This ClassicNote focuses on the poems contained in Louise Glück's collection Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014). In total, the collection is comprised of 24 poems, and it is primarily comprised of three types of poems: prose poems which seek to teach a variety of personal and spiritual lessons; standard poems, often long or in numbered sections, which reflect either indistinct personae's lived experiences or autobiographical concerns about death and old age; and standard poems, written in a lengthy and elliptical style, that follow the life story of a fictional English painter whose parents died in his youth.This Note addresses a representative sample of 15 poems at length, but because many of the poems' themes connect, repeat, and intersect in important ways, every poem in the collection will be addressed. Considered as a complete body of work, these poems shed light on Louise Glück's recent fascination with death and silence as transitory states: while both are the conclusion of one type of life, noise, or art, they are perhaps also the gateways into new forms of life or creativity. At the same time, however, the transformational aspects of silence and death are not something to be anticipated or taken for granted—after all, to pass the threshold of mortality means that one will have to contend with the loss of their memories, close ones, and daily rituals. In old age, Glück wants to center the idea that one is constantly trapped in the push and pull between these two forces—a painful, retrospective excavation of one's life and memories and a hopeful, potential new beginning (perhaps even joined by one's departed loved ones) on the other side. As a whole then, the collection can be said to be a haunting exploration of the phenomena of loss, trauma, and death, taking us closer to the edge of each of these sensations than perhaps any author has ventured before.
The poems analyzed in this Note are organized based on where they appear in the collection, beginning with "Parable." This poem, in which a group of travelers spends most of their lives arguing about how to take an upcoming journey, provides us with a powerful allegory about the correct way to live, if it can be said that there is, after all, a "correct" way. In the end, however, Glück's travelers realize that it is the strange miracle of life and its attendant changes—the world shifting around us with the seasons, the ways in which we ourselves grow and change over time, and so on—that both give life direction and also fulfill a more free and unrestrained search for true purpose. This is then followed by "An Adventure," a poem in sections in which Glück's speaker slowly bids farewell to a world of familiar things, then gets close enough to the kingdom of death to feel the simultaneous "joy" and "task" of meeting those who have passed away. After waking up from this dream of death, then, Glück's speaker is like the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi, unable to say whether they are truly dead (as they dreamed) or have escaped from death's kingdom back into life. After a brief dive into the intersections between memory, family, and nature ("The Past"), the collection then turns to one of its major foci—the story of the aging English painter. In "Faithful and Virtuous Night," the title poem of the collection, the speaker tells us of his early childhood sharing a room with his brother, his first encounters with art and literature, and the death of his parents (caused by a felled tree). Together, these recollections paint a picture of a man who is deeply interested in both the aesthetic question posed by death—that is, how one can properly end, given a beginning—as well as the ways in which nighttime and silence prepare us for the intimacies, transformations, and revulsions that accompany the period of one's life just before death.
"Theory of Memory" then follows, the first of the short prose poems which seek to convey the strange, ephemeral, spiritual majesty of life, as well as instill a sensibility with which to appreciate this majesty. The poem focuses on a child's visit to a palm reader, who tells them that they have amazing things either ahead of or behind them, neither of which really matters because of the urgency of the present moment. After this, "Sharply Worded Silence" tells the story of a speaker who once had a mysterious encounter with an old woman who was fond of cyclical journeys. Feeling that there is some hidden meaning in what the old woman said, perhaps not even contained in language, the speaker then begins to focus intently on the woman's story until they re-enact it themselves, returning to their hometown and waiting in anticipation of their own circular journey. This of course, like "Parable," is an extended metaphor about the cyclical nature of life, as well as the mysterious ways in which the old convey wisdom onto the young. "Visitors from Abroad," like "The Past" before it, then returns to the themes of family and loss, exploring the strange ways in which the past constantly returns to haunt the present. It also interrogates the relationship between memory and reality, exploring the ways in which one's real and departed loved ones are absorbed by the mind, becoming both incorporated into the self while also remaining held at an infinite distance. The loneliness of surviving the other members of one's family is also explored, a theme which continues into "Aboriginal Landscape."
After a detour through another mysterious prose poem ("Utopia"), the collection then zeroes in on its central character of the English painter, continuing his story in four poems. In "Cornwall," the speaker explores his somewhat parasitic and abusive relationship with silence, detailing the ways in which words both approach and fail him in complete silence. The trauma of the loss of his parents envelops him, and he is only able to note the ways in which the light plays off of nighttime fog, as well as how it cycles between daytime and nighttime. The poem is then itself directly referenced and dissected in "Afterword," a poem in which the speaker then realizes the centrality of his trauma in his own preoccupation with silence and death. "Afterword" also sees our speaker begin to understand and appreciate the sublime qualities of silence, directly confronting both the uncertain hopes and likely cessations that will one day be attendant to his own death. This is then followed by "Midnight," a poem that sees the speaker fully embrace the night and therein find himself trapped between the urgency of the present and the shattered fragments of his past (represented by memories of traveling on pleasure boats with his aunt and brother). "The Sword in the Stone" then sees the painter-speaker get rather meta again, visiting his psychoanalyst and having dinner with a friend, during which the artist's purist and spiritual aesthetic is critiqued as impotent by a friend.
Fittingly, the poems in the latter half of the collection then take us closer and closer to death than the poems in the first half. In "Forbidden Music," one of the strange prose-poems in the collection, a musician finds himself thrown into a patch of music not regularly allowed by the conductor and is confused at his surroundings (in an embodiment of the confusion one feels crossing into the "forbidden" territory of death). In "The Open Window," another prose-poem, a writer who begins his stories always with a definite but unclear end in mind (like human lives have their definite yet uncertain ends from the very beginning) learns to embrace both nature and uncertainty in order to write more excitingly. This too is a metaphor meant to convey a spiritual lesson about life. "The Melancholy Assistant" and "A Foreshortened Journey," which follow, also take us into this territory, telling the story of the deep ambivalence and directionlessness one can feel while sitting at the threshold of death. Appropriately, the threshold of death is then where we pick up the story of the English painter in "Approach of the Horizon." Faced with the cessation of feeling in his painting arm, our speaker goes to the hospital, where he imagines his own death and finally finds an aesthetic means of "painting" or rendering death in the form of an airplane flight. "The White Series" then, sees the painter take a literal plane flight to visit his brother in Montana, a strange and alien place that reminds us of the land beyond death. Here, the painter is strangely inspired, finds a lover in the form of his nephew, and returns home, having learned that darkness brings with it both longing as well as new beginnings, neither of which overshadows the other necessarily. This idea of twoness is then explored in "The Horse and Rider," a short prose-poem exploring the intimacy between the title figures. "A Work of Fiction," another prose-poem, also speaks to the power of internalization and intimacy. "The Story of a Day" takes us into a speaker's conflict between structuralism (i.e., the codification and exploration of opposites) and narratology in their old age. "A Summer Garden" explores the ways in which memory and nostalgia can make time dilate and form eddies, similar to what we have seen throughout the collection through our elderly narrators. Finally, "The Couple in the Park" explores the potential for unseen intimacy, which also carries a dimension of the spiritual or predestined.
