When power narrows the areas of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truth which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment.


- John R Kennedy
   
  


   
   
An appeasing rendezvous of sublime energy reaches fractional temperance of musical air waves into the ears of a listener, engaging momentum of tranquil entrancement, slowing down the heart beat, while mobilizing the brain in stupefying orientation. The musical score permeating the listener’s headphones is a track from Chopin’s Nocturnes. Elated in ecstasy, the brain ascends its underpinning flow of energy, capturing Chopin’s brilliant artistry in a halcyon of dispassionate mirth, sedating its composure while conceding the body to detach within itself a versatile soothing assuage.

The virtuosity of music and poetic averment is credence of erudite formation, recognizing the refinement of dexterity in the affiliation of poetic stimulation with music, rendering an accomplished correlation of substantial and laudable excellence. The artistic flavor resonant with their fraternity, images a euphonic seasoning, ripening the progressive emanation that infiltrates the mind and heart as it ebbs its cascading dominance and presence with an essence of spirited streamlined passion.

Laced with an effervescent rhythm that calibrates a softening blend of artistic showcase, the mind is occasionally haunted by a redistribution of its sedating senses. However, its nucleus amalgamates the core senses to redefine a paradigm with a smorgasbord façade of mellifluous seasoning, inculcating a treasury of harmonious musical and poetic erudition. Under such circumstances, the mind uniquely unfolds the propensity to unleash a dexterous myriad of artistic flair, rendering full-flavored dedication, to pursue a deep realization that imbeds momentous thrust of multifarious orchestration of poetic averment, navigating its musical score to a meridian.


The Therapeutic Distillation of Music

Music permeates the mind with mirrored captivation, ascending its potent aura in a gamut of wide array and preponderance, bewitching a presence of mind that ameliorates a soothing effect upon the listener. Its synergy captures a frequency of austere sentiment, attempting to off-load a pleasurable experience while submerging the mind in euphoric benefaction. Its advocating rich demeanor bestows a therapeutic perception and succumbs to exalt passionate fervor within its craftsmanship of excellence.

Virtuosity of music is a celebration of salubrious gratification with an infinite surge of energetic tenacity, reinforcing an echelon of melodic amplification, yet central to human life. In its ostensible form, the innate structure of music is manifest in every culture and civilization, reinforcing a sang-froid, rubicund charisma, with appealing overture of metaphorical indignation. Such impression embodies patterns of illustrative mechanism, as music motivates the brain in proportion of parity and evenness, distilling reassurance of harmonizing ecstasy, intensifying its suite of congenial application, while detonating a balanced rapport to be on the same wavelength with humane tenderness.

The therapeutic distillation of music transcends a variation of diversified dedication, oscillating a festive kaleidoscopic mélange, categorically defining its cavernous affiliation within a mindset of fiery ardent musical score. The mind rebounds itself through divergent semblance, stupefying mesmerizing stance that emphatically nourishes its mellifluent soul, grasping rhythmic plausibility and lyrical appreciation.

The brain comprehends the dexterous enrichment of harmonizing musical melodies to distillate the compounding wisdom of its spiritually therapeutic improvisation. Such remedy may endeavor to associate a plausible avenue of uplifting elucidation, bolstering to map out the significance of decisive dimensions applied to music, especially that of healing the mind. The essence embodying therapeutic distillation of music is a responsive and congenial illustration, which, when applied to healing, induces to alleviate and restore the mind in beneficial coalition with the heart, soul and body. Healing, with applied music, assuages a state of equilibrium in the mind, thwarting to abate the negative impact of sluggish, inanimate malfunction.

The employment and practice of listening to music, of appropriate rhythm and movement, on a regular frequency, enables to strengthen a mind that is impaired and debilitated, allowing articulated mechanisms that are rudimentary and depend on distinct human brain functioning dedicated to the analysis of complex, segmented, rapidly changing streams of sound. Music therapy may initiate to improve degeneration of the brain and mind through its diaphanous perseverance, broadening its dynamic repertoire to stoic, undermined deterioration.

