Summary
"A Summer Garden" is the twenty-third and penultimate poem in Louise Glück's Faithful and Virtuous Night. It follows a speaker who finds an old photograph of their mother and finds their self awash in a flood of memories and nostalgia surrounding the image. The speaker engages deeply with the photo, as well as with the copy of Death in Venice inside which they found the picture. The nostalgia of viewing the photo and the experience of noting how much things have changed then spurs the speaker to meditate on the world around them: the earth is peaceful, quiet, and full of stability. At the same time, however, there is an eeriness to the stability "like an afternoon in Pompeii" (63). The speaker then looks back in time again to when they were a young child and recalls both their mother and their servant named Maria. Finally, the point of view shifts, with the mother figure in the poem suddenly being called Beatrice, and we are given insight into the instant that the photo was taken, now revealed as a timeless moment of post-war calm and bliss.
Analysis
The poem is very unconventional in its progression, primarily due its unique treatment of time. This treatment—in which time seems all at once to dilate, contract, and stand still—is similar to the perception of time held by many of the collection's older characters (and, in particular, the central painter) as they both wait in anticipation of death and retreat inward into their own pasts. In "A Summer Garden," however, the focus is not so much on death, but rather on a discrete experience or moment that catalyzes a shift in the speaker's temporal perception. This moment, the discovery of the photo, then allows the speaker to revisit a variety of moments from a series of different angles.
First, there is the fact of the speaker finding the photo in Section 1. Here, the scene set of the mother in the photo is one of calm and tranquility, and the language used to render this scene is effusive and ornate. This is commensurate with the speaker's own assertion that a "persistent / haze of nostalgia [...] protects all relics of childhood" (8). In other words, the speaker recognizes each of the faded joys and virtues present in this photo fo their mother, and in describing them inflates them out of nostalgia. This is why they become more and more immersed in the photo as they remove more and more dust from its surface: "The more dust I removed, the more these shadows grew" (11). Much as death seemed to have its own gravity in other poems, drawing each elderly figure towards it with time, so too does this memory of our speaker's past and their past seem to draw them in. Suddenly, however, they begin to think of all that has changed since the days of the photo, and when they find a word to label this sensation, it immediately leaves their mind. The speaker wonders why this is so—"was it blindness or darkness, peril, confusion?"—but we as readers know by now that it is because the truths of the matter, aging and the irreversible flow of time, are too painful to confront while in the reverie of looking at the photo (19).
The second section is consistent with the tone, register of diction, and general focus of the first. Having sat with the photo for a bit, the speaker then goes to replace it in the book where it was originally found, a copy of Death in Venice. The allusion to this book should not be considered random: after all, the idea of a creatively stifled artist of middle age falling for a younger boy bears great resemblance to the story of the painter speaker from elsewhere in the collection. The speaker sits a while with Death in Venice and tries to discern meaning from the annotations in the margin, but ultimately is only able to discern general sentiments like "urgency" (31). By placing the photo back in the book, the speaker feels that they are both restoring order and participating in the strange process by which the past constantly returns to haunt the present: "Thus the little photograph / was buried again, as the past is buried in the future” (36–37). At the same time, however, it is notable that the speaker is also, in completing this action, seen to be falling deeper and deeper into the nostalgic seductions of the past. The narrator gazes upon the words "sterility" and "oblivion" in the margins, but rather than think about how each of these has negative connotations for the past (which itself is sterile and has been consigned to an irretrievable oblivion), the speaker only focuses on the parallel seduction of Gustave von Aschenbach in Death in Venice: "And it seemed to him the pale and lovely / Summoner out there smiled at him and beckoned..." (39–41).
Section 3 then returns us to the present, where the speaker is now focused on the world around them. It is called "quiet" more than once, but there is also something strange and off about this landscape. The lines have gotten much shorter, and the language has become less florid in the absence of nostalgia. In the middle of the sky, the sun stands as a kind of "immodest god" (53), so close to the earth that "the grass is shadowless" (60). The sun tells the speaker that all that exists is the remainder or continuation of something that once was: "Things are [...] they do not change; / response does not change” (54–55). At the same time, however, the speaker knows that this is not true; something has been lost between them and their mother, between the past and the present. This is why, despite the tranquility of the scene around them, they feel that the silence is evocative of "an afternoon in Pompeii" (63).
The confusion between the idealism of the past and the realities of the present world are brought out very strongly at the beginning of Section 4, where the speaker forces two contradictory visions of their mother into contact: "Mother died last night, / Mother who never dies" (64–65). Right after this, however, the speaker lapses back into yet another memory from their childhood, this time a nighttime scene during which they could hear their servant Maria singing and folding the washing. Though it may be coincidental, the fact of a singing maid named Maria also evokes the kind of corny nostalgia one might attribute to The Sound of Music. The memories of the narrator seem to be varnished with a similar, vintage sheen. The degree of rose-tinting to their memories is in fact so strong that the passage of time is not even recognized. Rather, the movement of one day to another happens via parataxis, with no significance or importance attributed to the difference between time periods: "It was the tenth of May / as it had been the ninth, the eighth" (88–89).
This dilation of the past to overshadow the present reaches its zenith in Section 5. Here, the first-person perspective of the speaker looking at the photo of their mother is transformed into a third-person point of view, and we enter the realm of the photo at last. The mother is named formally as Beatrice, and we learn that the picture of the mother was taken in a park just after the war (ostensibly WWII) ended. Beatrice thinks of the movements of the planes above as peaceful at last, and the new third-person speaker corroborates this: "It was the world of her imagination: / true and false were of no importance" (96–97). The importance of subjective perception is thus foregrounded here as it was in other places in the collection. The speaker then tells us that this was also a better time before dust had settled on things. Whether or not this is true, we as readers learn to recognize the subjective evaluation being made and the sentimental value that such a judgment holds for our speaker, just as viewing the planes as peaceful was significant for their mother. So too do we see similarities between our speaker's idea of time and the mother's conception of time: "Infinite, infinite—that / was her perception of time” (108–109). Ultimately, in search of the lost intimacy between themself and their mother, this speaker has warped time and viewed their relationship with their mother and the world around them from a variety of angles, so time has opened up for them in a similar way. This is why, only when the moment depicted in the photo has passed, the speaker is finally able to say that something has gotten "older" (113).
