In My End Is My Beginning
(Posted on Monday, November 3, 2025)
Like the essay on my home page where I introduce my work here on the web, I am publishing here in my blog the three passages of poetry with which I conclude the three books. I’ve arranged them in the order I wrote them. Since I completely rewrote the second half of my second book on self-government after writing Sacred Kingship, I composed the poem I call “The Fuse” (Thank you, Dylan Thomas!) when the work on all three was complete.
Part One
A Comic Vision of Great Constancy ends with “A Coda.”
The great hunt that Theseus and Hippolyta enjoy prior to their marriage puts in mind the great hunt for a comic vision that has been the preoccupation of human beings from ancient times. In these essays I have traced that vision to its conclusion, the way a hunter traces a deer (or a dear heart) to its conclusion. From ancient times, poets have found something of great constancy in this quest, and people still seek this something out in works that have stood the test of time. I have borrowed the words “something of great constancy” from Hippolyta’s debate with Theseus concerning the dreams of the four young lovers. Because their argument is about the reality not just of fairies but of the comic vision that’s the purpose for writing a work that may lighten the heart of another, Hippolyta’s response to his skepticism is worth recalling here:
But all the story of the night told over,
And all their minds transfigured so together,
More witnesseth than fancy’s images
And grows to something of great constancy;
But howsoever, strange and admirable.
Hippolyta speaks for much more than the story told over by the four lovers. The comic visions of our literature have transfigured minds and have witnessed more than fancy’s images for thousands of years as they are told over and over from generation to generation. The constancy can be found in the comic vision itself and in the way people continually seek out the the sense and sensibility of great comic poets who have gone before them. In these texts they find the friendship of those who love and look in this way.
In the epilogue, Robin’s plea (to the audience) to give him our hands echoes the final words of Chaucer’s Theseus. Emily, the longtime object of Palamon’s passion, signals that she agrees to wed Palamon by giving Theseus her hand, and Theseus turns then to Palamon to say:
I think there needs but little sermoning
To gain your own assent to such a thing.
Come near and take your lady by the hand.
The joining of hands at the end of “The Knight’s Tale” and at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream sums up the essence of a comic vision. Like hands that touch, everything we have seen or heard in the play transmits the spirit of comedy and lights a path forward for those who would survive and prosper. Like hands that hold, it’s a spirit that’s “catching,” for it expresses that which has been passed, like the light of one candle lighting another, through the generations. Anyone who enters the theater of Shakespeare’s play or Chaucer’s poem is invited to become a link in this chain.
But this is just another image, out of many, to which poetry must resort. Like fairyland, this image and all the other images in its train trip away at break of day as we do when we get out of bed in the morning and go to work in the world. Notwithstanding, a vision of these images may yet do the business of comedy. Even though it comes and goes like the images of a dream, the vision I have set down here has a remarkable durability and constancy. It’s like a round and orient pearl set overnight in a small flower or on a slender blade of grass that dissolves in the heat of the day. With unearned luck I find it there for a time, a pearl of great price, mine own and not mine own.
Part Two
A Comic Vision of Sacred Kingship ends with this poem.
Follow the Breath (Out)
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 as one follows a breath in, and it ends the work 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.
Part Three
The second edition of A Comic Vision of Self-Government ends with this poem.
The Fuse
Here at my desk at night
A lamp illuminates
My book of poetry.
I see the cord, but I
Can’t see the force that heats
The incandescent wire.
Likewise, I wonder what
It is that powers my sight.
Pray, what ignites this life
So I can read it now?
Can it be that truly
I’m the son of sunlight,
Son of light that shines
As far as light can go
Into an infinite darkness?
What does it mean to be
This ongoing, astounding burst
Of all and everything?
September 2025