The wisdom associated with the therapeutic distillation of music is extravagantly rooted to absorb a wide distribution, mushrooming with gargantuan passion, sedating the mind as it submerges its rhapsody in brain waves of inordinate emotion. Emotion forms the basis of relenting capitulation, effectuating a craving that outperforms a spate of musical score. Such superfluous submission is confined to an ambience of survival, often prolonging its nurtured subsistence with surreal amplification. Music filters into the brain with magnifying awareness, defining its unforeseen presence in a sphere of smothering waves, as sound ripples throughout the body, akin to swells and breakers from spindrifts of water, foaming and swashing a surfer’s frame. Regardless of the aura accompanying music’s distillation of therapeutic extrapolation, it unfurls to distill momentum which augments an expanse of ethereal liberation in the heart and mind, hypothesizing its ostentatious indulgence with dedication and passionate mysticism.


The Whimsical Refrain of Poetic Averment

The genesis of poetry divulges a surmounting approach with overwhelming silhouette, affirming its dexterous protocol as it garnishes a revolutionary decorum and envisions emulous, though vacillating and concord, within its capacious aura. The eminence that endeavors poetry to outshine is emphatically expressed by the mind with precise and positively poised effort, grasping its rhythm and repertoire with haunting probability and conceivable acclaim. Such hypothesis infers vital dynamics of poetic application and its latent untapped potential that correlates a response of pragmatic discipline, cascading to outperform a diligence of sterling framework and artistic buoyancy.

The whimsical refrain of poetic averment transcends to motivate the mind with leisurely enchanting enthusiasm, ascending to permeate through the multi-layered parameters, inducing poetic piquancy, while embedding laudable and cherished dedication of poetic affirmation. The sentimental impulse acquired by listening to poetry embraces to ignite and consummate unmitigated assimilation of riveting pleasure, if focused in a mature state of mind. Such absorption prompts a sponge-like effect, with unadulterated refrain, immersing to abet a stimulus within the brain with retentive and arresting affirmation. Simultaneously, the application of poetic refrain facilitates an immoderation, imposing a coercion of intemperance and inexorable passion with ordained uniqueness, carving unremitting gratification with vehement infatuation.

Writing poetry is often a conscious decision to navigate and use the unconscious mind, often submitting to the process of exploring unknown states of the mind. The technique of behavioral elucidation goes deep into a zone of creative metaphors, surfacing to a responsive phase and frequenting the applied art of imagery. Poetic averment of creativity necessitates a free-flowing heightened awareness that is collectively calm, yet assertive. Further, the frame of mind justifies a paroxysm of frenetic rhapsody, with agitated wildness. Such disposition abides in a poet’s mind, assembling an underpinning of unambiguous and candid fashion, where creativity of poetic averment abounds with meridian zest and virtue of excellence.

The whimsical refrain of poetic averment is a tribulation that researches the profound nature of a poetic brain, advocating insightful synthesis, while applying reasonable explanation of the avenues indicative of human brain function, to appreciate creative behavior and the delicate passion that ebbs the flow of mercurial etiquette. Understanding the mirth of creative stimulation by the mind requires dexterous reinforcement and desensitization of the brain’s comportment, along with incumbent research and value-added application, to study poetic demeanor and responsive reaction.


The Epiphany of Music and Poetry in Healing

Stabilizing a troubled mind is a towering effort, requiring openness and receptive engagement and collaboration, navigating unimpeded access into a grieving mind as it penetrates its enfeebling presence through the layers of the brain. Debilitation saps the energetic stamina and devitalizes the encumbered backbone that saddles to trespass the domain of the mind, weighing to arrest tenacious perseverance with restricted localization.

