Summary
"Faithful and Virtuous Night" is the fourth poem in Louise Glück's collection of the same name. It is also the first of the "painter poems" in the collection—that is, those poems which follow the story of an English painter orphaned at a young age. "Faithful and Virtuous Night" specifically cover the earliest portion of the painter's life—his early childhood and memories of growing up with his older brother and aunt. The poem begins with a meditation on what it means to begin a story and how it is possible to end it after doing so, most succinctly summarized by the line "If it is so difficult to begin, imagine what it will be to end" (5). From here, the speaker remembers sleeping in his childhood bed and sharing a room with his brother, who he remembers once read a book called "the faithful and virtuous night" (28). Though the speaker mistakes the title as such, it is clear from context that the book is actually about King Arthur and carries the word "knight" in its title, rather than "night." The speaker then recalls a series of restless and busy days punctuated by periods of rest at night, followed by a brief description of one of his early birthdays, during which he is gifted a book called My First Reader by his aunt.
Eventually, the speaker feels that a schism is occurring in time, and recalls his parents leaving to go on a trip from which they never returned, having been killed by a falling tree. The speaker recalls his early sadness at his parents' death, then flashes back to reading My First Reader and his brother always returning from school in the evening, now older. Even amidst these constancies, however, the speaker is trapped by a sense of discontinuity and sadness. Once a vibrant and happy talker, the speaker seems to have stopped speaking to others while deep in this period of sadness. The speaker then meditates on the fact that they were no longer a baby, yet did not know what direction their future life was to take. Eventually, the speaker summarizes this feeling of ambivalence: "It had occurred to me that all human beings are divided / into those who wish to move forward / and those who wish to go back. / Or you could say, those who wish to keep moving / and those who want to be stopped in their tracks / as by the blazing sword" (163–168). The speaker's brother comforts him, however, and he eventually is able to speak again, which overjoys their aunt.
The speaker closes by discussing his subsequent upbringing under his aunt. He mentions that he passed time drawing with colored pencils, "though what [he] saw [while drawing], as [he] told [his] aunt, / was less a factual account of the world / than a vision of its transformation / subsequent to passage through the void of [himself]" (188–191). The speaker says that he often drew pictures of his mother, and that while his soul searched for his mother and he felt this strongly as a kind of "death wish," he also had learned to be content through "accepting [the] substitutes" and diversions that art provides (210, 215). The speaker then draws the poem to a close by condensing the time after his childhood, stating simply that he grew into a man. From here, he leaves the ending rather open, saying "It has come to seem / there is no perfect ending. / Indeed, there are infinite endings. / Or perhaps, once one begins, / there are only endings" (222–226).
Analysis
"Faithful and Virtuous Night" is rightly the titular poem of the collection, introducing us at a very early stage to many of Glück's central theses and philosophies in the text. As mentioned, the poem also introduces us to the character of the painter, a personality who shares distinct similarities with Glück but also departs from her in key ways. Glück, like the speaker, is an artist who attempts to make visible what is invisible and extract meaning from everyday life; still, their chosen media differ. So too, are their family lives different: while both felt very close to their mothers, Glück's family remained whole and intact far longer than the painter's. Why, then, does Glück assume this persona, who is so different from her but also shares the sentiments and reflections of old age with her? Perhaps it is a deflection device, allowing Glück to reach the heart of things that might otherwise seem odd or disingenuous coming from her own mouth. At the same time, however, it is possible that Glück chooses this distinct persona specifically to highlight the fact that, regardless of one's background, the hazy and eerie period of old age causes similar fascinations, emotions, and memories to stir.
One of the central fascinations of the poem lies in silence, something that will also come to define much of the thematic focus of the collection as a whole. Consider even how the poem opens: "My story begins very simply: I could speak and I was happy. / Or: I could speak, thus I was happy. / Or: I was happy, thus speaking" (1–3). As a creative, the speaker of the poem maps breaking silence to happiness. He is happy when he makes the first stroke on a canvas, just as a poet is only satisfied when they are speaking. Silence in the poem is thus initially presented as something to be avoided and perhaps even feared. The speaker's opinion of silence changes, however, soon afterwards. By embracing the night, as well as the intimacies provided by sharing that time with his brother, the speaker learns to see night as a respite from the chaotic worries and activities of the day. Then, he reverts to his original thinking after the death of his parents. Deprived of the people he loves, he is unable to fill the void between his internal state and the world around him, and he falls once again into silence. Only by creating art—and specifically, mimetic or prosthetic representations of what he lost ("I drew pictures of my mother / for which my aunt posed" [194–195])—is the speaker able to speak again and find contentment. Silence in the poem thus lends itself to understanding what intimacy and art mean to our speaker, as well as priming us to understand what they mean to Glück.
Just as silence lies at the uncanny boundary between an ecstatic, speechless life and death, time also plays a very liminal and strange role in the poem, as well as in the collection as a whole. Time seems here to be viewed through a kind of telescope, with events in the recent past being blurred and contracted into an indistinct mass while events from the distant past come into distinction and focus. This is, of course, what happens when one is at the peak of a reminiscent old age, but it is also evidence of the fissures and fragments formed in the speaker's mind after the death of his parents. Trauma, one of the focuses of Glück's larger oeuvre, here takes on new life as old age and childhood are brought together in retrospective, and childhood and death are brought together in the moment of the young speaker's recollected memories. It is this understanding of time and trauma as mutually influential that brings the speaker to make such claims as his distinction between those who want to move forward and those who want to go back, as well as what creates the aberrations in time within the poem (like his brother getting suddenly older). It is also this recognition of subjectivity that influences the artist's aesthetic philosophy regarding the "void of [himself]" (191). Thus, in understanding how the self understands and constructs time in the poem, Glück is able to unify aesthetics, trauma, and the nostalgia of old age all at once.
These conceptual foci of the poem are also spoken to by its immense and sprawling form. The poem is lengthy, spanning over 200 lines, and its language is tense, florid, and elliptical in a way that differs from Glück's earlier work. The constant digression, tautological expression, and general wordiness of the poem is a testament to the ways in which these scattered moments from the speaker's youth stick with him. He is unable to do anything but dwell on them in old age. This is also where the poem's fixation on endings comes from. Rather than introduce us to a spiritual or vague sensibility like some of the other poems in the collection, here the opening up of the conclusion is very purposeful and tailored. We have already seen how life, time, trauma, and memory have become aesthetic fixations and questions for our speaker: it is only fitting that the question of how to close (i.e., how to stop creating, and thus how to die) are also very aesthetic questions for the speaker. Does death resemble the silence of an ending, or is there a blossoming that occurs in death, opening the self up to myriad new possibilities that are not fully understood (as in "An Adventure")? The form of the poem is thus well-suited to its content, emphasizing its major points and giving readers general impressions of these points, perhaps before they are even formally recognized.
