Listening to a Prayer: Mahapatra

Listening to a Prayer by Jayanta Mahapatra

byBijay Kant Dubey

Stone cuts deep
A bell trembles,
touched by the pain
of countless people.

Across the temple square,
the wind
that settles on my shoulders
has nowhere to go:
neither a silence
nor an answer.

Listening to a Prayer is one of those poems of Jayanta Mahapatra which figure in his A Rain of Rites collection of poems which has appeared from The University of Georgia Press, Athens, USA, published in 1976.

A poet of rains and rites, rocks, stones and trees, lakes, rivers and bird sanctuaries, sea beaches and tourist attractions, photography and imagistic reflection, Jayanta Mahapatra delves into history, art and culture, religion, philosophy and ethics, spirituality, cosmology and metaphysics to reveal to what he has observed personally and privately.

A poet of Orissa and Orissan landscapes, rock-built temples and rituals doing the rounds, he tells about Puri, Cuttack and Bhubaneswar; Khandagiri, Dhaulagiri and Udaygiri; Konark Sun-temple, Jagannath Puri-temple and Lingaraj Temple. The Rathyatra of Puri has always drawn his attention from and he liked it so much. The defeat of Kalinga he has not been able to forget. He still rues the site by the river Daya with the skulls and skeleton bones and the bloodshed King Asoka did for vanquishing Kalinga.

The sculptures carved upon the outer walls of the Sun-temple with ample decorations, erotic figures and figurines in love and affection or differently portrayed take the canvas of the poet and he thinks of the structure, its cutting, borders, columns; human devotion, love, affection, passion and engraving. The chariot design gives borders to his poetry and the engravings the images of the dark daughters.

When the poet says it, stone cuts deep, by it he means to refer to a vast body encompassing within rock-built temples, art and architecture, sculpture and artifacts, engravings upon; the Siva lingas. The sea shores and the beaches around, he refers to all that.

A bell trembles touched by the pain of the countless people. If faith is so sacrosanct and sacred, holy and pious on the one hand doubt seems to be clawing on the other as because this is the world where people have to live in and where they have to die too. The woes and sorrows of the men are mundane and earthly. The tales of the hunger-stricken people, those who have no food in stock to take none but a distraught fellow can say it. Human hunger is the worst of all. The mammoth crowds, where are they going to?

The temples remain so jammed and packed that the wind has nowhere to go rather than settling on his shoulders. There is nothing as to be counseled in neither silence nor an answer to get from. Prayer is best taken to in silence, but the scenes crowded and chaotic.

Leaving rocks and stones, what has he? The gravels round and smooth and blackly are anointed as Vishnu. There are so many gods and goddesses to adore. But apart from holding faith in confidence, life too has its own grind to grind.

With the prayer there conjure up the images differently opined. Where is faith so sacrosanct? Is it in rituals or in service? One can definitely look up to in piety and reverence. But should there be any scope given to doubt and suspense lurking within?

The temples become so jammed and cramming that even oxygen has to be put into the ventilation of the sanctum sanctorum as for to avert tragedies and loss. Generally in the rock-built temples, one door remains for the entry and the outlet. So many devotees and worshippers with the wishes of their own overcrowding the complex, is the scene. The bells which lie in hanging are metallic. Somebody has definitely made them. People ringing it, trying to knock the god, telling of arrival and submission of piety, comes under the purview.

Listening to a Prayer is no doubt a fine poem, but it is difficult to mean it if one knows it not the history of Orissa; if one knows it not the Hindu view of life. Without viewing the scenery of a temple complex, one may not be able to lay it bare. It is a poem of faith, but of doubt too recoiling around to be contradicted by logic and reasoning.

Stones are deep into the psyche of the people and they are so much adhered to it that they cannot reason it taking to be logic as their guide. While reading the poem, we become reminded of Krishna, Balbhadra and Subhadra and their grotesque images.

