Hello, my name's John Holmes I'm professor of
Victorian literature and culture at the
University of Birmingham as part of our
year-long Arts and Sciences Festival
we're moving on in the spring now to
think about the topic of hope I was
going to give a lecture on poetry before
the university had to close down on
account of the COVID-19 crisis
and somehow that theme of poetry and
hope seems now all the more pertinent
than it did before we had to enter the
lockdown
I want to think a little bit today with
you about what poetry can offer in a
time of crisis in particular what poetry
can offer us in the way of hope. The
current crisis has led to an odd
burgeoning of the arts it's a strange
thing to say because of course many
people have been left out of work and
lots and lots of artistic institutions
have had to close but we've seen
concerts being recorded on Zoom and
distributed around the world we've seen
the national theatre streaming major
productions of its plays. There's been
poetry read on radio 4 every day so
clearly there's a sense that the arts
can offer us something now that we need
in this time but what about poetry
particularly? What can poetry offer us?
And what hope can it offer us? I think
the first thing to say about poetry is
that it's a slow art form it's an art
form that you have to take your time
over. In fact to read poetry is to take a
moment's pause. Now of course in a way
we're all taking a moment's pause from
our lives at the moment - it's as if the
pause button has been pushed, we're all
waiting to know when we can start again.
But that moment of pause has given us
time to reflect, time for what's come to
be known I think recently as mindfulness
and poetry is a very mindful art form. It
makes us think but it also makes us feel
we have to digest it. We read it slowly,
we read it ideally aloud
and we feel it in our bodies when
a poem brings a tear to your
eye for example or sends a shiver down
your spine that's a sign that poetry is
a full-body art form. It's embodied in
not as obviously as drama for example
but nevertheless it is absolutely an
embodied art form. So poetry gives us
these moments to pause, these moments of
of mindfulness, these times to reflect on
what really matters, what we really value
and the time also to reflect on our
memories and how the memories of others
speak to our own. The poet William
Wordsworth had a phrase for this he
talked about spots of time in his poem
The Prelude and particularly he wrote
thinking here about his own memory but
it applies to all of our memories he
wrote 'There are in our existence spots
of time, That with distinct pre-eminence
retain A renovating virtue, whence our
minds Are nourished and invisibly
repaired; A virtue, by which pleasure is
enhanced, That penetrates, enables us to
mount, When high, more high, and lifts us
up when fallen.' This capacity of poetry
to capture these spots of time and
communicate them to other others is
one of its real strengths. It's one of
the things that it can offer us now in a
moment of crisis is to hear voices from
the past from other places from other
times of people going through
experiences that recall or anticipate
more precisely the experiences
we're going through now. Of course the
most profound experience that has been
felt by people during the COVID-19
crisis has been the experience of loss.
The experience of bereavement is the
most intense version of that but of
course we've all lost many things. We've
lost contact with people. We've lost
those daily interactions that we depend
upon. We've lost the chance to go places, the chance to do things, we may have lost our
working lives in some sense or at least
the practicalities of them. But that loss
of bereavement of course puts
all of that in perspective and that's
why so many governments around the world
have decided quite rightly to prioritize
human life over economic necessities if
you like or economic stability. Now
poetry can talk to us very profoundly
about loss and I want to share a couple
of poems with you today that do that, and
that help us to grapple not only with
loss itself but with the movement beyond
bereavement, the change to
the next stage, the stage of processing
that experience. Of course there are so
many of these poems one could pick any number but I'm gonna
hone in on a couple that are special
favourites of mine. The first one because
it speaks to us from a time when we
really wouldn't expect, I think, to find
ourselves hearing the words of somebody
that we recognize so profoundly as
experiencing what we experience. I want
to take you back to the 17th century. I'm
going to read you a section of a poem
from the 1620s. In 1624 a man called
Henry King lost his wife. Henry King was
a clergyman in London at St. Pauls. He
went on to become a bishop later in life.
