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‘Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind’

Rudyard Kipling

There are many ways of dealing with stress: a walk in the park, a cup of tea and a chat with a friend, a long hot bath, or that form of practised meditation which has become known as ‘mindfulness’. In this little book, we would like to share another remedy, in fact one of the oldest remedies of all: the reading of poetry.

True poetry, claimed William Wordsworth, is either ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ or ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’. The idea for this anthology came from the recollection of the powerful feelings stirred by some life-changing moments. There was a thirteen-year-old girl who lost her father and found comfort in a four-hundred-year-old poem by John Donne. There was the sense of utter desolation on being told by a compassionate consultant that a five-year-old daughter in intensive care could not be guaranteed to survive the night: hope came from a remembered poem that gave a glimpse of how others have endured their own desolation and come out the other side. Then there was the need to fill the mind with beautiful words and rich thoughts while waiting through many hours of surgery as that same child received a life-saving transplant.

There was also the experience of stress so intense that it manifested itself as physical pain in the hands and feet that was as real as that of an organic condition: yet the pain evaporated when a creative general practitioner prescribed not a drug but a book that provided exercises for managing stress. This inspired the thought: if words can do the work of drugs, what is to lose by putting them in our mental health first aid kit?

There is nothing to lose and everything to gain. The great eighteenth-century reader and writer Dr Samuel Johnson said that the only purpose of literature was to enable the reader better to enjoy life or better to endure it. We offer some poems that provide pure (even nonsensical) enjoyment, but most of our selections are intended to help you endure some of your stressful moments and painful experiences. Among the themes to which poets have returned again and again over the centuries are love and death and memory – remembrance of childhood, of happy days and beautiful places, of loved ones we have lost, or of feeling at peace and at one with the natural world. We have harvested an array of classic poems on such themes in the hope that they will speak to you when you are processing your worries or when you simply want to fill your mind with different, more positive thoughts.

As ‘Poems on the Underground’ have for many years been momentary mental oases for stressed-out London commuters, so this volume of enduring classics and forgotten gems is intended for the waiting room, the sickbed, the sleepless night, the day when everything seems to be going wrong, the moment of respite. Keep it by your bed or stash it in your bag.

For centuries, people have turned to poetry in dark times. The philosopher John Stuart Mill told in his Autobiography of how reading the poetry of William Wordsworth cured him from depression. Queen Victoria said that Poet Laureate Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam, a sequence of elegies working through his grief at the loss of his beloved friend Arthur Hallam, was the only means other than the Bible through which she coped with the death of Prince Albert. Poetry anthologies, most notably the Golden Treasury of Francis Turner Palgrave, were life-savers as much for soldiers resting behind the lines on the Western Front during the First World War as for young Victorian women suffering the kind of nervous complaints that now manifest themselves in eating disorders, exhaustion and worse. Tennyson said that Palgrave’s book was ‘able to sweeten solitude itself with the best society – with the companionship of the wise and the good, with the beauty which the eye cannot see, and the music heard only in silence’. And that is what we hope might be achieved in some small measure by our own selection, to which a range of readers and poetry-minded medical practitioners have contributed.

If poetry has the power that we – and so many others – claim for it, where does that power come from? Poems are language in concentrated form. They make you feel and make you think. They take you out of yourself, transport you to other worlds, away from your present troubles. Because they use words with beauty and care, they demand to be read with attention and without rush. The words must be savoured, because they are the linguistic equivalent of the best food and wine. Most of the time, we fill our minds with words that are the equivalent of fast food. Poetry is slow mind food, real nutrition for the soul. Attentive reading slows the breath and empties the mind of other cares. Especially if read aloud, and slowly, the rhythms of a good poem may be inherently calming and therapeutic, regardless of the subject matter. At the same time, the subject matter of poetry – memory, love, the restorative power of nature, confrontation with sorrow and death – often serves for attentive readers as a mirror of their own feelings, a welcome discovery that we are not alone in our own dark or anxious state.

The chime of rhyme, the reassurance of repetition, the sense of balance in the pattern of a stanza or the fourteen lines of a sonnet: all of these are formal devices which poets use to bring order to the chaos of experience and a sense of musical harmony, of resolution. But the basis of poetry is the alternating rhythm of stressed and unstressed syllables that replicates the beating of the human heart.

Tiger tiger, burning bright

In the forests of the night

Stressed, unstressed, stressed, unstressed: we hope you will discover that this poetic pattern, in its limitless variety, leads you to a calmer mental and physical state.

Next time you are feeling stressed or anxious, worried or sleepless, panicky or unable to cope, we invite you to choose a short poem at random from this book and perform a little exercise in what might be called ‘word cure’ or, to use the technical term, ‘bibliotherapy’.

Make yourself comfortable. Try to clear your head of all your worries. Breathe slowly and regularly. Listen to your own breathing as you breathe in and out: already you will feel slightly calmer. Now read slowly through your chosen poem, maybe in your head, ideally aloud, perhaps both. Then immerse yourself in its words. Poems are often made by building a series of interconnected images. Look through your chosen poem again, finding the images. Try to recreate each successive image in your head, one at a time. Now, having focused on the component parts, imagine the whole as a little world of its own that you can hold in your mind’s eye. You will perhaps find yourself recreating a calming landscape or a movement from troubled questioning to a sense of resolution.

By entering into the harmonized world of the poem, you have momentarily escaped your own world of stress and worry. Now you can slowly return to yourself, in the knowledge that you can find an oasis of calm, of beauty, and of belonging in the world. Now step back and ask yourself if you feel different from how you did before.

If the exercise has had any effect on you, then you are someone for whom this book is meant. Read on. You will find a few thoughts and suggestions at the beginning of each section. Our idea, as you work through the anthology, is that you begin by simply absorbing yourself in the moment, in the words of the poem, and that this will bring you mental relief and release. Then in later sections you will find poems that address experiences such as bereavement, heartbreak and depression, and we hope that you will take comfort in recognizing your own experiences in the lives of others.

And don’t worry if the language or the thought patterns of some of these poems – especially the ones written in more distant centuries – seems difficult. You don’t have to work it all out or turn to a dictionary; you can still enjoy the rhythms and the verbal inventiveness. Especially if you read aloud. Some readers take a special pleasure in learning poems by heart – the rhythmic beat and the brevity of the lines make that easier than other forms of rote learning. Who can forget, once they have read them – as you just have – the opening two lines of William Blake’s ‘Tiger’? And a poem committed to memory can often serve as a kind of mantra in times of stress: just by reciting it, we refocus ourselves.

In reading this anthology, you will take command of more than a hundred of the best poems ever written. You will enter the minds, and form a connection with, some extraordinarily creative men and women. Even those who are long dead live on through their words. You will go beyond your own circumstances, glimpse other lives and other levels of feeling. You will develop a sense of wonder in the beauty and strangeness of the world, together with deep admiration for the powers of human endurance and verbal expression. Above all, you will enter into a shared experience with the poets themselves and the countless others who have read and remembered and loved their poems. You will become part of an immortal community.

Jonathan Bate