Bruce Summers’ Reflections
At Keele Medical School, I have a dual role in teaching orthopaedics to year 4 medical students, and organising and providing medical humanities projects, schemes, and developments. I, and my medical humanities colleagues, strongly consider that poetry plays a significant role in developing the human side in the education of our future doctors. Poetry creates feelings and thoughts which can be difficult to express in other artistic forms of representation, such as music. I have always considered many poems to be verbal music, particularly when read aloud, and even though my own significant deafness prevents me from hearing most words in poetry readings, I can still appreciate the sounds, the rhythm in the verses, the quality of the human voice, the surroundings, place, and audience, which all create an individual mood and experience.
- S. Thomas said in his titled poem that “poetry is a spell woven by consonants and vowels” (Thomas 2002), and he added in the body of the poem “in the absence of logic.” It’s a wonderful metaphor allowing us the fun of adding that music is a spell woven by crotchets, minims in the absence of logic. This latter phrase “in the absence of logic” is key, and Thomas did not write “illogical”, as art is not illogical but simply expresses the human vagaries of imperfection. So poetry, music and many of the arts do not always follow a rational, methodical or analytical system of creativity, and Medicine is much the same. In my own clinics, the majority of patients do not toe the line reciting the textbook symptoms of their conditions. Their medical narratives are a combination of the physical, emotional, and social environments they find themselves in. It is important that we introduce to our medical students the concept that logic doesn’t always play a part in the management of illness, and that an appreciation of the human condition through the elements of the medical humanities is as important as an appreciation of the anatomical and pathological conditions of their patients.
Last year, I sent the poem “Twice Shy” by the Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney to all 140 or so Keele medical students in year 4 based at the Shropshire campus. I have done this before with various artworks and paintings but not with poems. I simply asked them to read the poem and write a short reflection. It is not a medical poem but it is a very human description of Heaney embarking on an anxious walk by the river with someone that he hopes will develop into a relationship, but wary because of previous disappointments. I wasn’t expecting a substantial response from the student body, hell-bent as they were on passing biomedical exams, and indeed I didn’t get one. Poetry can be considered difficult and inaccessible, and even my own brother thought I was “weird” to read poetry in my student days. However, I did receive a small handful of responses, of which two were particularly thoughtful and worthy of sharing. Both are quite analytical but also personal, honest, and open, and they get to the core of the poem, that is the anxiety of new love and the fear of failing to achieve love.
My own immediate impression on reading the reflections was that, if I was in need of medical help and approached by one of these two young students or freshly qualified doctors, I would feel immediately safe in the knowledge that my concerns would be listened to and my needs empathetically dealt with. Robert Frost said, “Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought, and the thought has found words.” Both Niv’s and Izzy’s reflections successfully work backwards from these words they found the thought, and from the thought, they found the emotion.
Izzy Smith’s Reflections
On first reading the poem “Twice Shy”, it seems simply to talk of youthful love, hesitant and exciting. However, with deeper exploration, a story unfolds of new love, holding back, fearful to love again after being hurt before. There is nothing more painful than giving someone the ability to destroy you, loving someone so deeply, especially when it is for the first time, and being utterly heartbroken at the end. Still, there is nothing more terrifying than experiencing all of this, and still choosing to do it all over again with someone new. This poem takes that feeling and perfectly articulates it. There is fear, but still, that this time, a childlike hope will prevail.
At first, the title “Twice Shy” does not reveal its meaning, but with the full phrase “once bitten, and twice shy”, light is shed on the context of the poem that both parties had been hurt before. Both, seemingly young, had experienced the hardship that is young love — love with no warning of the heartbreak that so often succeeds it. They are now hesitant, both wanting to harbour new romance, yet fearful of what the outcome might be from their learned experiences, as shown in the lines: “Our Juvenilia / Had taught us both to wait”. Juvenilia meaning works produced by a young artist or author, implying, from a storyline perspective, that their young art, or previous love, had taught them to hold back. This is followed with “Not to publish feeling, / And regret it all too late”, which uses the word “publish” to suggest the double meaning behind juvenilia — perhaps reflecting on how Heaney might feel about his works in literature and in life. Heaney also uses “regret” to state clearly how things had not worked out in previous experiences.
