Gretel in Darkness

subject, using repetition to emphasize the extent of her obsession with the past. She writes of her memory of the forest where the burning took place that "it is real, real."

This repetition is Glück's poetic device used to convey Gretel's persistent mental return to the event. Moreover, by using such descriptions as the witch's tongue shriveling into gas, "the spires of that gleaming kiln," and the fire in the black forest, and by interspersing them throughout the poem, Glück conveys her speaker's repetitive recollections of the same incident, each time describing a different facet of a chronologically simultaneous occurrence, the burning of the witch.

Gluck's poem shows Gretel as a tormented adult so haunted by the act of murder she committed that it consumes her every thought. It is ironic that her brother, for whom she committed the murder, goes on with his life without a care in the world, as if the murder never happened...

subject, using repetition to emphasize the extent of her obsession with the past. She writes of her memory of the forest where the burning took place that "it is real, real."

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