William Sieghart's poetry pharmacy prescribes the perfect words to help you through your problems. This week: insecurity about ageing

As we grow older and (often, though not always) wiser, we discover what perhaps we should always have known: that our bodies are not ours alone to shape. When we’re young, we tend to think of our natural attributes as defining us. The world has not yet had time to leave its stamp on us; our bodies carry no evidence of how we have chosen to live. When that shift finally comes, and we begin to see evidence that our bodies have been lived in, loved in and lost in, it can come as a shock.

Many of us flail against that change, trying to remedy it with potions, diets, injections. It is easy to see why. It cannot be denied that we live in a world which places a premium upon youth and conventional attractiveness, especially where women are concerned.

Yet when we read this tremendously measured and insightful poem by Fleur Adcock, we see another way opening up before us. It is a wilder way, one where the beauty of the landscape is so stark that it bites us like a cold wind.

Adcock gives us a vision of what it would be like to fall in love – not with a person who makes demands of us, but with something to which we are incidental. Fall in love with a place, she says, and instead of caring how you look to your beloved, your beloved will shape how you look.

This is a marvellous reminder 
that we don’t need to be traditionally desirable in order to be loved, or lovely. We simply need to embrace the echoes of happiness which a 
life well lived will leave us. Anyone who truly loves us will love those echoes too.

Weathering by Fleur Adcock

Literally thin-skinned, I suppose, my face

catches the wind off the snow-line and flushes

with a flush that will never wholly settle. Well:

that was a metropolitan vanity,

wanting to look young for ever, to pass.

I was never a pre-Raphaelite beauty,

nor anything but pretty enough to satisfy

men who need to be seen with passable women.

But now that I am in love with a place

which doesn’t care how I look, or if I’m happy,

happy is how I look, and that’s all.

My hair will turn grey in any case,

my nails chip and flake, my waist thicken,

and the years work all their usual changes.

If my face is to be weather-beaten as well

that’s little enough lost, a fair bargain

for a year among the lakes and fells, when simply

to look out of my window at the high pass

makes me indifferent to mirrors and to what

my soul may wear over its new complexion.

‘Weathering’ is from Fleur Adcock: Poems 1960-2000, published by Bloodaxe. To order a copy call 0844 871 1514  or visit the Telegraph Bookshop

The Poetry Pharmacy Returns is published by Particular

Which poems would you suggest on the theme of 'insecurity about ageing'? Tell us in the comments section below.