Poetry and Staying Sane

...or "When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be"

For the last six years I worked an incredibly stressful job—the kind that is 24/7 in your brain and you always had to “be on.” I’ve written about this previously. Frankly, as happens with high levels of stress and pressure, your thoughts turn toward your health.

In my case, this was sort of forced on me, as I went into the hospital twice: once for exhaustion/migraines and another because my blood pressure launched through the roof like Sputnik. That said, I was an administrator during the pandemic, and as crazy as this sounds, it all felt like a small price—thousands of people were dying, hospitals in many regions were full, and our own workplace was not untouched by the Covid’s trail of damage and trauma.

Still, I could not turn my brain off. There were too many problems to address: this professor’s family, back in his home country, is sick. Where do we get the right PPE materials for musical instruments? Can we get streaming equipment in time for our theatre students to perform (as they are required to earn their degrees)? What if we need a replacement in a class mid-semester? What about the Adobe licenses for remote work? How do we keep students from just giving up and never returning to us, thus cratering our enrollment? Etc., more, etc., more. All of those things. And it was clear—sooner rather than later I would have a stroke.

*John Keats has now entered the chat*

“I also had fears that I would cease to be.”

I tried reading a book on meditation, a bit on Buddhism, dabbled in Pilates—anything to calm down. Nothing stuck. Nothing stuck but poetry, specifically John Keats’s sonnet “When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be.” Not only was I having such fears, but I have this poem memorized (and often make students memorize it), so I began reciting it—aloud or in my head—as a mantra, or a chant. And poetry worked at 2 AM or 4 AM. Over and over, poetry worked.

Here is Keats’s sonnet in full:

When I have fears that I may cease to be 
   Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain, 
Before high-pilèd books, in charactery, 
   Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain; 
When I behold, upon the night’s starred face, 
   Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, 
And think that I may never live to trace 
   Their shadows with the magic hand of chance; 
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour, 
   That I shall never look upon thee more, 
Never have relish in the faery power 
   Of unreflecting love—then on the shore 
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think 
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

This poem is incredible. John Keats is incredible—to die so young yet have fashioned so much beauty.

Not only did repeatedly reciting Keats’s poem to myself reset my brain and slow my heart down, you also have to know that I am a rhythm and meter freak. So, as I would recite this poem in my head, I would also “scan” it and think about the variations where Keats diverges from iambic pentameter (the poem’s dominant rhythm).

Instead of thinking about how to hold an entire college together during a global health crisis, I could, after two opening lines of iambic pentameter, think about the word “Hold” that opens line four—the stressed syllable breaking the iambic yoke for a variation that says, “This takes effort! The planting, the harvest, and the storage! It deserves a gosh-darned stressed syllable!”

Now that’s easy, but here is how line four scans as a whole—prepare to have your rhythmic minds blown ( / = stressed syllable; u = unstressed):

/ u / / u u / / u /

Are you kidding me! “Garner” in this case refers to storage houses for the grain—and there the garners sit, full, two spondees ( / / ) placed right in the line itself. (I know some traditionalists scan these lines differently. I will fight them.)

And there are many other variations to point out—the stressed syllable “Huge” opening line six, so we must be talking really huge cloudy symbols! The stressed “Never” ( / u) that opens line 11—Keats, my man, just stressing (for real and syllabically) on the thought that he might not see or have a future with his love. When he feels this way, he stands on the shore of the “wide world”—another spondee ( / / ), because wow is the world wide enough to be lonely in—leading us to the last line, and I mean the real Bruce Lee kicker: “to nothingness do sink.”

Now, let me tell you what very smart scholars and experts of poetry will tell you: the last line is traditional iambic pentameter—restoring the dominant rhythm and meter as a form of acceptance, of resignation. Fools! Totally wrong! If you really have the guts—if you’re Tom Cruise flying a jet airplane or hanging off cliffs in your early sixties—then you read “nothingness” as three unstressed syllables, a tribrach! ( u u u ) Barely uttered aloud! I don’t think you even whisper them—you “just below” whisper them (a real sound), because that’s how much Keats feels the nothingness of the wide world into which his feelings sink. (Fun fact: the opposite of a tribrach is a molossus, which sounds delicious.)

Memorize a poem. At first this will be a mechanical process, but then it will become a part of you, something you dialogue with, especially when you really need someone to talk to at 4 AM.

So, if you have already forgotten what I started off talking about in this post, then you understand how I stayed sane and refocused when I needed to. Thank you, John Keats, for being by meditation and my Buddha.