Stressed, Unstressed: Classic Poems to Ease the Mind

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.

composing (#u6c035132-f38e-5ffd-924f-803d52714640)

‘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