Summary
"The White Series" is the nineteenth poem in Louise Glück's Faithful and Virtuous Night. It is also the final 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." It follows our painter speaker after his brush with death in "Approach of the Horizon," during a time period in his life where he feels static, almost trapped within a web of unmoving time. When his funds run low in the UK, he travels to visit his bother in America, in the state of Montana. Montana seems an alien world to the speaker, but he reconnects with his brother instantly and feels deeply the remembered intimacy of their nights together as children, sharing one bedroom. There is sadness mingled with joy in his brother's face upon their arrival at the brother's home, where the speaker thinks of the home in Cornwall and feels a sharp sense of terror.
Later, while living with his brother, the speaker begins to learn a variety of "new world skills / for which [he] would soon have no use" (75–76). He also gives drawing lessons to his sister-in-law and begins to paint again. These paintings are "immense and entirely white," with "glimpses, flashes / of blue, the blue of the western sky" (85, 87–88). They seem to speak to our artist of a different world, a place of purification far from the everyday. At the same time, however, the speaker's sister-in-law remarks that they speak to a deep sadness and desolation. The speaker feels as if he has been enclosed by the stillness of his surroundings, but still makes very conscious decisions while painting like that of a murderer deciding to kill. He then runs with this analogy, saying that he feels an obligation to paint but does not specifically recall how the paintings came into being.
The speaker then returns home with his young nephew (who has now become his lover) in tow. His nephew, a domestic and kind boy named Harry, sings from The Sound of Music and also the Jacques Brel that earlier haunted the speaker in "Afterword." The speaker claims that he need not choose between the two songs, since they become intermingled in Harry's voice. He also says that the darker songs inspire Harry, with each iteration acquiring a new variation on the theme. As the poem ends, the narrator feels, listening to Harry's singing, both desolate and as if a new passage is opening before him. He remembers the cat from the Jacques Brel song, now covered in snow and disappearing into the winter landscape. Finally, our speaker closes his tale by asking a very simple, yet unanswerable question: "O what will I see when I follow?" (141).
Analysis
If "Approach of the Horizon" represented a first brush with death, then "The White Series" places our speaker almost inside of or beyond death, waiting in strange liminal spaces for his physical body to expire. We are thrown into this strange, almost post-mortem setting immediately by the quick succession of telegraphic and concise lines at the start of the first stanza. Where our speaker would earlier have waxed for lines upon lines about the way light changes in winter or even throughout the day, here we only get "one day continuously followed another" and "winter passed" (1–2). So too do we get "the end came and went" at the beginning of the second stanza (7). After this introduction of death, then, there is a brief callback to the extended metaphor of the previous poem: "I passed through it like a plane passing through a cloud. / On the other side, the vacant sign still glowed above the lavatory" (9–10). Right afterwards, however, we return to concision, and the speaker tells us very quickly that "[his] aunt died" and "[his] brother moved to America" (11). From these first three stanzas, it thus becomes clear that this is a wholly different speaker than we knew just a few pages ago.
Our speaker's florid and prolix language returns, however, when he discusses something less objective than the passage of events—how he feels and responds to the passage of time. He speaks of the watch face, which even in darkness, has a special blueness which allows it to be read. It is in talking of this feature that we learn our speaker is in fact on a literal plane ride, breaking from the realm of metaphor into pataphor (i.e., a metaphor where the figurative components become literal or real). Even so, reading a watch face does not equate to the passage of time for our speaker, who feels that "the serene transit of the hour hand / no longer represent[s] [his] perception of time / which ha[s] become a sense of immobility / expressed as movement across vast distances" (17–20). This, of course, proximally refers to the fact that the speaker feels time has stopped while traveling in the plane, but it also carries the additional valence of time freezing and turning into something else entirely after a near-death experience. This idea is only solidified by the speaker's second explanation of how he feels about time: "time was now this environment in which / I was contained with my fellow passengers, / as the infant is contained in his sturdy crib / or, to stretch the point, as the unborn child / wallows in his mother’s womb" (23–27). Here, time literally becomes the fuselage of the plane, encompassing with the same stillness silence, death, or the pre-birth environment of the womb. More than simply letting silence and stillness enter him, the speaker has by now fully internalized its logic, seemingly allowing the reality of death to freeze him in his tracks (like the elderly man in "A Foreshortened Journey").
