Poems of Ageing

This is a small but, not surprisingly, growing part of my output. Ageing is a time of new opportunities but also in many ways a troubling time, and these conflicting emotions have found their way into my poetry. In a society where older people have become a larger component of the population at large, and where services relating to ageing have become an industry in themselves, we may expect that the arts will reflect these phenomena more and more. This is very evident on the screen, so why not poetry as well?

How this might affect poetic style I’m not sure. In my own case, ageing has brought forth a bit more humour, but equally there’s the possibility that it will bring forth feelings of anxiety, loss of control, and indeed despair. The modes of expression are likely to be fairly conventional, even though in some cases one might be writing about states of mind where disorientation is a factor, and it would not be unreasonable to expect the unexpected to surface as a result: thoughts to be incomplete or jumbled, for example. My little poem Forgotten, dealing with dementia, is a case in point.

For what it’s worth, I can never think of ageing in poetry without T. S. Eliot coming to mind. In Eliot we find more than just physical ageing; we find also the decay of the spirit, which is not just an individual experience but something that occurs in a society or even civilisation as well. And as I move deeper into old age, I wonder whether Western civilisation isn’t also, in some senses at least, in a parallel condition.