Henry King was in his early thirties, his
wife Anne was only 23 and she died and
he wrote a poem memorializing her. He
called it An Exequy which means a rite
for the dead, a ritual for the dead, but
it's not a ritualistic poem. It's not a a
poem that is highly formulaic or
structured according to conventions. It's
a very personal poem, a very private poem
in some ways and I hope we all agree
with me when you hear it it's a very
beautiful and moving tribute to Ann and
account of his feelings towards her and
a tribute to their love. The poem, the
section I'm going to read you
which begins about half
way through the poem begins with an
address to the earth where she's buried
and then it moves on to an address to Ann
herself and the poet is thinking here,
Henry King is thinking here, about
reunion with his dead wife in due
course in time and time therefore
becomes an image for the the movement
towards that moment of coming back
together. So here is a selection then
from An Exequy by Henry King: 'Meantime,
thou hast her, earth; much good May my harm do
thee. Since it stood With heaven's will I
might not call Her longer mine, I give thee
all My short-liv'd right and interest In
her whom living I lov'd best; With a most
free and bounteous grief, I give thee what
I could not keep. Be kind to her, and
prithee look Thou write into thy doomsday
book Each parcel of this rarity Which in
thy casket shrin'd doth lie So close the
ground, and 'bout her shade Black
curtains draw, my bride is laid. Sleep on
my love in thy cold bed
Never to be disquieted! My last good-
night! Thou wilt not wake Till I thy fate
shall overtake; Till age, or grief, or
sickness must Marry my body to that
dust It so much loves, and fill
the room my heart keeps empty in thy tomb.
Stay for me there, I will not fail To
meet thee in that hollow vale And think
not much of my delay; I am already on the
way, And follow thee with all the speed
Desire can make, or sorrows breed. Each
minute is a short degree, and ev'ry hour
a step towards thee. At night when I
betake to rest, Next morn I rise nearer my
west Of life almost by eight hours' sail
Than when sleep breath'd his drowsy gale
The thought of this bids me go on, And
wait my disillusion With hope and
comfort. Dear (forgive The crime) I am
content to live Divided, with but half a
heart,
Till we shall meet and never part.'
For me this is an immensely touching
poem, the personal quality of the
address, the way he speaks to Ann as my
loved one, says to her my last good night,
is very very moving and he's there also
admitting that this is - even in the
process of um a kind of bounteous grief
or grief that is overflowing - he is still
finding his way towards hope and comfort,
towards an accommodation, an acceptance
that life must go on in the meantime. I
particularly love that image of time
moving and him moving with time towards
that moment of reunion and that as a
sailing journey, a journey towards the
west of course, the west of life, the
sunset of life. It's an it's an elegant
conceit actually but it's also a almost
a kind of shared - jokes the wrong word -
but a shared indulgence in an idea that
he and Ann have together, something that
she might appreciate and it did indeed
take him a long long time to reunite
with her  - there's another 45 years that
Henry King lived on, he lived to the age
of 77, very old in his time till 1669 so
he lived to see and not only this very
personal crisis but of course the
national crisis of the Civil War. I want
to turn now to a much more recent voice,
a much more recent poem but which also I
think speaks to our moment, and it speaks
to our moment partly because of its
recognition of loss and its recognition
that even when you lose somebody you
retain them. They're with you your there,
you're able to remember them, to recall
them, to speak with them. This is a poem
called Kew Gardens one of my favourite
poems again, it's by D. M. Black, a
Scottish poet of South African, Southern
African origin and it's addressed to his
father
Ian Black who was a botanist. It's in
memoriam of him Ian Black. 
