Although most readers encounter poetry now as written text, it is fundamentally an oral and aural art form, meant to be spoken and heard. In ancient Greece, poetry was typically recited, accompanied by the strains of a lyre; in many Indigenous cultures, poetry and storytelling is incantatory, often with the specific intent of healing psychic injury. Such means of sharing poetry summon its visceral power, with rhythmic language mimicking our heartbeats and forging both physical and spiritual communion. Thus, it should seem unsurprising that sharing poetry with patients in medical contexts might interest clinicians. “Reading Emily Dickinson in the NICU” describes just such a human interaction, occurring inside a highly medicalized space. The poem depicts an intimate moment, as a newborn patient rests, ear to the speaker’s heartbeat, as she reads Dickinson’s poetry. Whether she reads aloud or not is almost irrelevant as we feel together the “hymnal cadence” of language, with Dickinson’s poem (perhaps “Once more, my now bewildered Dove”) echoed in the lulling meter and undergirding internal off-rhymes. This healing effect, re-encapsulated by the Dickinsonian reference to “a nested dove,” arises from and illuminates the layered connections that often intertwine with care: voiced poetry becomes another form of skin-to-skin contact, known to be therapeutic for NICU patients. Yet not only the patient is healed through this poetic touch, as the speaker, in feeling herself so profoundly adjoined to her patient, in the end recognizes “Together…we two survive.”
