Matrix

“For it was out of Eleanor all good things flowed: music and laughter and courtly love; out of her beauty came beauty, for everyone knew beauty to be the external sign of god’s favor.”

Marie’s devotion to Eleanor has a religious tinge at the beginning. She is in love with Eleanor as a woman but also worships her like a god. As Marie grows into her role as prioress and then abbess at the abbey, her faith will become less conventional, and her view of both Eleanor and godliness will change.

“Eight hours of prayer: Matins in the deep night, Lauds at dawn, followed by Prime, Terce, Sext, chapter, None, Vespers, collation, Compline, bed. Work and silence and contemplation throughout.”

This is the schedule of a day at the abbey that the abbess Emme presents to Marie. While Marie will transform much about life at the abbey during her own tenure as abbess, this essential rhythm will not change. Rather, Marie will find more meaning and mystery within the routine.

“Someone is saying now, Oh there was a broom flower tucked behind the helmet’s visor and this is how the poor violated maiden’s mother knew who had raped her daughter; and with this, Marie knows with a shock of cold that they are speaking of her own mother; of the circumstances of Marie’s birth.”

Marie overhears the nuns in the abbey gossiping about her and her origins. This passage establishes Marie’s origins and backstory for the reader while also providing a sense of the close, gossipy atmosphere at the convent. It also shows the smallness of the world that Marie inhabits and the speed with which stories travel.

“And in fact, when the speaker was a maiden, the girls in her own family used to be told that they’d be strangled if they turned out like their unwomanly cousins, all wild, flying across the countryside scandalously galloping astride, with their swordfighting and daggerwork tutors and their knowledge of eight dialects and even some Arabic and Greek […]”

The speaker is a nun at the abbey who is distantly related to Marie. The passage shows that learning, along with fighting and wildness, is considered “unwomanly.” While the speaker is condemning her cousins’ unladylike comportment, her extensive dwelling on their freedom and accomplishments also betrays some jealousy and longing.

“It was love she felt in her, a love hard and sharp and fixed.”

Marie recalls her first encounter with Eleanor. The analogy is one of love to a fishhook, suggesting that the love is acute but also painful and allows no prospect of growth or change.

“Marie will be allowed back to the court, to the place where none ever starve, and there is always music and dogs and birds and life, where at dusk the gardens are full of lovers and flowers and intrigue […]”

Marie envisions the court of Eleanor as an alternate Garden of Eden from which she is exiled. She writes her lais to Eleanor in an effort to return to this garden. This passage shows the extent to which power, religion, and romantic longing are linked in Marie’s world.

“The life of the abbey is the dream. The set of poems she is writing is the world.”“The life of the abbey is the dream. The set of poems she is writing is the world.”

The poetry that Marie is composing for Eleanor is more real to her than her surroundings are. The parallelism of these two sentences, with “the world” echoing “the dream,” shows Marie’s rapt, intense state of mind.

“She puts in poor Sister Mamille, who is noseless, for a jealous hound had bitten it off the day she came to her marital house, a new bride; then she was given, still a virgin, to the abbey for the fear that any children of Mamille would be born without a nose.”

This is one story that Marie includes in her poems to Eleanor, and it shows that not all of her writing is about noble, beautiful subjects. This story, both violent and comical, offsets the loftier stories and sentiments that Marie sets down in her poems. It shows the expansiveness of her vision, one that includes earthly as well as courtly love.

“Then the white doe lifted her head and looked at Marie across the pond; looked her entire self into the girl. She spoke something there into the wordlessness at the center of Marie. Time stilled. The forest watched.”

The image of the white doe will return at the end of the book, when Marie is on her deathbed. The language in this passage is simple but also ambiguous; “something” is being spoken, but the narrator doesn’t reveal the message. The sense is of an encounter that cannot quite be translated, but that simply is.

“She is not built to thrive without others.”

Marie recalls the isolating years after her mother died, when she had to manage her household alone. It is a paradox of Marie’s nature that she needs people around her, but she is also an iconoclast and a loner. It is her very concept of community and nurturing that isolates her, in the sense that it puts her at odds with the traditional church.

“She found the captive bird’s song unbearable. It sang no inspired flights or strange tunes lifted from the hearts of other birds, it sang the same few songs the same few ways.”

Marie thinks about the nightingales at the court of Queen Eleanor. Her distaste for the limited song of these birds shows that she occasionally found the court stifling, as well as exciting and glamorous. The nightingale’s repetitive singing is also a metaphor for the circumscribed life of the nuns at the abbey, which Marie will come to find more and more meaningful.

