Under My Skin: Poetry As Inspiration

I’ve said before that poetry has a way of getting under my skin in a way few other art forms - except music - can do. It also informs and inspires my writing, no more so than the poetry of the seventeenth-century Metaphysical poets John Donne, George Herbert and Andrew Marvell, introduced to me as an A-level student and never forgotten.

The following wonderful poem by George Herbert is one of my favourites, and features in Rope of Sand - the third book in The Secret of the Journal series. This tender, wistful poem accepts the inevitability of death, but chooses to frame it as Life.

In this extract, Emma and Matthew take a few quite moments together.

“Will you read it to me?” he asks her, but she didn’t need to because she knew it by heart.

I made a posy, while the day ran by:

Here will I smell my remnant out, and tie

                           My life within this band.

But Time did beckon to the flowers, and they

By noon most cunningly did steal away,

                           And wither’d in my hand.

My hand was next to them, and then my heart:

I took, without more thinking, in good part

                           Times gentle admonition:

Who did so sweetly deaths sad taste convey,

Making my minde to smell my fatall day;

                           Yet, sugring the suspicion.

Farewell deare flowers, sweetly your time ye spent,

Fit, while ye liv’d, for smell or ornament,

                           And after death for cures.

I follow straight without complaints or grief,

Since, if my scent be good, I care not, if

                           It be as short as yours.**

He remained without moving or commenting as the last words resonated, his eyes closed, the slightest puckering of the skin between them as he concentrated. Then he opened them and smiled at me. “You recite beautifully and yes, it is poignant, isn’t it? I think I had forgotten. But there’s hope there, too, and that’s what we hang on for - especially in my case.”

“I understand,” I said softly.

He put his arm around me and I cuddled into him. “Yes, I know you do,” he said.*

*Excerpt from Rope of Sand by C.F. Dunn pub: Lion Fiction

**Life by George Herbert from: Eight Metaphysical Poets by Jack Dalglish, pub. HEB Paperback

You can see the heavily annotated page from the student copy I didn’t hand back.