dissolution of a marriage).

"All Hallows" is pure melancholy, overlaying the barren fields of the season¹ with a wife's loneliness. Like many great poems, it's beautiful but it's not joyful.

by Louise Glück

Even now this landscape is assembling. The hills darken. The oxen sleep in their blue yoke, the fields having been picked clean, the sheaves bound evenly and piled at the roadside among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:

This is the barrenness of harvest or pestilence. And the wife leaning out the window with her hand extended, as in payment, and the seeds distinct, gold, calling Come here Come here, little one

And the soul creeps out of the tree.