Special issue: The Uses of Poetry

The Very Grief a Cure of the Disease

Philip Davis and Josie Billington

Centre for Research into Reading, Literature and Society (CRILS), University of

Liverpool, Liverpool, UK

p.m.davis@liverpool.ac.uk; jbilling@liverpool.ac.uk

The Very Grief a Cure of the Disease

This article uses Elizabethan poetics and the Renaissance sonnet as a template for

understanding and theorising the power of shared reading as it is exhibited in

modern-day mental health contexts, specifically by national charity The Reader.

Our concern is with the medicine of verbal beauty, representative expression, and

formal ordering towards perfection. In particular, the article focuses on the

relation of ‘erected wit’ and ‘infected will’ as described in Sidney’s Defence of

Poetry. It examines transcripts from the shared-read-aloud groups pioneered by

national charity The Reader and produced as part of research projects on reading

and mental health conducted by the Centre for Research into Reading, Literature

and Society (CRILS) at the University of Liverpool (where the authors are

based). The article demonstrates how the reading of serious Elizabethan poetry,

precisely by not offering a form of directive or targeted therapy, has the potential

to help ease the suffering of those whose personal and existential problems are

too often ignored by conventional therapies because ‘incurable’ as such.

Reference will also be made to Samuel Daniel’s defence of the sonnet as a little

mental world – analogous in its mapping to modern aspirations for brain-imaging

(in which CRILS is also currently involved).

Keywords: reading groups; shared-reading; The Reader; Elizabethan poetry;

brain-imaging; reading and mental health

In The Art of English Poesy (1589), George Puttenham speaks of two kinds of losses.

One you may be able to do something about – a run of bad luck, blemished character,

loss of money. You may be able to claw something back, receive a second chance, find

a remedy that makes the loss, in retrospect, only temporary. For help to make it so, you

may go to the counsellor, the money-lender, or the physician. But the other kind of loss

is to do with the irrevocable and irreversible, loss through death or at war or in

unrequited love. These things – in a sense more intrinsic to life – are those which cannot

be cured (Puttenham 2007, 135-6). What then can you do? To whom then can you turn?

Nothing. No one.

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,

Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,

Raze out the written troubles of the brain,

And with some sweet oblivious antidote

Cleanse the fraught bosom of that perilous stuff

Which weighs upon the heart?

Therein the patient

Must minister to himself.

Throw physic to the dogs; I’ll none of it.

(Shakespeare, Macbeth, V.iii, 42-9, 2001, 997).

But Puttenham proposes not razing out the written troubles of the brain but writing them

out again by ministering to oneself through poetic composition. He writes of the virtue

of lamentation:

Lamenting is altogether contrary to rejoicing: every man saith so, and yet it is a

piece of joy to be able to lament with ease, and freely to put forth a man’s inward

sorrows and the griefs wherewith his mind is surcharged. This was a very

necessary device of the Poet and a fine, besides his poetry to play also the

Physician, and not only by applying a medicine to the ordinary sickness of

mankind, but by making the very grief it self (in part) a cure of the disease.

(Puttenham 2007, 135)

Physic is not thrown to the dogs but to the poets, as though what cannot be healed by

medicines may be helped by some hidden virtue in words put into song or verse:

Now are the causes of man’s sorrow many [and] such of these griefs as might be

refrained or holpen by wisdom and the parties own good endeavour, the Poet gave

no order to sorrow them . . . Therefore of death and burials, of the adversities by

wars, and of true love lost or ill bestowed are the only sorrows that the noble Poets

sought by their art to remove or appease, not with any medicament of a contrary

temper, as the Galenistes use to cure contraria contrariis, but as the Paracelsians,

who cure similia similibus, making one dolour to expel another, and on this case,

one short sorrowing the remedy of a long and grievous sorrow. (Puttenham 2007,

136)

The followers of Galen – the second-century physician, surgeon and philosopher – had

one way, the followers of Paracelsus, another. What would the Galenist do? In The

Anatomy of Melancholy Robert Burton speaks of combating misery by force of

opposition – as by humours a greater heat dispels the cold or a greater cold reduces heat.