Her Hand: Mahapatra

Her Hand - Poem by Jayanta Mahapatra

by

Bijay Kant Dubey

Even a few of the poets have said, what Jayanta Mahapatra has in this small poem of ready reference and delving, really a great poem to contain in present-day child abuse, moral depravity and sexual exploitation. Just out of filial love and expression, he says many a thing apart from the wish of holding the hand of the small girl. How to hold it, as guilt hangs heavy over, as the body lies it abused? The streetlights too seem to be conspiring against the gruesome acts. Is this the picture of India where female feticide is done? Is this the India where the daughter is considered to be a curse, a debt? Is this the India where the rape cases are increasing?

Her Hand is no doubt a representative poem of Jayanta wherein the poet taxes with his gruesome observation of the small daughter-like girl. The title is charming indeed, but the heart of the matter pathetic and painful. Even the palmist will be afraid to see her hand, what to say of the poet? Her fate-line devastating, how to re-orient and re-structure it, my God? Her suffering and agony, how to describe it? Is India not good for daughters?

The little girl's hand is made of darkness
How will I hold it?

The streetlamps hang like decapitated heads
Blood opens that terrible door between us

The wide mouth of the country is clamped in pain
while its body writhes on its bed of nails

This little girl has just her raped body
for me to reach her

The weight of my guilt is unable
to overcome my resistance to hug her

The little girl’s hand is made of darkness, how to hold her? The first line strikes us differently to think why to feel it otherwise after holding the hand of the little girl? Why can it be not out of filial love? The streetlamps appear to be decapitated heads; the second stanza adds to the misery and pity of the theme and aggravates it. We shudder at imagining the thing; the heart of the matter. What is it that forms the crux of his subject-matter? Perhaps rape, violence, female feticide, abortion, moral depravity, sexual abuse, etc. form the crux of the matter which he means to reveal to as we often avert the gaze from hardcore realities.

The theme has not ended with the description of the decapitated heads. Apart from decapitation, blood oozes out and opens the door to view the landscape and we appalled to see it. The wide mouth of the whole country is clamped in pain and the body held aloft on the bed of nails adding to human pathos and pity, misery and woe.

This girl too has just been raped and her bruised body, how to view it? How to approach her? The weight of the guilt is unable to contain in his conscience and he too wavers in hugging the victim. How to overcome resistance to hug her?

To read the poem is to be taxed and burdensome; is to bear the load and brunt of. To read it is to feel it, is this the India where the small daughters are not reared properly, is this the India where domestic violence is taking a toll upon womankind?

We do not know where have we come to, where are we going? When will domestic violence stop? When will child abuse come to a stop? How to give moral support to an abused girl?  

The poem is psychological as well as sociological fraught with trauma and tension it releases. Who is at fault? Our conscience itself is guilty. What works, functions it when, who can but say it whether the dark consciousness or the sub-consciousness? Human psyche is indeed a complex thing what it undergoes within, who can but? Ours is a guilty mind always suspicious.

What did we promise while making a tryst with India’s independence? What have we done for the women, widows and children? Have we been able to banish poverty, hunger, underdevelopment, illiteracy and superstition? 

Freedom: Mahapatra

Freedom by Jayanta Mahapatra

By 

Bijay Kant Dubey

Freedom by Jayanta Mahapatra is like the Freedom essay, radio-talk delivered by G.B.Shaw on the B.B.C., London wherein the dramatist discusses it what it is freedom, who a freeman and what the attributes of it? The dramatist as an anti-thesis giver, a playwright of ideas discusses it the types of slavery, natural slavery and man-made slavery. Similar is the case with Jayanta Mahapatra who also seeks to know what it is freedom. Should it be corroborated with the independence of India and the installation of democracy? How the meaning of it varies from man to man? If freedom means something to one man it is differently to another man.

What did we promise making a tryst with India’s freedom? Today India is free, but what have we for the women, children and widows? Only false promises cannot give a strong foundation and the nation cannot progress just with the leaders’ white lies.

While delving in such an aspect, the poet takes a use of the sub-conscious and the dark conscious as because the fickle and abnormal mind of man keeps viewing and opining in its way. But when we speak, we try our best to filter such a thing and try to be social and measured in our stepping. But as far as the case of Jayanta Mahapatra is concerned, he even registers the incongruities and oddities while dispensing with the topic.

