Summary
"Midnight" is the twelfth poem in Louise Glück's Faithful and Virtuous Night. It is also the fourth 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." The poem follows our speaker as he sits at night on his balcony, feeling at once both incapacitated and supported by the night and the silence that surround him. Once the speaker internalizes and acknowledges this silence, he thinks of his memories as stars insofar as they are fixed. Immediately after, however, he qualifies this description of his memories by saying that stars "are unending fires, like the fires of hell" (23). This gives him pause, and he looks below his balcony to the dark river, where people are enjoying themselves on pleasure boats.
The speaker then recalls going on one such pleasure boat as a boy, along with his aunt and brother. He recalls distinctly the feeling of watching the same movements follow one another in succession as the boat moved "so that we moved into the future / while experiencing perpetual recurrences" (42–43). Similarly, he recalls the circular voyage of the boat, first moving up the river and then down it again as "through a reversal of time" (46). Finally, the speaker comments that watching the beauty of each shore pass made the voyage seem "like a religious ceremony / in which the congregation stood/ awaiting, beholding, / and that was the entire point, the beholding" (49–52). The speaker follows this by saying that, after the cruises, he and his brother were always tired, as if their entire childhoods were distinguished by exhaustion.
As the poem closes, we flash back into the present, where the speaker watches the moon rise from his balcony. He mistakenly thinks that he sees his aunt's hand on the railing, and finishes by noticing the exuberance of the pleasure cruisers below, who "[climb] onto the upper deck / to watch the land disappear into the ocean" (72–73).
Analysis
While much of the "painter poems" in the collection are either written in anticipation of night or staged during brief moments of the nighttime, "Midnight," as the title implies, is spoken entirely from a place of submersion into the night. Here, what we have only been able to grasp in abstractions or brief glances becomes embodied, and the narrator remarks on how the darkness of the night physically affects them. Interestingly enough, the effect of night on the speaker is not unilaterally negative or disquieting; rather, the night has a dynamic and diverse series of implications for our speaker's mental state and perception of the world. As before, the speaker feels a sense of enclosure in the nighttime, but unlike earlier poems, here the feeling of the night is unburdening: "I floated on it, perhaps in it, / or it carried me as a river carries / a boat" (2–4). The speaker feels at one with the dark and also relieved by it: "It had no end. I did not, I felt, / need to do anything. Everything / would be done for me, or done to me, / and if it was not done, it was not / essential" (11–15). Indeed, as he later declares, it seems "silence had entered [him]" (19). This seems to be a very stark departure from our speaker's earlier feelings about letting the night in and learning to accept silence as a necessary part of life. At the same time, however, the speaker returns slightly to his earlier reservations regarding the nighttime when he construes the metaphor of his memories as stars, thrown into relief by the surrounding blackness. These memories are not cheerful, however, but rather painful reminders of the past, hence their casting in the mold of "unending fires, like the fires of hell" (23).
Looking below himself, then, the speaker is re-centered in the calm of the darkness by noting how the river, an element of the dark night, connects him to both the natural world (i.e., "man’s work / interrupted by nature" [28–29]) and his own past (i.e., through his memories of the pleasure boat). Picking up the metaphor of night as a boat from the first stanza, the speaker then takes to a pleasure boat scene from his youth, where what he seems to remember most is the cycling or repetition of discrete sensations: "The coins in my aunt’s hand passed into the hand of the captain / I was handed my ticket, each time a fresh number. / Then the boat entered the current" (36–38). Diving deeper into this idea, the speaker then explores the "perpetual recurrences" of the monuments' passing (43) and the "reversal of time" represented by the boat's reversal of course in the river (46). The speaker thus experiences memory as a kind of haunting: the past, in its shattered fragments and discrete sensations, swims to him again and again, constantly being revisited and repeated in his mind. In this way, his memories are indeed (as the speaker himself says earlier) "fixed" (21), but they are also events which have no real significance or symbolic meaning. They are simply moments from the past that are brought up again, and the "entire point" of their existence is "beholding" (52). It is this act of beholding the past retrospectively from the present, after all, which allows the speaker to construct a sense of his own childhood and also assign new meaning to phenomena that might not have initially been obvious (e.g., the experience of the pleasure boat as commensurate with the experience of a palpable nighttime).
"Midnight" thus sees the painter-speaker fully immersed in the dream logic of the nighttime, rehashing the events of his earlier life as in a dream to synthesize new meanings and connections for the present. This subjective muddling of the past and present carries through to the poem's last two stanzas, which represent the formal culmination of the poem's logic and content. Here, right after we see the speaker reaching home with his brother as a boy, we are thrown into a rather confusing setting:
The night was very dark.
The moon rose.
I saw my aunt’s hand gripping the railing.In great excitement, clapping and cheering,
the others climbed onto the upper deck
to watch the land disappear into the ocean— (68–73)
Here, it is perhaps not readily apparent upon a first reading in which time frame we are stationed, let alone what is literally happening. Taking note of these stanzas' diction, however, one sees that the only other place in the poem in which "railing" is mentioned is in the context of our speaker's balcony. These final stanzas thus represent a sudden flashback to the moment of the present, in which the speaker imagines their departed aunt to still be with them on their balcony. Finally, looking down at the boats one more time from his balcony, the speaker contemplates the passengers ultimate slipping away into the blackness of the night. While this is the literal and eerie grounding on which the final stanzas rest, there is definitely an intentional confusion on Glück's part between past and present. After all, we are told that the boat itself moved back and forth in the speaker's youth: might these last two stanzas, then, be a reverse glimpse from the speaker's childhood home to the boat, where the aunt is gripping the railing on the deck and revelers are enjoying their night to come? Of course, the railing in the image convinces us that this is not so, but the feeling of these lines and their actions take us nonetheless back to the childhood memory of the pleasure boat. With the shift into the last two stanzas and through their internal construction, then, Glück allows us to feel the haunting weight and intrusion of the past just as her narrator does.
