“But there are so many accessible poems, and those are the ones I’ve tried to choose for the book.” “Perhaps it’s because it takes them back to their schooldays, or perhaps it’s because they think it’s impenetrable,” she explains. They’ve been chosen by Georgina Rodgers, who says the first hurdle to overcome is that for too many people, poetry is scary. She’s written the foreword to a new book that features 52 poems – one a week, for a year – to learn by heart. Today, Kelly is OK: and she’s keen to share the power of poetry. “He held my hands across the century and said to me, ‘You are going to be OK,’” she says. I kept repeating those lines, and they spelled out hope to me: they’re about renewal and rebirth, and I started to know that, as Herbert goes on to say, my shrivelled heart would recover its greenness.” What was so powerful, says Kelly, was that Herbert described desolation – but also recovery. “One of her favourite poets was George Herbert from the 18th century, and there are some incredible lines: ‘Grief melts away/like snow in May/as if there were no such cold thing’, from a poem called The Flower.
“She would drip-feed me little lines of poetry – it was like chicken soup for the soul,” remembers Kelly. When her mother realised the power of repeating words, mantra-like, she sought out more. This seemed like a shard of something positive, something I could cling on to.” He held my hands across the century and said to me I’d be OK And those words felt like the first stirring of hope. And suddenly my mother started murmuring some lines from Corinthians: ‘My grace is sufficient for thee, for my power is perfected in weakness’. I was clinging on to my husband, who was on one side of me, and my mother, who was on the other. “I’d had a lot of drugs and I was in a terribly anxious state. Kelly was very unwell – at one point she was in a psychiatric hospital – when she had an inkling that poetry could offer enormous comfort. Kelly describes how two lines from Invictus by WE Henley can make all the difference to what happens to her next: “I am the master of my fate/I am the captain of my soul.” When all she can hear in her head are negative voices, she can drown them out by repeating, over and over, positive lines from poetry: they’re substitutions, life-giving mantras rather than life-sapping ones. There’s also a certainty and stability about being able to conjure those words: they’re a crutch, we can lean on them, they can even do the thinking for us. And it’s something we can all do: poetry we’ve learned to recite means we have another voice inside us that’s always there, a kind of on-board first responder in times of psychological need. Whenever she’s feeling wobbly, she finds reciting lines of poetry is grounding, validating and connects her to others who have felt as she is feeling in this moment. How can learning poetry by heart help us to be more grounded, happy, calm people? “Let me count the ways,” says Rachel Kelly, who has suffered from anxiety.
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