Sometimes when he watches, it appears to be that the country’s body goes floating on the river waters. Left alone he grows into a disembodied bamboo half sunk into and half flourishing on the banks. Here old widows and dying men cherish their freedom, bowing time after time in obstinate prayers.

But while on the other the children cherish to be free and dream of a world so creative and dreamy and full of imagination. The poet too wants to be with them as he opines leisurely, taking a break from his routine life or busy schedule.

Nor with the wish to know the people lying unfed and unattended in the remote villages, just with little rice to tell of what we have in the aftermath freedom these long years who even do not know it what freedom is actually. When did India become free? What in Parliament House? Who sitting then, who now? These concern them least as they have nothing to do with. He is also not there to see the uncaught, bloodies lights of sunsets catching the tall and white pillars of Parliament House.

In a temple built new, the priest enjoys liberty whereas the gods seem to be hiding in the dark like an alien. This is not the ended of the story. The poet has something more to say.

And apart from, each day he keeps looking for the light which but the shadows fail to contain in. Only freedom that he knows is the freedom of the body when it is alone. The lines are very meaningful:

Trying to find the only freedom I know,
the freedom of the body when it's alone.

The fickle mind seems to be at work; the abnormal mind. Sometimes in abnormalities lies it the kernel of a great thought is the thing here. Geniuses are found to be with the streaks of abnormality which add to really in making them great and extraordinary. The poet means to say that what we take to be something is nothing and vice versa. Freedom is not what we actually mean for. Freedom is the freedom of the body, the freedom of the soul and spirit. Freedom is the state of being free and unrestricted without any barrier and binding, where the mind goes or flies to or catches its dream and reflection. But say you, who is free? Are we? What we want, are we able to do without hindrances and hitches? Do we ever take the mind and the heart into good faith? What is human mind? How the composition of it and the reveries? Our impulses are inhibited; unrestricted.

What the abnormal mind says that too should be taken into confidence sometimes and if take we, something extraordinary we shall opine to pride over as our finding.

While elucidating freedom, Jayanta Mahapatra says that in India, the old widows and dying men cherish it, bowing in obstinate prayers. All through their lives, they remain under restrictions. The Indian widows fail to mix freely, eat and live freely. Similarly the dying men too see it as a liberation from.

Only Parliament House with the historicity and constitutionality of it cannot guarantee it freedom. Only the making of it cannot be the charter of our natural freedom. Freedom is what we take, what we believe in privately and personally. Freedom is the freedom of the mind, of the heart and the soul; of the spirit, the liberation from, complete deliverance. The unconscious mind is the screen on which figure the impressions of the heart and the soul. Impulses are the harbinger, but we need to distil them as for being social. Mark it that from the dark layer of the coalfield, is got the diamond. So is our dark consciousness from where originates it all:

Here, old widows and dying men
cherish their freedom,
bowing time after time in obstinate prayers.

Blakian innocence is childish vision and with their dream and imagination, they want to transform the world, but the hardcore realities contrasting indeed, which the children know it not that freedom lies it restricted here:

While children scream
with this desire for freedom
to transform the world
without even laying hands on it.

The freedom of the silent shale, the moonless coal, are the beds of streams of the sleeping god as he  keeps the ashes away, tries not to wear them on his forehead. Which is what, who can say?

The things of Jayanta Mahapatra’s poetry the talks of the unconscious mind.

Freedom

At times, as I watch,
it seems as though my country's body
floats down somewhere on the river.

Left alone, I grow into
a half-disembodied bamboo,
its lower part sunk
into itself on the bank.

Here, old widows and dying men
cherish their freedom,
bowing time after time in obstinate prayers.

While children scream
with this desire for freedom
to transform the world
without even laying hands on it.

In my blindness, at times I fear
I'd wander back to either of them.
In order for me not to lose face,
it is necessary for me to be alone.

