For much of my life I assumed there was something slightly wrong with me.

I never felt quite as comfortable with people as I imagined everyone else did. I often felt like an observer rather than a participant, someone standing just outside the circle, watching rather than belonging. I thought that perhaps I had somehow missed the lesson that everyone else had learned.

Reading poetry has slowly persuaded me otherwise.

Over the past few years I have spent thousands of hours with more than twenty-two thousand poems. They were written by people separated by centuries, languages, countries, beliefs, and circumstances. Yet again and again I found the same anxieties, the same joys, the same bewilderment, the same longing to understand what it means to be alive.

The more poets I read, the less unusual I began to feel.

Perhaps we are all strangers to ourselves.

Yesterday I was setting A. E. Housman's Good Creatures to music, and one short verse stopped me in my tracks.

I need but stick it in my heart
And down will come the sky,
And earth's foundations will depart
And all you folk will die.

Of course, Housman is not claiming that the physical universe would end with one man's death.

He is saying something far stranger.

The universe as he experiences it would end.

That thought has stayed with me.

Each of us lives within a world that no one else can fully enter. Everything we have ever seen, remembered, feared, loved, imagined, or misunderstood exists within the private landscape of our own consciousness. Your universe is not mine. Mine is not yours.

And yet they overlap.

Every conversation, every friendship, every disagreement, every act of kindness is a brief meeting between two universes that can never entirely become one.

Sometimes they merely touch.

Sometimes they collide.

Sometimes they drift apart almost as soon as they meet.

And very occasionally, one settles gently alongside another.

I have always found that both beautiful and slightly frightening.

Perhaps that is why love asks so much of us. It is an attempt to bridge a distance that can never be crossed completely. We spend our lives trying to explain ourselves to another person, while knowing that some part of us will always remain beyond explanation.

D. H. Lawrence understood this better than almost any poet I know. Again and again, his poems return to the mystery of two people trying to meet one another, discovering both intimacy and separation at the same time. Love, for Lawrence, is never the disappearance of difference. It is the courage to remain close despite it.

Looking back, I think one of the reasons I have always loved poetry is that it narrows that distance.

When I read a poem written hundreds of years ago and suddenly recognise one of my own thoughts staring back at me, the boundaries of my little universe seem to soften for a moment. Someone I could never meet has somehow reached across time and said, "I have been here too."

Perhaps that is all poetry has ever tried to do.

Not to tell us what to think.

Not to solve the mystery of being alive.

Simply to remind us that although every human being inhabits a universe of their own, none of us lives entirely alone.

As for me, I remain profoundly grateful that one universe chose to anchor itself alongside mine.

Without that companionship, there would be no V2Melody.

And without poetry, I suspect I might never have realised that the universe I inhabit has always been shared, however briefly, with countless others.