Summary
"Visitors from Abroad" is the seventh poem in Louise Glück's Faithful and Virtuous Night. It follows the story of our speaker, an older woman who is awoken in the middle of the night by a strange phone call. When no one is on the other line, she looks out on the front steps and sees her deceased mother, father, and sister, who accuse her of having forgotten them. After this confrontation, the speaker is tormented for the remainder of the winter night and thinks to herself that she does in fact remember her family, constructing them time and again from her own memories and impressions: "Every time I say 'I,' it refers to you" (33). As the poem closes, the speaker then looks out on the winter scene and, deeply troubled, wonders who would call her in the middle of the night.
Analysis
Like "Aboriginal Landscape," the poem that immediately follows it, "Visitors from Abroad" stages an encounter between the speaker and her late family members. Unlike "Aboriginal Landscape," however, "Visitors from Abroad" is not so focused on the anxiety of death as it is on the anxiety of separation from one's loved ones. Despite both the cheekiness of the title (i.e., the fact that her family is visiting her from the afterlife and not from "abroad") and some of the language used in the poem (e.g., "like Mormon missionaries" [25]), this poem is a highly pained and conflicted one. Moreover, given the fact that the speaker is definitively a woman writer of an older age (as is evidenced by "a daughter, a fellow female" [17] and the speaker's "books" [19]), the speaker persona may be thought of as a parallel to Louise Glück, if not directly Glück herself. Together, the poem thus provides readers with a highly personal account of a woman nearing death, whose encounter with her beloved family members both shocks and disquiets her. Especially since the reuniting of a family upon death is presented positively elsewhere in the collection, "Visitors from Abroad" is thus important insofar as it provides us with a more complicated and nuanced picture of this idea.
In order to fully unpack the speaker's encounter with her parents, each aspect of their interaction must first be explored, beginning first with the phone call. Even before the speaker knows that she is about to meet with her departed relatives, we are shown how she is already thinking of them: "[The ringing phone] had / my mother’s persistence and my father’s / pained embarrassment" (9–11). Notably, this evidence directly contravenes the accusations of her parents that she has forgotten them. Next, once the speaker picks up the phone and realizes that no one is on the other line, she meditates to herself, "When I picked it up, the line was dead. / Or was the phone working and the caller dead? / Or was it not the phone, but the door perhaps?" (12–14). This pensive turn brings our attention once again not only to the fact that the speaker is thinking of the dead, but also to the fact that the speaker is here (as elsewhere in the collection) conflating silence with death. This silence, the gap that separates the speaker from her dead relatives, is then evoked here, as elsewhere in the collection, by the same image of the door.
After this image, the speaker blurs the boundary between herself and her family in interesting ways. In Section 2, the speaker's parents accuse her of forgetting them, though we have already seen ample evidence in Section 1 that this is not the case. This is likely a reflexive move on the speaker's part, an excuse to bring her departed family even closer to her in mind and spirit than they already are. Later, in Section 3, after the speaker is tormented by meeting with her seemingly belligerent and angry relatives, she grows bold enough to rebut their claims explicitly and on her own: "I write about you all the time, I said aloud. / Every time I say 'I,' it refers to you" (32–33). Rather than imagine her family as distinct entities and consider them in her poetry, we learn here that the speaker has learned to fill the void of her family's losses by considering her family members as pieces of herself, or else forces that have shaped and left an indelible impression on her. The speaker's own mind reconstructs her family through memory, perhaps rather than thinking of her family members as they actually were. Though this is how the speaker attempts to respond to her family, it notably leaves her with a feeling of unease and irresolution. As the poem ends, she contemplates the silence around her (evocative of the divide of mortality which separates the living and the dead), refuses to return the phone to its receiver, and thinks about how "trouble" and "despair" have visited her (43).
The picture we are left with is thus an interesting and realistic picture of an artist troubled by their past as well as by their future. The speaker is unable to divorce themselves or their art from the memory of their departed family members (the speaker and her 3 deceased family members even being echoed on a formal level by the poem's 4 sections), but their thoughts of these loved ones are of course rooted in and oriented in the speaker's individual perceptions and memories. The only way for the speaker to return to authentically communicating with and joining in with her family members is to cross the threshold of mortality (symbolized by the door), but even this is disquieting and makes the inevitability of the speaker's own death feel all the more real. The sentiment is familiar in the collection, and echoed even in "An Adventure," one of the collection's other numbered poems: "All around, the dead were cheering me on, the joy of finding them / obliterated by the task of responding to them—" (33–34).