At first, things remain desolate and dreary (consistent with the air of death and loss) when the speaker arrives at his brother's home in Montana, where we learn he was traveling on the plane. It seems almost like the afterlife, with the speaking arriving "in darkness" and getting the feeling that he "had moved/ not horizontally but rather from a very low place / to something very high, / perhaps still in the air" (34, 36–39). He even compares the landscape of Montana to "the moon" (40). This is where the first major shift in the poem occurs: in the car with his brother, their mutual silence reminds our speaker of his youth. The speaker notes each of the substitutions between the bedtime tableau of his youth and this scene of riding in his brother's care, but he eventually declares that the two scenes are "interchangeable" (49). There is both alienation and familiarity, intimacy and coldness in the company of the brother. This is also mirrored when the two arrive at the brother's home, where "waves of sadness [alternate] with waves of joy" on his brother's face (61). It is both a homecoming and a farewell, and all parties recognize this. Even in the poem's form, from this point on, telegraphic clauses alternate with longer flights of language to mirror the mixed emotional content of the speaker's time in Montana.
The next important shift that occurs in the poem comes when our speaker begins painting again. The paintings are all white, testaments to the speaker's entrapment by silence, blankness, and death. At the same time, however, they contain flashes of the same blue from his watch face, almost an enchanted blue that pierces through such blank silence and portends something more positive. The overwhelming impression given by the paintings is still one of "helplessness or desolation" (99), but it also promises and speaks to a kind of spiritual redemption or purity in its blankness: "I have led my people, it said, / into the wilderness / where they will be purified" (91–93). The paintings then, are another metaphor—and one rooted in materials of the aesthetic—that tells us how it feels to be consumed and surrounded by death. As with the metaphor of the vital monitor and the plane, death represents the approach to a blank and infinite horizon, a world of silence where nothing can be retrieved. At the same time, however, within this desolate setting, there is some unknown, and perhaps even spiritual, potential for life to begin anew, in a strange and different form. This is also, on a more minor scale, a reflection of the speaker's own journey through death to Montana, where he recovers both a bit of his artistic sensibility and also feeling for another person (in the form of his nephew). Important here, as well, is the fact that the speaker feels deliberate and purposeful while painting the titular series of white paintings, using a darker tone to compare himself to a killer. This too is a message about how the painter has lived: even though it might not appear like it in hindsight, or even in the moment, life—just like artistic creation—is composed of a series of nested and purposeful choices that mutually interpenetrate and define one another.
The final change is, of course, the appearance of Harry. Harry is a mirror of the speaker and a constant reminder of his family life: after all, they "suit each other," and Harry sings just as the speaker's "mother sang (or, more likely, so [his] aunt reported)" (119-120). Just like a connection with the young girl in "A Foreshortened Journey" provided clarity and comfort to the old man during his trial, so too here does Harry provide a kind of palliative care to his uncle in this poem by reminding him of the passage of wisdom, memory, and life from one generation to the next. At the same time, however, Harry also serves as yet another reminder of what our speaker left in the past, singing songs to him from The Sound of Music and Jacques Brel. Interestingly, however, despite the stark contrast in the tone of these two songs, the speaker claims that "we do not, in the main, need to choose between them" (134). In the intimacy provided by both his brother and his nephew, the speaker learns at the end of his life to find comfort in the mingled sorrows and joys of life, as well as of death. This is also mirrored in the speaker's penultimate claim about the Jacques Brel song itself: "The end of hope, I think it means, / and yet in Harry’s voice it seems a great door is swinging open—" (138–139). Even in this song, about the decline of people in old age, the speaker has learned to see some positivity and potential for newness, for he has recognized that it all depends on what is inside him, much like the speaker of "A Work of Fiction" (the poem that immediately follows). At the end of the poem, and of the speaker's life, then, he is no longer scared of death, but rather curious and open to all possibilities, for he knows it constitutes a kind of loss, a kind of rebirth, and a kind of return, all in one: "The snow-covered cat disappears in the high branches; / O what will I see when I follow?" (140–141).