Whatsoever it is that runneth in his mind which so much affects or troubleth him,

by all possible means he must withstand it, expel those fears and sorrows,

beginning by doing something or other that shall be opposite unto them. If it be

sickness, ill success, or any adversity that hath caused it, oppose an invincible

courage, persuade evil for good, set prosperity against adversity. Force out one nail

with another, drive out one passion with another. (Burton 2001, 102, 105, 114)

‘Throw physic to the dogs’, cries out Macbeth, trying to expel if not the troubles of the

mind or heart, at least the failed hope of curing them. So when the citizens cry again and

again in Coriolanus, ‘Let him away. He’s banished. And it shall be so, it shall be so, it

shall be so’. Suddenly Coriolanus cries out ‘I banish you’ (Shakespeare, Coriolanus,

III.iii. 109-127), as though one man could outshout and thereby momentarily overtop

the whole of Rome. It is that individual ‘I’ against the social mob who, according to

Aristotle, must therein be either beast or god (Aristotle 1962, 227).

But the way of Paracelsus is different, working not by invasive intervention but

by a kind of homeopathy: ‘similia similibus’, making the very grief a cure of the

disease. Here is Philip Sidney, in Astrophil and Stella, Sonnet 57, where at first the pain

of woe at unrequited love is aggressive in its verbalization:  

Woe, having made with many fights his own

Each sense of mine; each gift, each power of mind

Grown now his slaves, he forced them out to find

The thorough’st words, fit for woe’s self to groan,

Hoping that when they might find Stella alone,

Before she could prepare to be unkind,

Her soul, armed but with such a dainty rind,

Should soon be pierced with sharpness of the moan.

(Sidney 2008, 175)

But then, as Puttenham might say in his interest in the very shapes of thinking, there is a

turn:

She heard my plaints, and did not only hear,

But them (so sweet is she) most sweetly sing,

With that fair breast making woe’s darkness clear:

- followed by his own realization of that reversal:

A pretty case! I hoped her to bring

To feel my griefs, and she with face and voice

So sweets my pains, that my pains me rejoice.

That is to say: what the beloved does to the poet in putting his woes into her song, the

poem analogously does for the reader: ‘So sweets my pains, that my pains me rejoice’

converting the painful to the beautiful as by counterchange. It is the same thing not

opposed by another version of itself and radically changed by the conflict but, rather,

gently transmuted only by being repeated in a different form, a modified setting or

another place. It is as though we cannot change the founding words of the world, the

basic elements, but we can change the syntax of their interrelation. It is this which

Sidney himself loves when in his ‘The Defense of Poesy’ he speaks more theologically

of that second nature, which in nothing [man] shows so much as in poetry, when

with the force of a divine breath he brings things forth far surpassing her doings,

with no small argument to the incredulous of that first accursed fall of Adam, since

our erected wit makes us know what perfection is, but our infected will keeps us

from reaching unto it. (Sidney 2004, 9-10).

This is what this poetry here does – make the infected will, the pain of thwarted love,

the very subject of the erected wit which transmutes it. Sidney’s turn in Astrophel and

Stella 57 is like that moment in a single line at the opening of Shakespeare’s sonnet

128:

How oft when thou, my music, music play’st . . .

The poet hears his beloved playing something as beautiful to the ear as she herself is,

simultaneously, to the eye – crossing the senses. It would not be anything like so

affecting if the sense were spelt out as a main clause along the line, slowly left to right,

one thing after another: ‘You play music and you are my music too’. The effect, so like

a double-take, is to do with that hidden inner contrapuntal or momentarily backwards

movement ‘when thou, my music, music play’st’ – making ‘music, music’ cry out in its

own voice from the oscillating middle of the line, like sudden love.

Puttenham is keenly interested in the energies and magnetisms of modified

repetition, particularly across lines or in the very midst of them, and cites Sir Walter

Raleigh in this respect:

With wisdom’s eyes had but blind fortune seen

Then had my love, my love for ever been

This is epizeuxis or what Puttenham renames as the cuckoo-spell (Puttenham 2007,

285) – when in counterpoint to the line and its commitment to a linear sentence of

farewell to love, it still cries out from the midst of itself ‘my love, my love’. That is the

very cry of the grief, seeking to cure its own disease: ‘my love, my love’, ‘my music,

music’, ‘my pains, my pains’. All three are inner messages of the heart hidden amidst

the sense they must also accept. They are each of them that ‘one short sorrowing the

remedy of a long and grievous sorrow’. And this is lyric poetry for just that reason: the

long contained within the short, the big enfolded within the minute and the passing.

