Searching for good, but finding only evil,
Job reached for poetry:
And heard it coming out of the whirlwind.
Jesus, on a Roman cross,
Charged with a sedition denied,
Reached for the poetry of the forsaken:
Found it in a Psalm.
After having an adult education imposed on him
As a child,
John Stuart Mill had a breakdown
And reached for poetry:
He found it in the healing words of
Wordsworth and Coleridge.
Absorbed in logic and mathematics,
Bertrand Russell reached for poetry:
He heard it in an unknown person reciting Blake’s “Tyger”,
And felt so dizzy he had to lean against a wall
To let these memorable words work on him.
W.H. Auden, a practitioner of this art,
Said whenever the travails of the world assailed him,
He always found help
In a poet
Or God.
Edward Baugh, reaching for goodness,
Found part of it waiting for him
In poetry.