Suffering and Sorrow: The Consolations of Poetry

Poetry is a source of empathy and encouragement even in the darkest hour.

Poetry can touch the heart and bring healing in a uniquely beautiful way. Biba Kayewich

For a few months after my wife died of a brain aneurysm a little more than 20 years ago, I found comfort in poetry. Poems such as Theodore Roethke’s “Elegy for Jane,” dedicated to one of his students, and Christina Rossetti’s “Let Me Go” and “Remember” were no longer abstract sentiments in some anthology of literature. Rather, they echoed the feelings of my heart.

In the past half-century, researchers have confirmed what our ancestors knew instinctively: Hearing and reading poetry can bring comfort, hope, and strength in times of suffering and distress. Gretchen Schmelzer’s 2024 “The Healing Power of Poetry” is just one of many online articles addressing the therapeutic powers of a poem. She sums up some of the healing effects of verse with this thought:

“Poetry forms its own language of interconnections and constellations. Poetry can somehow act as a sort of gossamer skein of threads or sutures that can knit connections between head, heart and history. Poetry can weave whole new cloth or pick up old dropped stitches.”

Old-Time Therapy

In English-speaking countries, the 19th century was a high-water mark for verses specifically written to provide comfort to grieving readers. Widespread literacy, an abundance of materials in print, and an absence of electronic entertainments made many of those men and women inveterate fans of the written word. It was a common practice, for instance, for families to gather in the evenings and read aloud stories and poems. Newspapers and magazines of the day commonly included poetry in their pages and children recited and memorized poems in school.

Coupled with this shared interest in poetry was the absence of medical treatments and drugs we take for granted. For those not-so-distant ancestors, death in childbirth and high child mortality rates were common, and infectious diseases that are now rare or treatable, such as tuberculosis, pneumonia, and sepsis, brought death knocking at the door.

Also absent were our social safety nets. When a father of five lost his job at the factory, or a farm family faced drought and ruination, the situation was dire.

Consequently, poets of that time frequently offered words to strengthen the heart and to provide some emotional release for readers. Although some today may find these poems mawkish or overly sentimental, we must keep in mind the sharp differences in circumstance between that past and our present.

Here are just a few of those verses, some now rarely read, that acted as medicine in those bygone days.

Memories of Love

Poetry can touch the heart and bring healing in a uniquely beautiful way. Biba Kayewich

Like today’s grief counselors, poets reminded their audience to treasure the memories of loved ones lost to death, to mourn their passing but also to recollect and celebrate their goodness. In this short poem, Irish poet William Allingham (1824–1889) encouraged this connection between the living and the dead, illustrating the beauty found in the remembrance of a shared past:

No funeral gloom, my dears, when I am gone, Corpse-gazing, tears, black raiment, graveyard grimness; Think of me as withdrawn into the dimness, Yours still, you mine; remember all the best Of our past moments, and forget the rest; And so, to where I wait, come gently on.

In a longer piece, “Let Me Go,” we find similar sentiments expressed by Christina Rossetti (1830–1894). In these lines, for example:

Miss me a little, but not for long And not with your head bowed low Remember the love that once we shared Miss me, but let me go.

She also offers some counsel that our therapists would surely applaud:

When you are lonely and sick at heart Go the friends we know. Laugh at all the things we used to do Miss me, but let me go.

Sorrow Takes the Lectern

Like our modern counselors and psychologists, the poets of that Victorian era understood that suffering could be a teacher for those wise enough to heed its lessons. In “Sorrow,” Irish poet Aubrey de Vere (1814–1902) tells us to receive the afflictions that “God’s messenger sent down” with “the soul’s marmoreal calmness,” then ends:

... Grief should be, Like joy, majestic, equable, sedate; Confirming, cleansing, raising, making free; Strong to consume small troubles; to commend Great thoughts, grave thoughts, thoughts lasting to the end.

“Along the Road” by U.S. poet Robert Browning Hamilton (1880–1974) more bluntly delivers the lessons that sorrow teaches in silence and contemplation:

I walked a mile with Pleasure; She chattered all the way, But left me none the wiser For all she had to say.

I walked a mile with Sorrow And ne'er a word said she; But oh, the things I learned from her When Sorrow walked with me! Although Hamilton published this poem in 1915, its worldview is that of the era into which he was born. Pleasure was a human good and worthy of pursuit and enjoyment, but sorrow was the teacher of wisdom.

Popular poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850–1919) also saw the mercies and even blessings that might flow from trauma. Her poem “Sorrow’s Uses” speaks of the value in the contrasts between the sunlight and clouds that weather our lives:

The uses of sorrow I comprehend Better and better at each year’s end.

Deeper and deeper I seem to see Why and wherefore it has to be

Only after the dark, wet days Do we fully rejoice in the sun’s bright rays.

Sweeter the crust tastes after the fast Than the sated gourmand’s finest repast.

The faintest cheer sounds never amiss To the actor who once has heard a hiss.

To one who the sadness of freedom knows, Light seem the fetters love may impose.

And he who has dwelt with his heart alone, Hears all the music in friendship’s tone.

So better and better I comprehend How sorrow ever would be our friend.

Kindness Is a Flower of Suffering

What we take away from this classroom depends to some extent on the student. Some horrific violation of childhood innocence, for example, can turn one victim into a monster and another into a saint. Like today’s therapists, these 19th-century poets and others tried to steer the broken and the traumatized away from anger and bitterness to insight and empathy.

In Wilcox’s “The Little White Hearse,” the poet demonstrates perfectly the process of compassion acquired through sadness and heartbreak. The poem’s narrator begins by describing the return of a hearse that had borne “somebody’s baby” to the cemetery. She imagines the bereft mother:

Somebody’s sorrow is making me weep: I know not her name, but I echo her cry, For the dearly bought baby she longed so to keep

Then comes the shock of the last stanza:

I know not her name, but her sorrow I know; While I paused on the crossing I lived it once more, And back to my heart surged that river of woe That but in the breast of a mother can flow; For the little white hearse has been, too, at my door.

Wilcox had one child, a son, with her beloved husband, Robert. The baby died soon after birth.

According to a biographical sketch written by her brother, Wilcox made “the art of being kind” her religion, and “lived it every day of her life.” Surely her experiences underpinned this tenderness for others.

Reading and absorbing the words of these poets and others like them, as countless thousands of people have done, can not only bring light to our darkness, but can also blossom into the kindness that is always in demand, as Wilcox noted in her short poem “The World’s Need”:

So many gods, so many creeds, So many paths that wind and wind, While just the art of being kind, Is all the sad world needs.