Summary
"Cornwall" is the tenth poem in Louise Glück's Faithful and Virtuous Night. It is also the second 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." Unlike "Faithful and Virtuous Night" before it, however, "Cornwall" is less narrative than descriptive: specifically, the poem describes the general silence of the painter and follows his attempts to find words and write in a journal, both in a rented country home and once he returns to his long-term residence. Though the speaker comes to recognize that elements of death (particularly, his parents' deaths) and silence hang over his everyday life, he attempts to keep writing and speaking. At the poem's end, however, he feels trapped between the past and the silence ahead of him, does not speak to others, and merely becomes an observer of the passing days.
Analysis
"Cornwall" is written almost entirely as an extended metaphor, detailing the speaker's perceived relation of words and silence a through broader comparison of light and mist. This begins in the first stanza, where the yellow ball from My First Reader in "Faithful and Virtuous Night" is seen falling into tall grass. The ball, now "gold," flashes in the grass and attracts the speaker, but upon approaching the ball, one finds that the flashes were instead coming from "field buttercups," a part of the grass (5–6). This metaphor introduces the central conceit of the poem, as felt by our speaker—that is, that he exists and lives in a landscape of silence, sometimes thinking that a word will be found only to realize that it was an illusion, a mere part of the expansive silence of the world around him. This also foregrounds the general conceptual divide—seen elsewhere throughout the collection—between clarity and doubt, with each shining word representing an instant of clarity and the obscuring grass representative of doubt or vagueness. This structuralist binary is then stated explicitly in the second stanza, where the speaker lays his ideas bare: "Word/mist, word/mist: thus it was with me" (7).
From this introduction to the concept of the poem's central conceit, the speaker then moves to a qualification of his perceived relation of silence and clarity: "my silence was never total" (8). In Stanza 3, the speaker then continues the metaphor of the game (i.e., with the ball) played in mist to say that, sometimes, the mist does indeed clear. Ironically, however, once the mist clears, the speaker claims that "the game was over" (11). Despite the word/ball having finally been revealed, the speaker claims that it has been "flattened by the elements / so it was now both recovered and useless" (12–13). The urgency and intent of pursuing the word in order to break silence have been attenuated, so by the time it is finally located and reached, there is no longer a point or game in doing so.
This qualification by the speaker then leads to a demonstration of this metaphor's real embodiment—the speaker's own attempts to write in a journal in a rustic landscape (whose fields and meadows recall the landscape of the metaphorical ball game). The speaker marks that night is a period where the murmur of the day lapses into "something akin to silence" (19). Only in this silent setting does the speaker then turn to his own journal in an attempt to write. When he does so, however, he is able only to "[sense] the vanished words / lying with their companions, / like fragments of an unclaimed biography" (27–29). He explains then that he was distraught at such silence, since it made him feel "as though the tree that confronted my parents / had become an abyss shaped like a tree" (34–35). In other words, by grounding his metaphor in the real experience of his grief, the speaker has brought his extended metaphor to its apex. It is not merely that the speaker is driven by silence to pursue words (albeit ones that may not always be there), but it is rather that silence plays a dual role for the speaker. It is both what drives him to create and write as well as what holds him back and restrains him through the traumatic memory of his parents' death. Silence is both yearned for and feared by our speaker, which immobilizes him.
From this realization, which perhaps drives too close to the heart of the matter for our speaker, we then return to the real world of the speaker's surroundings. Now at home, he looks out around him and sees the few bright points where fog encircles a lightbulb and is made visible. This, however, draws him not to the clarity of the bulb (as was done before with the ball), but rather to the general pervasiveness of the silence around him (represented by the fog/mist). The realization that this is "simply the way things [are]," that silence bounds him on both sides—and metaphorically, in the past with his trauma and in the future with his death—sobers him and causes him to stop writing (58). He then retires into a reclusive habit, speaking to few and merely watching the earth and the sky take turns being lit up (a rendition of day and night that focuses on light rather than darkness). The poem thus ends in a very ambivalent place, with the speaker both perceiving the gravity of the darkness around him but also attempting to hold on to the light he also sees.
This ambivalence is also reflected deeply in the form of the last several stanzas. Consider the poem's ending:
I shut my book.
It was all behind me, all in the past.Ahead, as I have said, was silence.
I spoke to no one.
Sometimes the phone rang.Day alternated with night, the earth and sky
taking turns being illuminated. (60–66)
Here, note that stanzas indicating a type of inactivity or resolution are written in the more stable couplet form. The speaker thinks that they can relegate their trauma to the domain of the past, and this mental defense mechanism results in a couplet. The speaker's hermitic ways, too, warrant a short and static couplet. Finally, the binary movement of the sun and the moon, of light and dark being balanced, also earns a couplet that closes the poem. At the same time, however, note that the speaker's thoughts of the future are uncomfortable and unbalanced, leading to the expression of these thoughts as a singleton line. Despite appearances, it would seem that there is a great deal of internal tension in these closing lines, despite the appearance of an ending with the final couplet. Fittingly, this very idea is touched on in "Afterword," the poem which immediately follows.
