The following version of this poem was used to create this guide: Glück, Louise. “Mock Orange by Louise Glück.” Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49601/mock-orange.

Note that all parenthetical citations within the guide refer to the line number from which the quotation is taken.

“Mock Orange” is the first poem in Louise Glück’s fourth poetry collection, The Triumph of Achilles, which won the Melville Cane Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award. Glück has had a long and celebrated career, garnering such honors as the Nobel Prize in Literature, the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and her appointment as the Poet Laureate of the United States. As a whole, the collection interrogates masculinity and myth-making. In it, Glück refers to well-known male characters of classical and biblical myth in order to expose their clichés and pitfalls. “Mock Orange” exhibit’s Glück’s ability to interrogate these themes on a personal, intimate scale.

The poem begins with an unnamed speaker addressing an unnamed “you” in the night as she cannot sleep. She complains that the mock orange flowers in the yard, not the moon, are keeping her up. She says that she hates the flowers and she hates sex, describing the disappointment of coming together with a man only to split apart into the same familiar roles. The poem ends with the speaker wondering how she can sleep with the smell of the mock orange flowers coming through the window.