How poetry can sustain us through illness, bereavement and change
When COVID lockdown loomed back in 2020, many people panic-bought toilet rolls – but I stocked up on notebooks and my favourite pencils.
I had been inspired by the writing of Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. In Letters to a Young Poet (1929), a collection of ten letters written to a young military cadet who had sent his poetry to Rilke for critique, Rilke advised: “Confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write?”
In a BBC radio programme, The Essay: Letters to a Young Poet, first broadcast in 2014, the English poet Vicki Feaver responded to Rilke’s question. She said: “Of course I wouldn’t literally die, but a part of me would die, as it did in the years when I didn’t write.”
My husband, Arthur Gardner, who died of motor neurone disease in 2008, would have identified with this. He started reading and writing poetry in his early 20s and his enthusiasm and ambition increased as he grew older.
During his last few months, he had lost the use of his arms and hands and was dependent on a machine that pushed air into his lungs. Nevertheless, he used every possible opportunity to work on his poems, particularly looking forward to the weekly visit of a sensitive and sympathetic Marie Curie nurse who would patiently scribe for him.
Feaver had wanted to be a poet since reading the work of William Blake as a child. But it wasn’t until she was in her early 30s, married with four young children, that she began to write seriously. The poem 1974, which appears in her collection, I Want! I Want! (2019), includes a conversation she had at a party when a man asked her what she did. The final stanza reveals how significant an impact it had:
‘I’m a poet!’ I lied
jolting myself to life:
a woman buried under ice
with words burning inside.
Feaver’s first full collection, Close Relatives (now out of print) was published in 1981. Thirteen years later, her collection The Handless Maiden won several awards. Many of these poems are reworkings of stories from other sources.
The title poem, one that Feaver has said is very important to her, is a retelling of one of Grimms’ fairy tales. A woman whose hands have been severed by her father has them restored when she plunges them in water to save her drowning child. Of course, hands are used for writing, and this is emphasised in the last lines of the poem: “And I cried for my hands that sprouted / in the red-orange mud – the hands / that write this, grasping / her curled fist.”
In a later poem, Bramble Arm, Feaver explores the notion that writing can be empowering. The speaker of the poem describes a dream where her right arm, “the arm that wields / my writing hand”, is covered in brambles:
It could be a punishment
for unlocking the voice
I was taught as a child
to soften or silence.
Or a sign of its power –
a weak woman’s arm
transformed into
a fearsome weapon.
Now in her eighties, Feaver has continued to write. Her most recent publication, The Yellow Kite (2025) is her first collection since she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. In the first poem, Ode to Parkinson’s, she addresses the illness which “began as her enemy”, but can be seen as a friend because: “You jolted her awake: / challenging her to live / every minute left to her.”
The word “jolted” is possibly a deliberate link to her earlier poem 1974. The jolt caused by the man’s question was the motivation to begin writing, and now illness has given a new sense of urgency to living fully – and for Feaver, that means writing.
There are 25 poems in the pamphlet. Many of them are about what it is like to live with Parkinson’s, some of them using the moniker “shaking woman”. One poem, Her Lost Words, reveals how hard it is for a poet who feels as if “the inside of her head”:
was a shaken snow-globe
where words, mingling with the storm
of whirling flakes, settled randomly,
revealing some and burying others.
In Parkinson’s Speaks, the disease is given its own voice, and it is a cruel one: “But I’m patient. I can wait. / You’ve already fallen / and broken a hip.”
The poems face up to the reality of ageing and serious illness but refuse self-pity or false optimism. The title poem, the last one in the pamphlet, refers to a kite that was a gift from a ten-year-old son “the year his father left”. The poet recalls “watching it as it soared” and the effect it had: “My spirit that I thought / would never recover / struggled up from the floor / and flew into the air.”
Writing does not take us away from the difficult and the painful. If we write with courage and with integrity, it can take us to the very heart of it.
It was after my husband’s death that I started writing poetry. Many of the poems I wrote then were raw and self-centred, but writing them helped me to make sense of my grief. Now I write with more awareness of the craft and with ambition.
It’s often difficult and frustrating but frequently absorbing and fascinating. I think of Rilke’s question. Must I write? My answer is yes.
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Julie Meril Gardner does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.