Because what is implicitly long and big within Puttenham is his sense that the world is

composed of what the theologian Catherine Pickstock (2014) calls non-identical

repetition. That is to say: things are neither radically different and separate nor utterly

monotonous and the same. The universe is variously composed out of modified

repetitions, in terms both of things and substances, and also of happenings and events.

So art itself is a modified repetition of nature, a place of alternative versions, including

the very shadow of what on any occasion life did not do or could not offer or might

have had. ‘Art,’ says Puttenham is, in such cases,

an aid or coadjutor to nature, and a furtherer of her actions to good effect, or

peradventure a means to supply her wants, by re-enforcing the causes wherein she

is impotent and defective, as doth the art of physic by helping the natural

concoction, retention, distribution, expulsion, and other vertues, in a weak and

unhealthy state. (2007, 382)

It is like remedial gardening after Eden but in memory of Eden still, an echo of a place

of perfect health in us.

It is the modified repetition called polyphony or counterpoint that is our

particular interest. For, as we shall further explain, it is a counterpoint that in being

‘point against point’ or ‘note against note’ is still harmoniously closer to ‘similiar

similibus’ than to the dissonance of ‘contraria contrariis’. This contrapuntal relationship

includes the simultaneity of senses crossing between eye and ear, ear and mind, word

and tone - the profitable interplay between the demands of sense and the requirements

of rhyme in the movements across and down the lines as well as horizontally along

them.

These involvements densen the poem even in its smallness and transience: the

more the horizontal impetus, the more the poet will momentarily create other

dimensions to offset it. Think of something as simple as the opening stanza of Robert

Herrick’s well-known lyric:

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,

Old Time is still a-flying:

And this same flower that smiles to-day

To-morrow will be dying.

(Herrick 1999, 143)

Lines and rhymes and internal verbal links are all here played off in counterpoint

against the drive of sentences. In particular, there is the movement, suddenly and

momentarily emergent, between the end of line three and the beginning of line four - in

the very midst of the sentence as in the very midst of life-time itself: the same flower

today/tomorrow. There is no better place to show how literature is therapeutic. For a

fraction of a second, but repeatably, every time you read it, you stay in that otherwise

uninhabitable space between today and tomorrow, just before the one goes into the other

again. For all our currently willed and artificial efforts at ‘mindfulness’, we are not

naturally creatures who are in time with time. We cannot live unthinkingly or

unemotionally in the present. Even as the present goes on, we live in hope or fear of the

future, in memory of the past, in pain or love. And yet those lost pasts, those anticipated

futures which perhaps never come, also seem so fleeting within the movement of the

present that goes on indefinitely despite them. This is why the rhyme offers a stay, an

interstices holding for a second between today and tomorrow: momentarily it turns

time-passing into a space for meditation, before releasing it back into time again in the

completion of the sentence: ‘tomorrow will be dying’. Such literature remains loyal to

life: offering a place for thinking about it without ceasing to be in it. To be in it without

being able to think about it is our usual state – what T.S. Eliot called having the

experience but missing the meaning (1944, 26). To think about it without being in it is

what education all too often offers – abstract consciousness cut off from its subject-

matter, as in text-books or self-help books, offering remedies wholly separate from the

feel of the griefs they purport to cure.

By contrast, reading the Elizabethan lyric is itself a contrapuntal act,

momentarily triggered to play off against the poem even as the poem continues on its

own smooth way. Take the opening of a Drayton poem often significantly printed with

this heading, ‘Verses Made the Night before He Died’:

So well I love thee as without thee I

Love nothing; if I might choose, I’d rather die

Than be one day debarred thy company.

Since beasts and plants do grow and live and move,

Beasts are those men that such a life approve:

He only lives that deadly is in love.

(Drayton 2015, 'Last Verses')

What does ‘the counterpoint of reading’, as we have called it, mean here? In the first

instance it has simply to do with a subliminal act of mental pointing: the reader’s mind

imagining these verses being written the night before the poet died, suddenly lights on

lines two and three, ‘I’d rather die/Than be one day debarred thy company’ (you think,

too quickly for articulation: ‘But he is going to die now, and then he will be debarred

her company forever’). Then the mind lights on line six: ‘he only lives that deadly is in

love’ (you think: ‘Is his love killing him? Is that nonetheless worth it, sustaining him

even to the eve of death?’). It is counterpoint because these modified repetitions are part

of the poem left behind in the reader even as the rest of the poem still goes on forward.

