I met Juliet at a #healingwords workshop
in Maidenhead for Depression Alliance. Here are her thoughts on the benefit of
poetry for those suffering and recovering from depression.
It can be hard to read when you’re depressed. In
fact, it can be hard to do anything at all. The effects of the illness range
from rank terror accompanied by strong physical symptoms, to a deadening misery
that feels as though you’re wading through chilled molasses. When in extremis,
all you can do is rest, but when the fog begins to lift a little it can be
enormously healing to focus on words, and particularly on poetry.
Reading poems, or having them read aloud to you, can
do much to arrest the pernicious spiral of negative thought that characterises
depression. Both the pleasure of well-chosen words, and the images and messages
they conjure up, have the power to derail depressing reflections.
Those of us who grapple with the tedium, frustration
and despair of this horrible illness know how useful it can be to reconnect
with the present moment and achieve some sort of perspective in the midst of
the mental maelstrom. Powerfully descriptive poetry can sweep you out of reach
of the Scylla and Charybdis of negativity and rumination. It can pilot you into
the calm waters of delicious fantasy or heightened reality – or even amusement,
for depressives usually manage to retain their senses of humour, even though
their usual responsiveness may temporarily be dimmed by anxiety or unhappiness.
Poetry is a marvellous addition to one’s mental
toolkit; it’s useful to learn verses that capture your imagination and give you
pleasure, for there’s nothing quite like the way they bubble up at the right
moments to provide solace, enjoyment or the intensification of feeling that
comes when remembered words underline and heighten one’s present experience. In
dark and difficult times you can travel numerous word-paths to relief and
delight.
You can become lost in fantasy:
O,
then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
She
is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes
In
shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On
the fore-finger of an alderman,
Drawn
with a team of little atomies
Athwart
men’s noses as they lie asleep.
Her
chariot is an empty hazel-nut
Made
by the joiner squirrel or old grub,
Time
out o’ mind the fairies’ coachmakers.
Her
wagon-spokes made of long spinners’ legs,
The
cover of the wings of grasshoppers,
The
traces of the smallest spider’s web,
The
collars of the moonshine’s watery beams…
You
can be transported to distant climes:
Quinquireme
of Nineveh from distant Ophir
Rowing
home to haven in sunny Palestine,
With
a cargo of ivory,
And
apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood,
cedarwood, and sweet white wine.
You could be encouraged to continue to plough what
can feel like a lonely furrow, until you are joined in it by the poet:
I
shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere
ages and ages hence:
Two
roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I
took the one less traveled by,
And
that has made all the difference.
You
may be brought vividly into contact with the ecstasy of reality:
Meanwhile
the world goes on.
Meanwhile
the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are
moving across the landscapes…
Meanwhile
the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are
heading home again.
Whoever
you are, no matter how lonely,
the
world offers itself to your imagination,
calls
to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting…
Sometimes
you have an electrifying realisation of your self:
I
celebrate myself and sing myself…
Stop
this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems…
You shall no longer take things at second or third
hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either…
You might be amused and revolted by a rollicking
historical rhyme:
Corinna wakes. A dreadful Sight!
Behold the Ruins of the Night!
The Crystal Eye, alas, was miss’t;
And Puss had on her Plumpers p---t.
Or gloriously challenged by the beauties of nature:
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through
the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day…
Tell me, what is
it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Or be wryly amused:
You cannot hope
to bribe or twist,
thank God! the
British journalist.
But, seeing what
the man will do
unbribed, there’s
no occasion to.
And whether or not you have
read, you can also write. There are few creative consolations so powerful as
that of savouring your own well-chosen words assembled like a pleasing jigsaw
on the page. If you can muster the energy, the very attempt connects you with a
mindful concentration that dispels the darkness of depression and reminds you
of your own intrinsic characteristics, and power, and identity:
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
Quotations
from:
Romeo
& Juliet, Act I Scene IV, by William Shakespeare
Cargoes
by John Masefield
The
Road Not Taken by Robert Frost
Wild
Geese by Mary Oliver
Song
of Myself by Walt Whitman
A
Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed by Jonathan Swift
The
Summer Day by Mary Oliver
The
British Journalist by Humbert Wolfe
Invictus
by William Ernest Henley
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