I joined Mindsprings a while ago and found it immensely helpful to my heightened anxiety states. I have found some poetry to be hugely comforting, knowing that other people have been in the same state of mind and come through better stronger humans.

P. Cavafy’s poem ’Ithaca’ is one that grows in my comprehension the more times I read it.

I have also tried to learn poems by heart, which I found relatively easy as a young person, but now takes a lot longer. I was recently in Hospital, and it was a bit scary, so I called on my memory for the three poems I had learnt in the last two years and it was so helpful. Robert Frost’s ‘ stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’, ‘High Flight’ by John Gillespie McGee and Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116.