I'll explain to you after I've read it
why I think it's so pertinent to our
precise crisis moment now but also I
hope you'll just enjoy listening to it
and enjoy the experience. So this is Kew
Gardens addressed to Ian Black, D. M. Black's
father: 'Distinguished scientist, to whom I
greatly defer (old man, moreover, whom I
dearly love) I walk today in Kew Gardens,
in sunlight the color of honey, which
flows from the cold autumnal blue of
the heavens to light these tans and
golds, these ripe corn and leather and
sunset colors of the East Asian liriodendrons, of the beeches and maples and
plum-trees and the stubborn green banks
of the holly hedges- and you walk always
beside me, you with your knowledge of
names and your clairvoyant gaze, in
what for me is sheer panorama seeing the
net or web of connectedness. But today it
is I who speak (and you are long dead,
but it is to you I say it): 'The leaves are
green in summer because of chlorophyll
and the flowers are bright to lure the
pollinators, and without remainder (so you
have often told me) these marvelous
things that shock the heart the head
can account for; but I want to sing an
excess which is not so simply
explainable, to say that the beauty of
the autumn is a redundant beauty, that the
sky had no need to be this particular
shade of blue, nor the maple to die in
flames of this particular yellow, nor the
heart to respond with an ecstasy that
does not beget children. I want to say
that I do not believe your science
although I believe every word of it, and
intend to understand it; that although I
rate that unwavering gaze higher than
almost everything there is another sense, a
hearing, to which I more deeply attend.
Thus I withstand and contradict you, I,
your child, who have inherited from you
the passion which causes me to oppose
you.'
There are so many reasons why I wanted
to share this poem with you and why I
think it's appropriate for our
particular moment. Maybe the first and
most obvious is of course that it's a
poem about loss, in a sense, it's a poem
about remembering somebody who died some
while before, remembering them and
knowing that you can still engage with
them - you can not only recall them but
you can even enter into a kind of
dialogue with them and of course that
relationship between Black and his
father is one that is really intensely
captured as in captured as intensely
loving within this poem - old man moreover
whom I dearly love is the second line of
the poem. So partly it's a poem about a
relationship, the loss of an elder
relative but the persistence of that
person within one's life and mind. It's
also a poem about nature or perhaps more
precisely we could say about gardens and
parks - Kew Gardens is at the moment sadly
closed but many parks are open and many of
us have found the fact that the parks
are open a lifeline really during these
times and we've been able to appreciate
living things - think about that that
catalogue of the beauty of plants and
the colours that Black captures in his
poem. I think we can all appreciate that
engagement with parks and gardens. It's a
poem too about science - now more than
ever we've come to know that like Black
speaking that poem, we need to believe
the science but we need to understand
the science too and yet at the same time
I think like Black we've come to know
too that the science is not everything,
that human reactions and responses
can't always be reduced to
something scientific, that we need to
appreciate those in themselves we need
to hear those as well as to see the
science and he uses that contrast
between sight and sound - sight for the
science sound for sound for poetry
really, poetry is an auditory art form - it
works through voice, it works through its
sound in our ears
and by hearing that beauty captured we
can recapture our own sense of the
importance of beauty as against merely
function, utility, that which can be
explained as such. So it's a poem that
directs us to what we value and helps us
to remember and think about what we
value in a moment of loss in a moment
where access to the outside is so
important to us. Now it may seem odd that
I've spent a lecture that is supposed to
be about poetry and hope talking
principally about grief and loss but of
course that's the crisis we're living
through it's a moment of loss and to
find the hope we need to face the loss
we need to move through it and poetry
can help us to do that I think by
hearing the voices of others - Henry King
all those centuries ago, D. M. Black, a
much closer contemporary to ours,
feeling their own loss, responding to
their own loss, processing it. Also I
think we have a need to be honest in
these moments. There's a line that always
sticks with me from Thomas Hardy's poem
In Tenebris, a second of a series of
three poems of that title that he wrote,
when he talks about himself as one 'Who
holds that if way to the Better there be, it
exacts a full look at the Worst' - in other
words we need to be alert to the risks,
the dangers, the worst possible effects
if we're gonna find our way to a better
world and that's true of COVID-19. It's
true of the crisis we're in, but it's
also, I'm afraid, even more profoundly
true of the even more profound crisis
that we are in long-term, which is the
environmental catastrophe that we're
experiencing .COVID-19 is in a way a
harbinger of a much worse crisis, much
worse, a much more real
apocalypse one might say. This is what
the climate change committee has
recently explained in its letter to the
government calling for the movement out
of the COVID-19 crisis to be also a movement
to address the crisis of climate change
and the environmental degradation which
we need very profoundly to deal with.
