Follow the Breath
(Posted on Tuesday, October 22, 2024)
(This poem opens my inquiry into what it means to be a living soul. A Comic Vision of Sacred
Kingship both begins and ends with it.)
Follow the Breath
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
I wrote the first stanza of this poem in 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.