[W]e could see this in one another; we had changed although / we never moved, and one said, ah, behold how we have aged, traveling / from day to night only, neither forward nor sideward, and this seemed / in a strange way miraculous. And those who believed we should have a purpose / believed this was the purpose, and those who felt we must remain free / in order to encounter truth felt it had been revealed.
In this quote, spoken by the speaker of "Parable," the poem's central travelers come to the realization that they have spent their lives debating their journey to come, rather than actually traveling anywhere. Interestingly, however, rather than see their lives as wasted, the travelers realize that in a figurative sense, they have journeyed through time, aging and changing with the seasons like the world around them. The majesty of these realization then satisfies both of the factions within the group of travelers—the faction that believes that life's journey should be conducted with a clear purpose or goal, as well as the faction that believes one has to remain free in life to encounter true meaning and beauty. In the spirit of a parable, then, this quote is significant because it implicitly introduces one of the main takeaways of the collection as a whole—that is, growing old is a mysterious, cyclical process that can be redemptive in its own right, if only one knows how to draw the proper conclusions from the experience of it.
It had occurred to me that all human beings are divided / into those who wish to move forward / and those who wish to go back. / Or you could say, those who wish to keep moving / and those who want to be stopped in their tracks / as by the blazing sword.
This sentiment, spoken by the English painter of the "painter poems," conveys another idea that recurs throughout the collection: that people are constantly torn between recollection of the past and anticipation of the future. As we see in the case of the painter and several of the poetic personae present in the collection, this is a phenomenon that becomes particularly pronounced in old age, when the prospect at looking back at what one has lost is just as sobering and difficult as the idea of looking to one's inevitable death. This is one of the key psychological and aesthetic questions presented in the collection, and it reappears in poems like "A Foreshortened Journey," where this sentiment is more or less repeated verbatim by the little girl's grandmother.
[T]hough what I saw, as I told my aunt, / was less a factual account of the world / than a vision of its transformation / subsequent to passage through the void of myself.
This quote, spoken by the English painter of the "painter poems," is rather confusing at first glance but upon further analysis reveals a great deal about the central messages and philosophies of the collection. This excerpt comes just after the English painter starts to draw using colored pencils as a child and—put more plainly—represents his claim that what he draws is not literal or representational, but rather is significantly influenced by the loss and trauma that he has experienced (i.e., "the void"), which shape his perceptions of the world. The idea of the self as a thinking subject—one influenced by all kinds of losses and joys—that has great power to shape and determine the landscape of its own world is especially important to the collection. As a whole, the collection itself relies on the losses and hardships of old age to subjectively render the past and memory as having substantial weight, and the distinctly aesthetic quality that this brings to death and old age is prefigured here by discussing the subjective representation of images in art.
It has come to seem / there is no perfect ending. / Indeed, there are infinite endings. / Or perhaps, once one begins, / there are only endings.
This quote, spoken by the English painter of the "painter poems," again brings up the aesthetic issue posed by endings of all kinds, from creative pauses to the death that awaits everyone in old age. Much like the quote above, this excerpt is significant to the collection as a whole because it constitutes a putative formulation of something returned to time and again throughout Faithful and Virtuous Night—that is, the idea that every ending (including death) is imperfect, but inevitable and necessary. Later on, this very realization will allow the painter to embrace the fact of death in his old age; after all, without the ending, there is no story at all, and only in considering life as something which begins and ends do we learn to appreciate it as a discrete and distinct experience, complete with highs and lows.
I write about you all the time, I said aloud. / Every time I say "I," it refers to you.
Much as the English painter says that he draws the world not as it is, but as it is once it has passed through the void of himself, so too does a Glück-like speaker utter this line when confronted with the idea that she has forgotten her deceased family members. Her family, our speaker contends, has not been lost to the ravages of time and the fallibility of memory; rather, they have become incorporated into and absorbed by her own subjectivity. Said more simply, when the speaker's self had gaps in it formed by the loss of her parents and sister, she recovered by filling in these gaps with elements of her own subjective thoughts: memories, reflections, and the like. In this way, she has absorbed her departed family members into the subjective unity indicated by the pronoun "I." It is never just the speaker talking, we are to understand: it is the speaker as she has been made through the remembrance of her mother, father, sister, and so on.
