The album was beautiful, made of red leather with gilt-edged pages. My late mother, Linda Kelly, who was a historian and lover of the 18th century, with biographies of Sheridan, Tom Moore and Talleyrand to her name, had been given it by her mother-in-law shortly after she got married in the early 1960s.
She decided it was too precious to fill with anything so prosaic as recipes or addresses. She chose instead to keep it as a commonplace book – filled largely with poetry, and with bits of prose too – and she kept it on and off until the day she died nearly four years ago.
Poetry had always been an enthusiasm of hers, which meant it became an enthusiasm of mine, and is something I’ve been writing about for some time now.
In 2014, I wrote a memoir called Black Rainbow: How Words Healed Me – My Journey Through Depression. The book is about how poetry consoled me at the height of my battle with the illness.
Ever since, I’ve been running Healing Words poetry workshops for mental-health charities and in prisons.
But my mother’s death changed my attitude to poetry, and has led to a new book. It’s about how poetry can help your emotional wellbeing, which is why I’ve called it You’ll Never Walk Alone: Poems for Life’s Ups and Downs.
I was previously drawn to poems for difficult times. But my mother’s passing, counter-intuitively, has prompted me to explore poems about hope and joy, as much as about sadness.
If I’ve learnt anything from losing her, it’s that life is too short not to focus on the happy times.
So my book still includes poems such as Love (III), in which George Herbert brilliantly describes feeling ‘guilty of dust and sin’. But it also has others such as A Blessing by James Wright, in which the poet captures the joyful moment he meets some wild Indian ponies in Minnesota: ‘Suddenly I realise / That if I stepped out of my body, I would break / Into blossom.’
Through this chance meeting, Wright finds a way to escape his materiality and loneliness.
The matter-of-fact language – notice how the poet imagines ‘stepping’ out of his body – makes the transcendence sound as simple as putting one foot in front of the other.
Both these poems, in different ways, help the reader feel, in the words of F Scott Fitzgerald, that our longings are ‘universal longings’, and that we’re ‘not lonely or isolated from anyone’.
Today, I’m drawn to different poems. My tastes have changed also when it comes to learning poetry by heart.
I now want to be more like my mum, someone who knew hundreds of poems from memory and could summon them at will, no smartphone required. As for many of her generation, it was commonplace at her school to learn a poem a week. She told me that she was also asked to learn poetry as a punishment for any minor transgressions.
One of my last memories of my mother is of her in the hospital dialysis unit – a windowless, airless room – attached to a machine she didn’t want to be attached to, with me desperate to distract her and make light of how miserable things were.
I looked up Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott on my phone. It was one of the first poems I had ever learned by heart, something we had done together, I lying on the beaten-up olive-green sofa in our sitting room, she pacing the room correcting my mistakes.
Of course, she instantly realised I was reading an inaccurate version online, not the Oxford Book of English Verse one. In that moment, I resolved to learn more poems by heart.
Once upon a time, this was not such an unusual pastime. Richard Ingrams, The Oldie’s founding father, recalls his schooling at Shrewsbury, where an English master, a man called McEachran, didn’t teach according to the curriculum.
‘He taught poetry in what he called “spells” – four- or five-line extracts which you had to learn by heart and recite,’ Ingrams recalls. ‘It was completely unlike anything else that was being taught at school and it made us interested in books and reading poetry.’
We children of the seventies and eighties were different. I don’t remember having to learn a single poem at St Paul’s Girls’ School.
And, more recently, I can’t recall any of my own children learning a poem by heart, unless it was encouraged with a bribe by me for some present or other. We have lost something.
I have found it invaluable to learn the kinds of emotionally companionable poems you will find in my book, in which I also share how best you might try to learn them. Now that I know at least some of my selections by heart, I engage even more closely with the feelings they evoke.
My mother knew all this only too well. Thanks to her, I now know it too. I like to think she is looking down from heaven, knowing her red leather album wasn’t in vain.
Rachel Kelly’s You’ll Never Walk Alone: Poems for Life’s Ups and Downs (Yellow Kite) is out now