Not to meet the woman and her child
in that remote village in the hills
who never had even a little rice
for their one daily meal these fifty years.

And not to see the uncaught, bloodied light
of sunsets cling to the tall white columns
of Parliament House.

In the new temple man has built nearby,
the priest is the one who knows freedom,
while God hides in the dark like an alien.

And each day I keep looking for the light
shadows find excuses to keep.

Trying to find the only freedom I know,
the freedom of the body when it's alone.

The freedom of the silent shale, the moonless coal,
the beds of streams of the sleeping god.

I keep the ashes away,
try not to wear them on my forehead.

Twilight: Mahapatra

Twilight  by Jayanta Mahapatra
By
Bijay Kant Dubey

An orange flare
lights the pale panes of the hospital
in a final wish of daylight.
It's not yet dark.

In the children’s ward
under a mother's face
the dead, always so young.
Water startles in the river's throat.

Its cry:
a plea to share in its curse?

Somewhere, this twilight shall fall
and hide the whiteness of jasmines about to bloom.

Newly-lit lamps
in the houses across the street
make me look out at the wet August evening
that holds up the vast unknown
in such small delicate hands.

Before writing about Twilight, one needs to know it that Jayanta Mahapatra is not a simple writer to be taken simply as is tedious and complex, hard to comprehend and mean. If one knows him not or has no idea with regard to his traits, one may not comprehend him in full as because nihilism and existentialism take the readings away from him. A poet who plays with words and images is very often seemingly meaningless as do come and light and darkness breaking upon and retreating back, as is the creation of the universe is, the break of the sound, who can ever resolve the mystery of life and the world? What is that permanent and durable here and lasting? Everything but short-lived, be that human glory or noteworthy attainment. Nothing, nothing, a poet of nothing and nothingness, nihilism and existentialism, he walks down the ways never trodden, never laid it bare where words mean it not.

So many evenings, mornings, dawn breaks, twilights, dusks, eve falls, night falls and midnights constitute the crux of his poetry so the moods after taking in various turns and twists of thought and idea and reflection. There is not one, so many poems named as Twilight, which Twilight is it, the matter will tell you, you need to know it by the body of the poem, not the title. Her the twilight he is relaying is one falling on the window-panes of a hospital with a flare, flashing upon and picturing the patients and the wards and the waiting or attending relatives, the kith and kin, the near and dear. An afflicted mother glancing or staring at the dead young tells a different story of pain and anguish.

Jayanta Mahaptara as a poet writes not for our pleasure and joy, but to tax the mid and brain with his observation and the other thing that he means to say is this that the things of the world and Nature go in their own way and they nave nothing to be penitent or broodful about. The other aspect too is that there is a vacuum all around. What it is written here? How to write the unwritten? Life of moments, hours, years and decades and each of the moment is passing by. Everything lies it in a contradictory position. This moment we feel something with, the next moment not with is the thing.

The hospital wards with the children and morose mothers lighted by the orange flare of the twilight are the first imagery that we come across. Again, the scene shifts and takes sides with another set imagery. The jasmines blooming in the hide of the twilight, about break open and spread a redolence of own, is another set of imagery and reflection.

Again, the newly-lit lamps in the houses of the street make him look at the wet August evening holding the vast space and vacuum to be lifted into such  delicate hands.

Twilight is an excellent poem from Jayanta Mahapatra wherein the imagery is splendid and extraordinary. It is a poem to see and feel rather than meaning it. The words used in the poem are beautiful, as such, orange flare, hospital pane, final wish of daylight, children’s ward, mother’s face, whiteness of jasmines, newly-lit lamps in the houses, the vast unknown, delicate hands, etc.

Twilight as  a poem does not remain a literary piece, but turns into an image, as the children do while attempting to draw, sketch and paint, pencil it. A small poem it says many a thing unsaid and undescribed. The language employed for the imagery is excellent and a brief poem can contain in so much amazes us.