One speaks a word: I. / Out of this stream / the great forms—
Like the quote above, this excerpt, spoken by the English painter of the "painter poems," brings a great deal of attention to the unity inherent in subjective perception. All things that someone experiences in life—no matter how disparate, traumatic, or seemingly insignificant—are united by the fact that they occur to a subject, whose mind later reframes and digests these experiences in order to let that subject grow and develop. This quote is significant in terms of the collection's narrative arc insofar as it represents the moment in which the painter stops seeing himself as a victim of silence/darkness/death, but rather as someone whose life is influenced and shaped by these phenomena. In terms of thematic significance, too, this quote is important because it shows that, even when one feels that all is lost or that there is nothing to look forward too, it is all a matter of one's thinking and state of mind, both of which can be changed by something as simple as intimacy with another person.
Shall I be raised from death, the spirit asks. / And the sun says yes. / And the desert answers / your voice is sand scattered in wind.
In these final lines of "Afterword," spoken by the English painter of the "painter poems," the speaker confronts the possibility of his own death by figuratively exploring the death of the cat from Jacques Brel's "Old Folks (Les Vieux)." While part of him believes that there is potential in death for rebirth and regeneration (represented here by the sun), another part of him believes that death represents only silence and annihilation (the dust scattered in wind). Here, the dissonance between these two possibilities is meant to be rather disquieting and unsatisfying, but note that this changes throughout the course of the collection. Later on, after all, the speaker realizes that joy and sadness coexist in life as they do in death, and that to either avoid or anticipate death with either emotion is incorrect, with the only correct option being to embrace the urgency of living in the present, enjoying the journey of life while it lasts.
I will be brief. This concludes, / as the stewardess says, / our short flight. / And all the persons one will never know / crowd into the aisle, and all are funneled / into the terminal.
In this quote, spoken by the English painter of the "painter poems," the speaker reaches the height of an extended metaphor comparing the journey of life to a plane flight. This metaphor picks up a great deal of complexity and meaning simply because of the word which ends the poem, "terminal." As mentioned before, a terminal represents not only an ending, but also a place of reunion, transfer, and new beginnings. By mapping the ultimate conclusion to life to something as multivalent as an airplane terminal, Glück here makes the very significant choice to open death up beyond its often unequivocal or univocal recognition as a kind of loss or decay. This is an integral part of the collection's central philosophy and answer to the aesthetic question of death, and it is here aptly summarized in an aesthetic and intelligible metaphor.
Sometimes his voice shakes, as with great emotion, / and then for a while the hills are alive overwhelms / the cat is dead. / But we do not, in the main, need to choose between them.
In these lines, spoken by the English painter of the "painter poems," the speaker we have been following for so long in the collection finally embraces the idea espoused above—that is, that there is just as much aesthetic satisfaction to be had in joy and sadness, and that one does not have to choose between them in either life or death. This represents not only the culmination of the painter's thinking about the unity of death/silence/darkness, but also the final distillation of one of the collection's key messages and aesthetic preoccupations.
It was the world of her imagination: / true and false were of no importance.
In this line from "A Summer Garden," the speaker looks at a photograph of their mother and imagines her emotional state on the day that she was photographed. Here too, the key takeaway is the importance and centrality of subjective perception which, when embraced, allows one to shape their world and control it in ways that once seemed lost to chaos. An irony here is that this sentiment is not truly the mother's but rather attributed to her by her child, and so thus really represents the child's imagination and truth more so than the mother's. At the same time, since we are told that true and false are "of no importance" to the speaker once the emotional and subjective valences of something are taken into account, what we are left with is a deepened sense that the child is intensely nostalgic: attributing a perhaps non-existent optimism to their mother and yearning for a calmer life they mistakenly believe lies in the past. This, then, is another instance of the collection's prototypical middle-aged or elderly person: attached to a past that is painful to remember, if only because it reminds them that their current life has lost an element of this past.
