Can't live without...Quietude

published in Newbooks, May/June 2010

The Oxford Concise English Dictionary defines quietude as ‘a state of quiet.’ Fowler’s Modern English Usage says that it is a literary alternative to ‘quietness’ which it defines as ‘the condition of being quiet.’ Well, quiet certainly comes into it, though I rather like all the words Roget’s Thesaurus says I may use instead of – or as well as – quietude: stillness, silence, peace, solitude, tranquillity, repose, calm, serenity; all lovely, roll-them-about-in-your-mouth words.

But what I think of as quietude encompasses all of these other sweet tasting nouns. Quietude is a place in my mind that I travel towards on my own, a place that no one else is able to enter, a place far away from the babble of the world. It’s the place Yeats found in The Lake Isle of Innisfree ‘I shall have some peace there,/for peace comes dropping slow…’ or Wordsworth’s ‘…inward eye that is the bliss of solitude.’

And I find that the best vehicle to get me to that place is poetry, whole poems, couplets, single lines: the rhythms, the very words, cause a contentment to settle over me like a mantle. Often it is the poetry I read when I was a child that I remember, or read again: poems like Walter de la Mare’s The Listeners, John Masefield’s Sea Fever, or The Shell by James Stephens, all with their hypnotising rhythm and sense of mystery, of something beyond understanding.

The way poets use words and the words they use are as mesmerising as the rhythm of poetry, and I love to catch just a glimpse of a poem, too. Like the end of Carol Ann Duffy’s Queen Herod, ‘We wade through blood/ for our sleeping girls./ We have daggers for eyes./ Behind our lullabies,/ the hooves of terrible horses/ thunder and drum.’ Or a piece from one of Gillian Clarke’s poems, My Box, ‘…how everything is slowly made,/ how slowly things made me,/ a tree, a lover, words, a box,/ books and a golden tree.’ Or the last lines from Derek Walcott’s Midsummer, Tobago that read, ‘Days I have held,/ days I have lost/ days that outgrow, like daughters,/ my harbouring arms.’ Or Ted Hughes’s ‘…cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket…’ from Full Moon and Little Frieda. Or R.S.Thomas’s lines from the beginning of his Song for Gwydion, ‘When I was a child and the soft flesh was forming/ Quietly as snow on the bare boughs of bone…’ I am half way to being hypnotised already: these snippets, these few words, hold a world of meaning and feeling that send me well on my way to quietude.

So, why am I looking for this place, what do I hope to find? Like Raymond Garlick in Pererin Wyf, ‘I seek the stillness, soft as snow/ that sifts beyond my ears.’ And when I have reached my destination, what I am most conscious of is my breathing, my inspiration. With each breath, my mind clears until I find Garlick’s ‘…prism, cool and white,/ through which the spectrum pours.’ One kind of inspiration allows passage to the other kind of inspiration; Adrian Mitchell put it beautifully in his short riff to Charlie Parker in Goodbye, ‘He breathed in air, he breathed out light…’ This is what I hope for.

My visits are never long, and on my return journey to the noisy, demanding everyday world, I feel like Robert Frost’s horseman: ‘The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,/ But I have promises to keep,/ And miles to go before I sleep,/ And miles to go before I sleep.’