Background Blog: Words worth remembering

Peele Castle in a Storm by Sir George Beaumont, 1805. © Wordsworth Trust. Image used by kind permission of the Wordsworth Trust.

As part of this project, Wordsworth Trust have invited me to see the Peele Castle painting, pictured above. Find out why it's important to me here:

Through songwriting I’ve often encountered the question of the difference between a good song and a good poem. It’s a juicy question because there isn’t a quick, googleable answer. There are some recognized structures of poems and of songs too, but there will always be a difference of opinion as to what makes something good. There was a particular difference of opinion about art that really helped my recovery from the habits and thought patterns that kept me locked in a cycle of self-harm for ten years.

I’ve never been that good at understanding poems, especially older ones due to archaic phrases and a short attention span, but I had a copy of English Romantic Verse from school (sold off for 10p in 1992), and there were a couple of poems I kept having a go at reading. One was Elegiac Stanzas by William Wordsworth. He, like me, was a Cumbrian lad and used to take his holidays at Rampside, south of Barrow town, overlooking Piel Island, a place not far from where I used to live. Another parallel in circumstance was that we had both lost younger brothers and struggled with grieving.

A year after his breavement, Wordsworth saw a painting of a ship being wrecked on the coast of Piel Island. His brother had died at sea and the painting stirred up some strong emotions. Elegiac Stanzas is his coming to terms with the fact that we all see things differently.

If Wordsworth had painted the picture he’d have pictured Piel Island on a calm sea, bathed in beautiful light. He struggled to make sense of why anyone would present it surrounded by crashing waves and dark, stormy skies. But they had and it was a revelation to him that if people can see physical things differently, then they can interpret thoughts differently too. If someone else can bear the pain of bereavement then he could find a way to do so as well.

As I touched on in a previous blog, sometimes we desire solitude and to block out unwanted stimulus. But sometimes it’s an unexpected sight, sound or experience that helps us shift our perspective of life, to be able to see in colour instead of black and white. When I understood that Wordsworth learned how to handle his grief, I knew that I could learn manage my darkest thoughts by seeing them from a different perspective. So no matter how much we want to shut ourselves away, there is a great benefit in fighting that impulse, in order to reconnect with the world. The simplest contact with other people can change our outlook in profound ways.

Update (6th April 2020): A little older and hairier, here's an abridged version of the poem set to a tune of mine and played on a banjo from China.

Click here to read Elegiac Stanzas and here to read a great blog by Jonathan Kerr on Pyschology and Mental Illness in Wordsworth's Poetry.