For there is hardly any time for the reader to step outside the poem and yet, again, there

are instants of momentarily extra time, or different dimension, within it. Consider again

that first line

So well I love thee as without thee I

It is like a poetic telegram. Just as ‘so’ and ‘as’ marshal the sentence-grammar, within it

those two ‘thees’ together implicitly say to the reader in this shorthand: Take ‘love thee’

in counterpoint with ‘without thee’. Again the sentence momentarily goes backwards

before forward completion.

This is one reason why our research centre, CRILS, has become involved in

using brain-imaging to track what it is that sentences do when they are not literally

straightforward. We have provided neuroscientists with multiple examples of poetic

sentences measured against the control of their translation into a more straightforward

prose. Our results are beginning to show that the turns and reversals, the counterpoint

between lines and sentences, make Elizabethan poetics themselves a sort of early brain

imaging (O'Sullivan et al 2015)1. In these verses you can feel the mind fitting itself

along the lines as though they were themselves made into brain-waves, pulsing and

twisting and turning in their shapes, lit up at certain words by reverse connections, or

sudden synaptic firings. When Samuel Daniel in his Defence of Rhyme writes of rhymed

verse as ‘orbs of order and form’ (Daniel 2004, 216), he is offering the Elizabethan lyric

as a small mental world formed out of chaos, a map of the mind that the mind itself can

look down at and suddenly see itself within. So it is at even the smallest most primal

moments: that second half of Drayton’s first line when he writes ‘without thee I’ before

it painfully resolves itself across the line ‘Love nothing’. What could be more basic to

1 The article concludes: ‘It is possible that some of the benefit associated with reading may

come from diverting individuals away from processing their struggles via ingrained and

ineffective channels and towards more diverse, novel and effective reasoning options’.

the law of poetic language and grammar than that little inner message ‘without thee I’ -

where the I stands there for an instant, bare without thee before having to go into

admitting to love nothing, meaning simultaneously to love thee completely.

This is not the ‘I’ of Coriolanus in the riposte of ‘I banish thee’. Instead the ‘I’

here exists in two dimensions: first, in mapped relation across to thee and other such

elements within the poem; second as almost literally a pro-noun on behalf of the writer

and the reader who look down on it as their representative on the page. This is why, as

we shall show in the final section of this article, the Elizabethan lyric fits so well with,

and indeed almost creates, the read-aloud model that is carried out by national charity

The Reader in its outreach mission to a variety of settings, from schools to dementia

homes, from libraries to prisons, as though one thing fitted all.2 For the lyric itself is a

choric or group thing: it becomes an almost objective map or ground that as it passes

contrapuntally triggers subjective responses to passing thoughts in the individual reader.

It is a representative ‘I’ which does not seek individuality or novelty so much as re-

embodiment each time it is performed. That is because the old is eternally new to it, in

fulfilment of fundamental laws of human nature and grammatical language that

constantly recreate the world in varying combinations. It is the sense of underlying law

that George Herbert describes in ‘A True Hymn’:

The fineness which a hymn or psalm affords,

Is, when the heart unto the lines accords.

(Herbert 2011, 576)

The poem forms itself as a living thing, an aural presence, as though the rhyme were a

body becoming fully and finally informed when the soul animates it: the musical

‘accord’ is that of the rhyme with the heart (in Latin the ‘cor’) now within it. Even

2 See www.thereader.org.uk

when the content is painful and contrary, it still feels like an achieved fit; it effects a

sense of calm, of soul and body at one.

The Elizabethan lyric works on the very boundary between the communal and

the individual, where the individual is that little bit of one’s own the reader registers

peripherally in passing, as the poem, like universal life, still passes on with or despite

us. So the Herrick lyric that begins ‘Gather ye rosebuds while you may’ famously ends

of course like this:

Then be not coy, but use your time,

And while ye may, go marry:

For having lost but once your prime,

You may for ever tarry.

‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may’ becomes ‘And while ye may go marry’ – the phrase

‘while you may’ is the same but now shifted to a different place and a different tonal

emphasis to go with it: from the end of the line at the start of the poem, to the beginning

of the line towards the poem’s end, it moves from threat to motive, without changing

the words. The words of the grief are the words of its cure. This is what the poet might

call using your time.

