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.
Baron Brooke Fulke Greville
Air That Once Was Breath
Topic: Life Beyond Death & the Spirit World
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, 1st Baron Brooke (3 October 1554 – 30 September 1628), known before 1621 as Sir Fulke Greville, was an Elizabethan poet, dramatist, and statesman who sat in the House of Commons at various times between 1581 and 1621, when he was raised to the peerage.
Greville was a capable administrator who served the English Crown under Elizabeth I and James I as, successively, treasurer of the navy, chancellor of the exchequer, and commissioner of the Treasury, and who for his services was in 1621 made Baron Brooke, peer of the realm. Greville was granted Warwick Castle in 1604, making numerous improvements. Greville is best known today as the biographer of Sir Philip Sidney, and for his sober poetry, which presents dark, thoughtful and distinctly Calvinist views on art, literature, beauty and other philosophical matters.
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].
Baron Brooke Fulke Greville
Theme: Life Beyond Death
About This Baron Brooke Fulke Greville Quotation [Commentary]
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.
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)].
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