Tumultuous times create heightened, often complex, emotions. It can be hard to voice or even identify our feelings when faced with war, illness, worry, or great changes of any kind.

Poetry offers many gifts – among them, capturing, reflecting or even just sitting beside us with our thoughts and feelings.

We asked five poetry experts – all poets themselves – for the poems they turn to in anxious times, for comfort or company.

We’d love to hear yours, too – you can share them in the comments section.

The Storm – Eugenio Montale

One poem I’ve been returning to this year is an old favourite: Charles Wright’s translation of Eugenio Montale’s The Storm. The title in Italian is La Bufera, an idiom Dante introduced in the Inferno, more akin to “tempest” or “squall” than “storm”, though I like the simplicity of Wright’s translation.

The first stanza begins in a relatively recognisable, concrete world: a thunderous March storm pummels a magnolia tree with hail. The storm swiftly becomes figurative as the poet addresses someone who has been startled awake from a “nest of sleep” by “sounds of shaking crystal”. The realist world becomes populated with surrealist images of gold flaring:

like a grain of sugar in the shell of your eyelids,

like a grain of sugar in the shell of your eyelids,

                                          blanches the trees and walls, freezing them like images on a negative.

                                          blanches the trees and walls, freezing them like images on a negative.

The poem sweeps up destabilising images and sounds of a storm’s destruction:

the jangling sistrums, the rustle of tambourines in the dark ditch of the night, the tramp, scrape, jump of the fandango.

the jangling sistrums, the rustle of tambourines in the dark ditch of the night, the tramp, scrape, jump of the fandango.

Montale moves entirely into metaphor with his subtly devastating final lines, where the reader is invited to see the storm as a metaphor for death’s simultaneous release and devastation:

sweeping clear your forehead of its cloud of hair, you waved to me — and entered........

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