Healing and Liberation Through Poetry: A Comparative Study of Rumi’s The Guest House and Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Introduction: The Emotional Alchemy of PoetryPoetry functions as an ancient artistic practice which has bound itself to human emotions since ancient times to offer comfort and comprehension while releasing transformative healing power.Through its verses poetry reaches the fundamental human feelings which help people explore themselves while they face suffering and strive to free themselves from personal and environmental challenges.The 13th-century Persian mystic Rumi and the 20thcentury American poet Mary Oliver both express healing and liberation through their poetic works.Through their poems The Guest House and Wild Geese the authors present their themes by using distinct yet harmonious perspectives.The Guest House by Rumi shows readers how to accept change by teaching them to receive every feeling that enters their life, including the difficult ones.The text embodies Sufi spiritual principles which view suffering as a path to wisdom and understanding.The poem Wild Geese by Mary Oliver presents a soft yet forceful message about freedom, which leads readers toward a natural world belonging without guilt.The Guest House helps people heal through emotional acceptance yet Wild Geese leads to freedom through self-compassion.The paper examines the dual role of these poems as instruments for achieving emotional and psychological wellness.The research demonstrates that poetry serves as a healing instrument which also leads people toward personal liberation through its literary and psychological analysis. Poetry as a Medium of Healing and LiberationPoetry, in its most basic form, is emotion's truth on a piece of paper.It describes feelings and experiences that often go unsaid.It takes shape of the felt things that are otherwise formless."When we write poetry, we give voice to our souls in ways that can be both revealing and healing," says the poet and therapist John Fox.And there, too, as poets show us, we see that same alchemy -poetry becomes a task of recognition, a release.
Author: Sahana R
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4411461244