Awareness of Death in “Faithful and Virtuous Night”

Abstract

“Faithful and Virtuous Night” is a collection of poems by modern American poet Louise Glück that won the American National Award in 2014. This paper uses these four poems as the main body of inquiry: “Faithful and Virtuous Night” (the title poem of the collection), “Cornwall,” “Afterword,” and “Midnight,” all of which use a fictionalized male painter as the narrator and use the painter’s voice to tell the reader about his life experiences. This paper intends to analyze the complex characterization of the male painter, focusing on the awareness of death embodied by the imagery (journey and color) in the collection of poems.