Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- About the Author
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Hearthsides and Hospices
- 2 From the Looking Glass to the Lamp
- 3 Prose Animations
- 4 For the Love of Music
- Conclusion: Democracy and Excellence
- Appendix: Inaugural Wellcome Trust Annual Public Mike White Memorial Lecture, June 14, 2016
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
Appendix: Inaugural Wellcome Trust Annual Public Mike White Memorial Lecture, June 14, 2016
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 August 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- About the Author
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Hearthsides and Hospices
- 2 From the Looking Glass to the Lamp
- 3 Prose Animations
- 4 For the Love of Music
- Conclusion: Democracy and Excellence
- Appendix: Inaugural Wellcome Trust Annual Public Mike White Memorial Lecture, June 14, 2016
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Seminal Publication of Professor Fiona Sampson's ‘A Speaking Likeness: Poetry Within Health and Social Care’
Here is a poem:
Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick- eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lacked any thing.
A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:
Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?
Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
My dear, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.
The Anglican metaphysician George Herbert wrote ‘Love’. He had survived the religious politics of the court of King James to become the priest of a small country parish, Bemerton, which lies among rolling Wiltshire hills and shallow chalk streams.
Something of the hospitality of this landscape seems to have got into his famous poem, which speaks to us regardless of our religious beliefs.
‘Love’ is a poem of longing for a hospitable acceptance of our very selves. This longing is among the most profound human needs. We can imagine it as halfway between ‘Consider yourself / at home’, as the boys of Fagin's kitchen sing in Oliver and the ‘Somewhere over the rainbow’, that Dorothy longs for in The Wizard of Oz. It's the object of redemption songs and revolutionary rhetoric; of liberation theology and utopian communities; of migration and enfranchisement. It's also, as it happens, the object of talking cures and of person- centred healthcare. Gerard Manley Hopkins, in ‘Heaven- Haven’, called it ‘Where springs not fail / […] where flies no sharp and sided hail / […] Where no storms come / Where the green swell is in the havens dumb / And out of the swing of the sea’. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger called this notion of perfect adaptation to an ideal home ‘dwelling’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Reading Fiona SampsonA Study in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, pp. 163 - 176Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2020