This is what differentiates from other poets. Jayanta Mahapatra has really come a long way from where it is difficult to look back. Into the poetry structure of a small poem, he fuses in art and craftsmanship with his master strokes of imagery and landscape-painting. Almost all the lines, words and images add to the poetic beauty of his poems. In the beginning one may not take to liking, but one keeps track of his poems, one will be definitely to comprehend his vision. A poet of nothing is what it seems to be and what it seems to be is nothing, he has miles and miles to go into the domain of poesy, this much we can assure about. What one can do is this that one may compare this Twilight with other poems if really one wants to make a comparative study and thinks to be endowed with.

Theme of Mahapatra

A Thematic  Study of Jayanta Mahapatra’s Poems

by

Bijay Kand Dubey

Jayanta Mahapatra is one of those poets of modern Indian English poetry whose bases are one of physics and the physicist-poet taking liberties with imagery, photography, penciled silhouette and word-play rather than literature, one of light and shade, astronomy and the origin of the universe, shadow space and random descent rather than poetical meaning and interpretation. As  swayamvara and indradhanush words are so are his poetic images, flimsy and frail like the dawn light. His poetry is just like the gossamer and the sunlight falling upon. Why to mean them if these mean it not? As we used to see pictures in kaleidoscopes is the case with his poetry. Man is but a negative photograph. See the negatives and think of his poetry, the images shadowed and blackened. An X-ray plate will be the best answer. He does not write for the sake of meaning to be understood and these poems are not for the Indian readers, but for the foreign audience, as some have opined about his poetry rightly. Poetry as the images of life forms the crux of his poems. What it lies ahead who can but say it? What is it substantial in life? His poetry is a study in nothingness; the void around; a poet of inner and outer vacuum. Where are we going, what are we doing? We don’t know is the answer. What is that lasts it here? Why does the same dawn break, the same twilight, the same morn, the same eve? Where does the light come from flashing? Where does darkness retreat back to finally? The universe is puzzling and life too riddled with uncertainties.

But Jayanta as a poet, it is difficult to take him into our clutch and stride. Though many call him an Oriya first, but he is not, first of all he is a professor of physics and physics his realm of study through which approaches he poetry and poetical studies. Secondly, is an imagist as his poems are studies in imagery, the imagery of nothingness and random descent, the blank space and the vacuum above. Who am I? What my name, my identity? To see it in the Shakespearean terms, ‘Man is a walking shadow.’ And then he is an Oriya or anything else, call him a realist, a feminist or a Nature poet. Apart from these, hunger, poverty, illiteracy, underdevelopment, scarcity, depravity, etc. form the basis of his discussion. Love, sexuality, loneliness and man-woman relationship too twitch him for an expression. A visionary and a dreamer, he derives from art, history, culture and tradition. After we made a tryst with India’s independence, what have we for the women, children and widows? There was a timer when drought, famine and unnatural deaths used to maraud our self and the stories of hunger, depravity, superstition, scarcity and depression used to do the rounds. Now it is the time for reckoning, what have we as for what we had promised? And what have they got, we mean the poor people? What developmental schemes have we for their welfare and development? How much successful are we in their execution? If this be, why are there poverty, unemployment, food problem and so on still? What did Gandhi envisage and dream about and how far have their dreams come true? It is not that Gandhi dreamt one day.

