The English Painter
One of the central figures in Faithful and Virtuous Night is the nameless English painter whose story occupies seven poems in the collection—called the "painter poems" elsewhere in this Note. Traumatized at a young age by the tree-related death of his parents, this speaker is obsessed with the aesthetics of silence, death, and nighttime throughout his life. At first, he is overwhelmed by silence and the ways in which it seems to cycle with activity, as well as the ways in which dark cycles with light over the progression of days. Eventually, however, he learns to see darkness/silence/death as inevitable, as well potential locations for new beginnings. This inspires him to paint again, and, as he ages, to accept his coming death with less and less trepidation. Towards the end of the collection, he also learns that intimacy with other people is a great redeeming factor in life, and he reconnects with his brother (who has moved to Montana) late in life, as well as his nephew Harry (whom he begins a romantic relationship with).
Elderly Speakers
Besides the English painter, Faithful and Virtuous Night also contains many poems written from the perspectives of other men and women in the twilights of their lives. Here, think of individuals like the old man in "A Foreshortened Journey," the older writer in "The Open Window," and the nostalgic speaker of "A Summer Garden." These speakers each have their own unique life experiences and—in the case of the prose poems—lessons to convey, but they all share one element in common. This, of course, is their age and what the fact of this age drives them to do. For example, the speaker of "A Foreshortened Journey" and the grandmother he encounters teach us about the terrible and ponderous liminality of old age, where remembering the past and anticipating the future are equally laborious and painful. The speaker of "The Open Window" is less despondent, but even he reckons with the end of his life as he learns in old age to finally embrace uncertainty of all kinds. The speaker of "A Summer Garden" is more focused on the excavation of the past than coping with the future, but even they contend with their death implicitly by showing the ways in which our perceptions of time become warped and cyclical to avoid the facts of loss and grief. Together, then, the elderly personae in Faithful and Virtuous Night are like case studies in death, each meant to condition readers' understandings that age brings much more than physical change to the body: it is also the beginning of a new way of life for the elderly, one that has deep emotional, mental, and psychological differences from the life to which they are accustomed.
Louise Glück
Amidst the various personae adopted in Faithful and Virtuous Night, Louse Glück herself also emerges as an important character. Though her presence in the collection is largely implicit, the intensely personal nature of Louise Glück's wider oeuvre calls our attention to her, even if she is taking efforts to distance herself from her speakers. When we look at the English painter, for example, it is hard not to notice similarities with Glück: both are fans of psychoanalysis, both are creatives who faced creative blocks in old age, and both are beset through their lives by experiences of loss and trauma. Still, in other poems, Glück herself appears as a rather clear persona—in "Visitors from Abroad," for example, a female speaker with deceased parents is made to confront the way that she, as a writer, incorporates and embodies the memory of her lost family members. The coexistence of these indirect personae and clear self-references in the collection is deeply important: what does it mean, after all, that there are things Glück is comfortable saying in her own voice and things that she is not comfortable speaking? And in what ways do these unspeakable things become even more central to the collection as a whole through Glück's efforts to divert our attention from them?
Parents
Sets of parents are present throughout Faithful and Virtuous Night, and they are key to exploring the collection's central theme of family, as well as the central idea of how the family either coheres or disintegrates with loss. In the poems following the story of the English painter, the speaker's parents are a constantly looming presence in his life, constantly emerging from the past to haunt him with the traumatic memory of their loss. This causes a creative crisis for the artist for a long while, but after confronting the truth of their loss directly, he learns to find new inspiration and generative power in their sudden absence. Similarly, in "Visitors from Abroad," when our Glück-like speaker's parents return to interrogate her about her writing, she is made to directly confront them and emerges with a new, although unsettling, realization of the way in which her own consciousness has incorporated her family's memory and used it to form the person that she is today. On the other side of the equation, however, when the speaker of "Aboriginal Landscape" is made to confront the loss of her family members, she is despondent and worried, reminded only of the looming fact of her own mortality. Together, then, parents in the collection are mainly deployed for evidence of what happens when they are absent: the mind confronts the memory of these lost people who were so important to us in our lives, and it is painful, but there are also many lessons about the self and the lives we live looming in how we confront this pain.
Siblings
Much like parents, siblings are also very present in Faithful and Virtuous Night, and they also allow Glück to touch on many of the same themes of family and how family changes in response to loss. Among the various siblings present in the collection, the most important is, of course, the brother of the English painter. The painter's brother is, all things considered, a rather minor figure in the collection, but he conveys a very important lesson about intimacy and its importance to those who have experienced loss. As a young boy, the speaker is able to embrace and accept darkness only because he feels the closeness and presence of his brother, who he imagines to be steering them both through the night. As an adult then, his brother once again offers him comfort and safe passage through the liminal world just before death (represented by Montana), offering him the last shattered fragments of their time together as children and in one sense providing him with additional intimacy in the form of his son (i.e., Harry, the painter's nephew).
Harry
Harry is the English painter's nephew, whom he takes on as a life partner after his trip to Montana in "The White Series." Harry is a young foil to the English painter, but he is particularly important in the collection because he provides the painter with an answer to the aesthetic question the speaker must confront in death: how can one end something properly, having begun? In the speaker's final moments with us in the collection, Harry sings him selections from The Sound of Music and Jacques Brel, each of which carries a distinct connotation for the speaker (joy in the case of the former and desolation in the case of the latter). By noting the inspiration that Harry takes in the darkness of Brel, the painter eventually comes to the realization that the joy of The Sound of Music has just as much to offer as Brel's more sobering music. By learning that he does not have to choose between the happiness and despondency of these two types of music, the painter eventually sees that death is much the same. Death, after all, represents the mingling and culmination of so many hopeful and melancholy emotions. Thus, it is not abrupt or surprising, but rather a fitting end to the lives that we are granted.
