Five Alternative New Year's Resolutions, Taken From Poetry
Poetry is nice isn't it?
After my Jan 5th piece hating on New Year’s resolutions I thought I’d do a U-turn and offer up a few. (My own New Year’s resolution is to be more inconsistent.) These five alternative resolutions are, I hope, nice words expressing nice things that leave you feeling inspired, as opposed to word-sticks to beat yourself with. So we’re being even more literature-lite than usual, but last week was heavy and next week there’s going to be Foucault, so then you’ll be grateful for this breezy intermission.
Writing about poetry is like explaining a joke*, said
, and she makes a good point. It’s very hard to paraphrase a poem because the whole meaning of it lies in the expression. But, still: I can try to tell you what each of these five mean to me, and then give you links to the full texts, so you can read them for yourself.Stop Worrying
Finally, I saw that worrying had come to nothing.
And gave it up. And took my old body
and went out into the morning,
and sang.Stop worrying. Easier said than done, right? But this deceptively simple poem by Mary Oliver (who’s a bit like Wendy Cope, in her way of using very plain language to cut to the heart of things) reminds us that worrying is almost always futile. The poem consists of a list of questions - ‘Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven, can I do better?’ - answered by that final clarion call of a stanza which I quoted in full above. It’s this contrast between two states - between questioning and doing, going outside, singing - which reminds us of the paralysing stasis anxiety creates. We think we’re taking action, by worrying. We never are. And in the poem’s final joyful evocation to sing, it echoes Siegfried Sassoon’s Everyone Sang, which you might know already, but is worth reading again here.
Need People
and this one self, beyond sufficiency,
gone like an oyster to the ocean's floor
to make of love the pearl's cold quality...
Apart from the books I needed for work, Alice Oswald’s first poetry collection The Thing In the Gap-Stone Stile is the only book I took with me to Budapest. (I’m doing a Playwriting Fellowship in Budapest!) The choice made sense from a packing perspective, because the collection is about as thick as a postage stamp, but I would have taken it anyway. These lines are from a sonnet about a person who wonders ‘whether I’ve lost my heart to my resilience’. Although it’s a sad and unnerving poem, it reminds me that love can’t exist unless we are willing to admit need, and sacrifice a degree of our carefully constructed self-sufficiency. The speaker has created a self so sufficient they are beyond sufficiency; they are superlatively self-sufficient. She (he?) has gone to the bottom of the ocean to transmute their love into a pearl; shining, perfect, and cold. Is it still a love worth having?
Delight In Your Riches
She's all states, and all princes, I,
Nothing else is.
Princes do but play us; compared to this,
All honor's mimic, all wealth alchemy.
I love John Donne. There’s a confidence and verve to his poetry that verges on arrogance, but to me it feels more like delight. (There are also depictions of women as states to be rules by princes, true. Such was the time.) John Donne is so ready to savour pleasure. In this poem, which is my favourite of his, he chastises the sun for its rude insistence on rising, thus forcing his lover and himself out of bed: ‘Busy old fool, unruly sun, / Why dost thou thus / Through windows, and through curtains call on us?’ Donne tells the sun he has greater riches in his bed than anything its beams shine on: ‘Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday, / And thou shalt hear, / All here in one bed lay.’ Because, quite simply, his love is the whole world: ‘nothing else is’. There’s almost a ferocity to the emotional force of this poem, like when you’re hugging a new favourite song to death, like when you love someone so much you want to bite them. Donne reminds us to revel in the riches we already possess. Compared to the awesome force of loving someone, ‘all wealth [is] alchemy’.
Look after your brain
The mind is its own place and in itself
Can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n.
These lines are spoken by Satan in Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost, just after God has kicked him out of heaven. So are we supposed to believe them? Hell is hell, after all. All the force of mind in the world can’t turn fire and brimstone into harps and angels. But plenty of critics have pointed out that it is Satan who feels like the hero (or at least anti-hero) of Milton’s work, with his passionate arguments for the necessity of self-governance. He certainly gets the best lines. The ones I quoted live rent-free in my mind, reminding me that it is the insides of our brains which mediate our experience of the world. Cliché as it has come to sound, it’s worth paying attention to our neural landscape, trying to talk kindly to ourselves, and trying to cultivate our ability to find annoying people funny, like Elizabeth Bennett does so well.
Put your phone away.
I bathe now. Epsom salt.
No books or phone. Just water & the sound
of water filling, glory — be my buoyant body,
bowl of me.
From ‘My Therapist Wants to Know About My Relationship To Work’, by Tiana Clark
You don’t need me to tell you that your phone is ruining your life. You’ve probably read two articles about it this morning (although if you have time for one more, this piece by
is brilliant.) So why are you still scrolling, numbing, rotting your brain; existing in a permanent state of distraction, inadequacy and dullness? Well, obviously because phones are enormously addictive, and habits are hard to break. This poem by Tiana Clark captures the experience of an addictive online existence brilliantly, its monosyllabic staccato lines tapping out like text-speak, as if her ability to form complete thoughts has been stolen by the internet: ‘I see what you wrote — I like. / I heart. My thumb, so tired. / My head bent down, but not / in prayer, heavy from the looking.’ Gah, that last bit’s good, isn’t it. Near the end Clark’s speaker manages to throw off the shackles of her phone and find some peace in the bath. I love that idea of a bath as a ‘bowl of me’; it’s so decadent. You can’t really find that state of indulgence while scrolling. But sensual luxuriousness is worth seeking out, even (especially) if it’s a state that’s come to feel less natural than the quasi-relaxation accessed through watching endless ten second videos of dogs dancing. Honestly - nothing important will happen while you’re gone.
*This quote is from the introduction to a poetry anthology compiled by Risbridger called Set Me On Fire. It’s an amazing collection and very worth reading!