On why I think writing poetry makes you a better reader of poetry

Until recently, late at night after I had finished work, I would cycle around north Bristol. Usually into Clifton, across the fairy-lit wrought iron of the suspension bridge and back then, skirting the southern edge of the Downs, down into the steep Victorian streets of Redland. As well as getting some necessary movement for my limbs after spending all day at a desk, it meant I could see the tall Georgian and early Victorian houses in ashlar sandstone around Clifton, and the pointed greyer stone of the later Victorian and Edwardian houses around Redland. The moon would appear at unexpected intervals at the ends of some roads and the icing on the cake was to listen to something tweedy on my iPod – the memoirs of David Niven or Stephen Fry, or a Sherlock Holmes story.

This audiobooking led to my painfully literal downfall, as I went over the handlebars and broke my wrist. So I started walking around after work instead. During one of these walks, the unstoppable bit of my brain which makes schemes for self-improvement was at its unpleasant work and, as it was coming to a moralizing conclusion which I have happily forgotten, I glanced up at the moon over a roof. For reasons that I can’t quite explain, I was certain that I would see an impassive, imperious animal staring down at me from the chimney-pot: a cat or an owl. I came home and covered a page in words in a way that I often do (Question from Michael Longley: Adam, do you write poetry? Adam: Um, I cover pages in words. ML: *nods sagely*). The result was this:

Nature

Walking home, making resolution

After resolution, and looking at

The moon over chimney-pots,

I half-expect to see

An owl, or perhaps a cat,

Who got there who-knows-why,

Looking at me curiously.

(I mention Michael Longley as making a short poem of a single sentence with clauses angled to leave spaces for new meanings is one of Longley's traits that I try to emulate.) I now think that this poem was a message, in the dream-language of symbols, that my sadly irresolute and forgetful nature would not be swayed by any resolutions that I could make. There, unmoved, immovable and clearly ruling the roost, my nature was looking down on my forlorn promises.

But coming to this conclusion started me thinking of other nature poems. Baudelaire’s ‘Correspondences’:

Nature is a temple in which living pillars 


Sometimes give voice to confused words; 


Man passes there through forests of symbols 


Which look at him with understanding eyes.

Perhaps the forest is man’s own nature, and the sonnet is not about the world outside of man, but the multiple worlds inside. Or what about 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'?

And I had done a hellish thing,


And it would work 'em woe:


For all averred, I had killed the bird


That made the breeze to blow.


Ah wretch! said they, the bird to slay,


That made the breeze to blow!

Was the Mariner being punished for attempting to destroy his own nature? For all I know, these readings are unoriginal, but the poems have been revivified for me because I have been able to connect them to my own experience. I now have a strong suspicion of what a silent, indifferent and knowledgable animal can represent, and can now read that understanding into other poems that contain similar creatures. It’s like the difference between proving Pythagoras by drawing right-angled triangles all day, and understanding the formula.