Summary
"Afterword" is the eleventh poem in Louise Glück's Faithful and Virtuous Night. It is also the third of the "painter poems" in the collection—that is, those poems which follow the story of the English painter introduced in "Faithful and Virtuous Night." It picks up right where "Cornwall" left off, reflecting on the abstruse and elliptical language of the poem explicitly as a defense mechanism: "a kind of artificial mist of the sort / sprayed onto stages to allow for difficult set changes" (4–5). From here, the speaker then confronts what he may be scared to face in himself, and he settles on fate. Fate, however, is a word the speaker treats with great cynicism, and he states that anything which has the appearance of fate is merely a local coincidence in a grand scheme of chaos. Having realized by now that chaos is the thing which envelops him, the speaker recognizes that he is unable to paint chaos or render in his art, which corresponds neatly to the "crisis of vision" he experienced over his parents' deaths (25).
Having acknowledged the main issue on his mind and his attempts to divert himself from it, the speaker then sees a path through all of his torment to a kind of sublime blankness or solitude. Introducing a more philosophical lens, the speaker then invokes Kant as a kind of metonymy, saying that he shares a birthday with the philosopher. A London street scene (acknowledged by the speaker as the "desert") is then briefly described outside the speaker's lodgings, where a woman is singing lines from Jacques Brel's "Old Folks (Les Vieux)", about a dead cat, in a thin soprano. This song reminds the speaker of his own encroaching old age, so he shuts his door and meditates briefly in solitude, in pursuit of "blankness, that / stepchild of the sublime" (62–63). He adds further in this meditation that blankness was always "both [his] subject and [his] medium" (65).
As the poem closes, the speaker wonders what Kant would have thought of his deep realization, and he thinks that Kant would have told him that no obstacle truly exists in his life (as opposed to the real obstacle of the tree faced by the speaker's parents). In the clarity of this digressive meditation, the speaker then remarks that "the mist had cleared" and that he feels creatively finished, turning his empty canvases "inward against the wall" (73–74). Suddenly, we then return to the figure of the dead cat from the Jacques Brel song. The cat asks if he will be reborn, and the sun tells him yes. The expansive blankness of the "desert" replies only that "your voice is sand scattered in wind" (79).
Analysis
"Afterword" elaborates on the aesthetic claims introduced in "Cornwall," and we are explicitly told so from the poem's first lines: "Reading what I have just written [...]" (1). This introduces a general and unique feature of "Afterword" as a whole—it is intensely self-referential. The speaker explicitly recognizes what we have already noticed in the tense and unresolved ending of "Cornwall"—namely, that "[his] story seems to have been / slightly distorted, ending, as it did, not abruptly / but in a kind of artificial mist of the sort / sprayed onto stages to allow for difficult set changes" (2–5). In other words, an artificial kind of mysteriousness or haziness was varnished onto the poem in order to afford the narrator space and time to change his mind and his perceptions of the world. The speaker then conjectures that it was "a shape" in "Cornwall" that made him defensive and eager to stop writing (9). This of course, although not said explicitly until a few stanzas later, is the realization of the lasting trauma of his parents' deaths, which he attempts to relegate to the domain of "fate" (9). He realizes too, however, that this is also a cop-out, and he drives even deeper to the heart of the matter by discovering that what really troubles him is "chaos" (21). It was a chaotic event that took his parents away, and the same chaos could return at any moment for him. This thought sobers the speaker and literally results in a cessation: "My brush froze—I could not paint it" (22). Note here also how the breath provided by the em dash parallels the cessation of the brush once chaos is discovered as the deeper issue plaguing the narrator.
Having realized now that what he really fears is chaos, the speaker then continues to be meta and self-referential with his art and writing. He divests himself of poetic language and uses parentheses to tell us factually what is meant in many of the remaining stanzas. His talk of the misty stage is unmasked as a metaphor for "([his] life)" (30). The isolation and blankness he feels as if in a desert surrounding is also unmasked: "(In reality, a crowded street in London, the tourists waving their colored maps)" (36–37). The speaker is learning to reconcile his true self with the projection of himself that he presents in poetry and in his paintings. This then leads the speaker to enter a meditative reflection on not just what his art represents, but who he fundamentally is: "One speaks a word: I. / Out of this stream / the great forms—" (38–40). The self is the subjective unity that contains all of the contradictions between silence, speech, doubt, and clarity, and living a life as that self is necessarily aesthetic as well as philosophical. Here, we thus return to the idea, explored throughout the collection, that art and life both pose aesthetic questions. It is perhaps for this reason that the speaker then turns to Kant, a philosopher who was deeply preoccupied with aesthetics, and addresses him directly in parentheses as a twin: "(We share a birthday)" (51).
After the slight distraction of the woman singing Brel, which reminds the speaker of his own old age, the speaker then shuts the door (elsewhere seen as a symbol of the threshold of mortality) and meditates to himself about the blankness he has always pursued in his art. He wonders then if perhaps his obsession with blankness out of trauma is ill-founded, since there has been no physical "obstacle" in his way, unlike the tree that killed his parents as a child (69). This moment of clarity then causes the metaphorical fog that has plagued the speaker to lift, and he is able to feel aesthetically fulfilled, turning his unfinished canvasses inward. In summary of the realization he just experienced, the narrator then returns to the figure of the cat from the Jacques Brel song. While the cat asks about the potential for regeneration or rebirth, the sun answers that this possibility is distinct and real. The "desert," used metonymically to stand in for the great chaos and blankness of the world, then seems to indicate that it is not a real possibility, since the voice is indistinct and scattered like sand in the wind. At the same time, however, might this gesture be more optimistic, suggesting that the sand will spread like the cherry blossoms of "A Sharply Worded Silence" and form a new world each time a grain lands? In either event, the ultimate conclusion of the poem is that the the speaker has recognized both the false optimism of spiritual purpose and the empty pessimism of a nihilist or chaotic perspective. He recognizes also, to a degree, that both are constructed by the self and are thus equally meaningful and equally meaningless. He remains unresolved, as at the end of "Cornwall," but is this time more sure of himself thanks to a thorough meta-analysis of his thinking.
One final thing to address in "Afterword" is the way in which the poem's self-reflexiveness prompts us to think of the person behind the persona of the painter—Glück herself. By thinking about what her painter persona has just written and unmasking the poetic language of this persona, Glück is really telling us to look more closely at herself and consider what she's saying with the authority of someone who is both informed (as the creator of the persona) and helplessly confused in the same ways as her creations (over the conflict between chaos and order). Importantly, one should also take care to note that the sublime is a longtime focus and element within Glück's own work, with NPR's Annalisa Quinn even writing in her review of Faithful and Virtuous Night that the collection's haziness represents the apex of Louise Glück's lifetime artistic trajectory towards blankness.
