Summary
"An Adventure" is the second poem in Louise Glück's Faithful and Virtuous Night. It follows the speaker's journey into and away from the kingdom of death, first beginning with the small goodbyes said by the speaker to things like love and poetry that have sustained them through their life. After these unceremonious realizations and goodbyes, the speaker then seems to literally ride into the kingdom of death, a conventional landscape where they are greeted by family members who have passed on. The speaker recounts the formlessness and strange experience of having entered death, then wakes to find their self in bed. The pillow next to the speaker is depressed, an indication to the speaker that "you had been with me" (44). As the poem closes, the speaker wonders whether they have actually escaped the kingdom of death in their dreams, or whether they are merely at the "precipice," about to fall into the landscape below (47).
Analysis
The poem is spoken from the perspective of an older person reflecting on the fact that their remaining time on earth is likely limited. Though the speaker is not clearly defined here, when placed in the context of the collection as a whole (and, specifically when contrasted with the prose poems and "painter poems" in the collection), it is likely that the speaker is meant to closely line up with Glück's own perspective as an aging artist. Moreover, the speaker of the poem reflects in the first two sections about the centrality of love and poetry in their life, two things which have been very central to Glück's own career as a poet.
In terms of its central message, the poem, much like "Parable" before it, frames the journey through old age and towards death as a kind of journey. Specifically, it is the speaker's imagined physical journey into the shadow of death that constitutes the titular "adventure." This journey is framed with with many of the same elements that were seen in "Parable"—mixing doubt and certainty, a sense of wonder, and a discussion of transformation—but at the same time, "An Adventure" differs in how it frames death not as the end of one's journey but rather the beginning of a wholly separate journey. For example, consider Stanza 1 where, as the speaker bids goodbye to the possibility of love in their old age, they are consoled by the possibility "that many profound discoveries / [await] us, hoping, at the same time, I would not be asked / to name them. For I could not name them. But the belief that they existed— / surely this counted for something?” (4–7). Here, there is much more of a definitive sense that death is the beginning of some other mode of being, rather than a sense of lament that one's time on earth is limited. As the speaker gets closer and closer to death, they start to realize that it is not a wall, but rather an unlocked door that serves as the threshold to something else entirely. Finally, this realization that death is not the end of being but rather a transformation of it spurs the speaker to be confused upon waking: is it true that they may have already died, not knowing the difference between life and afterlife, or is it true that their stirring in bed is evidence of having escaped death? This tension closes the poem out with the same dreamlike, philosophical bent that is seen in many other poems in the collection.
In terms of its form, the poem departs from Glück's traditional style by being written in numbered sections and lapsing into sections of lengthy descriptions. The latter is particularly important to recognize for the way in which Glück here (and in other poems in this collection) juxtaposes lengthy flights of ornate language with simple truisms, adding an additional feeling of tension between doubt (evoked by elliptical language) and certainty (evoked by pithy or concise language). For example, consider the way in which the speaker's lengthy mental rumination condenses into a short statement of the truth, spoken by their heart: "It came to me one night as I was falling asleep / that I had finished with those amorous adventures / to which I had long been a slave. Finished with love? / my heart murmured" (1–4). This contrast between ornate, hazy fantasy and clipped, concise truth then continues throughout the rest of the poem, expressed primarily through punctuation and rhythm. In Sections 1–3, for example, as the speaker imagines their transformation into a knight riding into the kingdom of death, the poetic phrases are much more protracted, breathy, and expansive. By the time the speaker is confronted with the embodied feeling of death in Stanza 4 ("All around, the dead were cheering me on, the joy of finding them / obliterated by the task of responding to them—" [33–34]), however, they begin to speak more to truth. Phrases become more compact and cut themselves off with em dashes, equations are made at the beginning of Stanza 5 between what was and what is (e.g., flesh versus mist), and eventually, the speaker wakes up in Stanza 6. On a formal level too, the poem thus represents a foray or adventure into the realm of fantasy, before coming to a sharp realization and returning to normalcy.
One other thing in "An Adventure" that it is important to account for is the appearance of the medieval imagery of knights and kingdoms, which will come to play an important role in the collection's later poems. First and foremost, the appearance of this imagery calls to mind Dan Chiasson's words that the collection on the whole "is governed by the logic of medieval dream vision, where the enigmas of the day are not resolved but, rather, reconceived as symbol and allegory." This is one such example of the "medieval dream vision": here, the speaker dreams that they have passed into the realm of the dead, first seeing their existence as a knight as emblematic of their rebirth as provincial, fantastical, and pure but eventually learning to see their armor as a burden (much like "the task of responding to them"). Even when the speaker realizes that the journey to death is not without its troubles, however, there is a retained aspect of purity or nebulousness (seen in the "mist" and in the "substance without form" [36–38]). This, too, however, is immediately undercut by the humor of the speaker's heart (reborn as a steed) uttering, "neigh, neigh [...] / or perhaps nay, nay" (39–40). The knight imagery is thus as equivocal as the speaker's thoughts on death, at once a picture of a devoted and devout servant, but at the same time a picture of a darker society, one where invading uncertainties needed to be fought off. Later in the collection, this dual quality of the knight will also be explored in the duality of "knight" and "night".
A lingering question that remains at the end of "An Adventure," however, is who the "you" is that appears in the last stanza (44). Earlier, the speaker uses the second person to comment generally to their audience, but here the "you" figure seems particularly embodied and specific, even leaving an indent in the speaker's second pillowcase (45). Is the "you" here a departed lover visited while temporarily in the realm of death? Is the "you" a current lover that belies their earlier claim about having given up love in old age? Either way, the impression left by this "you" is just as eerie and dreamlike as the rest of the poem, and the overall impression left by it is not so shocking or unexpected as it is contributing to the general air of mystery and wonder that pervades the collection.
