Summary
The "Parable" is the first poem in Louise Glück's Faithful and Virtuous Night. It tells the story of a group of travelers lengthily debating the nature of a coming journey, as well as whether this journey should have a purpose. As the travelers argue, a great deal of time passes and the travelers age. When they realize this (i.e., that they have aged but not physically moved anywhere), however, their understanding of the journey at hand changes. Those in the group who thought the journey should have a purpose now think that the purpose of the journey was, all along, to simply pass through time and see how both one's self and the surrounding world change. Those in the group who did not want the journey to have a purpose, on the other hand, now feel that they had encountered purpose and truth by remaining free and not pursuing any specific goal. All in all, the strange miracle of life's journey leaves all the travelers content with their respective existences, regardless of how small or sedentary they were.
Analysis
As the title of the poem suggests, this poem is a parable (i.e., a story used to demonstrate a moral or spiritual lesson) regarding the meaning of life. The poem teaches that, regardless of the fact that our time on earth is limited, the realization of this fact and accounting for it in the face of all we get to experience together produce a sense of wonder. Regardless of whether one has some purpose (e.g., religion, vocation, family) while moving through life or whether one freely lives with little direction, we all end at the same place (i.e., death), and our journeys from birth to this ending place are all in some way purposeful and meaningful by virtue of being distinct and discrete.
In terms of its form, the poem adopts a prosaic tonality without fully lapsing into a prose poem structure. In other words, like some other poems in the collection (e.g., "Utopia," "Forbidden Music"), the pithiness and didacticism of "Parable" make it read less like a poem than a spiritual lesson or religious paradox. Unlike the prose poems present elsewhere in the collection, however, "Parable" is written in verse (albeit in one continuous stanza) with clear and irregular line breaks that produce a sense of rhythm. This intermediate or liminal nature of the poem's structure allows it to serve as an introduction or trace a turning point in Glück's oeuvre (i.e., from verse to prose poetry). Additionally, it mirrors the content of the poem insofar as it is a dynamic form that makes use of enjambments but nonetheless appears static as one paragraph. In a similar way, the lives of each of the travelers in the poem appear static on their surface (i.e., because they have not actually gone anywhere) but in reality reflect a wide variety of subtle and unique changes and experiences over time.
At the forefront of "Parable," then, are two thematic phenomena—religion and the natural world. To speak first of religion, consider the way in which the title, evocative of the Bible, already situates us in this milieu. The first line's allusion to the teachings of Saint Francis then solidifies and grounds this focus moving forward in the poem. From here on, the poem's lexicon is highly religious: consider words like "souls" (2), "worldly goods" (9), "consecrated" (10), "pilgrims" (11), and "miraculous" (30). The language used in the rest of the poem (e.g., "purpose," "journey") is nondescript and rather vague, but this highly religious and spiritual context that pervades the poem establishes that the topic at hand is truly life, and that the "purpose" and "journey" really carry deeper meaning as well. This suggestive quality of "Parable" not only plugs the poem into parable as a wider genre, but also sets the vague yet clear tone that will come to dominate the rest of this collection. An important point about the coexistence of clarity and doubt in "Parable" also lies in the fact of the poem's ending. We are not told that life is unequivocally miraculous, only that things "seemed / in a strange way miraculous" (29–30). Moreover, instead of being told what the purpose of the journey was explicitly, Glück only tells us that "those who believed we should have a purpose / believed this was the purpose, and those who felt we must remain free / in order to encounter truth felt it had been revealed" (30–32). Here, feeling, seeming, and subjective judgement are just as important as being and fact, and this contributes to the dreamlike philosophical quality of both the poem and the collection. Perhaps this realization of truth and illusion's coexistence is what Glück gestures to as "a dream, a something-sought" earlier in the poem (12).
Also on the poem's mind is nature and the cycling of the seasons. In order to illustrate the passage of time, the poem shows us the different ways in which the world changes around our travelers, rather than vice versa:
And snow fell upon us, and wind blew,
which in time abated—where the snow had been, many flowers appeared,
and where the stars had shone, the sun rose over the tree line
so that we had shadows again; many times this happened.
Also rain, also flooding sometimes, also avalanches, in which
some of us were lost [...] (17–22)
Nature, as in Glück's earlier work, is here necessarily regenerative and cyclical. Things happen "many times," but they also yield to one another seamlessly in a way that is in itself always unique and beautiful (as clued by the occasional markers of "also" and "sometimes"). In the poem, the lives of the travelers then seem very plugged into nature: they change between day and night over the years, but also retain a cyclical element and a general feeling of consistency. Were these travelers not present in nature and about to undertake their journey for many years, would they have come to the same realization about the nature of aging and life? Based on what we are presented with, it appears that nature is just as important to the poem as the religious overtones: nature is thus a site of religious or spiritual revelation, but also necessarily a site of stasis and destruction. It is the coexistence of these elements in nature that moves both the travelers and we readers to recognize the same forces at work in our own lives.
