Summary
"Approach of the Horizon" is the eighteenth poem in Louise Glück's Faithful and Virtuous Night. It is also the sixth 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 tells the story of the painter's visit to a hospital after experiencing numbness in his right arm. Once in the hospital, the painter meditates on his old age and the ways in which he has changed over the years. Remembering that his birthday is approaching, he even takes this meditation so far as to think about his ghost meeting his original body on the day of his birth, which he claims would effectually be "a ghost [being] forced / to embrace a mutilation" since "much of [his] original self / is already dead" (21–23). Since he cannot see it, he thinks of how the sky is a remote possibility, emblematic of freedom, far away from him.
From here, sitting in numbness and silence, the speaker then makes the first of many comparisons that will come to undergird the poem as a whole: he compares the departure of feeling from his arm to the conclusion of the audio portion of a plane's in-flight service (33–35). He then looks at the vital monitor near his bed, which tracks the rise and fall of his pulse "like a human voice in a lullaby" (55). He thinks of how, as he approaches the horizon of death, this line will also flatten out and become a straight line, resembling a horizon in its own right. Thinking of death's approach, he also thinks about how he has no heirs and nothing of substance to bequeath. He also asks forgiveness from loved ones, in advance of "the distortions / compelled by the occasion" of his death (68–69). After uttering these words, he closes the poem by returning to the airplane analogy, anticipating his own death using the language of a flight's journey:
I will be brief. This concludes,
as the stewardess says,
our short flight.And all the persons one will never know
crowd into the aisle, and all are funneled
into the terminal. (70–75)
Analysis
Though death has long been on our painter's mind, it is only in this poem that he actually gets close enough to death to confront it as a physical possibility. Remarkably, however, the confrontation of death as a physical possibility and inevitability does not erase here the painter's concern with death as an aesthetic question. Rather, this is the central preoccupation of "Approach of the Horizon," with the poem's central airplane metaphor being an attempt to create an aesthetic comparison between the known experience of air travel and the unknown experience of passing on.
Before the airplane metaphor is introduced, however, there are several interesting aesthetic questions raised by the advancement of death on the speaker. First, we are clued into the importance of aesthetics in the speaker's interrogation of death by the fact that it is, in the first place, a loss of feeling in his "painting arm" that sends him to the hospital (3). Only when the possibility of creation is seemingly undone does our speaker truly feel the presence of death, despite the fact that he had been fixated on it for quite some time. Second, after sending the doctor out in exchange for a secretary, the speaker explicitly states that the secretary's record of his ostensible passing will be aesthetic, as a story's account or narrative is: "So we begin" (14). Having been so concerned with the aesthetics of beginning versus ending before, it is very striking here that the speaker concedes that death itself also has a discrete beginning. These aesthetic elements behind beginnings and endings continue into the following stanza, where the speaker considers that he may die on his birthday and have "the two great moments [...] collide" (19). "Great" here, though a simple word, pulls a lot of weight in showing how the speaker imbues aesthetic value and gravity to birth (the human beginning) and death (the human end).
The introduction of the sky serves as a bridge between this aesthetic primer and the central metaphor of the poem. To the speaker, the sky represents unbridled freedom, a place where he is free to imagine "the triumphs of old age, / immaculate, visionary drawings / made with my left hand— / 'left,' also, as 'remaining'" (28–31). The sky thus plays a very dynamic role, here serving as a counterfactual dimension of fantasy in which death does not occur but also as a real place in which the speaker must confront his continual deterioration. While he may still be able to paint and create, it is only a remainder or relic of what was once possible with his young, able body. Silence then intrudes, something that the speaker has learned over the course of the collection to treat as both muse and anathema. This silence is also commensurate with the first piece of the plane metaphor, the conclusion of the audio service on a flight. This comparison both deflates the gravity of death while also making it all the more real and palpable.
Three more bridge elements link this first element in the airplane conceit to the later pieces that conclude the poem. First, the speaker's jocular observation that "Feeling has departed [...] / would make a fine headstone" introduces the most tangible aesthetic question of death—that is, what words one will leave on earth forever as an epitaph once they pass (36–37). Second, in the deferential movements of his secretary's head, the speaker discerns that "It cannot help, really, but be thrilling, / this emerging of shape from chaos" (47–48). Far from his earlier idea that death represents a loss of aesthetic composure, a complete yielding to the chaos of the surrounding cosmos, here the speaker seems to espouse that death is rather the consolidation of a final aesthetic form from the general chaos of life. Third, of course, is the element of the life support/vital machine. In the ebb and flow of his own pulse on death's doorstep, the narrator discerns the aesthetic vacillations of a lullaby. A moment later, he also maps the horizon of the machine, an infinite line and accompanying silence, with the metaphorical horizon of death as it approaches. This of course, is also commensurate with the horizon approached by a plane on its journey. Together then, such bridges provide us with the elemental materials necessary as readers to assemble a vision of death as both generative, destructive, and dynamic—something that the speaker has been trying to reach for almost the entire collection.
As the poem concludes, then, note the movement in the last three stanzas. The third-to-last stanza is very straightforward and emotional, even maudlin in its feigned complacency. It almost entirely shirks poetic language in favor of prosaic information. Where we move from there, however, is towards the metaphor that has been set up throughout the entire poem. In the penultimate stanza, the mapping of life to a plane's journey is completed. Then, in the final stanza, the most significant aesthetic choice is executed in the poem's last word—terminal. A terminal, is after all, an end to things, but it is also the place where flights begin and where people come together in a concourse. This is what the end of life is to Glück's speaker—perhaps a change of planes, perhaps a journey out of the sky and towards home, or perhaps a reunion with those who one has been missing. Death is all of these things, and at the same time, none of them fully can encompass its topography. The journey of our speaker towards reaching this arch metaphor is a process of continual discovery, an excavation of a prosthetic to understand what death truly is that never truly reaches its end.
