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Life Savers
Psychic first-aid kit
by Stephanie Piper
Paging through a catalog, I came upon a book that sent me running for my credit card and the 800 number. The title was “101 Poems That Could Save Your Life.” I had to order it and see if my list matched their list.
Long ago and far away, I had the good fortune to attend a school where memorizing poetry was a key element of the English curriculum. It sounds quaintly 19th century now, when math and science rule and students don’t memorize much beyond computer passwords. But back in the olden days of my secondary education, Shakespeare and Milton and Keats and Wordsworth were right up there with the periodic table on the rote agenda.
It wasn’t enough to simply know who wrote “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day” or “On His Blindness” or “Ode to a Grecian Urn.” You had to be able to recite each one straight through. “Learn it by heart and it’s yours for life,” proclaimed my 11th grade English teacher, a wrinkled nun who bore a striking resemblance to Winston Churchill. Most of us just learned it for the test, but somehow, the words printed. Once released from the obligation to memorize, I found myself collecting and learning poems that spoke to me. They remain firmly lodged in my memory, and decades later, they remain life savers.
Poetry can lead us out of the cramped cubicle of self and remind us that someone else once stood on this hill or on this shore and felt exaltation or peace or sadness. Edna St.Vincent Millay distills autumn for me in a few lines: “Lord, I do fear /Thou’st made the world too beautiful this year; /My soul is all but out of me- let fall /No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.” Emily Dickinson does the same for dawn: “I’ll tell you how the sun rose, /A ribbon at a time, /The steeples swam in amethyst, /The news like squirrels ran.”
Poetry invites us to look at the universe through a wider lens, our vision refined by Wordsworth, who observed that “The world is too much with us, late and soon /Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers” or Keats, who knew that “beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all /Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” It challenges us to follow the upstart wisdom of farmer-poet Wendell Berry, to “leave tracks, often in the wrong direction. /Practice resurrection” or to consider Jane Kenyon’s luminous view of time in eternity: “Our calm hearts strike only the hour.”
Poetry’s healing power lies in its ability to define and transform experience. “Give sorrow words,” Shakespeare advised, a prescription for mental health as valid today as it was in the 17th century. Naming the misery is a kind of blood-letting, a release. When Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote “the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall /Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap /May who ne’er hung there” he gave a voice to anyone who has ever suffered mental anguish. His counsel to “call off thoughts a while /Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size” is a bit of psychic first-aid that has sustained me through the worst spells of gloom.
Poetry reminds us that other people have survived betrayal and loss and lived to tell about it. And it reminds us that, despite the external trappings, the human condition hasn’t changed much since Homer first described the wine-dark sea. We are born. We love. We suffer. We question. We work. We die. Some try to make sense of it by writing it down. Some of us, reading those words, take them to heart. Then, as a wise old English teacher once said, they are ours for life.
September 2, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 36
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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