The sluggishness gripping a troubled mind relentlessly enervates activated hindrance with obstructive impediment, hampering riveting absorption, spawning an enigmatic perplexity within the sphere of a mind struggling to overcome endless grief with borderline extremity. Assuming a compulsive coercion of such prostration obtrudes with favorable functioning of the brain, interjecting the mind captive in judgmental cognition and aptitude. The reasoning power of the brain is incomprehensible as it intercepts determined intensity, irresolute with diluted and weakened emptiness. Further, such wavering and sporadic interior manifestation alternates an intrinsic deepening, heightening its magnitude as it escalates a density within the innate structure of the brain.

The epiphany of music and poetry in healing is a venturesome approach that unifies an assumed interplay conforming beneficial resources to appreciate an unbiased attempt that invasively empowers the ingenuous alliance of music and poetry. The amenable relationship of this alliance is an elucidated overture with apropos estimation that music and poetry may buoyantly ameliorate to mend a troubled mind. An opinionated inference can disregard this conviction, with assumed prejudice, inferring stringent belief that music and poetry is only pure entertainment. This narrow-minded impression orchestrates a declamatory enjoinder, assertive and prejudiced, convinced with supposed reckoning and thinking.

The volitional opulence ingrained in the affiliation of music and poetry is cavernously affluent and appropriately seasoned with all the meritorious healing in superlative anticipation and abundance. This view is rationally and culpably expressed by Dr Jack Leedy, a psychiatrist from Columbia University and one of the leaders of the rapidly growing poetry therapy movement, in Poetry as Healer. The subject is the healing use of poetry: the ways poetry can touch minds and break down isolation; make expressible and self-illuminating the most chaotic of feelings; used as a safety valve for tortured emotions. It asserts the enormous solace from writing or reading poetry – discovering that someone may have experienced just what one has and understands.

“Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak
Whispers the o’erfraught heart and bids it break”

- Shakespeare, from Poetry as Healer by Dr Jack Leedy


The epiphany of music and poetry in healing matures with time, rectifying to transform the mind of those who are open and tractable to its adroit ambience. Through its therapeutic value, defined within channels of demonstrative characterization, the brain is amicable and approachable, although withdrawn by devastating hunger to rescue its inertia exacerbated by turbulence and depression. A troubled mind requires time to heal, which in itself can be formidable and taxing, arresting conflicting or vacillating thoughts to appear, causing closed-mindedness and obscure uncertainty to fluctuate, permeating the mind with dubious captivity. As this restraint apprehends its snare, enveloping the milieu of the brain, it festers, unprovoked, to satiate its arousing nourishment from brain cells caught in a frenzy of muddled assault and ambiguous habitat.

Departure from such surrounding aura can be reversed by soliciting appropriate gestational timing of essential therapy, enhancing a salubrious convergence delivered by the rapturous combination of sound … that of musical score and poetic refrain.

The germane relevance of music and poetry as healing tools in therapy is an unadulterated vision that elucidates a harvesting of munificent liberation, overflowing with bounteous dexterity, to germinate an indulgence in creative heartfelt passion. Its semblance assimilates a rudimentary creation, apropos to a budding flower, springing up to demystify the sentiments of a troubled mind, sometimes in denial, unearthing the demeanor that affects malignant behavior. Such deliberation attempts to delineate and characterize a dispirited and melancholy mind versus one that is elated and euphoric, emancipating a portrayal of how the brain deludes itself into a temporary sinking state of delirium or into heavenly bliss of ambrosial pleasure.

As poetry therapy is a continued probe with investigative reconnaissance, its value affirms its application in psychiatry and psychotherapy, as an established avenue of treatment of the emotionally suffering. According to Dr Jack Leedy, “the isoprinciple effective in music therapy has proved important in the choice of poems for use in poetry therapy. As music that has the same feeling as the mood or mental tempo of the patient has proved a valuable tool, so poems that are close in feeling to the mood of the patient have been found helpful.

