Summary
"The Sword in the Stone" is the thirteenth poem in Louise Glück's Faithful and Virtuous Night. It is also the fifth 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." This poem is less expressly ruminative than the other painter poems, and it conveys a brief narrative of the speaker's visit to a psychoanalyst, as well as his subsequent trip to have dinner with a friend in town, who is a writer.
At the psychoanalyst, the speaker thinks of the intimacy established by his performances that the analyst seeks to ignore and see through to the heart of the speaker's mind. The speaker says that he has had a longstanding feeling that he is floating above his life, but he is unsure of whether the life he observes is still occurring. He reflects that, though he has started to draw and sculpt again, the analysis takes up a lot of his time. He thinks about the forgiving and accepting look given to him by his therapist, and he maps it to the looks shared by he and his brother when they shared a room: "perhaps the silence between us [i.e., he and his brother] prefigured / this silence [i.e., with his therapist] , in which everything that remained unspoken / was somehow shared" (43–45). After this thought, however, his hour with his psychoanalyst ends, and the speaker departs into town.
The speaker walks through town and notices the bustle and activity around him, which makes him uneasy. Conversely, he believes that "truth [...] / [is] expressed as stillness" (64–65). On his way to meet a friend for dinner, he passes the river and a gallery, where he remarks through the window that his friends have become famous. Later at dinner, the speaker gets in an argument with his friend over aesthetics. It is revealed that this friend is a writer, and his friend finds the river reflecting the lights of the bridge to be a potent metaphor for the way in which nature reflects art. The speaker then lapses into a discussion of his friend's career as a writer—he writes books that resemble one another, and he is seen as a mirror image of the speaker in that the friend's "complacency disguised suffering / as perhaps [the speaker's] suffering disguised complacency" (84–85). The speaker accuses his friend of laziness, and to lobby an insult back, his friend turns a clean glass on the table, commenting that, like the speaker's perfectionism and ostensible purity, it leaves no mark on the tablecloth.
As the poem closes, the speaker returns home with a dazed feeling, contemplating whether it is the night or the wine that has intoxicated him. He then recalls a point made by his friend about the process of artistic creation and reception:
It is the critics, he said,
the critics have the ideas. We artists
(he included me)—we artists
are just children at our games. (97–100)
Analysis
There are two important relationships in "The Sword in the Stone"—the relationship of the speaker with his psychoanalyst and the relationship of the speaker with his good friend. These relationships are further defined by core values that contravene one another. In other words, the relationship with the analyst is meant to reassure the speaker and solidify his sense of self; meanwhile, the speaker's relationship with his friend is meant to be challenging, and the speaker even allows his friend to attack his sense of self. Given the poem's title, which situates us again firmly in the milieu of the medieval, it would seem that the speaker's two relationships are parallel to the dichotomy of the knight/night figure at the center of the painter's interest throughout the collection: while one side is focused on virtue and clarity of purpose, the other is focused on doubt, obfuscation, and perhaps even violence. To fully understand the poem, it is thus important to fully unpack these relationships and their consequences for the speaker.
In the speaker's relationship with his analyst, there is a sense that the general wispiness and spiritual bent pervading the collection ought to be rejected, thrown out in favor of intimacy and understanding. Rather than really trying to reach any root of disordered or troubled thoughts with his therapist, the speaker instead plays a "game" with him, of one "ingenuity versus / evasiveness" (6–7). He comments more on his intimacy with his analyst than he does on the therapist's techniques—saying that this intimacy is, keeping in theme with the medieval, "like a forest around a castle" (15). Before we get more information on either, however, we learn that our speaker has been dealing with the "giddy sensation /of floating above [his] life," feeling as if the life he remembers occurred "far away" (20–21). He is even unsure about whether the life he currently is living is even the same as the one he remembers. Just a few lines later, it seems that he also questions the fundamental character of his life, wondering if spending too much time in therapy takes time away from anything else—and, if so, what. After this, we get a rather unflattering portrait of the analyst's techniques: "long intervals of silence alternating / with somewhat listless ruminations / and rhetorical questions" (36–38). These do not move the speaker or make him feel any more grounded in his life and body. What does, ironically, is the way that his analyst looks at him, like "a mother," with "forgiveness preceding understanding" (40–41). One might begin to wonder if the speaker is accepting the analyst as yet another substitute to fill the void of his mother's loss, but he rebuffs this idea almost immediately, mapping the gaze of the therapist instead to his brother's looks at nighttime in early childhood. It seems, consistent with what we know about our speaker, that silence is more cherished by him than words, at least in part because silence opens the door for people to connect genuinely with one another via the unspoken (e.g., gazes, physical touch). Just as the speaker thinks of interrogating this more, however, his hour with his therapist ends.
If the therapist relationship is one of silent intimacies and harmonies, then the friend relationship is one of loud dissonances (albeit endearing ones). This difference in the two relationships is first prefigured by the speaker's walk through town. There, he first encounters a loud rush of activity that stands out against the backdrop of his quiet therapy appointment, but this eventually gives way to the quiet of galleries and the consoling "smell of oblivion" which comes from the local river (69). The experience of the therapy appointment is tempered by the loudness of the street, just as the coming disagreement with the speaker's friend is tempered by the introductory serenity of the natural world around him. Also important is the fact that the speaker stops to remark on his friends' fame at the gallery: this also sets the stage for his confrontational and comparative interaction with his friend. When the speaker actually arrives at dinner with his friend, then, they immediately have a disagreement over aesthetics. Aesthetics have been framed throughout the collection as an essential dimension of life, so this argument over aesthetics should not be tossed aside, but rather registered as a deep conflict over the proper way to live. And rightly, the speaker's friend seems to be an inverted mirror image of himself. Where the narrator has always thought nature serene for the way it eats up the affairs of men and casts them into blankness, his friend instead thinks that the reflection of artifice in nature is remarkable. His friend feigns complacency to cover up suffering, but the narrator gives a great deal of weight to his experiences of suffering to obscure the utter numbness and complacency with which he lives through old age. And, most remarkably, when the speaker complains about his friend's work ethic, his friend merely tells him that he an impotent creator, and that his affected purity and sense of mystery does not produce any distinct impression. This seems to hit home for our speaker, whose final words in the poem (recounted from his friend) seem to support the idea that, as artists, they are in general as impotent as children, while critics are the ones who have all the real ideas.
In this poem, we thus learn a great deal about the speaker's personal relationships in the present, including with himself. Whereas earlier "painter poems" have primarily sought to show the events and thought processes that have guided our speaker to this point in his life, here we are made to confront the shortcomings of how these events and philosophies influence his relationships. He craves silence, which allows for the creation of deeper intimacy and clarity, but he also loathes direct speech, the primary way such intimacy and clarity is conventionally created. He loves to argue with his friend and to rethink his own philosophies, but doing so also torments him and threatens his sense of self. In sum, the artist is portrayed as deeply insecure, rapidly shifting from being on guard to a state of reverie, and vice versa. One final thing that is also worth noting is that here the painter especially resembles Glück, with an interest in psychoanalysis and a coterie of famous creative friends. Elsewhere, the persona is built up rather distinctly from Glück, but why here does she allow the persona to grow so thin?
