How a poem a day can ease life’s pain and help us through the hardest times

From war to weather extremes, loneliness and digital overload, has there ever been a more challenging time for the human psyche? The founder of the Forward Prizes for Poetry explains why we should all be self-medicating with verse

‘In our increasingly secular world, the canon of poetry has become the secular liturgy’ (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

When Covid struck and we were all told to stay at home, I thought my Poetry Pharmacy would come to a halt. It had taken me all over the world, acting as a kind of therapist, listening to people’s problems and prescribing poems to help them with their anxieties.

I had put an email address in the back of the books published as part of the project, asking readers to send me the poems that inspired them. Instead, I received messages, from all walks of life, looking for poetic inspiration in the loneliest of times. Most of all I received them from people working in the NHS. While we were at home, learning to bake bread, they were in First World War conditions dealing with death every day.

It was with this backdrop that I set out to research and write the third and final part of the Poetry Pharmacy trilogy, The Poetry Pharmacy Forever. I realised in these times we needed poetry more than ever. Lacking the ability to commune or even worship together through those long months, it made me realise, as poetry flooded my social media, that every liturgy of every faith is filled with poetry and, in different times, we used to recite that poetry communally and regularly. In our increasingly secular world, the canon of poetry has become the secular liturgy, with passages of inspiring poetry on every social media platform filling the spiritual void.

So I looked for poetry to help us through the hardest times; poetry to combat isolation and loneliness, climate anxiety, digital overload and existential dread. I hadn’t expected what would happen next. No sooner were we liberated from lockdown and had just begun to feel our way back into a new world of human engagement, with rusty social skills and a newfound timidity and shyness to overcome, a new wave of worries and anxieties were evoked by Ukraine, the impact of Brexit, a year of worrying weather extremes and now the horrors in the Middle East.

I cannot recall in my lifetime a more challenging set of circumstances for the human psyche, particularly with the ability of the digital world to have one’s mind and attention locked in to all of the global dramas without respite day or night.

And this is where poetry comes in. For poetry helps us make sense of everything. When you read the right poem at the right time it gives you a complicity with how you are feeling, expressed rather more elegantly than you could express yourself. You are no longer alone or mad, and if that poem was written centuries ago, then you understand that humans have always felt like this and your anxieties are normalised.

I tell my patients to try and give themselves the space to read a poem a day. It won’t take long. Unlike fiction, poetry won’t send you to sleep after a long day’s work. Read the poem like a prayer, not like a piece of journalism or fiction. Read it aloud, or aloud in your head. Hear the musicality and lyricism in the poem. Read the same poem for a few nights and notice the different thoughts it evokes depending on your mood and your day. If you can commit the ones you like or find helpful to memory, even better. Then you have your own medicine cabinet in your head.

‘The Poetry Pharmacy Forever’ completes William Sieghart’s trilogy of anthologies (Particular Books)

I’ve tried to cover a whole range of emotions and conditions with the poems that I’ve chosen. Some ancient and some written in the last few years. The great Sufi poets, Hafez and Rumi feature as always, as do WB Yeats, Dorothy Parker, Rabindranath Tagore, Warsan Shire and Wendy Cope. Even an excerpt from TS Eliot’s Four Quartets finds its way into the pharmacological cabinet.

When times are hard it can be very tempting to comfort eat or drink, reach for pharmaceutical help to sleep or get through the day; anything to stamp out or ease the reality that life throws at us. These may dull the pain but they won’t help you process it. Try the complicity of poetry to get you through the day or night. It has no contraindications and might surprise you in its impact. There’s no telling the new friends you might meet through your literary practice. Self-medicating with verse is all the rage.

Three poems to ease the soul in troubled times

“Yes” by William Stafford

“Everything is Going to be Alright” by Derek Mahon

“Horizon” by Rudy Francisco

‘The Poetry Pharmacy Forever’ is out now, published by Particular Books