WHATEVER anyone else says about poetry (Letters, April 20 & 21) and how they choose to define it, it hit me smack, bang wallop between my 14-year-old brain cells as I sat in a church cemetery with Matthew Arnold.

Shakespeare, Wordsworth and so on had all been tackled at school but Matthew Arnold was quite something else. His poem To A Gypsy Child by the Seashore took me on to Rilke, Robert Frost, and Peter Porter.

Poetry in its myriad forms is something that hits you "fair and square" and you never recover from it. It took me a few years of constant reading to understand Eliot and Paul Celan, but once understood, life is not the same. I have spent years with Empedocles on Etna, another Arnold poem and still see the many flowers I picked then and pressed in this book. Happy memories of a grave-yard I loved in my youth.

The Russian/American poet Joseph Brodsky said that "poetry is a mental accelerator that, if mastered, can cure anguish or cause joy". There is a lot of anguish in the world just now and there are good poets out there, dead or alive, to be read and enjoyed. Their poems appeal differently to different people, but they bury themselves in your heart and mind. They just wait to be read.

Thelma Edwards, Kelso.

SOME people do like to write

When their muse is awoken,

And a rhyme will often help music,

Whether its sung or is spoken.

Blank verse can also have music,

Which will earn it appreciation,

But, sadly, some is just prose

With very poor punctuation.

John N E Rankin, Bridge of Allan.

RECENT letters on the subject of poetry brought to mind a line I understand was based on the American Civil War: "Whoever touches a hair of thon grey head dies like a dog, march on he said".

I first heard this line as a young office boy in an accountant's office in Glasgow as quoted by an older colleague.

It still resonates with me now. Can your readers shed light on what was the title, who was the author and what was the story?

Bill Wylie, Ayr.

Wisdom of the epistles

THE first place I make for when I buy my Herald of a morning is the Letters Pages, but more for entertainment than edification. But this has set me thinking. Would it not be sensible to dissolve our elected government and turn running the country over to the letter writers?

After all, they seem to be the ones that have all the answers.

James Gracie, Sanquhar.

The cuckoo watch

ANENT the subject of hearing the first cuckoo of spring (Letters, April 14), on April 29, 2012 I was coming down from a long day in one of the big glens of Easter Ross when I became aware of the presence of a cuckoo in a little clump of trees. (“Heard, not regarded”). Half an hour later I met the local landowner, who became excited and demanded to know where "the simple bird that thinks two notes a song" had been noted, if not spotted.

He informed me that to hear the cuckoo before the end of April ensures an extra year of life. The only problem is – have I had the extra year? Or is it yet to come?

Walter Stephen, Edinburgh EH10.