Old Age
One of the central themes in Faithful and Virtuous Night is that of old age, as well as the unique emotional and psychological contours of old age. Generally speaking, Glück uses the older age of many of her speakers in the collection to shed light on elderly life as liminal—that is, as fundamentally indeterminate and trapped between two more definite states. These, of course, are death (if one is to move forward) and a hollow life of nostalgia, futility, and perhaps even psychosis (if one tries to go backwards).
In speakers like the English painter before "The White Series" and the old man in "A Foreshortened Journey," we see the very real way in which old age can feel like a trap, producing both creative and physical anergy. What Glück endeavors to convince us of in Faithful and Virtuous Night, however, is that this common way of depicting or understanding old age is in some ways disingenuous: old age does, in fact, bring a great deal of uncertainty to one's life, but this is why it is all the more important to take advantage of one's golden years. Death does sit ahead, but might death truly be the beginning of something new and incomprehensible? Is it worth living in fear of death, or wasting one's present to wallow in the past? Glück tells us that it is verily not in our interests to let such existential worries define us: rather, we ought to seek and seize intimacy and other living virtues while we still can, while also keeping calm with the knowledge that one day, the body will accommodate death. With regard to whether this accommodation will be just like our bodies' accommodations of trauma and loss during our lives, however, Glück does not pretend to have an answer.
Silence (and Darkness and Death)
Important to the collection's development of the theme of old age is its twin exploration of death, as well as death's companion phenomena of silence and darkness. Silence is the most elemental and protean of the three, taking a variety of forms and also appearing within the other two phenomena. The English painter in Faithful and Virtuous Night, for example, notices night as the encroachment of a type of silence (corresponding to the cessation of daytime activities), but he also comes to see silence as a response to trauma, a very basic and inevitable thing which precludes him speaking and creating new things in the world. At the beginning of the collection, silence and darkness then come off as a kind of stifling, albeit one in which there is some potential for rebirth or regeneration. Consider, for example, how at night, despite feelings of isolation and continued reminders of one's losses and traumas, there is the potential not just for intimacy (as the English painter has with his brother as a boy) but also for dreaming (as in "An Adventure"), which both rehashes the events of one's day and provides an opportunity for the logic of these events to be destabilized and reformed. This bivalent role played by silence and night, as both closure and potential crucible for newness, also develops throughout the collection into the speakers' mature conceptualizations of death. Death, too, represents a kind of final ending to one's life, but it also perhaps provides the potential for something new. If one knows how to look at life, Glück tells us, one can find inspiration in each of these three phenomena and condition one's self not to fear them.
Intimacy
One of the ways in which Glück tells us that we may fend off fears of death/silence/darkness is through the pursuit of intimacy. The intimacy presented in Faithful and Virtuous Night is rather generalized, not being specific to lovers or close friends; rather, intimacy in the collection is rendered simply as an important form of human connection, one that can be located in all of one's relationships (with family, lovers, or perhaps even with strangers). In the story of the English painter that runs throughout the collection, for example, note the grounding role played by both the speaker's brother and Harry—both allow the speaker to feel as if he is not alone, and both show him (albeit in different ways) the potential for darkness to also hold generative or new elements. In other poems like "The Couple in the Park," intimacy becomes evidence that we still have power in our lives and that we can still effect changes in both ourselves and others through the strange beauty of connection. Together, then, intimacy becomes one of the highest virtues of life in Faithful and Virtuous Night, stirring our speakers to new realizations while also providing them with the comfort necessary to do so. Importantly, too, intimacy is something that can be rewarded in death as people reunite in the afterlife with those they have lost. Whether or not this is a consolation or a worry relating to death, however, is something that is up to each person to decide.
Loss and Trauma
Faithful and Virtuous Night is also deeply invested in excavating trauma and loss, which are in some ways prefatory to the final loss that death represents. Here, think of the loss of the parents in the story of the English painter, the loss of the parents and cousins in "Aboriginal Landscape," and the loss of the parents and sister in "Visitors from Abroad." In each instance, someone has lost a person or multiple people who are very close to them and who have shaped them as an individual. On one hand, Glück shows us the ways in which trauma and loss can be almost paralytic, draining someone of the energy needed to both advance in life while also preventing them from living and creating in the present. On the other hand, however—and perhaps a greater focus of Glück in this collection—Glück also shows us the ways in which the mind learns to make substitutions and prostheses to compensate for losses, integrating memories and impressions of that which was lost into a fuller and more coherent version of the self. When one loses their parents, for example, the gap represented by this loss can be absorbed by the ego, with the parents becoming an almost subtextual or hidden presence in everything one does (see "Visitors from Abroad"). Ironically then, when something is lost, it is never really lost, but rather more fully integrated into one's thoughts, allowing for new interpretations and arrangements that were not possible before the loss. As evidence of this phenomenon, consider the English painter's realizations about chaos following his parents' death, or his inspiration late in life to paint the titular "White Series" of paintings.
Aesthetics
Seeing as a great deal of Faithful and Virtuous Night revolves around creatives like the English painter, the elderly writer in "The Open Window," and the writer in "Visitors from Abroad," it is inevitable that Faithful and Virtuous Night brings up questions of aesthetics. While some of these questions of aesthetics revolve around the proper way to create in life—for example, when the English painter's friend tells him of the emptiness of his virtue signaling in "The Sword in the Stone"—the most significant aesthetic question in the collection revolves around death. Specifically, one of the major things that weighs heavily on the minds of the collection's speakers is, said simply, how to end, once one has begun. This applies not only to life, where one might be unsure of how to live their final days, but also to art and writing, where one may be unsure of how to put a capstone on a long career or history of creation. Ultimately, however, Glück urges us to take a similar position to the one taken by herself while writing Faithful and Virtuous Night in order to cope with this issue—deflate the importance of the ending, focus on the remainder of the time one has to be active or alive, recognize both the good and the bad in ending, and simply create, knowing that it may not be the best work one has ever done.
The Family
The family is also an important area of thematic exploration in Faithful and Virtuous Night. As discussed elsewhere, however, the family is primarily deployed in the collection so that we can explore what happens in its absence or when its integrity has been disrupted. In the collection's explorations of loss and trauma, important intersections are made with the theme of family, fleshing out the specific textures and topographies of losing a family member, as well as how one can "absorb" these lost family members or learn to see them in their self post-loss. At the same time, however, it should also be noted that the family intersects deeply with the collection's thematic exploration of intimacy. In the English painter's relationships with his brother and his nephew, for example, we see the ways in which the family provides support (as opposed to the uprooting that occurs when this support is taken away). All in all, then, the family is presented as an important part of one's life that can be removed; when this removal happens, however, one can still learn a great deal about themselves and the world based on how they choose to cope.
The Natural World
Though its presence is more subtle in Faithful and Virtuous Night than in some of the other works of Louise Glück, the natural world has an importance to the collection that is unmistakable. As in Glück's other works, the natural world is primarily used here as a site of revelation and regeneration, one that mirrors the world of human affairs. For example, as early on as "Parable," Glück's characters learn to see that the natural world undergoes an aging process just like human beings do, marked by cycles and repetitive periods. Additionally, the silence and darkness that are inherent to nature allow the speakers of Glück's poems to reckon with the silence and darkness within themselves. Finally, because nature seems to contain a blankness or neutrality that is commensurate with the sublime, nature is the place in the collection where people encounter the strange and and spiritual—for example, consider the strange music that seems to come from the trees in so many of the poems in Faithful and Virtuous Night. Nature is thus a complex and spirited location in the collection that allows people to both discover themselves and see themselves reflected in another, even if they are without human company.
