Poetry and Literature: guest post

An idiosyncratic relationship

Oct 20, 2022

Welcome Winston Davis, pen name, who tells his story from his heart. See below for memoriam.

Our guest writes about Starting Late. We’re studying authors who did just that in my lessons: Write it! How to get started.

Here is his story:,

My relationship with literature has been an idiosyncratic one. See my poem ‘Poetry Personified.’

As a young child, an aunt, who lived with us, used to delight my bedtimes by quoting from a small collection of much loved and memorized poems.*

(See Verse 1 of ‘Poetry Personified).

My mother sent me at twelve to an elocution teacher, a friend of the family. Later I went to an erudite and inspirational teacher, Nana Ward, whom I knew through competing in Speech and Drama festivals. Other elocution teachers taught me to recite poetry.

Nana taught me to understand, explore a poem, its author and milieu. I’ve dedicated to her my book Poems of Youth and Age.

I was immersed in poetry from then until age seventeen (see verse 2). I cleared the decks in preparation for starting an intensive engineering course (see verse 3) at The Queen’s University Belfast. I graduated, first class honors, in 1961 and worked for two years in industry before returning to the university for a PhD, 1966, in Electrical Control Theory. (See verse 4). I again worked in industry, but had a yen to get into the Medical field. In 1967 I obtained a position in the Medical Physics Department of Edinburgh University. I worked there for the next 31 years, until retiring at the end of 1998.

By 1971 I had abandoned literature so completely I could joke with a colleague that I couldn’t remember when I last read a book, other than a technical one. Little did I know the harm I was doing to myself, because I was doing violence to the person I really was.

In 1971, I developed a psychosis (see verse 5) and went on sick leave. I went to Belfast on holiday with my family, my wife and three young children. Knowing I was not well, through a medical contact, I was referred to a psychiatrist at the Belfast Psychiatric Hospital. I told him I thought I had a psychosis and he asked me what I meant by that. I replied “I’m an engineer, not a doctor. But when a system is not in tune with its environment, there is a problem, and I am not in tune with my environment.” I quoted from Sylvia Plath’s poem, “Lady Lazarus”. After waking from an attempted suicide, she wrote “I am the same identical woman.” I said then emphatically, “She wasn’t. No one goes through an experience like that and remains unchanged.”

The trigger for my illness was the violence then unfolding in Northern Ireland and its effect on people I knew there. But the energy for the psychosis was the suppression of my core nature by having abandoned literature.

I was about three weeks in the psychiatric ward. They first sedated me and I slept a long time because I’d not been sleeping. I had ECT (a much less traumatic treatment than its reputation). It is essentially the inducement of an epileptic fit. Nowadays a muscle relaxant is administered first, so skeletal injuries are no longer a problem.

After treatment I returned to Edinburgh and to Medical Physics. I was given a supply of the psychiatric drug largactil, but I did not use it. My professor suggested I work only in the mornings, and in the afternoons I walked and sat in Holyrood Park. This was my largactil. After about three weeks, I told my professor I felt ready to return to full time. A couple months after returning, my section head told me I had made a remarkable recovery.

To recover, I read voraciously. I was like a dried-out sponge that needed to be refilled. The Medical Physics department was situated in the old Royal Infirmary, near Edinburgh Central Library. Every lunch time, I walked down and borrowed books. At night I read them and typed up notes on each one. I still have the notes, now on CD. In all there were 239 books. Here’s the wide, eclectic subjects.

A. Sociology & Counter Culture
B. Medicine , Psychology & Psychiatry
C. Theology, Humanism & Morality
D. Civil Conflict & War
E. Poetry, Art & Music
F. Science, Biology & Evolution
G. Government, Resistance & Counter Culture
H. Agriculture & Ecology

After three years, I returned to a more natural reading pattern, and reread many of the novels I’d read when young, and other novels. I’ve recently finished reading Dostoevsky’s The Demons and have started reading Dickens’ Bleak House.

I have reread T. S. Eliot’s The Four Quartets, poems I’ve long loved. Also the war poets, especially Wilfred Owen. My favorite poem is “Anthem for Doomed Youth.” The title was suggested to him by the older established poet Siegfried Sassoon when they first met at Craiglockhart military hospital for officers. This is now a campus of Edinburgh Napier University in the area of Edinburgh where I live.

This essay is a long medical discourse, but for me my life and my poetry are interwoven. I do not so much write poetry as poetry writes me. As I say in the quoted poem, it was the poetry and not my scientific training that ‘knelt at my bedside and helped me heal.’ (See verse 6) And ‘she’ returned to give me a creative period, after a lapse of some 16 years. (I had written a few poems near the end of my time with Nana Ward, and nothing since).

After this creative period, it was another forty years before I wrote anything else. I had taken a few days away at a beautiful retreat center, The Bield near Perth. By chance, I picked up a leaflet saying there was going to be a poetry workshop on the weekend. I decided to extend my stay to attend. On the first morning, we were invited to go out into the grounds and write a poem.

I watched a bee alight on a flower and disturb a wasp, gathering nectar.

Photo by Krzysztof Niewolny on Unsplash.

The bee quickly flew away, and the wasp returned to its task. As I walked back towards the house, the words of a short poem came complete to me (see verse 6). I rushed back to the workshop, grabbed a piece of paper, a pencil from the table, and scribbled down the poem. This is the poem in my book called ‘The Bee’.

This experience opened the floodgates, and I wrote the rest of the poems in my poetry book in the following two years.

Recently, since learning about the recurrence of my lymphoma, I’ve started writing again, a mixture of poetry and prose.

One last thought: The study of science sharpens the mind; the study of literature feeds the soul.

*Hearing stories and poems can profoundly affect the later literary development of a sensitive child.

I think of Walter de la Mare and his poem “Martha.” I believe the stories she told in ‘the Hazel glen’ influenced his becoming the poet he later became.

Robert Louis Stevenson, who as a child had a close association with the area of Edinburgh I live in, had his young mind nurtured and influenced by the stories his beloved nanny Alison Cunningham told him.

My aunt certainly influenced me.

In Memoriam: David Williamson1938-2022. David Williamson (Winston Davis, his pen name) died on October 10th, shortly after he sent me this lovely, vulnerable and heartfelt poem and essay. I hold David, his belovèd wife Mildred and their children in my heart.

Love,