Faithful and Virtuous Night Literary Elements

There is not a consistent speaker or narrator in the collection, with the adoption of various personae defining the entirety of the collection. Two central personae, however, are the English painter introduced in "Faithful and Virtuous Night" and the female writer figure that is the speaker of "Visitors from Abroad" (and perhaps some other poems). Together, these two personae convey a great deal of information regarding Glück's mature philosophies of death and life.

Most of the poems are free-verse, but there is variation between these (which are either written in stanzas or numbered section) and prose poems in the collection.

The poetry in this collection is very dense with imagery, and it also make use of very ornate and elliptical language to describe the speakers' surroundings, thoughts, and experiences. Commensurate with these two features, metaphor and simile play an important role in making the imagistic fabric of the poems cohere. Moreover, since many of the speakers in these poems are creatives themselves, simile and metaphor are important to establishing their ethos as speakers and to showing us the different ways in which they creatively think.

One consistency between this collection and the works contained in Glück's wider oeuvre lies in the fact that alliteration and assonance are not often used to create rhythm or other sonic effects in her poetry. There are isolated instances of these devices throughout the collection, however, and their presence indicates that this collection is more florid or literary than the conventional and conversational approach of her other collections.

Much of the collection is, despite its florid language and spiritual affect, strikingly direct and straightforward. As such, it lacks a great deal of irony per se, but there is much in the collection that becomes revealed or more clear over time. Rather than convey a sense of irony, however, these instances produce the impression of a spiritual or moral education, which is more consistent with the themes of the collection as a whole.

Lyric Poetry, Prose Poetry

The English countryside; various other locations

Elegaic, pensive, and at times optimistic

There is not a clear antagonist, but as mentioned before, the two main characters are the female writer figure and the English painter figure.

The major conflicts explored in the collection are the tensions between life and death, between past and present, and between creation and cessation (or noise and silence). These three dynamics are all also closely related to each other, and the collection's most poignant and effective poems are the ones that attempt to reconcile these three conflicts as part of one single existential and aesthetic human struggle.

Since the collection tracks many different story lines, it is hard to locate an exact climax for the collection. One might say, however, that in the English painter series of poems, "Approach of the Horizon" represents a turning point both in terms of the poet's aesthetic and physical proximity to death.

As mentioned, in the poem "Faithful and Virtuous Night," a great deal of foreshadowing is done with regard to the English painter's mature aesthetic philosophies and ideas, which are articulated in putative forms early on. Additionally, certain ideas or themes recur and are foreshadowed in the collection, such as the idea of the being trapped between moving forward and going backward (which appears in "Faithful and Virtuous Night" as well as "A Foreshortened Journey").

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The English painter builds up his creative and educated ethos by making allusions to figures like Kant and Jacques Brel. Additionally, Arthurian myth is deployed largely in the collection as part of the tension between knight and night—that is, the tension between upstanding, positive virtue and a darker existential or survivalist instinct.

The most prominent metonymies used in the collection are the substitution of light/dark for day/night and the substitution of silence, darkness, and death for one another.

There is not a great deal of personification of the natural world or of the inanimate in the collection, but consider the final two lines of "Visitors from Abroad" as an example of personification that appears within the collection: “Trouble calls, despair calls. / Joy is sleeping like a baby.”

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