Summary
"A Sharply Worded Silence" is the sixth poem in Louise Glück's Faithful and Virtuous Night. It tells the story of a speaker in a park (in an unknown city) called the Contessa's Garden, who speaks to an old woman and hears about her past. Having run away from a love affair and taken up work at a local toy factory, the speaker returns to the Contessa's Garden in the evenings, where they like to observe the cherry trees. Then, once acquainted with the old woman in the park, the woman tells the speaker that in her youth, she liked to walk in circles through the garden and observe the rising of the moon while snippets of The Marriage of Figaro could be heard from somewhere. Though some nights were discouraging and had neither moon nor music, the old woman set out each night in hope of the same pleasures, each time reaching the glittering doorknob of her own front door.
After the old woman finishes her story, the speaker comments on how the night makes their sense of wonder more pronounced, and how they felt that something secret and important was conveyed by the old woman's story. The old woman then tells the speaker that she has mistaken the speaker for one of her old friends. Following this, the speaker returns to their hometown and reunites with their former lover. At the same time, though, they feel that they have returned to the old woman and the Contessa's Garden. The speaker turns the old woman's story over in their head time and again, and even wonders if "whatever message there might have been [in her poem] / was not contained in speech" (57–58). As the poem closes, the speaker thinks that, much like the old woman in her story, that they will come upon the doorknob of their own front door at some point, though it is impossible to say where or when.
Analysis
The title of the poem calls our attention to the fact that, as in other poems in the collection, silence plays an integral role in the text. Starting in the first stanza, where the name of the specific city is elided, we are cued into the way in which silence can both define a scene while also introducing a kind of generality or obfuscation. Note also that it is the silence of the park, "particularly in the quiet hours / after sunset, when it was often abandoned," that draws the speaker to the Contessa's Garden in the first place and stages their encounter with the old woman (7–8). This silence is mapped directly to the nighttime, when the speaker feels "enclosure / as in a train cabin" (15–16). In a strange way, silence separates the speaker from the world around them, but it is also what draws them closer to figures like the old woman. This feeling regarding silence is similar to that held by the old woman, who both enjoys the silent majesty of the moon's rising but recognizes that silence is also disconcerting (as when she is made disconsolate by the absence of music from The Marriage of Figaro). Such multifaceted feelings about silence in the poem make it seem to take on even greater importance than speech. After all, once the old woman finishes speaking, the speaker cannot help but wonder if writing the story down and creating poetry from it is "pointless" (32). Later on too, when the speaker compares the pauses made by the old woman to the titular "sharply worded silences" of their mother, the speaker is really contemplating the failure of language to express what can be contained by silence (59).
The narrator's somewhat circular feelings about silence also draw our attention to the importance of circularity in the poem. Of course, the central story of the old woman is by its nature a circular one, one that involves her walking always through the same gardens and inevitably at her front door each time. Still, the old woman finds majesty and joy in this circularity. The narrator, too, falls into a trap of circularity: by becoming obsessed with the story relayed by the old woman, the speaker winds up fixating on the story and turning it over in their head constantly, unable to move forward from it.
The silences of the narrator's mother then, when mapped to the silences of the old woman, introduce the pertinent application of circularity in the poem: what is really being discussed here is circularity in life. The old woman, after all, is at the end of her life and has come to recognize and appreciate the circularity of living (not unlike the travelers in "Parable"), while the narrator is merely shocked by the circular similarity of something they heard in childhood (i.e., their mother's silence) and something they heard in maturity (i.e., the old woman's silence). This is also where the imagery of the cherry blossom becomes important. Though cherry blossoms grow cyclically over the years, their actual flowering is quite brief, albeit magnificent. So too goes the human processes of aging and life. The speaker's appreciation of the blossoms, combined with their comment that the blossoms seem to form "new worlds" upon landing (51) and their comparison of the blossoms to "pilgrim[s] seeking expiation and forgiveness" (63), seems to imply that they grasp the gravity of such an image. Circularity in the poem, along with silence, are thus two commentaries on the preciousness, precariousness, and strangeness of life.
What then, is to be made of the door at the end of the poem? To answer this question, it is necessary to first consider the fundamental purpose of the narrator's encounter with the old woman. Surely, on a deeper level, it conveys information about the circularity and silence inherent in life, but what is the central takeaway of the speaker? This, in fact, we are told explicitly: "I felt that some important secret / was about to be entrusted to me, as a torch is passed / from one hand to another in a relay" (36–38). The narrator's encounter with the old woman is almost a type of reincarnation, in which the life essence of one person, complete with all of its messages, is transferred to another person. This is one kind of cyclicality in the poem. The door, then, represents another kind. Much as the old woman found herself each evening at the door of her own home, so too does the speaker return to their own hometown, to their old lover, and to their old ways. In every sense but temporal, they are returning to their youth, though by moving forward in time, they are also approaching the end of their life. The door to their own house, then, conveys a message that is present elsewhere in Faithful and Virtuous Night: that in old age, once the secrets and mysteries of life have revealed themselves, one cannot help but figuratively (or perhaps literally) revisit their past, excavating their childhood and youth in an attempt to view it from their newfound perspectives. In this way, youth and old age become mirror images of one another, united by the common image of the door.
In terms of its form, too, the poem accomplishes much. Alternating between long flights and shorter, terse stanzas, the poem creates a sense of dilation and contraction, as well a a sense of silence and clamor as the white space on the page grows and shrinks. Moreover, while the shorter stanzas of the poem are the ones that deliver more of a clear message, the longer stanzas convey messages more indirectly and elliptically. In this way, Glück makes us feel the presence of silence, either through what is omitted in shorter stanzas or simply unsaid in longer stanzas. One additional element that allows readers to feel silence or imbalance in the poem is the fact that most of the stanzas are written in odd numbers of lines, either in tercets (3 lines) or septets (7 lines). The lack of complementation in an odd-numbered stanza creates a feeling of incompletion or abruptness, both of which also carry the general impression silence's sudden intrusion.