So let us finally look at an Elizabethan lyric at work in the modern world. Our

initial example comes from one of the first research projects we carried out at CRILS. A

study of reading in relation to depression, it was undertaken in collaboration with

Liverpool Primary Care Trust and Liverpool Health Inequalities Research Institute

(Billington et al 2011; Dowrick et al 2013; see also Billington, Davis & Farrington

2013). The groups studied here do not read targeted self-help books, with programmatic

‘steps’ to overcome depression, with all the set language of aims and outcomes, and

with stereotyped diagnoses and empowering remedies. Instead, they have the language

of literature – the widest possible human language in situations of emotional

significance. Very few of these distressed people have much education in reading great

literature. The poems and stories are not pre-selected with a view to a prescribed effect

on a particular client-group called ‘depressives’. But equally these groups do not shrink

from the depiction of human trouble, offered as something not related to a ‘case’ but to

the whole spectrum of normative human being. The poem does not know and cannot

care whether its reader is well or ill, apparently educated or so-called uneducated. But it

is read aloud in every group as the vocal key to everything, as though it were thus made

itself a human coalescing presence in the room.

The group in this instance takes place in a mental health drop-in centre and the

example centres on Lorraine,3 a woman in her early fifties with learning disabilities,

who lives alone (she has two children in care) and suffers from depression and nervous

anxiety. Lorraine was always one of the quietest members of this talkative group, Carol

also mentioned here one of the more involved. There was also Bertha, a somewhat

aggressive and disturbed person, suffering from severe depression but hating the

counselling therapy which she was required to attend weekly. The Reader insists that

the poems it uses should not all be modern. On this occasion the group was reading

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29.

When, in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

4 And look upon myself and curse my fate –

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featur’d like him, like him with friends possess’d,

Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,

8 With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

3 All names are pseudonyms.

Like to the lark at break of day arising

12 From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate:

For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings

That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

(Shakespeare 1999, 91)

What follows is an edited excerpt from the transcript of the session, which was audio-

recorded. Bertha speaks first. She says, out of what Sidney might call a rather infected

will:

Bertha: This man doesn’t feel in connection with people, feels outside of

everything. But I hate Shakespeare. I can’t stand him. No I really don’t like

Shakespeare.

Project worker: Why is it you don’t like him?

Bertha: I just don’t like him, I don’t like the verse, I don’t like his poetry, I just

don’t like Shakespeare. When we were doing it at school it was absolutely boring, I

couldn’t stand it. And all those teachers and professors making too much of it.

Carol: But at the beginning it’s really down and out, lonely and self-disgusted, and

yet at the end, it’s like on top of the world . . .

Project worker: Where does it change, do you think?

The person who is leading the group, a recent graduate from our School of English, asks

– you notice - ‘where’ not ‘how’: find your place first, think about explanation only

much later. It is Lorraine who answers, barely audible. And interestingly what she

points to is not line 9 – the ‘Yet’ turning-point of what a more conventional and better

educated person would call the closing sestet – but line 12 ‘It says: “From sullen earth

sings hymns at heaven’s gate”’. She adds, ‘Can’t explain’.

But of course ‘sullen earth’ is the point she begins from. By instinct, prior to the

language of explanation, she pinpoints the secret breakthrough moment in between the

bad stuff and the good – the very instant where the poem launches itself up out of its

downcast state in an uplift of spirits - ‘From sullen earth’. How does she manage to do

this?; because that is the almost invisible enabling point of transition she is often

silently looking for; because the poem offers a place on the human map to point to.

Then it is that Bertha – who, she has said, ‘hates’ Shakespeare - comes back in

again, suddenly rather surprisingly different:

Isn’t that a beautiful verse, ‘haply I think on thee and then my state like the lark at

break of day rising’, isn’t that lovely, isn’t that lovely. I don’t really like him, but

that is beautiful.

Lorraine’s pointing action has allowed Bertha momentarily to ‘forget’ that generally she

hates Shakespeare. She hasn’t really forgotten, and will stubbornly remind us in her

next sentence; but for the moment all she can think about is the beauty of this particular

moment. This is what erected wit looks like and sounds like today, in an unlikely

setting. She speaks in a somewhat different voice more quietly, repeatedly: ‘Isn’t that

lovely, isn’t that lovely’. And this is related to the poem being read out loud, in its

voice, its music:

Lorraine: He says ‘arising/From sullen earth’, and ‘from sullen earth sings hymns

at heaven’s gate’

Bertha: That’s what the lark does, doesn’t it, it goes up to heaven doesn’t it, but

larks sing right up there you can’t even see them.

