Poetry Will Save Your Life

Though our grand patron here, C.S. Lewis' 'Is Theology Poetry?' has nothing to do with this essay. Let us not get carried away. Or maybe just a little bit :)

In my online cart of a bookshop eCommerce account, is a book titled Poetry Will Save Your Life. It has been there for a little over a month now, with the rest of my hopeful purchases. Shame, or at least a smack of reality should ideally make me empty the cart by either purchase, or clicking the ‘remove from cart’ button. But one does not merely find such a title and move on from it. No. They keep it in their cart, hopeful that one day they will hold it in their hands.

The description on the website says that it’s the author talking about the poems that have changed their lives. I don’t know the author, but I desperately want to know those poems. I want to read the stories of when she first read them and what they did to her and how they made her feel and what they made her think of. I want to live in the pages of that book and the mind of the author. But I think the overarching thing is too suddenly feel the need to chronicle the poems that have changed mine.

My list may not be a book bound in pages and sold somewhere. But somewhere in my memory, and obviously, here in this space that I have reserved for such ramblings. The list won’t be long. It’d definitely have my favorites like Lucille Clifton’s Won’t You Celebrate With Me, Brian Patten’s Sometimes It Happens, Wendy Cope’s The Orange, and of course, John Fletcher’s Upon An Honest Man’s Fortune. And the list will continue with poems that have come in the form of songs too; Andrew Petersen’s Don’t You Want To Thank Someone, and Manana’s All I Seek. But one that I might struggle to accurately talk about, while feeling the need to do so, is Frances Ridley Havergal’s Take My Life and Let It Be. Poetry and then a hymn. Look at these stanzas;

Take my silver and my gold;
not a mite would I withhold.
Take my intellect and use
every power as thou shalt choose.

Take my will and make it thine;
it shall be no longer mine.
Take my heart it is thine own;
it shall be thy royal throne,

It is so simple, and yet so profound. A prayer and a declaration, quietly written in the 19th Century and now sung by millions of people, years after, praying the same thing.

Wikipedia says that Frances who wrote the hymn, “did not occupy, and did not claim for herself, a prominent place as a poet”¹. I found that particularly charming. How she just went on about her writing and praying and declaring, and created for all time, a poem so dear to many, so dear to one. She did do other things too. The internet is replete with records of it. The works of her hands (or more accurately, her mind) outlive her, stirring in the hearts of many, what she herself prayed for and desired all those many decades ago. Generations to come affected by the hymn might not be able to accurately express how her words have changed them. But they would definitely keep going back to her words for how it affects them, becoming their own prayer and declaration too.

One day, I will go back to the cart and clear it in a wise way² . In the meantime, one should (must, actually) take time to sit with themselves and the poems that they presume have changed their lives. In doing so, they will either be introduced to a new version of themselves, or have a necessary reintroduction to the version that so loved said poem. The one that “saved their lives”.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Ridley_Havergal#:~:text=Frances%20Ridley%20Havergal%20(14%20December,tracts%2C%20and%20works%20for%20children.

2. Whatever that means, for someone who has books in her home that she is yet to open the first page of.