How Poetry Can Help When You’re Feeling Lost
When we’re feeling lost, we tend to go looking for answers. We ask what we should do next, which direction we should take, what needs to change. We make lists. We ask other people what they think. We search online. Sometimes we search so hard for a way forward that being lost starts to feel like another problem we ought to be able to solve. But what if, sometimes, we didn’t need an answer? What if we needed a poem?
I’ve been thinking about this since my conversation with Deborah Alma, poet, editor and founder of The Poetry Pharmacy, for A Thought I Kept. Deborah has spent years prescribing poetry for the emotional ailments of everyday life, and the thought she brought to our conversation was beautifully simple:
“A poem can fundamentally change someone’s mood.”
Deb first understood the power of this while working with people living with profound dementia. Through a poem, she could take someone to the sea, fly a kite with them or go on an imaginary picnic. They might not remember afterwards where the poem had taken them, but Deborah saw that the feeling it created could remain for hours.
I love this idea of a poem as somewhere we can go. That we can seek them out to experience something different for a moment as well as to find answers. To step outside the moment we’re in. To remember the sea. To notice sunlight. To find ourselves somewhere else in our imagination when our actual lives feel particularly difficult to navigate. Perhaps that is also why poetry can help us when we feel lost.
Deborah told me that increasingly the people coming to her for poetry prescriptions are living with a more general anxiety about the world. They’re trying to work out how to live with uncertainty. And poetry, she believes, is particularly good at this because uncertainty is a place poets already know how to inhabit.
So much of feeling lost is about wanting to get out of where we are. We want certainty back. We want to know what happens next. We want the new job, the decision, the relationship to resolve itself, the grief to become more manageable, the sense of possibility to return. We want to find ourselves again. Poetry doesn’t necessarily give us any of those things. Instead, it can help us stay for a moment with what we don’t yet know.
There is something almost spiritual in that for me. Not spiritual in the sense that we have to believe anything in particular, but in the way poetry asks us to pay attention to what it means to be here.
Deborah talked about this beautifully. She believes we all have the poetic in us. We notice a bird landing in a tree while we’re grieving and wonder if, somehow, we’ve been visited by the person we’ve lost. We see that the sea is exactly the same colour as a flower in front of us. We notice strange coincidences, beauty, juxtapositions, things that seem to mean something even when we can’t quite explain what. For Deborah, those moments are already poems. We just haven’t written them down.
Maybe poetry is akin to a spiritual practice in this way: a practice of noticing. A way of interrupting the scrolling, doing and busyness long enough to see what is actually around us. A way of making contact with beauty, meaning, mystery and our own humanity without needing to pin any of it down.
I know that I have reached for poetry most instinctively when I haven’t had the words myself. When my mum died, I found myself looking through the Norton anthologies I had studied at university. I have a literature degree and a longstanding love of John Donne, so perhaps I thought I was supposed to find something suitably literary and profound. But my mum would never have chosen John Donne. She loved Pam Ayres.
So at her funeral I read Ayres’ poem These Hands, about all the often invisible things a mother’s hands have done throughout a life. It managed to hold something I couldn’t quite hold myself: what we had overlooked while Mum was here and what her absence now meant. The poem didn’t resolve my grief but it filled a space where my own words failed me.
Towards the end of our conversation, I asked Deborah to prescribe a poem for someone feeling lost. She thought about lostness as uncertainty and stuckness, but also as losing contact with possibility and hope.
The poems that came to her were about stillness, finding your own centre and noticing the small and beautiful things around you. One was Lost by David Wagoner, which imagines being lost in a forest and, rather than continuing to wander frantically in search of the way out, becoming still. She also suggested Denise Levertov’s Variation on a Theme by Rilke and Esther Morgan’s Grace, poems that offered her a sense of hope and possibility.
Perhaps this is what we so often miss about being lost. We assume our task is to find the path as quickly as possible. But perhaps there are moments when we need to become still enough to notice where we already are.
A poem can help us do that. You don’t need to understand all of it. You don’t need to analyse it as you once did at school. You don’t even need to become someone who “reads poetry.” Deborah’s invitation is much simpler: find a poem. Sit with it. Notice what happens.
Maybe it changes your mood. Maybe it gives you words for something you couldn’t name. Maybe it makes you notice the light coming through the window or remember somewhere you once felt more like yourself. Maybe it offers no answers at all, but makes the uncertainty a little easier to inhabit.
And when you’re lost, that might be somewhere to start.
Listen to my full conversation with Deborah Alma on A Thought I Kept: “A Poem Can Fundamentally Change Someone’s Mood.”
And if you are feeling lost, explore emotions coaching with me.