We've all seen over the last 10 years 20
years an extraordinary terrifying
escalation in extreme weather events
whether we're talking about hurricanes
in the Caribbean on the coast of America
or wildfires in California and Australia
in the Amazon absolutely terrifyingly
and of course abetted there by human
activity. Whether we're thinking about
flooding in Bangladesh or in our own
homes here in Britain, whether we're
thinking about drought across the
continent of Europe, these changes are
happening. They're happening now, they're
happening rapidly - much more rapidly
indeed than the science has projected
that they would happen. You can see that
with the levels of ice melt in the
Arctic for example, the impending sea
level rises and of course this is and
indeed not to mention the other effects
of human activity on the environment. We
all know about plastic pollution in the
sea we, all know about air pollution in
our cities and towns and this is going
to have it's already having but it's
going to have ever more profound human
effects. It's going to lead to population
migrations, it's going to lead to
food shortages. It's hard to see those
not in turn leading to wars and of
course diseases unless we address the
problem, unless we do something about it,
unless we find the hope that we need to
do something about it and I think poetry
can play a role in finding that hope for
us. We know the role that the science must
play. We know that we must understand it,
we have to believe it because it is our
best data. It's the thing that is telling
us what is happening but at the same
time we need poetry, we need the arts and
we need them more than for any other
purpose I think for hope and for the
imagination because if we are going to
get to a world which is sustainable for
us to live in if we're going to move
beyond simple recapitulation
of the kind of rapid activity,
consumption, production, draining of the
earths resources which we saw
before COVID-19 and which
actually COVID-19 has given us
pause to think about and has slowed
momentarily has slowed down those
processes allowed us to imagine and indeed
experience a world in which the air
is cleaner. It's given us quite literally
a breather but if we're going to get it
beyond this we need to seize that moment
but we also need to be able to imagine
what world we're going to, to imagine
other ways of living in relation to
nature, in relation to each other, other
forms of economy of course but also
other forms of value, other things to
value - the value in fact that we found
ourselves placing or been reminded of
for ourselves through the COVID-19
crisis - the value of human relations, the
value of the arts, the value of the
natural world around us, the value of
those things that we missed but
particularly selectively those things
that we missed, which of the things we
miss most - each other probably and the
world around us so we need to get to
this place. The role of poetry is partly
to inspire us to get to it. Poetry is one
of the most powerful forms of language
for inspiration for moving people and
also to imagine it. There's a phrase, a
formula- formulation that the poet Percy
Shelley came up with at the end of his
essay Defence of Poetry around 200 years
ago where he said that 'Poets are the
hierophants of an unapprehended
inspiration; the mirrors of the
gigantic shadows which futurity casts
upon the present' and he closed that
essay by saying 'Poets are the
unacknowledged legislators of the world.'
These are very grandiose claims but what
Shelley means by the poet is the person
who is capable of imagining things other
than as they are, who's capable of
imagining that communicating that not
necessarily knowing even that that is
what they're doing but who in freeing up
their imagination
can take us to somewhere new and by poet
he doesn't just mean a writer in
verse, he means other kinds of
imaginative and creative writer and
artist. In our own time we might think of
science fiction writers or fantasy
writers any writer any artist any
filmmaker who is not trapped within a
presumption that the present is the way
things are and has to be. Shelley wrote
at the end of his poem Prometheus
Unbound about the need 'to hope till Hope
creates From its own wreck the thing it
contemplates' - hope has to face despair.
