Poetry recommendations for a pandemic

As the pandemic began to unfurl around us, I stopped reading. I found myself frozen, except for my scrolling thumb. I know I wasn’t the only one. The children were home, charging around stickily with a maelstrom of toys strewn in their wake, always hungry. There was still work to do: my own from the boisterous house and my husband’s, troublingly, still onsite in London. It wasn’t only lack of time that was preventing me escaping into a novel, though. For all the people declaring that Lockdown was the perfect time to tackle War and Peace at last, there were many who, like me, couldn’t focus their skittering attention enough to make it to the end of the paragraph.

Poetry came to my rescue because it was nourishment that could be quickly snapped up while stirring a soon-to-be forcefully rejected lunch or running a bath. It was a swift ejector seat from the panic of the present to somewhere - at this point, anywhere - else.

Everything is uncertain and unsettling. The least terrifying track I’ve found through the weeks of Lockdown is to focus, myopically, on today. Count the wins, savour the coffees, forgive yourself the frayed tempers, stop counting the crisps, and don’t raise your eyes to cast a speculative glance into next week. Here are some of the poems I’ve found comforting.

For the evenings during which you are despairing at the day just passed:

‘New Every Morning’ by Susan Coolidge

Every day is a fresh beginning,

Listen my soul to the glad refrain.

And, spite of old sorrows

And older sinning,

Troubles forecasted

And possible pain,

Take heart with the day and begin again.

To remind us that our imaginations cannot be locked down:

‘Imagination’ by Phillis Wheatley [extract]

Imagination! who can sing thy force?

Or who describe the swiftness of thy course?

Soaring through air to find the bright abode,

Th’ empyreal place of thund’ring God,

We on thy pinions can surpass the wind,

And leave the rolling universe behind:

From star to star the mental optics rove,

Measure the skies, and range the realms above.

There in one view we grasp the mighty whole,

Or with new worlds amaze th’ unbounded soul.

From one recluse to the hearts of millions more:

‘Hope Is the Thing With Feathers’ by Emily Dickinson, beautifully illustrated by Chris Riddell

To remind us that that, too, shall pass:

‘Sea Love’ by Charlotte Mew

Tide be runnin’ the great world over

‘Twas only last June month I mind that we

Was thinkin’ the toss and the call in the breast of the lover

So everylastin’ as the sea.

Heer’s the same little fishes that sputter and swim,

Wi’ the moon’s old glim on the grey, wet sand;

An’ him no more to me nor me to him

Than the wind goin’ over my hand.

As a useful antidote to tedious Boy’s Own war rhetoric:

‘Love Among the Ruins of London’ by Muriel Grainger

In the desolated alleys near Saint Paul’s

Dust still falls,

And by Paternoster Row, the bookman’s haunt,

Ruins gaunt

Stand uncovered, as though mourning Fleet Street’s pride—

Lost Saint Bride.

But in city wastes are churches once concealed,

Now revealed—

All the squalid blocks that hid their ancient stone

Overthrown—

And the quiet benediction of a sunset fires

Wounded spires.

Pricking up between the paving, shoots of green

Now are seen;

In a sheltered niche a bird finds spartan rest

For her nest—

There is love among the ruins; after strife

There is life.

The most gently moving, eloquent promise I can imagine making to myself:

‘Lochan’ by Kathleen Jamie. Listen to Kathleen reading this beautiful poem here.