That is to say, creating order. Poets, like those who write music, are composers. They take emotions and ideas and words and put them into harmonious, melodious order. There is no better example of this process than the special form of poetry known as the sonnet. It is a form that has certain rules – though great poets always know how to bend the rules. You need fourteen lines, a regular five-beat rhythm, a pattern of rhymes and perhaps a twist in the tale. The name is derived from the Italian word ‘sonetto’, a little song. When we read a great sonnet, our appreciation of the poet’s ordering of thoughts – about love or beauty or sorrow or time or almost anything – can help us to compose ourselves.
You can take this to a deeper level. As science writer Philip Ball argues, ‘our brains are attuned to finding regularities in the world’ – and they respond to patterns ‘aesthetically’. Try looking at one of the sonnets that follow as if it were a kind of visual or musical pattern. Maybe take a pencil and circle the alternating rhymes. Or speak it out loud and see if you can hear a regularity of rhythm. When we find a pattern – whether it is in the regular coil of a snail’s shell, the ‘fearful symmetry’ of Blake’s tiger, or the movements of a poem – our brain gets a kind of rush, which Ball calls ‘the pleasure and satisfaction of seeing universal harmonies’.
Paradoxically, a poem can give us just this kind of brain-rush in the very same moment that it encourages us to slow down our thought processes or to be still and observe the world around us. Wordsworth’s ‘Upon Westminster Bridge’ is especially soothing and reflective. In July 1802 he and his sister Dorothy were crossing the bridge in a coach on the way to France early on a cloudless summer morning, when the city was still sleeping and bathed in golden light: ‘Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep’. It invites the reader to read the sonnet slowly, meditatively, pausing with each reflection: ‘The beauty of the morning: silent, bare, / Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie’.
Similarly, R. S. Thomas, in his ‘Bright Field’, which keeps to the fourteen lines but relaxes the rules for stressed syllables and rhyme, urges us to remember that life should not be rushed. Hurrying is an illusory quest for ‘a receding future’, which is an unhealthy as ‘hankering after / an imagined past’. We must make time for ‘turning aside’.
Upon Westminster Bridge
Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning: silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!
William Wordsworth
Sonnet 116
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no; it is an ever-fixèd mark,
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
William Shakespeare
Bright Star
Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art –
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priest-like task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors –
No – yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillowed upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever – or else swoon to death.
John Keats
Open Winter
Where slanting banks are always with the sun
The daisy is in blossom even now;
And where warm patches by the hedges run
The cottager when coming home from plough
Brings home a cowslip root in flower to set.
Thus ere the Christmas goes the spring is met
Setting up little tents about the fields
In sheltered spots. – Primroses when they get
Behind the wood’s old roots, where ivy shields
Their crimpled, curdled leaves, will shine and hide.
Cart ruts and horses’ footings scarcely yield
A slur for boys, just crizzled and that’s all.
Frost shoots his needles by the small dyke side,
And snow in scarce a feather’s seen to fall.