Carol: You can’t see the larks when they are so high, but you hear them.

What has happened here? This is now active, collaborative, shared reading, related

nonetheless to deep private and individual understandings. It is, as with the sight of the

larks ascending, a shift to an imaginative hearing. One thing that Lorraine notices

simply by repeating the lines is the double-take of the syntax. Modern editors

sometimes add brackets to help explain the lines, to break them down and make it easier

for readers

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

(Like to the lark at break of day arising)

From sullen earth sings hymns at heaven’s gate:

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

(Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate:

(Shakespeare 2008, 439; see also The Norton Anthology)

But actually it is these lines fluidly sliding together that yield the force to give the poem

lift off. This is the dense internal double-take, when a poem looks backwards and

forwards at the self-same time.

The poet Don Patterson writing a commentary on Sonnet 29 in a very successful

I-pad app on Shakespeare’s sonnets says:

As Shakespearian arguments go, ‘whenever I feel awful, I think about you and then

I feel much better’ isn’t up there with his most sophisticated; but it’s a pretty

enough poem, I suppose. It’s really no more than flowery periphrasis. There’s very

little here to lift it out of the mundane. (Paterson 2010, 88)

Patterson dismisses the poem as unoriginal fluff, as repetitively sentimental. But all this

means, arguably, is that he is a poet and an academic who simply is not reading as well

as the relatively uneducated depressives in The Reader groups. It is ironic that he finds

very little in this poem to lift it out of the mundane when actually we have just seen the

poem lift people emotionally precisely because of the lark arising from sullen earth!

We have to teach people to read, even educated people, to immerse themselves

in a densely emotional communal place and not just offer paraphrased opinions where

they appear already to know all about it. So in CRILS’ brain-imaging experiments we

have provided as a test a more prosaic example of our sonnet that goes more

straightforwardly thus:

Yet though I almost hate myself,

When I think of you my bad mood lifts

Like a bird at morning time rising from the ground

To the sky and singing happily up there

It is always ‘on the up’. But in the real poetry:

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate

Notice how Shakespeare’s verse here goes from ‘arising’ back down again to ‘sullen

earth’ before going up again finally to singing at heaven’s gate. The poem’s deep ‘self-

help’ message is this: we must not go with the simplest meanings, the easiest routes to

apparent progress; we must not know in advance, but follow the meaning through all its

unexpected turns and changes, the good and the bad - including the dis-ease. We must

not exclude the downers, the sullen earth. They are part of our experience and we must

use all our time, not just the uppers, the apparently good bits. Any chance of happiness

or wellbeing lies not in trying to forget the sullen earth but in the ability to include it in

life’s whole meaning. That, and not simple ‘positivity’, as it is called, is true health.

Speaking at a conference of The Reader in 2013, Erwin James said that it was

Shakespeare’s sonnet 29 that he had sent from inside prison, from the wreck he had

made of his life, to his estranged daughter, as a message to her in the bottle of those last

six lines. ‘Yet haply I think on thee . . .’ That was real: poetry saying for you what you

couldn’t say for yourself alone. ‘You can’t see the larks,’ says Carol, ‘when they are so

high, but you hear them.’ Such larks are poems, shifting from seeing to hearing

something higher, just out of sight.

These shifts are involuntary as we have seen. Here is Bertha’s voice again:

Isn’t that a beautiful verse, haply I think on thee and then my state like the lark at

break of day rising, isn’t that lovely, isn’t that lovely. I don’t really like him, but

that is beautiful.

And with it, Russell Hoban’s account of what it is like for a voice, a tone, to take over a

listener:

His voice came from inside my head, making a great space happen all round it, and

all that space was inside my head. It made me feel very strange, being on the

outside of his voice . . . hearing only a silence all around me and my own voice far

far away inside my head . . . opening the mind to the idea that could hardly be held

by any mind. (Hoban 2002, 20)

Our research into transcripts of reading groups shows that when anyone quietly hears

something ‘beautiful’, something largely good is happening that lifts readers and admits

them to another, cleaner, purer, and more alive place in which to be - as if before they

became ill. It is above all the Fall, says Burton, that is the cause of melancholy. It is

poetry, says Sidney, that helps us know something of the perfection before it.

We have found across many groups that the word ‘beautiful’ is very quickly

associated with another word in their own voice. It is the word ‘lovely’. Some of these

group-members are undergoing counselling, suffering from depression or chronic pain.

