To appreciate fully the meaning of and drive behind Louise Glück's "The Mystery," it is helpful to read the entire collection, Vita Nova, in which this poem is included. Published in 1999, Vita Nova, which translates into "new life," explores the poet's emergence from the despair and loneliness that plagued her for years after her husband left her. Her previous collection, Meadowlands (1996), recounted the deterioration of her marriage and Vita Nova picks up where that book left off: Glück's life after divorce, drawing from a mixture of allusions to distraught lovers in Greek mythology and to her own plight as a rejected, sometimes self-pitying, woman. But "The Mystery" can be read and enjoyed as a single poem as well, and it stands on its own as an uplifting testimony to spiritual, emotional, and intellectual rebirth.

Perhaps uncharacteristically for Glück, this poem's extended metaphor is based on mystery writer Rex Stout's series of novels and short stories featuring the renowned detective Nero Wolfe. The rotund, sedentary, and brilliant detective is known for his love of food and orchids as much as his uncanny knack for solving crimes. Glück uses the idea of mystery to describe her rise from the bitter depths of sadness and abandonment, likening the process to one of a person who has emerged from the dark to become "a creature of light." In essence, she is able to find resolution for at least some of her emotional pain and in doing so she has "acquired in some measure / the genius of the master"—in this case, Nero Wolfe.