TWO favourite poems for National Poetry Day? An impossible choice, but today Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘Pied Beauty’ seems to be reaching out to me. Perhaps it’s thanks to the glorious late summer warmth and a feeling of Nature’s bounty. Perhaps it’s because I always turn to this poem if I’m feeling low, and today I’ve been sharing it with our son who has just failed his driving test for the fifth time. It has managed to cheer him up. So I hope it will work its magic for you. The poem’s vibrant language and images rekindle my enthusiasm for words and refresh my own stale vocabulary. It feels as if Nature is reaching out and grabbing me by the collar, forcing me, like Hopkins, to celebrate even the smallest miracles of creation – the rose-moles on a trout; a finch’s wing.

Glory be to God for dappled things –
   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                                Praise him.

My second poem will have to be George Herbert’s ‘Love (III)’. Herbert brilliantly describes what depression can feel like. It makes one feel ‘guilty of dust and sin’ with a soul that is ‘drawing back’.  But in the poem Herbert also gives us a second compassionate voice, that of love.

Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back
                              Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
                             From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
                             If I lacked any thing.
 
A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:
                             Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
                             I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
                             Who made the eyes but I?
 
Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame
                             Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
                             My dear, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
                             So I did sit and eat.

Yes: my soul can draw back. Yes: I need love to bid me welcome. The poem pinpoints my sense of guilt that I can still, at times, feel low even whilst being blessed with a loving home and husband and every good fortune. Herbert’s words provide a different, gentler, more compassionate narrative – that we need to learn to love and forgive ourselves, and ultimately, ‘sit and eat.’ Herbert himself almost certainly suffered depression, albeit it undiagnosed at the time. I feel as if we have been to the same place and speak the same language, even though his visit was centuries ago. He is a companion on my journey – and I hope will accompany you too.

Rachel Kelly’s memoir about how poetry helped her recover from depression and the 40 poems that helped her through, Black Rainbow: How words healed me – my journey through depression, is published by Yellow Kite Books, a subsidiary of Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99. All author proceeds are going to the charities SANE and United Response.