Stressed, Unstressed: Classic Poems to Ease the Mind. Jonathan Bate
these are the things that are with me now,
in the town;
and I am grateful
for this minute of my manhood.
F. S. Flint
A Noiseless Patient Spider
A noiseless patient spider,
I marked where on a promontory it stood isolated,
Marked how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launched forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.
And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be formed, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.
Walt Whitman
This Is Just To Say
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
William Carlos Williams
Leisure
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare? –
No time to stand beneath the boughs,
And stare as long as sheep and cows:
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass:
No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night:
No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance:
No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began?
A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
W. H. Davies
2.
‘Compose yourself’: that is what we sometimes say to ourselves when we are stressed or flustered. Calm down, take things moment by moment, organize your thoughts. The word ‘compose’ comes from the Latin meaning ‘putting things together’. That is to say, creating order. Poets, like those who write music, are composers. They take emotions and ideas and words and put them into harmonious, melodious order. There is no better example of this process than the special form of poetry known as the sonnet. It is a form that has certain rules – though great poets always know how to bend the rules. You need fourteen lines, a regular five-beat rhythm, a pattern of rhymes and perhaps a twist in the tale. The name is derived from the Italian word ‘sonetto’, a little song. When we read a great sonnet, our appreciation of the poet’s ordering of thoughts – about love or beauty or sorrow or time or almost anything – can help us to compose ourselves.
You can take this to a deeper level. As science writer Philip Ball argues, ‘our brains are attuned to finding regularities in the world’ – and they respond to patterns ‘aesthetically’. Try looking at one of the sonnets that follow as if it were a kind of visual or musical pattern. Maybe take a pencil and circle the alternating rhymes. Or speak it out loud and see if you can hear a regularity of rhythm. When we find a pattern – whether it is in the regular coil of a snail’s shell, the ‘fearful symmetry’ of Blake’s tiger, or the movements of a poem – our brain gets a kind of rush, which Ball calls ‘the pleasure and satisfaction of seeing universal harmonies’.
Paradoxically, a poem can give us just this kind of brain-rush in the very same moment that it encourages us to slow down our thought processes or to be still and observe the world around us. Wordsworth’s ‘Upon Westminster Bridge’ is especially soothing and reflective. In July 1802 he and his sister Dorothy were crossing the bridge in a coach on the way to France early on a cloudless summer morning, when the city was still sleeping and bathed in golden light: ‘Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep’. It invites the reader to read the sonnet slowly, meditatively, pausing with each reflection: ‘The beauty of the morning: silent, bare, / Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie’.
Similarly, R. S. Thomas, in his ‘Bright Field’, which keeps to the fourteen lines but relaxes the rules for stressed syllables and rhyme, urges us to remember that life should not be rushed. Hurrying is an illusory quest for ‘a receding future’, which is an unhealthy as ‘hankering after / an imagined past’. We must make time for ‘turning aside’.
Upon Westminster Bridge
Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning: silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!
William Wordsworth
Sonnet 116
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no; it is an ever-fixèd mark,
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
William Shakespeare
Bright Star