Light and Darkness (Motif)
In Faithful and Virtuous Night, one of the most striking motifs is the interplay of light and darkness. In poems like "Parable," "Cornwall," and others, the cycling of day and night as evoked by changes in light is meant to convey that time both passes through nature and seems to function cyclically in it. This then sheds light on the fact that human life is much the same, with a trajectory that goes forward in time but that is also periodically trapped in eddies (where individuals are unable to move on from the past but also unable to accept or face the future). At the same time, however, the alternation of light and dark is used in other poems in Faithful and Virtuous Night to convey a different message—that is, that life and death both feature the coexistence of joy and sorrow, just as a complete day necessarily features both darkness and light.
Cat (Symbol)
An interesting symbol that recurs in Faithful and Virtuous Night is that of the cat from Jacques Brel's song "Old Folks (Les Vieux)," which describes the general stagnation and decay of the elderly at the end of their lives. In the song, one specific aspect of the old folks' sadness is the death of their little cat, and Glück seizes on this detail and makes it a fixation of her English painter persona. This is primarily because the cat is symbolic of the speaker himself and his own nearness to death. In "Afterword," for example, just as the speaker begins to contemplate the possibility of his own death, as well as the potential for sublimeness to dwell in death, he thinks of the cat, which is simultaneously told that it will be reborn and scattered in the wind. This represents the speaker's own twin ideas—that is, the fear that death is truly the end and the simultaneous, optimistic hope that it is not. Later, in "The White Series," the cat then reappears, but only to disappear into the snow that surrounds the speaker. This, again, reminds the speaker of his own return to the blank and sublime parts of nature (death), and moves him to question for a final time what he will see in the afterlife.
Silence (Motif)
As discussed elsewhere, silence is motific in Faithful and Virtuous Night and is also important for the way in which it conveys lessons about fear and death. Throughout the collection, silence is complexed with death and darkness, becoming almost synonymous with each and allowing us to see places where each phenomenon intersects with the others. At first, silence is explored as the opposite of speech or creativity in the English painter poems, which is also commensurate with the painter's perceptions of death and nighttime as creatively stifling and emotionally taxing. As he learns to embrace uncertainty, chaos, and even the latent possibilities within death, however, his understanding of silence also shifts, and the presentation of silence in the collection changes to match. Silence becomes almost an open door, something which on its own may pose a threat (by opening the door to an outside threat) or alternatively offer salvation (offering passage into a new or different realm entirely). This then maps to the collection's mature thoughts on darkness and death, as well.
Select Prose Poems (Allegory/Parable)
Most of the prose poems in the collection seek to convey a spiritual lesson or tell us readers what the proper way to think or live is. As such, they fall within the purview of allegory and parable, two closely related genres primarily distinguished by the fact that parables use human characters, while allegories feature more animal, inanimate, or non-human characters. Looking at poems like "Theory of Memory," "Forbidden Music," "A Foreshortened Journey," and "The Open Window," it is easy to see how Glück was significantly influenced by parable while writing the collection, perhaps to emphasize the focus placed by the collection on new wisdom found in old age. At the same time, however, it is important to note poems like "The Horse and the Rider," which read more like allegorical fables and seem to gesture towards greater spiritual and material unity between nature and human beings as well.
Journeys/Trips (Motif)
One other image motific in Faithful and Virtuous Night is that of the journey or the trip. Whether these journeys are brief and repetitive like those in "A Sharply Worded Silence" and "Midnight" or long and drawn out like those in "Parable" and "Approach of the Horizon," each journey seems to have an interesting correspondence to a lesson about life. Shorter journeys and their cyclicality evoke the passage of smaller units of time like a year (composed of 365 more or less repetitive days), while longer journeys emphasize the enormity and scope of a human life. All types of journeys in the collection, however, are used by Glück as attempts to piece together a cohesive aesthetic picture of what life and death look like, which is fittingly also one of the central preoccupations of her English painter persona.
