Seminal Publication of Professor Fiona Sampson's ‘A Speaking Likeness: Poetry Within Health and Social Care’

Here is a poem:

The Anglican metaphysician George Herbert wrote ‘Love’. He had survived the religious politics of the court of King James to become the priest of a small country parish, Bemerton, which lies among rolling Wiltshire hills and shallow chalk streams.

Something of the hospitality of this landscape seems to have got into his famous poem, which speaks to us regardless of our religious beliefs.

‘Love’ is a poem of longing for a hospitable acceptance of our very selves. This longing is among the most profound human needs. We can imagine it as halfway between ‘Consider yourself / at home’, as the boys of Fagin's kitchen sing in Oliver and the ‘Somewhere over the rainbow’, that Dorothy longs for in The Wizard of Oz. It's the object of redemption songs and revolutionary rhetoric; of liberation theology and utopian communities; of migration and enfranchisement. It's also, as it happens, the object of talking cures and of person- centred healthcare. Gerard Manley Hopkins, in ‘Heaven- Haven’, called it ‘Where springs not fail / […] where flies no sharp and sided hail / […] Where no storms come / Where the green swell is in the havens dumb / And out of the swing of the sea’. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger called this notion of perfect adaptation to an ideal home ‘dwelling’.