Hope has to triumph over despair and
Shelley of course was himself a great
prophet of democratization equality
fairer human relations many of which
have come into being in one form or
another. More freedom more personal
freedom was another thing he was a great
prophet of. So poetry can help us I think
get to that kind of new world where we
need to be it can help us hope and it
can help us to imagine. I want to close
then with one last poem by for my money
as far as I know one of the
greatest Australian poets of the 20th
century, perhaps the greatest Australian
poet of all, certainly one of the
greatest poets of the 20th century her
name was Judith Wright. She was also a
great campaigner for aboriginal rights
for the environment in Australia and she
wrote a poem in 1973 the year I was born
which seems extraordinarily prescient
now. It was called Lament for Passenger
Pigeons and it's a poem about human
induced extinction. The passenger pigeon
is probably well one of the most famous
instances of human induced extinction it
was probably the most abundant bird in
the world in the nineteenth century it
flocked
literally in billions across the United
States of America but through intense
and wanton hunting and also through
deforestation the populations of
passenger pigeons collapsed
until there were only a few individuals
left and it's one of the very few
species when we can pinpoint the exact
moment that it went extinct which was on
September the first in 1914
around 1 o'clock the the zookeeper in
Cincinnati Zoo where the last passenger
pigeon lived her name was Martha was on
his rounds he went past her cage she was
still alive 15 minutes later he went
past again and she was dead - that's the
moment the passenger pigeon went extinct.
Now the passenger pigeon is a symbol of
the impact we have had on the natural
world and the wanton destruction that
we've had we've made we've taken on the
natural world but for Judith Wright it's
more than just that. It's also a symbol
of our insistence on valuing things
functionally valuing things according to
what use they have for us.
She starts ironically with a quotation
'Don't ask for the meaning, ask for the
use' from the philosopher Wittgenstein
and this is the adage that she's going
to challenge in this poem and it's a
poem that as Hardy says exacts a full
look of the worst. It's a gruelling poem
it's a poem that starts with and runs
into a deep condemnation of human
activity and yet it ends on a note of
hope it ends on the possibility that we
can change our values we can change the
world that we live in as a result and
this is the poem I want her to close
with so this is Lament for Passenger
Pigeons by Judith Wright: 'The voice of
water as it flows and falls the noise
air makes against earth-surfaces have
changed; are changing to the tunes we
choose. What wooed and echoed in the
pigeon's voice? We have not heard the bird.
How reinvent that passenger, its
million wings and hues, when we have lost
the bird, the thing itself, the sheen of
life on flashing long migrations? Might
human musics hold it, could we hear?
Trapped in the fouling nests of time and
space, we turn the music on; but it is man,
and his man who leans a deafening ear.
And it is man we eat and man we drink
and man who thickens round us like a
stain. Ice at the polar axis smells of
men. A word, a class, a formula, a use: that
is the rhythm, the cycle we impose. The
sirens sang us to the ends of sea, and
changed to us; their voices were our own,
jug jug to dirty ears in dirtied brine.
Pigeons and angels sang us to the sky
and turned to metal and a dirty need. The
height of sky, the depth of sea we are,
sick with a yellow stain, a fowling dye.
Whatever Being is, that formula, it dies
as we pursue it past the word. We have
not asked the meaning, but the use. What
is the use of water when it dims? The use
of air that wines of emptiness? The use
of glass-eyed pigeons caged in glass? We
listen to the sea, that old machine, to
air the hoarsens on earth-surfaces and
has no angel, no migrating cry. What is
the being and the end of man? Blank
surfaces reverb a human voice whose echo
tells us that we choose to die: or else,
against the blank of everything, to
reinvent that passenger, that bird-siren-
and-angel image we contain essential in
a constellating word. To sing of Being,
its escaping wing, to utter absence in a
human chord and recreate the meaning as
we sing.' What Judith Wright holds out for
us in this poem is the possibility that
poetry can revive for us something
that's gone it can recalibrate our
values it can enable us to imagine the
world in a different way to think about
it differently to experience it
differently to revive it and ourselves
through that process. So poetry not only
preserves the memories and values that
have always meant so much
for us it enables us to recapture them
it enables us to reach towards a new
possibility if collectively we can now
we can imagine the new world that is on
the far side of this crisis and on the
far side too of the far deeper crisis
of our own making if we can imagine it
we can reach it and poetry can help us
to do that. Thank you.
