Choosing Love- We Swallow Light
Chapter 5 — the return home
We Swallow Light is an unusual book of poetry because of how the poems are arranged.
Most poetry books use sections based on the style of a poem, or they are grouped by topic.
Tree Langdon created chapters that follow a story line, using the 5 main components of a good story. Her chapter titles are:
The Binding
Surrender
The Passage
The Rituals
Choosing Love
As a student of the Story Grid, Langdon discovered the 5 commandments of storytelling and has applied them to her new book.
The fifth chapter is Choosing Love, and it‘s the Resolution of the story. In many fictional stories, this is when the protagonist returns home, a very changed person.
This part of the story is the payoff, where the reader gets to see if the journey was worth it. It ties the story back to the Inciting Incident (The Binding) and the Crisis (The Passage).
Here’s a quote from one of the poems:
I Feel Your Whispers On My Skin
“I inhale the dust of you in the pages of my book. A piano softly plays. Secrets of infinity sit inside the songs.”
I hope you liked this take on the fifth and final chapter of the book. It’s a fascinating way to organize a book of poetry, and it really works.