A Three-Part Series by Alan Griesinger

In My End Is My Beginning

(Posted on Monday, November 3, 2025)

Book Three of Sacred Kingship is a reading of “Believing in God,” the first chapter in Roger Scruton’s The Soul of the World. Near the end of Book Three, I wrote a section called “Windows” which reviews some of the poetic imagery I employed to convey what Scruton would tell us about experiences that have moved people, maybe even Scruton himself, to believe in God. The previous section had discussed (in Scruton’s words) “the perspective of a religious believer” for whom an experience of the sacred (like Moses turned aside by a burning bush or Pascal arrested by a nuit de feu) “is a window unto the transcendental and an encounter with the hidden God.” Because I argue throughout my book about the importance of poetry when one looks into experiences like these, I spent some time exploring Scruton’s metaphor of a window with a review of other windows I have found in literature and painting. The chapter in which these two sections appear is illustrated with Fragonard’s “Stolen Kiss.”

A: Sonnet 3

Look in thy glass, and tell the face thou viewest
Now is the time that face should form another,
Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,
Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.
For where is she so fair whose uneared womb
Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?
Or who is he so fond will be the tomb
Of his self-love, to stop posterity?
Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime;
So thou through windows of thine age shalt see,
Despite of wrinkles, this thy golden time.
 But if thou live remembered not to be,
 Die single, and thine image dies with thee.

Scholars have wondered for centuries about the identity of the person being addressed in the sonnets. It’s a cottage industry. I have studied different commentaries on “Look in Thy Glass,” and it would appear that for these critics the meaning of it is less controversial. The poet is advising a young man—whom he addresses with the words “thee,” “thou,” and “thy”—to get married and have children. When you are old, he tells him, you’ll see your golden time once more in your child. If you never have a child, you lose the pleasure of seeing the youth and beauty of your child. In other words, you lose everything, and everything loses you.

This reading makes sense, but I now propose another one. In this alternative reading the couplet imagines a completely different state of mind. The previous quatrains have reflected for the reader (as in a mirror) domestic scenes which add up to a sort of comedy. There’s the young man looking in his “glass” in preparation for a social event, there’s the suggestion of a young woman blessed with new life in her womb, and there’s a mother who sees in her child the lovely April of her prime. “Die single” in the couplet, however, dramatically changes the tone and tenor of what has gone before. Here the poet doesn’t paint pleasant scenarios for our comic hero; he commands. He sentences him to death. 

Instead of this hazy, mazy business of mirrors—where the poet initiates the business by encouraging a Narcissus to lose himself in his own image, where his wife then loses herself in the image of her child just as his own mother did, and where the now married Narcissus loses himself in the image of his son—the poet suddenly sees that he should be a window, a transparent glass. The poet’s perspective and mental state has been utterly transformed. Instead of reflecting images that tempt his Narcissus to act a certain way, the poet would be what he now realizes he has always been, a window on the absolute value of creation. His advice, his little hall of mirrors, is a dead end, as the mirror image was for Narcissus. Now, the poet sees himself seeing; he sees himself as the creator of the whole tableau brought to life in the poem. He is the window on the golden time he has just imagined for the other. The other’s problem as well as the other’s golden time has become, and has always been, his own problem and his own golden time. This is certainly the case, but it’s also true that his relationship with the young man (whatever that might be), which prompted him to write the poem, has opened this window on creation.

Instead of speaking to another about a conventional way to project and perpetuate one’s image in the world, he seems now to speak to himself (or to the other as an alter-ego) with great urgency about the prospect of this golden time. Maybe, he says to himself (and the reader), it’s time to relinquish all that you have invested in your “image” and in being “remembered” a certain way by others. The point is not to be remembered. The point is to be. (The clause “But if you live remembered not to be” is a rich vein of golden words for one who would interpret it.) The time has come, the poet tells himself, to slip into the pool like Narcissus did and die single. Why does he feel compelled to impress others with facile advice?  Live without attachment, die single, he urges, as if willing himself to do so, and let’s see if the transparency of a true self reveals a golden time. 

Before closing, I’d like to emphasize that this reading does not advocate for monkish celibacy or a life of monkish isolation in a cell. It’s about an obsessive attachment to an image. As in the original story about him, the Narcissus of “Look in thy Glass” drowns, but he’s reborn, in this case as a work of art. It exists in the world to beautify and celebrate creation, and in doing so it celebrates those of us who study it. Thanks to the poem, it may be we come to life in a way that we couldn’t have without it. The poet poured himself into the poem, and now he lives in us.

