You that seek what life is in death, Now find it air that once was breath. New names unknown, old names gone: Till time end bodies, but souls none.

Fulke Greville

Air That Once Was Breath

Theme: Life Beyond Death

You that seek what life is in death,
Now find it air that once was breath.
New names unknown, old names gone:
Till time end bodies, but souls none.
Reader! then make time, while you be,
But steps to your eternity.

Fulke Greville

Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke, born on October 3, 1554, was an important Elizabethan poet, dramatist, and statesman. Educated at Shrewsbury School and Jesus College, Cambridge, he entered public service early, securing a seat in the House of Commons by 1581. Greville held several key positions, including treasurer of the navy and chancellor of the exchequer, serving under Elizabeth I and James I. In 1621, he was elevated to the peerage as Baron Brooke. Though his political career was significant, Greville was deeply engaged with philosophical and literary pursuits.

Greville’s poetry is known for its introspective and often dark tone, influenced by his Calvinist beliefs. His major work, Caelica, grapples with themes like mortality, ambition, and the transient nature of life. His writing, frequently described as challenging and complex, offers a deep reflection on human existence and the inevitable confrontation with death. Greville’s sober style and focus on philosophical issues set him apart from many of his literary peers.

A close friend of Sir Philip Sidney, Greville wrote a biography of him after Sidney’s death, cementing his legacy while showcasing his own reflective nature. Greville’s life ended in tragedy when he was stabbed by a servant at Warwick Castle, where he had lived since being granted the property in 1604. He died on September 30, 1628, just shy of his 74th birthday. His work continues to be studied for its depth and insight into human nature.

(1554-1628) Humanism, Arts and Sciences
Caelica 83

Crow, Martha Foote, and Baron Brooke Fulke Greville. Elizabethan Sonnet-Cycles, edited by Martha Foote Crow. Paul, Trench, Truebner, 1898, [Caelica 83: You that seek what life is in death].

Fulke Greville

Theme: Life Beyond Death

About This Fulke Greville Quotation [Commentary]

In this passage, Fulke Greville reflects on the nature of life and death, offering a straightforward meditation on the fleeting nature of the physical world. The opening lines, “You that seek what life is in death, / Now find it air that once was breath,” suggest that life, once vibrant, fades into something as insubstantial as air. His use of “air” and “breath” highlights the transition from life to death, where familiar identities become unrecognizable—“new names unknown, old names gone.”

Greville’s Calvinist worldview, which often wrestles with human mortality, is clear in the line, “Till time end bodies, but souls none.” While physical bodies decay over time, Greville suggests the soul remains untouched by death. He doesn’t delve into specifics about the afterlife but affirms that the soul persists beyond the body’s end. His sober tone underscores his belief that, although names and bodies fade, the soul continues in some form of existence beyond death.

The final lines, “Reader! then make time, while you be, / But steps to your eternity,” offer a direct message to the reader. Greville urges the audience to use their time on earth wisely, as preparation for eternity. By stressing the enduring nature of the soul, he encourages thoughtful reflection on life’s purpose and the need to focus on what lies beyond death. In his typical style, Greville conveys this message clearly, emphasizing that while the body may perish, the soul endures.

Caelica 83

The title comes from a 16th-century poem by Baron Brooke Fulke Greville that demonstrates that feeling of profound calm combined with immense urgency, concentrated into just six lines.

Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air

Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air, a memoir by an unknown author, became a best-seller for an unusual—almost unheard-of— reason: the quality of its writing. By “quality” I mean excellence but also a specific mode of narrative and meditation that Kalanathi achieves, a peculiar, calm intensity: a certain immediacy. No doubt that methodical intensity owes something to medical training. The book is, after all, a brilliant young neurosurgeon’s account of his own fatal illness. (His wife Lucy Kalanithi, also a physician, tells the end of the story in an epilogue.) A compelling subject, but the writing is crucial, in a way that derives from Kalanithi’s interest in poetry. Reviewers, including Anna Reisman in Slate, have justly praised the writing as “poetic,” but a poetry of understatement more than image, and precise abstractions—rather than heightened color—inform When Breath Becomes Air.

Finality, here, demands language this direct about its subject. The poem is also direct with the reader. Of the 41 words here, “You” is the first word and “your” modifies the last word. Fulke Greville’s poem gets right to its subject and speaks directly to its reader, with an exclamation mark, too. The second-person “you” also governs Kalanithi’s closing passage: a brief farewell addressed to the couple’s infant daughter. “You filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy,” he tells her. That “sated joy”—“a joy that does not hunger for more and more”— is, Kalanithi writes, “an enormous thing.”

—Robert Pinsky [How a 16th-Century Poem Inspired the Clarity of the Prose in When Breath Becomes Air (Excerpt from review in Slate, September 9, 2016)].

For readers of Atul Gawande, Andrew Solomon, and Anne Lamott, a profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir by a young neurosurgeon faced with a terminal cancer diagnosis who attempts to answer the question What makes a life worth living?

—Paul Kalanithi, Foreword by Abraham Verghese [When Breath Becomes Air (Review on goodreads website)].

Air That Once Was Breath

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