Poetry for an anxious world: 5 experts share poems of grief, hope and restoration
- Written by: James Ley, Deputy Books + Ideas Editor, The Conversation
Tumultuous times create heightened, often complex, emotions. It can be hard to voice or even identify our feelings when faced with war, illness, worry, or great changes of any kind.
Poetry offers many gifts – among them, capturing, reflecting or even just sitting beside us with our thoughts and feelings.
We asked five poetry experts – all poets themselves – for the poems they turn to in anxious times, for comfort or company.
We’d love to hear yours, too – you can share them in the comments section.
The Storm – Eugenio Montale
One poem I’ve been returning to this year is an old favourite: Charles Wright’s translation of Eugenio Montale’s The Storm. The title in Italian is La Bufera, an idiom Dante introduced in the Inferno, more akin to “tempest” or “squall” than “storm”, though I like the simplicity of Wright’s translation.
The first stanza begins in a relatively recognisable, concrete world: a thunderous March storm pummels a magnolia tree with hail. The storm swiftly becomes figurative as the poet addresses someone who has been startled awake from a “nest of sleep” by “sounds of shaking crystal”. The realist world becomes populated with surrealist images of gold flaring:
like a grain of sugar in the shellof your eyelids,
and lightning that
blanchesthe trees and walls, freezing themlike images on a negative.
The poem sweeps up destabilising images and sounds of a storm’s destruction:
the jangling sistrums, the rustleof tambourines in the dark ditch of the night,the tramp, scrape, jump of the fandango.
Montale moves entirely into metaphor with his subtly devastating final lines, where the reader is invited to see the storm as a metaphor for death’s simultaneous release and devastation:
sweeping clear your foreheadof its cloud of hair,
you waved to me — and entered the dark.
For all its residual mystery and strangeness, The Storm is a poem that insists on recording, with striking clarity, what loss leaves behind: a heightened and twinning attention to the world’s ephemeral beauty, and the permanence of its grievous absences.
Sarah Holland-Batt is a poet and professor, and head of writing at UTS.
The Peace of Wild Things – Wendell Berry
“The mind has mountains, cliffs of fall,” as Gerard Manly Hopkins wrote. But a poem can create an inner room in the mind, a place of shelter from a threatening and precarious world. Poems can be “amulets against the darkness”, as the poet Molly Peacock noted. It’s another good reason to commit them to memory.
Wendell Berry is a Kentucky tobacco farmer and environmental activist, better known for his prose than poetry. His plain diction is lightly rhetorical. Always grounded in the material, his poems are gently sacramental.
The Peace of Wild Things opens in anxiety, but the speaker finds temporary rest in nature’s immanence:
I go and lie down where the wood drakerests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.I come into the peace of wild thingswho do not tax their lives with forethoughtof grief.
Two overt metaphors are crucial. The future taxes our lives, whether it’s making plans, or fearing the worst; other animals are tax-exempt. The “day-blinds stars” are a reminder that certain transcendent and objective realities remain, whatever our perception may suggest.
Unlikely as it seems, peace is always a possibility.
Aidan Coleman is a poet and senior lecturer, English and creative writing, Southern Cross University.
Fiona Wright’s chosen poem offers a hope grounded in the real world.
Giramondo/Georgina Cappel Associates
Of Mutability – Jo Shapcott
I first came across Jo Shapcott’s Of Mutability in a time of illness – which is also, fittingly, the circumstances under which it was written. I love the awful sensuality with which Shapcott speaks of this in the opening lines of the poem –
Too many of the best cells in my bodyare itching, feeling jagged, turningin this spring chill
– and how immediately this opens up into something shared, an almost universal vulnerability. There are so many ways you can understand what it means to
feel smallamong the numbers. Razor small.
The poem establishes a sense of great fragility and deep uncertainty:
Look down these days to see your feetmistrust the pavement and your blood teststurn the doctor’s expression grave.
But then it turns to offer a hope that’s grounded in the real world, and, in its metaphysical possibilities, marvel at the world and all that it contains:
Look up to catch eclipses, gold leaf, comets,angels, chandeliers, out of the corner of your eye,join them if you like, learn astrophysics, orlearn folksong, human sacrifice, mortality,flying, fishing, sex without touching too much.Don’t trouble, though, to head anywhere but the sky.
This vulnerability exists, it says, but so does all of this wonder – and it is up to you what you make of it.
Fiona Wright is a poet, writer and tutor in creative writing and communications at Western Sydney University.
John Kinsella has a clutch of poems he turns to as a means of survival.
Transit Lounge/Penguin Random House
God’s Grandeur – Gerard Manley Hopkins
In trying to cope with the death and destruction being meted out by people towards each other and the biosphere, I have a clutch of poems I turn to as a means of survival.
A poem that often helps gets me through, due to the sheer power of its language, the “sprung rhythm” engagement with an essence of being, is Gerard Manley Hopkins’ God’s Grandeur, which contemplates “bright wings” over and around damage, while deeply lamenting it. It begins gloriously –
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
and unfolds into the reality of human impact on the (“bent”) world as it –
wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soilIs bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And yet, Hopkins then lifts us, with “And, for all this, nature is never spent”.
Though the poem resolves in the spirit through Hopkins’ specific faith, it can be extrapolated into something we might all share in, across cultural spaces.
What matters here is his search for the “inscape” of the specificities of “nature”, which ultimately opens words out to unseen meaning.
John Kinsella is a poet and emeritus professor of literature and environment, Curtin University.
Luke Johnson chooses a poem that improvises on Yeats’ quintessential poem for anxious times.
Griffith Review/Wikipedia
The Art of Disappearing – Sarah Holland-Batt
The quintessential poem for anxious times has to be W.B. Yeats’ The Second Coming. Several of its lines have found their way into popular discourse, including the apocalyptic “the centre cannot hold”.
In her poem The Art of Disappearing, Sarah Holland-Batt improvises upon Yeats’ evidently timeless theme with a sensual, intimate and relatable lyricism. The poem begins with the lines:
The moon that broke on the fence post will not hold.Desire will not hold. Memory will not hold.The house you grew up in; its eaves; its attic will not hold.
Holland-Batt goes on to lay out fragments of a life that appears, always and inevitably, to be slipping from the grasp of its speaker. The poem manages the feat of being nostalgic and equanimous at the same time. I find its homages – Rilke makes an appearance alongside Yeats – reassuringly connective.
Luke Johnson is a poet and senior lecturer in creative writing, University of Wollongong.
Authors: James Ley, Deputy Books + Ideas Editor, The Conversation
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