Heaney uses a variety of metaphors throughout his poem to develop an understanding of how he perceives romance with his partner, also using them with imagery of his surrounds to generate an almost tangible tension between the poem and the reader. The overarching metaphor that is used throughout the poem is of a thrush and a hawk. The contrast of predator and prey creates an image of imbalance. One person is the hunter and one person is the hunted; however, within this poem, it is hard to discern who is the thrush and who is the hawk. Perhaps both of them feel like the prey, about to be hunted and lose control, giving power to the other person to break them. He also describes the sky as a “tense diaphragm” and the “traffic holding its breath”, illustrating the tension between the pair that is so evident that it is seeping into their very surroundings.
The beauty of this poem is how, despite both of their previous experiences, they are hopeful to love again. “Chary and excited” is used as the first line of the last stanza, the word “chary” articulating their caution and “excited” showing that, with time, something may grow, and it all starts on this first walk together. Nervous and wounded, but ready to try again.
Nivetha Sudhakar Kalaivani’s Reflections
In the poem “Twice Shy”, the poet explores the complexities of emotions involved in a relationship’s conception. It captures the contrasting feelings of titillation and trepidation faced by the couple during the initial stages of their courting. Much like his other poems, Heaney employs dark symbolisms through his description of nature to emphasise the intensity of the sentiments faced.
As much as I would like to deny it, I’ve got to admit that, as a medical student, when I read phrases like “holding breath”, “tense diaphragm”, “collapsed…heart”, “burst”, “thrush”, my mind swims with a list of differential diagnoses, just like I am trained to do for the coming finals. I am beginning to understand that health comprises both the physical and mental components, and certain emotional manifestations of what could potentially be “life-threatening symptoms” might be something utterly desired. It all comes down to the stimulus; i.e. a racing heart could mean the patient has SVT or could mean that their crush made eye contact with them from across the classroom. One desirable, the other not so much.
As someone who has recovered from panic attacks, a lot of the sombre metaphors used by Heaney remind me of the suffocating feelings of anxiety that I had endured in the past. It reminds me of a poem that I read in school – War Photographer by Carol Ann Duffy. When the war photographer returns after witnessing tragedies, he describes rural England as “home again, to ordinary pains.” I certainly am not comparing myself to victims of war, and I don’t believe that pain of any degree should be cast aside based on comparison, but I believe that “ordinary pains” such as the one described in the poem are a privilege that I once envied. I envied anyone who had a “vacuum of need” for intimacy instead of having a “vacuum of need” for oxygen during a panic attack.
The notion of agony is further enhanced by portraying the battle between societal implications of “classic decorum” versus their desire for furthering their intimacy. The very relatable ordeal that Heaney brought to life through vivid imagery serves as evidence of Freud’s reality principle. The couple, instead of seeking immediate gratification for their urges, seek a realistic and socially appropriate avenue to heed to their “vacuum of need.” The readers are made to understand that this is a budding romance that comes from a place of maturity rather than “juvenile” ventures that one takes before their ego develops.
I read this poem through the various masks that I own – the one of a medical student, the one of a wounded soldier, the one of an aspiring philosopher. I saved my final reflection for my last mask – the one of a 22-year-old hopeless romantic. This mask is the reason I like the poem. In an era where a plethora of movies, songs, books, and poems are made every single day, singing the glory of newfound love, Heaney depicts a more realistic version of what the initial stages look like. It is a very exhilarating episode in one’s life being caught up in the ‘chase’, a hunting party, “hawk and prey apart.” However, what I love more is the calm that follows. The partnership that follows, to battle “ordinary pains” together and to hunt with each other rather than each other. What renews my faith in romance is not the movie where the fireworks play in the background as the actors kiss each other, but when I see a 70-year-old patient’s wife remember every single medication that her husband is on.
References
Thomas, R. S., 2002. Residues. Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books Ltd.