B: The Play’s the Window and the Window in “The Knight’s Tale” 

Shakespeare employs a different kind of window as the comic centerpiece of his Pyramus and Thisbe play at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Here it’s a chink in the wall between the apartments of two families through which the whispers of two lovers may pass. Tom Snout, a tinker, plays Wall in the play, and before his scene begins, he explains himself to the audience:

In this same interlude it doth befall
That I, one Snout by name, present a Wall;
And such a Wall, as I would have you think,
That had in it a crannied hole or chink;
Through which the lovers, Pyramus and Thisbe,
Did whisper often, very secretly.
This loam, this roughcast, and this stone doth show
That I am that same wall. The truth is so.
And this the cranny is, right and sinister,
Through which the fearful lovers are to whisper.

For eighteen years students in my AP English class acted out the Pyramus and Thisbe play. This scene—where Tom presents a wall, sticks out his arm, and spreads index and middle fingers to present the chink for the subsequent dialogue between the two lovers—never failed to transform my student actors into practiced comedians. The lovers’ conversation that follows, lips almost touching but kept from touching by the cranny of two fingers, is comic gold. As if inspired by that meeting, the rest of Peter Quince’s little play unfolds in the same spirit until Thisbe discovers her Pyramus (like Juliet finding Romeo) lying on the ground all bloody. 

In addition to being about the relationships between human subjects who fall in and out of love, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is about the relationships between human subjects and the transcendental world of fairyland, the world that’s the subject of Lewis’s book [The Allegory of Love]. The play itself is that chink or cranny between the two worlds. Like Janus, like Scruton’s description of a sacred object as a medium, it looks in both directions. It looks into fairyland and looks (with sympathy) at the foolishness of human beings. Robin presents fairyland’s point of view with words that may live for all time when he exclaims, “Lord, what fools these mortals be.”

Peter Quince’s little play also highlights another medium, the person of the tinker Tom Snout. Without him we have no wall, and we have no opening in the wall. Like Peter Quince’s play itself, he is the medium without which there is nothing, for he and his chink get the love story going. As such, Tom Snout is standing in for the play, which is standing in for our author; he’s our passage on the horizon [to the sacred]. Through Tom, the play, Peter Quince, and finally Shakespeare himself we glimpse the transcendental goal of our pilgrimage. Through this window we can see, despite all our fears about mortality, the golden time of a comic vision, for Peter Quince’s little play manages to turn tragedy into comedy. Shakespeare deftly turns the prospect of a double suicide into comic farce, and yet at the last moment he preserves the pathos of it with the magic of Thisbe’s poetry at the end. As if to underscore the comic intent, Pyramus and Thisbe rise from the dead to join the entire cast in a dance for their courtly audience—a lively Bergomask, no less. It’s a miracle! 

It’s the miracle of live theater. About the same time that I began teaching A Midsummer Night’s Dream to seniors, PBS brought out a video of a live performance filmed at the Shakespeare Festival in Central Park. I credit the director Joseph Papp for engaging hundreds of my students with wonderful farce, the speed and energy of fairyland, and the force of great poetry. Papp’s direction of Peter Quince’s play at the end reveals why I can call it comic gold. It would be impossible to see that gold when it’s buried in a printed text; it takes a master director and live theater. (A Comic Vision of Great Constancy presents a more detailed reading of Peter Quince’s play. It includes a discussion of Thisbe’s poem which ends the play.)

Of course, there’s comic gold throughout the canon. The plays are chock-a-block with scenes where a character does not have all the facts, but other characters and the audience do. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream poor Helena doesn’t know why Lysander suddenly loves her, when a few hours earlier he had been doting on Hermia. The audience, though, has heard Oberon explain to Puck the power of the love juice he possesses, and it has seen Puck pour the juice on the eyes of Lysander. Scenes which contrast the limited view of a character with a larger view are a staple of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy. These scenes function like a sacred medium for the audience; we identify with the ignorance of the character whose perception is limited (we look into our human nature), but the play, the sacred object, gives us a window into the whole of the situation.

I argue in my book that Shakespeare borrowed much from Chaucer for his version of “The Knight’s Tale.” In Chaucer’s story Theseus has imprisoned two knights at the top of his keep in a cell that has one window. Everything in the tale turns around those moments when first one knight and then the other glimpses a beautiful young woman in the garden below. They fall in love severally and then fight over the woman, but the rest of the story reveals the stages of an alchemical process whereby Love is made whole. Just as A Midsummer Night’s Dream does in Peter Quince’s play, it mixes tragic and comic elements to tell the story.