Somewhere it is about the Oriyas and Oriya culture, art and tradition; rocks, stones and trees, somewhere about Puri, Cuttack, Bhubaneswar and Balasore, somewhere about Jagannath Puri temple, Dhaulagiri and Khandagiri; the Konark Sun-temple, somewhere about the Chilika lake, rivers and bird sanctuaries, somewhere about hunger, moral depravity and scarcity of food, somewhere about sexuality, sensuality and carnal desires, somewhere about flesh and blood contact, man-woman relationship, give and take and attraction and repulsion met in love, somewhere about flesh trade, woman trafficking and body business. It is flesh trade which he deals with in Hunger, it is myth which he trades in Myth, the nameless identity of a rural persona in A Nameless Person, the contrast between faith and doubt in Dawn At Puri. The old father tired of fishing, hurling the nets and gathering them with the retarding muscles sells her teenage fisher girl on the sea beach. How much pathetic and pitiable is the scene? Using the same title he has written so many poems, naming Twilight, Morning, Evening, A Rain of Rites. There are a few on Cuttack, Puri, Bhubaneswar encompassing poems where he has tried to catch the rhythm and beat of the towns throbbing and pulsating and keeping pace with. The architectural splendor of the rock-built temples and the sculptures carved upon, erotic and passionate tell a different tale. The rathyatras of Puri have always delighted him with its festivity and procession, Jagannath, Balabhadra and Krishna going out and returning back after a few days, the grotesque-grotesque bizarre gods and goddesses carved out from wooden logs looking puppet-like and with the ogling eyes. Somewhere the echoes of Vedic and Upanishadic chants going in the temples even by noon or thereafter have always found echoes with his poetry as muffled voices or music from the behind and this is but his Vedism, Upanishadism, the inward love for. Somewhere the hot and perspiring summers, the hot scorching suns, the sun-burnt countryside homes with the mother and the daughter sitting in the mango orchard, fanning and seeing the motherly hair for louse take the canvas from and he gives touches to those aspects which lie undescribed. Finally, where to go leaving Orissa and Orissan landscapes, Orissa the land of his birth, nativity and schooling?

A Nameless Person

In the darkened room

a woman

cannot find her reflection in the mirror

waiting as usual

at the edge of sleep

In her hands she holds

the oil lamp

whose drunken yellow flames

know where her lonely body hides

An Indian village lady tattooed, call her a purdahwalli, ghumtawalli or burkhawalli is the persona depicted in. The tongue cannot click the name of her lord. She passes her days in anonymity just like a persona without a name and identity. A home keeper or a housewife, call we, but she should be with an identity of her own.

With an oil lamp burning into the hands of hers, burning somehow, she keeps waiting or moving to and fro whose drunken flames know it where the body hides. She is feeling sleepy, but instead of keeps waiting for the return of the master.

Dawn At Puri

Endless crow noises

A skull in the holy sands

tilts its empty country towards hunger.

White-clad widowed Women

past the centers of their lives

are waiting to enter the Great Temple

Their austere eyes

stare like those caught in a net

hanging by the dawn's shining strands of faith.

The fail early light catches

ruined, leprous shells leaning against one another,

a mass of crouched faces without names,

and suddenly breaks out of my hide

into the smoky blaze of a sullen solitary pyre

that fills my aging mother:

her last wish to be cremated here

twisting uncertainly like light

on the shifting sands

Dawn at Puri is a poem of faith and doubt stranded on the vast seashore of Puri marking the funeral pyre burning, the black crows crowing, the holy skull lying on the sands, the widows queued up to enter the Great Temple and the lepers scrambling as nameless figures. Crows and the skull picture a world raked by hunger, scarcity, heat, dust and thirst; depravity, mismanagement and trouble. The white-clad women are in rows to enter the temple who have nothing left with them, the eyes looking waterless. What to ask for from the deity, deliverance or something else? The dawn light flashes upon and shifts to, frail and shaky in its presence. The lepers assembled add to the pity and misery of the poem and contrast faith with doubt and suspense. Where actually is faith? Why does God not see it all? Again the dawn light dazzles over the pyre burning on the sands. The sudden blaze lights up the sky and it reminds him of the wish of the mother who too likes it to be cremated here as Puri is the swargadwara. As dawn light is frail and shaky in its presence so is human faith staggering. Nothing is certain here, everything but temporary and transitory.

Hunger

It was hard to believe the flesh was heavy on my back.

The fisherman said: Will you have her, carelessly,

trailing his nets and his nerves, as though his words

sanctified the purpose with which he faced himself.

I saw his white bone thrash his eyes.

I followed him across the sprawling sands,

my mind thumping in the flesh's sling.

Hope lay perhaps in burning the house I lived in.

Silence gripped my sleeves; his body clawed at the froth

his old nets had only dragged up from the seas.

In the flickering dark his lean-to opened like a wound.

The wind was I, and the days and nights before.

