Simon Armitage has written a poem to address the coronavirus and a lockdown that is slowly being implemented across the UK, saying that the art form can be consoling in times of crisis because it “asks us just to focus, and think, and be contemplative”. The poet laureate’s new poem, Lockdown, moves from the outbreak of bubonic plague in Eyam in the 17th century, when a bale of cloth from London brought fleas carrying the plague to the Derbyshire village, to the epic poem Meghadūta by the Sanskrit poet Kālidāsa. Armitage, who is at home with his family in West Yorkshire, said that “as the lockdown became more apparent and it felt like the restrictions were closing in, the plague in Eyam became more and more resonant” to him. His poem references Eyam’s boundary stone, which contained holes that the quarantined villagers would put their money in to pay for provisions from outside, and then fill with vinegar in the hope it would cleanse the coins. It also touches on the doomed romance between a girl who lived in Eyam and a boy outside the village who talked to her from a distance, until she stopped coming. A man touches the boundary stone in Eyam from which no resident could pass during the village’s isolation in 1666. Facebook Twitter Pinterest A man touches the boundary stone in Eyam from which no resident could pass during the village’s isolation in 1666. Photograph: Gary Calton/The Observer The poem was also influenced by a scene in Meghadūta in which an exile sends reassuring words to his wife in the Himalayas via a passing cloud. “The cloud is convinced to take the message because the yaksha, which I think is sort of an attendant spirit to a god of wealth, tells him what amazing landscapes and scenery he’s going to pass across. I thought it was a kind of hopeful, romantic gesture,” said Armitage. He thought there was a message to be learned “about taking things easy and being patient and trusting the Earth and maybe having to come through this slightly slower, and wiser, at the other end – given that one thing that’s accelerated the problem is our hectic lives and our proximities and the frantic ways we go about things”. Poetry is “by definition consoling” because “it often asks us just to focus and think and be contemplative”, said Armitage. “Poetry is often about detail, even to the point where there’s just something sacramental in the ordinary descriptions of everyday life,” he said. “It’s unlikely that there’s going to be a book of poems that are consolation against catastrophe, but just in poetry’s nature, in the way it asks us to be considerate of language, it also asks us to be considerate of each other and the world. In the relationship with thoughtful language, something more thoughtful occurs.” Lockdown by Simon Armitage And I couldn’t escape the waking dream of infected fleas in the warp and weft of soggy cloth by the tailor’s hearth Advertisement in ye olde Eyam. Then couldn’t un-see the Boundary Stone, that cock-eyed dice with its six dark holes, thimbles brimming with vinegar wine purging the plagued coins. Which brought to mind the sorry story of Emmott Syddall and Rowland Torre, star-crossed lovers on either side of the quarantine line whose wordless courtship spanned the river till she came no longer. Coronavirus: the week explained - sign up for our email newsletter Read more But slept again, and dreamt this time of the exiled yaksha sending word to his lost wife on a passing cloud, a cloud that followed an earthly map of camel trails and cattle tracks, streams like necklaces, fan-tailed peacocks, painted elephants, embroidered bedspreads of meadows and hedges, bamboo forests and snow-hatted peaks, waterfalls, creeks, the hieroglyphs of wide-winged cranes and the glistening lotus flower after rain, the air hypnotically see-through, rare, the journey a ponderous one at times, long and slow but necessarily so.