Chaucer’s window is structurally like the chink in Shakespeare’s wall; it’s a long hole in the stone through which love is communicated. It’s like the view we get from a telescope. What they see is strictly limited. The knights will never have a 360-degree view of things, like the view from Olympus. They are effectively imprisoned by their limited point of view. Nevertheless, experience in the world teaches us that there is a 360-degree perspective. We know it exists, even if we can’t have it right now due to strict limitations of our perception. This describes a feature of perception that Chaucer reinforces through the use of first person point of view narration as I pointed out earlier. Chaucer’s window and the use of a limited point of view function like sacred objects as Scruton defines them. They make us aware of ourselves as a limited point of view. The awareness of an end, however, gives our point of view a value that it could never have without the limitation. We find ourselves, as it were, at night in a vast wilderness with only a small fire burning. Life then is a great mystery, and what little we see of it dances in the firelight. Shakespeare’s poems and plays often leave me with this impression. Can this vision of life in this world be gainsaid, do you think?

C: The Face is a Window (Vermeer’s painting illustrates the first chapter of Book Three, which is an imaginative reading of the painting.)

Light from the window in Vermeer’s painting brings the scene to life in the viewer’s eyes, but the window itself is “insensible.” We have to imagine it. This window is closely linked, I believe, to the light of a smile in the young woman’s face. Just as we might ask where the light streaming in from the left is coming from, we also might ask where the light in the young woman’s face is coming from. Like that other light we have to imagine its ultimate source. In my reading of the painting, I argue that Vermeer intends it to be the light of a living soul. It’s something that has been called up from within This Life; I could also call it love. The window we can’t see and the light shining through it are part of a metaphor. They help Vermeer to express his love of the inner light that shines in the young woman’s face.

Scruton wrote a book called The Face of God which develops his view that the face is a window on the soul. It looks out at us, and it invites us to look for the mystery within. He describes in the book how this interpretation impacts interpersonal relationships, relationships with the earth in our human settlements of it, and finally our relationships with God. The Soul of the World, which he wrote after The Face of God, includes insights developed in the earlier book. In Scruton’s view of it, the face is a medium—like Chaucer’s window in “The Knight’s Tale,” Shakespeare’s chink in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the body of Tom Snout, the “face” of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a whole (the hidden face of its author), and Vermeer’s “window” in The Allegory of Painting.

Where a skeptic like Hume sees the face as a feature of our bodies which, like the masks of tragedy and comedy, can express feelings of sadness and amusement, Vermeer and Scruton see in the face a mystery, a subject that appears to us through the medium of the face as an insensible something, the “I” of the other. We speak to this something with our own “I” (I love you), we may try to kiss this something when we kiss the face, but it remains, ultimately, hidden from us. Still, the mystery has shown its face and tempts us to know it. With great mastery of his craft, Fragonard’s The Stolen Kiss presents the greatness of this mystery in the metaphoric language of a visual art. It’s a mystery, Fragonard suggests, that’s even more engaging than the dress that swells with a satin sheen out of the darkness center stage. 

Part Three

A Comic Vision of Sacred Kingship ends with this poem.

Breathe,
Oh,
Breathe
To be a living soul…

It
Is
The
Gift beyond compare

Of
An
Unbroken
Line of ancestry.

Again
We
Wake
With breath that lifts the breast,

(Each
A
Perfect
End unto itself)

That
Would
Be
Given again to the source

Of
Breath
And life
And all and everything.

This poem both begins the work, just as one follows a breath in, and it ends the work, just as one follows a breath out. At the beginning of the book I added the following commentary:

I wrote the first stanza of this poem at the beginning of my inquiry. The poem grew to its present shape over the years. Like a lighthouse and a north star, it warned me about getting off track and guided me home.

As I reread and edited the work near the end of the process, I noticed that the phrase “all and everything” kept showing up throughout the text like a refrain in a song. Since it has taken upon itself this kind of importance, I need to acknowledge that I’ve borrowed the phrase from Neville Coghill’s translation of Chaucer’s “The Knight’s Tale.” It appears in the speech where Theseus delivers his “sentence” to the court on the events that have unfolded (for the reader as well as his subjects) over the course of the narrative. Since the narrative involves the death of a young knight, his sentence (the meaning) must include the sentence of death that hangs over all human life, like the sword of Damocles. Theseus has much to say, but I’ve abbreviated it to these six lines:

There is no help for it, all take the track,
For all must die and there is none comes back.
Who orders this but Jupiter the King,
The Prince and Cause of all and everything,
Converting all things back into the source
From which they were derived, to which they course?

In the last four lines Theseus appears to be asking a question, “Who orders this?”, but at the same time he is answering the question by affirming that “this” is ordered by a sacred king. I argue in my book that the conversion he describes is like a hinge on which all and everything turns to reveal what it means to be a living soul.

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