Depressed patients, for example, are helped by poems sad and gloomy in tone, yet having lines or stanzas that reflect hope and optimism, especially toward their conclusion. By reading, studying, memorizing, reciting or creating this kind of poem, depressed patients come to feel that they are not alone in their depression, that others are also depressed, that others have been depressed and recovered from their depression, and that no disgrace attaches to victims of extreme alterations of mood. For them, crying precipitated by a poem is often therapeutically helpful: the poem becomes symbolically an understanding someone with whom they can share their despair.

Therapeutic Implications: Poetry therapy has guided patients to constructive adjustment after every approach known has been tried and failed. It helps some patients make their emotional disorders easier to bear, assists the process towards their recovery, and helps them to develop a philosophy of life that abets their adjustment to their misfortunes.

Poetry encourages patients to explore their feelings, to feel more deeply, to extend their emotional range yet to discover patterns, also, of control and fulfillment.

As Robert Frost has written:

Theme alone can steady us down. Just as the first mystery was how a poem could have a tune in such a straightness as meter, so the second mystery is how a poem can have wildness and at the same time a subject that shall be fulfilled.

It should be the pleasure of a poem itself to tell how it can. The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. No one can really hold that the ecstasy should be static and stand still in one place. It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life – not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.

- Frost, Robert, “The Figure a Poem Makes” (New York, Holt, 1939).

Poetry therapy helps patients to become more spontaneous and creative. Poetry is one of man’s deepest expressions, and emotions are thereby released. A poem has been described as the shortest emotional distance between two points, the points representing the writer and the reader. This may explain why communication through poetry is established so readily, and why patients themselves are moved so frequently to attempt their own composition of poems”.

- Dr Jack Leedy, “Poetry as Healer” (New York, Vanguard Press, 1985).


Resurrecting Hope through Music and Poetry

The complacency attributed to the restorative regimen of music and poetry justifies the heightened adroitness consummating the mind, rendering unmitigated amelioration that revolutionizes concrete remission and recuperation. Its abysmal synthesis is a value-added preservation of immaculate zeal and tenderness, its artistic distillation an opportune astuteness and an emblazoned acuity of towering sentiment. The perceptive initiation that funnels therapeutic insight into the mind through music and poetry is a discerning acculturation that can, innovatively, submerge its flexible passion within a wandering mind. The evolution that elucidates the virtuosity of music and poetic averment calibrates a juxtaposed fusion of brain cells that are responsive and retrofit to induced permeation of the rapturous harmony innate in musical score and poetic refrain.

Resurrecting hope through music and poetry ignites to harmonize a mind weighed down by turmoil and tumultuous depression, effectuating the destined suffering to surrender into an existence of animated recovery. Such capitulation acclimates to bring to fruition a pleasing rapport that alleviates recuperation in concert with modified behavior and utilization of the tools of music and poetry. Understanding a wavering mind and its assimilation with the brain is an applied skill, consummated with knowledge in the employment of appropriate music listening and reading or writing poetry. The dexterity concurrent with such a paradigm defines to accentuate significant measure of timing along with desired hope and healing. An overflowing wealth of music and poetry can rationalize the therapeutic foundation of the mind, filling the void with nutritious musical score and poetic rhapsody, resurrecting remedial hope and harmony.

A rudimentary acculturation of rehabilitative measure necessitates the healing virtuosity of music and poetic averment which construes restorative functioning and apropos manifestation of simulated adherence. Simultaneously, healing the mind opens a plethora of synchronization, capturing riveting absorption of passionate dedication and harmony to flow, undiluted, nestling its ornate and emphatic rapport within fearless boundaries. The artistic perseverance of music and poetry escalates to acclivity, with determined gradient, attributing an aspiration of cardinal comprehension while acclimatizing its averment with enamored captivation and liberating its captivity with harmonious ascension.

The power of the virtuosity of music and poetic averment runs its course akin to a waterway, casting its charismatic snare through arteries into a canal where healing abounds and therapeutic wisdom elucidates its mystical passion into harmonious idiosyncratic illustration.




© Laura Simoes

August 2009