But the language of the beautiful and – better – the lovely and the loved at such

moments replaces the directive language of therapy. A self-help book tells the targeted

reader: ‘Getting out of depression takes effort’. It tells you to move on, to seek closure –

all that well-meaning exhortation, backed up by medication such as Prozac. But we are

saying there is another way, another language – through literature, an alternative to the

language of therapeutic problem-solving. Think of that lark-rise in sonnet 29. It already

makes a change, felt at a specific textual moment to which one can point and return

(lines 11-12) – and it makes that change without demanding a change.

In our most recent CRILS research study, Donald, a man in early middle age

suffering from long-term depression and attending a Reader group, read aloud for the

very first time in his adult life, these lines from Herrick’s ‘To Anthea, Who May

Command Him Anything’. He read haltingly but with quiet care, guided by the rhymes

and lines as holdfasts. The reading group session was video-recorded.

Bid me to live, and I will live

Thy protestant to be:

Or bid me love, and I will give

A loving heart to thee.

A heart as soft, a heart as kind,

A heart as sound and free,

As in the whole world thou canst find,

That heart I’ll give to thee.

Bid that heart stay, and it will stay,

To honour thy Decree.

Or bid it languish quite away,

And’t shall doe so for thee.

(Herrick 1999, 144)

One of the research methods we have developed at CRILS is the interviewing of

participants about their experience of reading, showing highlights from the video-

recording in order to help them recall the feel of significant but small passing moments.

Witnessing this moment of reading, Donald was asked: ‘How did it feel to read the

Herrick poem? Can you say anything about that?’:

Donald: I was shaking inside. It’s very emotional. Certain words touch nerves with

me [pointing to poem on page and reading]- ‘Heart as soft, heart as kind’. See it’s

that commitment thing. I just find loyalty, commitment, really good things, which

I’ve not had. Softness, kindness, I like those traits. (Davis et al n/d)4

What is most striking here is the ‘not’ – ‘things which I’ve not had’. It is in counterpoint

to Donald’s experience and its name is imagination – in which ‘not having’ is testimony

to a value not a deficiency. It is as with Arthur Clennam in Charles Dickens’ Little

Dorrit:

He was a man who had, deep-rooted in his nature, a belief in all the gentle and

good things his life had been without. Bred in meanness and hard dealing, this had

rescued him to be a man of honourable mind and open hand. . . . And this saved

him still from the whimpering weakness and cruel selfishness of holding that

because such a happiness or such a virtue had not come into his little path, or

worked well for him, therefore it was not in the great scheme, but was reducible,

when found in appearance, to the basest elements. A disappointed mind he had, but

a mind too firm and healthy for such unwholesome air. Leaving himself in the

dark, it could rise into the light, seeing it shine on others and hailing it. (Dickens

139-40)

‘Certain words touch nerves with me,’ said Donald. Those words, for Samuel Daniel,

however vulnerable, exist within certain measures and frames:

All verse is but a frame of words confined within certain measure, differing from

the ordinary speech and introduced the better to express men’s conceits, both for

delight and memory. Which frame of words hath [in rhyme and metre] those due

stays for the mind, those encounters of touch, as makes the motion certain though

the variety be infinite. (Daniel 2004, 210, 213)

4 See also Longden et al 2015

What poetry from an older age is doing in such instances as we have looked at,

is to offer a holding-place (a ‘frame’ or ‘stay’) for experiences which are otherwise hard

to hold or contemplate and to which people from a later time and in different

circumstances can continually return. The group leader remarked to Donald how

‘beautiful’ it was when he read the first line of the third stanza, ‘Bid that heart stay, and

it will stay’ and instinctively replaced the impersonal with the personal pronoun: ‘Bid

that heart stay, and I will stay’. But it is the impersonal Elizabethan verse form which

contains the personal, the ‘it’ that releases the ‘I’.

For not only is this not therapy – it’s poetry; precisely by not being therapy it has

a therapeutic effect. The most recent version of the medical dictionary for psychiatrists

– the DSM V (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition) –

states that if symptoms of depressive grieving continue for more than two weeks after

the loss of a loved one, then the bereaved sufferer is deemed to be ill and may be treated

with medication (American Psychiatric Association 2013, 133-134). It is the most

extreme version of the medicalization of human nature to date. It shows that in the

modern age we have all too much in terms of names and labels, diagnoses and

definitions. What we do not have is any language for the shape of human processes, for

the time or the contour of crucial movements towards change or recovery, hidden but

perhaps not wholly lost in manuals of Elizabethan poetic rhetoric.

