Faithful and Virtuous Night Essay Questions

How does Louise Glück present death as an aesthetic matter in Faithful and Virtuous Night?

In Faithful and Virtuous Night, as much as the various speakers and characters fear death for conventional reasons, almost an equal concern for these various personae appears to center on death as an aesthetic matter. In the case of the female writer persona presented in the collection, note that death is primarily explored for the way it has influenced or will influence her writing—for example, in "An Adventure," she worries that she has bid farewell to poetry as a craft, and in "Visitors from Abroad," she thinks deeply and painfully about how the deaths of her family members have influenced the subjective voice of her writing. In the case of the English painter, on the other hand, death poses a deep aesthetic question insofar as it makes the painter wonder how he will end his life and career, having begun both with little choice or willpower. Both of these speakers initially see death as a kind of aesthetic stultification or closing when compared to the productivity of their lives, but both ultimately learn that death is not so neat and simple. Rather, the speakers of Glück's collection learn to embrace the uncertainties and losses attendant to death, seeing in its shadow the latent potential for a new kind of creativity or life, albeit one not recognized by the living of this world. Finally, the awareness of death in the collection becomes not just a depressive factor, but also inspires many elderly figures in the collection to seize their remaining life with additional fervor and creativity (see "The Open Window").

How do cycles and larger notions of cyclicality play an important role in Faithful and Virtuous Night?

In Faithful and Virtuous Night, Glück endeavors to show us how entrenched the human and natural worlds are in cycles. In the case of the human world, as early on as the first poem in the collection ("Parable"), Glück refers to the aging process as a progression of cycles. From day to night, week to week, and even through the four recurring seasons, Glück shows us that what resembles the flow of time might actually be visualized as a series of interlinked eddies, within which one is constantly trapped in the present. In this present, the focus of many of the elderly speakers of the collection, one is constantly torn between recalling the past and anticipating—or perhaps, reviling—the future to come, which in itself poses a kind of self-destructive cycle. At the same time, however, the collection directs our focus to the cycles inherent in the natural world—between day and night, between seasons, and so on. The speakers' attentiveness to the cycles of nature also allow them to see the smaller cycles inherent in their own lives, which frees them to imagine death as something more than just a hard stop.

Describe the character of the English painter. In what ways is he similar to Louise Glück? In what ways is he different?

The English painter is a very striking figure in Faithful and Virtuous Night. He is obsessed with mortality from a young age—something he has in common with Glück herself—but he is unable to confront the origins of this fascination until he is more mature. He is creative, like Glück, but his chosen medium of painting is different from the medium of writing. Nonetheless, however, the English painter is also a figure who is deeply invested in silence, as well as the ways in which silence can both enable and stifle productivity. This, too, is a similarity with Glück. Finally, the painter and Glück are both at the stage of their lives where they are constantly tormented by the real possibility of death, which influences their art and drives them to produce new, unusual, and stark work that stands out from their earlier oeuvre. What differs between them, then, is mostly demographic: the painter is a gay man, and Louise Glück is a woman; the painter is English, and Louise Glück is American; the painter falls in love with his nephew, and Glück does not; and so on. Despite these differences, however, it is important to note what the two have in common and what these commonalities imply for the universality of the collection's central messages. Recall here also Glück's words about personally struggling with silence in old age and her deliberate choice to not write of this struggle from her own voice, which she feared may have been too maudlin or insincere.

Ultimately, what is the stance by Louise Glück in Faithful and Virtuous Night regarding trauma and loss?

Glück's picture of trauma and loss in Faithful and Virtuous Night is complex and moving. Glück is under no illusions that trauma and loss are not painful: rather, she depicts at length the haunting effect that these two phenomena have on her various speakers. Each speaker is, to an extent, hollowed out and changed permanently by the losses they have faced. At the same time, however, by the end of the collection, Glück's picture is more nuanced: while loss and trauma are seen as significant destructive forces in one's life, they are also seen as significant instructional and formative experiences. For example, losing one's mother (as the painter and writer personae both do) may deeply affect somebody, but the memory of that mother and the fact of her loss will then move that person to think and live their life differently. In a way, the loss of someone physical or the physical impact of a trauma can also liberate someone to internalize things more strongly and grow as a person. Thus, while these two phenomena may still be deeply destructive, Glück ultimately tells us in Faithful and Virtuous Night that working through this destruction can produce light and progress.

Describe the language used in Faithful and Virtuous Night. What effect does it produce for readers, given the collection's thematic focuses?

In stark contrast to the style of Louise Glück's wider oeuvre, Faithful and Virtuous Night makes use of a lot of ornate and elliptical language. Moreover, a lot of this florid language is compounded in its effect by the heavy presence of prose poems in the collection. Together, these create the impression of haziness and equivocality, which produce an almost mystic, unfocused air that hangs over the collection as a whole. Given the collection's focus on the discovery of deep and unclear meaning, perhaps not even contained in language, both in old age and in a variety of other circumstances (i.e., presented in the prose poems), the language Glück uses effectively complements the content of her poems and the focus of the collection as a whole. At the same time that we note this, however, one does well not to forget the fact that this linguistic shift was a shock to both Glück and many critics of the collection upon its initial publication. The unfocused and misty language does indeed convey a sense of greater wonder at the mysteries of the universe, but might it also reflect the low standards that Glück set for herself? And if so, does it detract from her intended meaning and the force of her words?