Prescribing poetry to ease your worries
Two centuries on from To Autumn, Joe Shute and William Sieghart retrace Keats’s riverside steps
Fury on the streets, demand for proper political representation, Parliament in a logjam… September 1819 bore uncanny similarities to today. And yet, against this backdrop of civil strife, the poet John Keats wandered along the River Itchen from Winchester and composed the immortal opening line of his ode To Autumn: “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness…”
This month marks two centuries since Keats’s poem was written. He took a daily walk from the cathedral past the cricket lawns of Winchester College and along the meadows on the banks of the chalk stream leading into the countryside. In the process, he drafted the lines of a poem that encapsulates like no other the joys of summer turning to golden hues.
His work, like so many of the Romantic poems, also devised a means of escape: an opportunity for readers to focus on the beauty of the world around them and a balm to the political crises convulsing Britain – and whatever struggles they faced.
A month earlier, a private militia, paid for by Manchester landowners, attacked a crowd of 60,000 working people after they took to the streets demanding political representation (a right which, at the time, was available only to the wealthy). An estimated 18 people were killed and 650 injured in what we know today as the Peterloo Massacre. The subsequent outcry paved the way for the creation of new seats and parliamentary democracy as we know it.
Two centuries on, with Parliament paralysed and people again taking to the streets, Keats’s poem endures as a means to rise above the fray.
“We need to be reminded that whatever is happening in
Westminster, the leaves are turning, the blackberries are ripening and all these things are happening as they have and hopefully always will,” says William Sieghart, an author who has joined me to recreate Keats’s walk.
“What Keats and the Romantics did so significantly is remind us of the beauty of nature and our need for beauty as a way of being distracted from the difficulties of life.”
This is a truth Sieghart knows better than most. In 2017, the founder of National Poetry Day published an anthology called The Poetry Pharmacy, in which he prescribed a certain poem for any number of modern afflictions. It has proved to be a bestseller, and ever since the 59-year-old has toured the country holding clinics in which he has sat with readers, listened to their anxieties and prescribed poems in response. His second anthology, The Poetry Pharmacy Returns, is published this month, while his new column starts in The Telegraph next Saturday.
The rising Brexit anxiety is part of a very modern affliction he has noticed during his thousands of encounters. “We live in a world of getting unnerved about things that haven’t actually happened yet. Poetry in its essence is terribly good at reminding one of the continuity of life – it allows one to see through the drama for what it is and focus on the bigger picture.”
We walk past Winchester Cathedral in bright autumnal sunshine, where the adjoining bookshop has a sale on to raise funds for its choir. Even in these peaceful surroundings, there is no escape from the “B-word”. On a chalkboard, somebody has written “Brexit book deal: tell us what you want and we will find something else”.
I wonder what other afflictions he is most regularly confronted with in his clinics: fear of the future, lack of courage and that modern scourge, loneliness, rank chief among them.
As we walk past an avenue of plane trees, whose leaves are just starting to turn as if edged with gilt, it transpires
‘We live in a world of getting unnerved about things that haven’t happened yet’
Sieghart has in recent months been required to take his own prescription, turning to poetry for his own despair.
Earlier this year his mother, Felicity, died aged 91. He lost his father 32 years ago and was extremely close to the woman he describes as a “matriarch”.
“When you lose both parents, you feel very small indeed,” he says. “That’s complex, because I’ve listened to so many people telling me about their grief I’ve learnt a lot about waves of grief that come unexpectedly. There is a small boy in me grieving. A son who is struggling to cope with the fact that somebody who has been in my life for 60 years isn’t there any more.”
I ask what poem he has turned to, and he tells me he is in the process of memorising TS Eliot’s Four Quartets: “I’ve found it the most helpful meditative thing to do.”