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    Stressed, Unstressed: Classic Poems to Ease the Mind
    Stressed, Unstressed: Classic Poems to Ease the Mind
    Stressed, Unstressed: Classic Poems to Ease the Mind
    Ebook203 pages1 hour

    Stressed, Unstressed: Classic Poems to Ease the Mind

    By Jonathan Bate, Paula Byrne and Sophie Ratcliffe

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    About this ebook

    Can you be re-lit by poetry? This little book offers everyone one of the oldest of all remedies for stress: the reading of poetry.

    Intended to help you endure some of your stressful moments and painful experiences, these poems tell us we are not alone. Returned again and again over the centuries by great imaginations are love and death and memory – remembrance of childhood joy, of happy days and beautiful places, of loved ones we have lost or feeling at peace and at one with the natural world. ‘Stressed Unstressed’ harvests an array of 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.

    Words can act as drugs, and on the bedside or in a waiting-room this little volume of poetry can help in all sorts of difficult circumstances. So here is a selection of new poems and old, enduring classics and forgotten gems. Next time you are feeling stressed or anxious, worried or sleepless, panicky or unable to cope, ‘Stressed Unstressed’ invites you to read a poem and join the thousands of others who have read and remembered and loved these poems – to form a very special community. This is bibliotherapy.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateJan 14, 2016
    ISBN9780008168162
    Stressed, Unstressed: Classic Poems to Ease the Mind

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    • 5/5
      This is a lovely collection of poetry, some ancient, some more modern. It is separated broadly into chapters entitled stopping, composing, meditating, stress-beating, remembering, releasing, feeling alone, living with uncertainty, moving on, seizing the day, and positive thinking. The editors state that their intention is for the book to be dipped into, perhaps in a medical waiting room, however I enjoyed it so much I read the whole thing over a couple of weeks. Some of the poems are incredibly sad, some more uplifting; both categories can be helpful in times of distress.

    Book preview

    Stressed, Unstressed - Jonathan Bate

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    copyright

    William Collins

    An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

    1 London Bridge Street

    London SE1 9GF

    WilliamCollinsBooks.com

    This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2016

    © Jonathan Bate and Paula Byrne 2016

    Jonathan Bate and Paula Byrne assert the moral right to be identified as the editors of this book

    A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

    All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

    Source ISBN: 9780008203863

    Ebook Edition © January 2016 ISBN: 9780008168162

    Version: 2016-10-28

    contents

    cover

    title page

    copyright

    ReLit and the Bibliotherapy Foundation

    introduction by Jonathan Bate

    1. stopping

    2. composing

    3. meditating

    4. stress-beating

    5. remembering

    6. releasing

    7. grieving

    8. feeling alone

    9. living with uncertainty

    10. moving on

    11. seizing the day

    12. positive thinking

    afterword by Mark Williams

    if you need help

    a note on the editors

    permissions

    index of poets

    about the publisher

    ReLit and the Bibliotherapy Foundation

    These poems were selected by Jonathan Bate, Paula Byrne, Sophie Ratcliffe and Andrew Schuman, who all contributed to the section introductions. Many of the poems have been tried and tested in healthcare settings or at stressful times, past and present. Proceeds from sales of the anthology will be donated to ReLit, the campaign of the Bibliotherapy Foundation (a charitable enterprise) to alleviate stress and other mental health conditions through mindful reading. For more information about the work of the Foundation, please visit www.relit.org.uk.

    We would love to hear about the ways in which this anthology, and poetry in general, has helped you. Please add your comments on our website www.relit.org.uk/stressed.

    introduction

    ‘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

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