Years ago, in my work as a pediatric intensivist, I attended to a child with unstable blood pressure following open-heart surgery. Their vasoactive infusion ran out in the middle of the night, suddenly causing hypotension, hypoxemia, and brain damage.
No matter how great the institution, how qualified its doctors and nurses, how novel their medicines or high-tech machines, sometimes things just don’t go as planned.
In my 40 years of attending to critically ill and injured children, running to innumerable “code blue” events, watching vital sign monitors for over 30,000 hours, and updating or consoling parents countless times, I’ve found that poetry has some answers.
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For poetry is life itself. Poetry is sung or recited at every major event of our lives, from battle cry to betrothal, across all cultures and climes. Why? It brings connection in shared meanings, interactions, or feelings, to those with similar experiences. Poetry brings coherence, making sense of what’s happened, how it fits in our life story. It brings blessings from those nearest to us, including our ancestors and peers. Poetry brings hope, not an irrational optimism or wishful thinking, but a positive orientation to the future, of what a better, healthier future would look like. Finally, it brings agency—our self-efficacy to choose thoughts or actions that foster resilience and proactive behaviors.
Poetry provides all these treasures and, even if we accept one of them, it restores our ability to cope, and our sense of control. My office shelves carry books of poetry alongside medical reference and scientific volumes.
When the unforeseen happens, how can parents or hospital staff find meaning and resolution? In an existential crisis triggered by critical illness or its complications, how does anyone restore emotional balance, chart a return to hope, or move towards acceptance?
Here, it is best not to choose the most appropriate poem for a particular situation but allow the poem to choose you. It could be something like Kevin Young’s “Ode to the Hotel near the Children’s Hospital” that brings up the gratitude and frustration many have felt.
Praise the room service
that doesn’t exist
just the slow delivery to the front desk
of cooling pizzas
& brown bags leaky
greasy & clear
Praise the vending machines
Praise the change
Praise the hot water
& the heat
or the loud cool
that helps the helpless sleep.
Most doctors, nurses, and parents of critically ill children will seldom, if ever, bring poetry into their space of crisis. There’s always more medical evidence, another test or scan, another consultant, another intervention or monitor, or the latest research study to claim our attention. And, of course, there are endless checklists, procedures, policies, and regulations.
So where does poetry fit into all this? And how does it work?
To speak, we have to breathe, bringing pauses or phrases into the cadence of speech. Reading poetry out loud also requires us to pause for punctuation or line breaks, increasing our parasympathetic tone and dampening our hyperactive sympathetic nervous system. Its rhythms and rhymes may evoke a stillness within us, helping us to take a step back and create the space for reflection and other possibilities.
At the debriefing after a major event, maybe the bedside nurse can share a poem that gives them solace or strength. Or during a family care conference, maybe the parents could read out a song or poem precious to their child.
One quiet evening in Atlanta, a mother shared the last verse of William Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” with me, saying that her now comatose daughter had loved these lines.
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
This one, brief interaction helped build more rapport with this child’s family than we had achieved during her entire hospitalization. To me, this was not just a patient comatose after a freak accident. I felt the sparkle in her eyes, the lilt in her vivacious voice, and her gestures in the lines of the poem.
We have all experienced the comfort of soothing words. When a traumatic experience overwhelms our psyche, articulating it brings back order. Poetry condenses our chaotic emotions into words, giving form to formlessness. It imposes a start, a middle, and an end; it forces a rhythm, meter, and verse. In doing so, poetry modulates our neuroendocrine, neuroimmune, circulatory, and other systems to bring back healing. No wonder, then, that innumerable people found refuge and solace in poetry after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. “The Names” by Billy Collins reflected the sentiments of so many at that time.
Names written in the air
And stitched into the cloth of the day.
A name under a photograph taped to a mailbox.
Monogram on a torn shirt,
I see you spelled out on storefront windows
And on the bright unfurled awnings of this city.
Crises make us acutely aware of our mortality, triggering experiences of fear and isolation. While this pain is uniquely ours, poetry quietly affirms that we are not alone. It connects us with countless others across time, space, culture, or language who have felt the same way and contributed their story to the collective human experience.
Reading or writing poetry are not merely expressions of defiance or despair, but measures of active healing.
Poetry does not alleviate or erase our suffering or pain. Through its use of metaphor, music, and imagery, it transmutes suffering into meaning and insight. It allows us to acknowledge the crisis, while reminding us of who we are and what is most important.
After reciting poetry, the same situation may appear differently, although nothing has changed except our perception, creating a space where the mystical, magical, or miraculous coexist, crafting a silver lining into the dark clouds of misfortune. Like the story of a patient that I’ve recounted recently in my poem, “A Sacred Space”,
Myra passed away peacefully that night
Once, she opened her eyes and smiled
Though medicine had tried all its might
But only Love could rescue this child!
Poetry invites us into a field beyond data, machines, and medicines, inspiring clinicians to incorporate deeper levels of healing into their daily treatment plans. Poetry strips away all the unnecessary static and allows us to simply be human—to understand, adjust, recover, and heal.