“For it is a deep and human truth that most souls upon the earth are not at ease unless they find themselves safe in the hands of a force far greater than themselves.”

This sentence refers to Marie herself and to the “force” that she acquires over the peasants living on her land. It could equally refer to the human desire to worship or to Marie’s own love for Eleanor. The phrases “deep and human truth” and “souls upon the earth” give the sentence an intentional broadness and resonance, as does its placement at the very end of the chapter.

“She flips their demands into favors she’s doing them.”

This is a succinct way of describing a complicated process, Marie’s manipulation of her elders at the church. The word “flips” is a modern, jaunty one that shows Marie’s own irreverence and modernity.

“The Romans, the Greeks, such giants compared with the Normans, or far worse, the paltry brittle-boned English […] Marie might have discovered others like herself in that era. She would not have felt so alone.”

Marie believes that she lives in a fallen world and that the “giants” came long before she did. While this is a historical novel, Marie does not believe herself to be living in important, historical times. The passage shows that history doesn’t necessarily feel monumental at the moment that it is happening; it simply feels like life.

“Women in this world are vulnerable; only reputation can keep them from being crushed.”

Groff frequently employs epigrams in this novel, statements that express a general truth in a concise or a memorable way. While this statement refers specifically to the nuns at the abbey, it could also refer to the nobles at Queen Eleanor’s court, as well as to Queen Eleanor herself. One underground bond between Marie and Eleanor is their shared understanding of women’s vulnerability.

“How strange, she thinks. Belief has grown upon her. Perhaps, she thinks, it is something like a mold.”

This is an unassuming and humorous way of describing religious belief. It is a mixing of registers, contrasting with the elevated language that Groff uses elsewhere in the book. It also shows the homeliness and unassuming nature of Marie’s life at the abbey.

“Visions are not complete until they have been set down and stepped away from, turned this way and that in the hand.”

Marie has a need to write down her religious visions to understand them. This passage suggests a state between experience and contemplation. It makes visions seem like tactile objects that can be “turned this way and that in the hand” and makes writing seem like a physical act as much as a mental one.

“And through the countryside, the women will tell stories, woman to woman, servant to servant and lady to lady, and the stories will spread north and south upon the island, and the stories will alchemize into legends, and the legends will serve as cautionary tales, and her nuns will be made doubly safe through story most powerful.”

The language in this passage mimics the process that it is describing: the turning of gossip into legend. The repetitiveness and the breathlessness of the passage suggest a fast-moving story. The language also becomes increasingly formal as the passage goes on, culminating in the antiquated-sounding phrase “story most powerful.”

“This is what Marie wanted. It strikes her as a loss.”

Marie finds herself saddened, rather than gratified, by Eleanor’s increasing frailty and dependence on her. These sentences express her feelings in a flat and understated way, thereby heightening the sense of surprise that they provoke.

“All gone: her mother, five aunts, Cecily, the queen, Wulfhild.”

Marie is taking stock of all the women who are gone from her life, although she and Cecily will later be reunited. There is an objectivity in this list of women—no one of them more important than the other—that suggests Marie is thinking about the reality of death and contemplating her own mortality.

“Marie suspects this fiery end would be the stone and the soil and the waters of the earth itself, through human folly and greed made too hot for it to be willing to bear any more life upon its back.”

This book often indirectly alludes to climate change, even though it is a historical novel. Marie imagines fire as the ultimate end of the world. The word “fiery” looks both forward and backward, suggesting the fires of hell but also literal fires brought on by the destruction that her projects and other human pursuits wreak on the land.

“Such comfort in knowing all the old cycles will turn again.”

As Marie grows old, she finds increasing comfort in the routine of life at the abbey. She connects the routine of the nuns at the abbey to the larger “cycles” of life: the changing of the seasons, the passing of life into death. The plot of the book itself is modeled on these repetitive cycles more than on a single, straightforward plot.

“Not the Word, because speaking the Word limits the greatness of the infinite; but the silence beyond the Word in which there lives infinity.”

Marie rejects a hierarchical vision of godliness, in which a priest preaches “the Word” to a clergy, in favor of a mystical union with the world. She believes that “the infinite” cannot be voiced, and that to attempt to do so is to reduce its power and mystery. This sentence expresses this complicated sentiment in a simple and resonant way through reversal and repetition.