References

American Psychatric Association (2013) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental

Disorders, fifth edition (DSM V), pp. 133-134.

Aristotle (1962), The Politics, trans. by J.A. Sinclair. Baltimore: Penguin Books Inc.

Billington, J. Dowrick, C. Hamer, A. , Robinson, J., & C. Williams (2011) ‘An

investigation into the therapeutic benefits of reading in relation to depression

and wellbeing’ Liverpool Health Inequalities Research Institute, University of

Liverpool

Billington, J. Davis, P., & G Farrington (2013) ‘Reading as Participatory Art: An

Alternative Mental Health Therapy’, Journal of Arts and Communities 5 (1): 25-

40.

Burton, Robert (2001) The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. by William H. Gass. New York:

New York Review Books, second partition.

Daniel, Samuel (2004) ‘A Defence of Rhyme’ (1603), in Alexander, pp. 203-33.

Davis, P. Billington, J. Corcoran, R. Farrington, G. & F. Magee (n/d) ‘Assessing the

intrinsic value, and health and wellbeing benefits, for individual and community,

of The Reader Organization's Volunteer Reader Scheme’ AHRC Cultural Value

Project,

http://www.liv.ac.uk/media/livacuk/instituteofpsychology/

CV,value,of,RO,shared,reading,scheme.pdf [accessed Dec 5, 2015]

Dickens, C. (1999) Little Dorrit, ed. by Harvey Peter Sucksmith. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.

Dowrick, C. Billington, J., Robinson, J. Hamer, A. & C. Williams, (2013) ‘Get into

Reading as an intervention for common MHPs: exploring catalysts for change’,

Medical Humanities 38, 15-20. doi: 10.1136/medhum-2011-010083.

Drayton, Michael (2015) ‘Last Verses’, Collected Poetical Works. Deplhi Classics.

Eliot, T.S. (1944) from ‘The Dry Salvages’, II , Four Quartets. London: Faber and

Faber, 19.

Herbert, George (2011) ‘A true Hymne’, The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. by

Helen Wilcox. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 576.

Herrick, Robert (1999) ‘To the Virgins, to make much of Time', in The Oxford Book of

English Verse, ed. by Christopher Ricks. Oxford; Oxford University Press, p.

143.

Herrick, Robert (1999) ‘To Anthea, Who May Command Him Anything’, in The

Oxford Book of English Verse, ed. by Christopher Ricks. Oxford; Oxford

University Press, p. 144.

Hoban, Russell (2002) Pilgermann. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Longden, E. Davis, P. Billington, J. & R. Corcoran, (2015) 'Shared Reading: Assessing

the intrinsic value of a literature-based intervention', Medical Humanities: 1–8.

doi:10.1136/medhum-2015-010704

The Norton Anthology of English Literature (1993), 6th edition, ed. by M. H. Abram

New York: W.W.W. Norton and Company, p. 811-12.

O'Sullivan, N, Davis, P., Billington,J. Gonzalez-Diaz, V & R. Corcoran, (2015) ‘"Shall

I compare thee": The neural basis of literary awareness, and its benefits to

cognition, Cortex 73, pp. 144-57. doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2015.08.014.

Paterson, Don (2010) Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets. London: Faber and Faber.

Pickstock, Catherine (2014) Repetition and Identity, The Literary Agenda. Oxford:

Oxford University Press.

Puttenham, George (2007) The Art of English Poesy (1589): A Critical Edition, ed. by

Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, Bk 1

ch. 24, pp. 135-6.

Shakespeare, William (2008) The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. by Colin Burrow.

Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Shakespeare, William (2001) Macbeth, V.iii, 42-9, in The Oxford Shakespeare: The

Complete Works, ed. by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.

Shakespeare, William (2001) Coriolanus, III.iii. 109-127 in Wells and Taylor.

Shakespeare, William (1999), The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint, ed. by John

Kerrigan. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd.

Sidney, Philip (2008) Astrophil and Stella in Sir Philip Sidney: The Major Works, ed.

by Katherine Duncan-Jones. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sidney, Philip (2004) ‘The Defense of Poesy’, in Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and

Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, ed. by Gavin Alexander.

Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd. pp. 1-54.