Consoling passages from poetry or drama or song?

April 30, 2020 7:41 PM

What are your most-comforting passages from poetry, or drama, or lyrics? What words ease your mind when worry gnaws?

I was just listening to this week's Shakespeare Unlimited podcast from the Folger Shakespeare Library (#143: Shakespeare and Solace. The hosts ask guests, "Do you have a passage from Shakespeare that you return to in difficult times? Is there a sonnet or soliloquy you keep coming back to for comfort or wisdom?"

I would like to have the question broadened and put to you all.

(Half-hearted apologies if this seems like ChatFilter to some of you: FIAMO -- but I could really use some comfort these days, so that I can pass along that strength to my family.)

posted by wenestvedt to Media & Arts (15 answers total)

Best answer: Carrion Comfort
BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist — slack they may be — these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan
With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?

Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.
Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,
Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer.
Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród
Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.
posted by praemunire at 7:58 PM on April 30, 2020 [3 favorites]

Hopkins again. I learned this poem by repetition when my father was dying and it still brings me much peace.

Heaven-Haven

A nun takes the veil

I have desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail,
And a few lilies blow.

And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 9:09 PM on April 30, 2020 [5 favorites]

Best answer: This passage from Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief always occurs to me when things get overwhelming.

“The world is so huge that people are always getting lost in it. There are too many ideas and things and people too many directions to go. I was starting to believe that the reason it matters to care passionately about something is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size. It makes the world seem not huge and empty but full of possibility.“

Susan Orlean , The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession
posted by The Deej at 9:09 PM on April 30, 2020 [3 favorites]

This above all: To thine own self be true. Hamlet
posted by Wild_Eep at 9:13 PM on April 30, 2020 [2 favorites]

There might be some things in this previously for you.
posted by bryon at 9:46 PM on April 30, 2020 [1 favorite]

"Asking a poet about poetry is like asking a flower about gardening"-Invictus

"Drawing is taking a line for a walk." - Paul Klee

"Architecture is frozen music." - Goethe

"The less a man makes declarative statements, the less apt he is to look foolish in retrospect."- Quinton Tarantino

"The church is near,
but the road is icy.
The tavern is far,
but I will walk carefully."

"Don't doubt my excellence."- asshole ex-coworker

And always "This to shall pass."
posted by Marky at 10:00 PM on April 30, 2020

Lapis Lazuli by Yeats is my go-to poem for hard times. Modern readers will have to get past the “hysterical women” in the first line.

All things fall and are built again
And those that build them again are gay.
posted by FencingGal at 3:53 AM on May 1, 2020 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Say not the struggle nought availeth,
The labour and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
And as things have been they remain.

If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
It may be, in yon smoke concealed,
Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers,
And, but for you, possess the field.

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.

And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light,
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
But westward, look, the land is bright.

- Arthur Hugh Clough
posted by Catseye at 4:28 AM on May 1, 2020 [1 favorite]

Let Evening Come

Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don't
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.

--Jane Kenyon
posted by MonkeyToes at 6:55 AM on May 1, 2020 [4 favorites]

Best answer: God's Grandeur

By Gerard Manley Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
posted by mermayd at 8:08 AM on May 1, 2020 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: I have a book of Hopkins' poetry around here somewhere -- I think I'll read it tonight at bedtime!
posted by wenestvedt at 9:05 AM on May 1, 2020

The 23rd Psalm from the Bible has always been a consolation to me--especially in the poetic words of the King James Version.

The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want.
He maketh me lie down in green pastures; he restoreth my soul.
He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death
I will fear no evil for thou art with me.
Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.
Thou annointest my head with oil.
My cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.
And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
posted by Gino on the Meta at 12:27 PM on May 1, 2020 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Someone I follow on Twitter posted this one today:

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.
Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

And I always liked this bit from Tolkien:

There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King (The Lord of the Rings, #3)
posted by sevenyearlurk at 1:21 PM on May 1, 2020 [3 favorites]

Best answer: "When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free."
Wendell Berry
posted by cocoagirl at 1:29 PM on May 1, 2020 [1 favorite]

"None the less, he knew that the tale he had to tell could not be one of a final victory. It could be only the record of what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers."


Albert Camus, "The Plague"
posted by mermayd at 8:48 AM on May 3, 2020