On World Poetry Day, we celebrate one of humanity's most treasured forms of cultural and linguistic expression and identity: poetry. It’s a day that reminds us poetry isn’t just something studied in classrooms or printed in books, it’s something we take with us, like a line remembered while walking or a verse that explains how we feel.
This year, imagine Poetry Day as a kind of prescription for peace.
Not necessarily the grand, geopolitical kind, although we need that one more than ever right now, but the quieter sense of peace we look for in everyday life: a sense of steadiness, clarity, or connection when the world feels busy or uncertain.
Four poems offer a particularly thoughtful path toward that inner steadiness: “Digging” and “Personal Helicon” by Seamus Heaney, “When I Am Asked” by Lisel Mueller, and “Peace, Be Not Proud” by Dr. Tulsi Hanumanthu.
Each poem touches something different in the human psyche. Together, they form a gentle sequence: grounding, reflection, gratitude, and courage.
Digging: the peace of belonging
Digging,
by Seamus Heaney
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
In “Digging,” Seamus Heaney sits at his desk with a pen in his hand while remembering the work of his father and grandfather digging potatoes and cutting turf. The poem touches something fundamental in us: our need for roots.
We are often searching, sometimes without realising it, for a sense of continuity with the people who came before us. Heaney recognises that he cannot follow in his family's footsteps in the same physical labour, but he honours them by doing his own work well. His pen becomes his spade.
That recognition brings a quiet kind of peace. We don’t have to replicate the past to respect it. We simply have to acknowledge where we come from and continue the work in our own way.
For many readers, Digging settles the restless question of identity. It reminds us that belonging can be carried forward, even when the tools change.
Personal Helicon: the peace of self-knowledge
Personal Helicon
by Seamus Heaney
As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.
One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.
A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom.
Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.
Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing
In “Personal Helicon,” Heaney looks back on the wells he was fascinated with as a child. He remembers peering into their depths, listening to echoes, and seeing reflections in the water. What this poem touches in the psyche is curiosity about the inner world.
The wells become a metaphor for reflection, those moments when we look inward and discover something about ourselves. As a child, Heaney was fascinated by the mystery of depth. As a poet, he realises that writing allows him to “set the darkness echoing.”
There’s calm in that idea.
Rather than avoiding the darker or more complex parts of our thoughts, poetry lets us acknowledge them, listen to them, and shape them into language. That act of naming can be deeply stabilising. Peace, in this sense, comes not from avoiding depth, but from looking into it without fear.
When I Am Asked: the peace of noticing
When I am Asked
by Lisel Mueller
When I am asked
how I began writing poems,
I talk about the indifference of nature.
It was soon after my mother died,
a brilliant June day,
everything blooming.
I sat on a gray stone bench
in a lovingly planted garden,
but the day lilies were as deaf
as the ears of drunken sleepers
and the roses curved inward.
Nothing was black or broken
and not a leaf fell
and the sun blared endless commercials
for summer holidays.
I sat on a gray stone bench
ringed with the ingenue faces
of pink and white impatiens
and placed my grief
in the mouth of language,
the only thing that would grieve with me.
Lisel Mueller’s “When I Am Asked” approaches peace from another angle entirely. The poem answers a large existential question: "why remain in the world?" with a series of small observations. What this poem touches in the psyche is our capacity for wonder.
Mueller’s reasons are not grand philosophical arguments. Instead, they come from moments of beauty, surprise, and tenderness that appear in everyday life.
In psychological terms, this is close to what we might call attentive gratitude, the ability to notice the small details that make life meaningful.
Reading the poem often has a quiet effect. It slows us down. It reminds us that the world still offers small gifts if we’re paying attention. And that awareness, simple as it sounds, is often where peace begins.
Peace, Be Not Proud: the peace that requires courage
Peace, Be Not Proud
by Dr. T
ulsi Hanumanthu
Evasive Peace, be not proud
That world's entire wealth can't purchase you.
Perhaps you'll not be bought for silver, gold,
Saphires, rubies, pearls and diamonds too.
But dare you say, for LOVE you won't be sold?
Evasive Peace, be not proud
That high you dwell, atop a towering tor!
Like Bruce's spider, ceaselessly we will
Try to heave ourselves right up to your door
By scaling, inch by inch, your craggy hill!
Evasive Peace, be not proud
That none can see or hear you; so no clue
We have to track you down. But we can feel
Your presence versus present absence too:
Suffices this, your hide-out to reveal!
Evasive Peace, be not proud
That you, At'lanta-like, can keep mocking
Your chasers all for whom you're much too fast!
Like shrewd Hippom'nese, your pathway blocking
With 'golden apples', win we shall, at last!
Dr. Tulsi Hanumanthu’s “Peace, Be Not Proud” shifts the tone slightly. Where the earlier poems reflect inwardly, this one speaks outwardly. Addressing peace directly, the poem challenges the idea that peace is something passive or fragile. What it touches in the psyche is our moral courage.
Peace, the poem suggests, is not merely the absence of conflict. It requires strength, integrity, and vigilance. It calls on us to stand up for values and resist injustice rather than settling for comfortable silence.
This is a powerful reminder that inner calm and outer responsibility are connected. The most durable peace, whether personal or societal, is built through thoughtful action.
In this way, the poem completes the emotional arc begun by the others. After grounding, reflection, and gratitude, it asks us to carry that steadiness into the world.
A quiet sequence of peace
Taken together, these four poems offer something like a pathway through the human psyche:
- “Digging” reminds us where we come from
- “Personal Helicon” invites us to look inward
- “When I Am Asked” encourages us to notice what sustains us
- “Peace, Be Not Proud” asks us to act with courage
Each poem touches a different emotional register, but they move toward the same destination: a deeper, steadier sense of peace.
Poetry doesn’t impose calm. Instead, it creates a space where reflection, memory, and imagination can settle into clarity.
On Poetry Day, that space is something worth celebrating.
A Poetry Day invitation
If you’d like to mark Poetry Day yourself, here’s a small writing prompt inspired by these poems.
Begin a short poem with any one of these lines:
“I come from…”
“I looked into…”
“I stay because…”
“Peace asks…”
Follow the line wherever it leads. Let memory, curiosity, or observation guide you. The poem doesn’t have to be long or polished. Like digging with a pen, it’s simply an act of paying attention.
Sometimes the smallest poem can open the deepest well.
And if you want, share your poems with us, comment below or email us at [email protected], or check out our upcoming workshops to experience poetry as a prescription.
