Healing words for quiet autumn evenings

While I am all for the joys of going out, be that to the theatre, an exhibition or a film, there are times when we can feel like curling up in an armchair, cradling a mug of something warm, and indulging a need for introspection. Perhaps we’re trying to make sense of our feelings? Or wishing to simply experience more ease and peace? As my late mum used to say whenever life was challenging, we may need to ‘go deeper’.


And for me, going deeper for a while now has meant poetry. Yes, I love reading fiction, but for me, poetry has had a special place in my heart ever since I fell ill with depression in my early thirties which led to being briefly in a psychiatric hospital.


Then I found comfort in soothing poetic one-liners, at a time when a whole book felt too daunting, lines that told a more positive story and reminded me that I was not alone. One favourite, which I used to repeat to myself at the height of my illness when I was suicidal, was from the Bible (which includes plenty of poetry). It’s an extract from Corinthians: 'My grace is sufficient for thee; for my strength is made perfect in weakness.'


My experiences and poetry’s role in my recovery led to my 2014 memoir, Black Rainbow: How Words Healed Me: My Journey Through Depression. Ever since I’ve been banging on about the healing power of poetry and running ‘Healing Words’ workshops in prisons and for mental health charities.


Initially, I was drawn to poems for hard times, like those I myself had experienced. But things changed when my mum died four years ago. It was she who had first inspired my love of poetry, as she had a head richly stocked with verse. But her death taught me that life is short. We also need to savour and enjoy the good moments, rather than whizzing past them. My mum showed me the need to go deeper into feelings of joy and hope as much as those of sadness. And that there were poems for that too.


This has led to my second book about poetry, ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone: Poems for Life’s Ups and Downs’. In it, I explain and share the poems which have helped me (and those in my workshops) to understand and allow all our emotions, whether despairing or joyful, and to feel we have a poem to keep us company whatever we are feeling.


So while my book still includes poems like Love (111) in which the 17th-century religious poet George Herbert brilliantly describes feeling ‘guilty of dust and sin’, it also includes the contemporary American poet James Wright’s evocation of the moment he experiences something extraordinary after a homely encounter with some horses in ‘A Blessing’:


Suddenly I realise

That if I stepped out of my body I would break

Into blossom


He can escape his materiality and loneliness. His use of the matter-of-fact ‘stepped’ making the transcendence he describes as simple as putting one foot in front of another. Both poems help us the reader feel in Scott Fitzgerald’s phrase, that our longings are ‘universal longings’, and we’re ‘not lonely or isolated from anyone.’ We feel more connected with ourselves, and in turn with others.


I’ve organised my selections according to the season in which they more or less ‘belong’: we all have seasons of our minds, from the wintry and dark, to the more spring-like and hopeful.


This connection – between seasons and the human experience – has been explored by poets down the ages. We need only think of Shakespeare’s opening line, spoken by the Duke of Gloucester, in Richard III: 'Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this sun of York.'


Later, in the 19th century, Keats wrote in his poem The Human Seasons: 'Four Seasons fill the measure of the year; / There are four seasons in the mind of man: / He has his lusty Spring... He has his Winter too of pale misfeature.' Like Shakespeare’s words, these ones chosen by Keats act as a bridge between our inner transitions and the outer seasons.


And so, whatever the seasons of your mind, poetry might help you to understand your emotions and feel less alone on those nights you find yourself drawn to staying in. With a poem by your side, going deeper just maybe got a bit easier.


Rachel Kelly’s new book You’ll Never Walk Alone: Poems for Life’s Ups and Downs is published by Yellow Kite on Thursday 3 November.