faithful and virtuous night by louise glück

He remembers the cat from the Jacques Brel song, now covered in snow and disappearing into the winter landscape. 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 also says that the darker songs inspire Harry, with each iteration acquiring a new variation on the theme. His nephew, a domestic and kind boy named Harry, sings from The Sound of Musicand 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. The speaker then returns home with his young nephew (who has now become his lover) in tow. 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 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. At the same time, however, the speaker's sister-in-law remarks that they speak to a deep sadness and desolation. They seem to speak to our artist of a different world, a place of purification far from the everyday. These paintings are 'immense and entirely white,' with 'glimpses, flashes / of blue, the blue of the western sky' (85, 87–88).

He also gives drawing lessons to his sister-in-law and begins to paint again. Later, while living with his brother, the speaker begins to learn a variety of 'new world skills / for which would soon have no use' (75–76). 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. 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. When his funds run low in the UK, he travels to visit his bother in America, in the state of Montana. 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. 'The White Series' is the nineteenth poem in Louise Glück's Faithful and Virtuous Night.

Faithful and virtuous night by louise glück