Palm fronds scratched my skin. Inside the shack

an oil lamp splayed the hours bunched to those walls.

Over and over the sticky soot crossed the space of my mind.

I heard him say: My daughter, she's just turned fifteen...

Feel her. I'll be back soon, your bus leaves at nine.

The sky fell on me, and a father's exhausted wile.

Long and lean, her years were cold as rubber.

She opened her wormy legs wide. I felt the hunger there,

the other one, the fish slithering, turning inside.

Hunger as a poem is a poem of not the hunger of the belly, but the hunger of the flesh and blood. What it startles us is this that a father can sell her daughter for money, that is a poor and old  fisherman offering his teenage daughter and the author persona taking the privilege of the situation. Here the sensual desires of the poet come to the fore side by side it pictures the poor living conditions and hard works of the seafaring poor folks like those of the fishermen and boatmen braving the winds, waves, surfs, foams and fatal aquatic animals they keep hurling the nets and trying. But here is a tale of an old, retarded, poor and miserable fisherman whose nerves work it not more, nets draw it not to meet up his demands. The poor shack built from haystacks and palm leaves and the soot from the dimly burning oil-lamp add to the description of poverty-stricken lives.

When the father says that she is just fifteen to feel her, the sky falls on him as he leaps towards her undecidedly but with a yearning within to quench the thirst, to extinguish the bodily fire burning him.

Myth

Years drift sluggishly through the air:

a chanting, the long years, an incense.

Face upon face returns to the barbed horizons

of the foggy temple; here lies

a crumpled leaf, a filthy scarlet flower

out of placeless pasts, on the motionless stairs.

                               Old brassy bells

moulded by memories, dark, unfulfilled,

to make the year come back again --

               a recurring prayer.

The stairs seem endless, lifelong,

and those peaks too, Annapurna, Dhaulagiri;

uncertain, impressive as gods.

               I dare not go

into the dark, dank sanctum

where the myth shifts

swiftly from hand to hand, eye to eye.

The dried, sacrificed flowers smile at me.

               I have become;

a diamond in my eye

Vague grieving years pit against

               the distant peaks

like a dying butterfly

as a bearded, saffron-robed man

               asks me, firmly:

Are you a Hindu?

Myth as a poem is not a myth of Orissa, but of ancient India, its thought and tradition, the snow-capped mountains and forested where meditated it the sadhus and yogis, into the caves turning years into penance, winning over the self. When we read the poem, the mystery of the caps and the myth of the yogis in sadhna do the rounds. The temples resounding with chanting and prayer add incense like aroma to it. But the crumpled leaves and flowers too have a song to sing. Why to pluck them for mere faith, ravish their beauty? The poet does not want to enter the temple, climb up as the bearded, saffron-robed man asks him if he is a Hindoo and here lies in the truth that he is a Christian convert.

The poem is one such which can even fail the mythical ones by William Butler Yeats as is the poetic quality of the lines. None can describe the mystery of the snow-capped peaks and caves and the myth of age-old meditation in such a way as he has taking in the old brassy bells and its tolls.

Indian Summer

Over the soughing of the sombre wind

priests chant louder than ever.

the mouth of India opens :

Crocodiles move into deeper waters.

The good wife

lies on my bed

through the long afternoon;

dreaming still, not exhausted

by the deep roar of funeral pyres.

Peculiarly private and personal, he takes to in his typical way of reflection. When the somber wind keeps soughing, the priests of India chant louder. The mouth of India opens at that time when heat and dust parch it up, the earth burns, the blazing summer with the Mercury soars up and even during that time, rituals continue on. The priests can be seen praying, chanting mantras. Crocodiles move into deeper waters. People take a siesta during the summer noon. The sun blazes it hot and it becomes difficult to stand under the sun. The good wife lies he by his bed dreaming and oblivious of the pyres burning far and the choric voices unto in a muffled reverberation. 

Jayanta Mahapatra is not a poet whose poetry is pleasurable and joy-giving and instead of taxes and waylays us. To read him is not to feel free. There is very much of nothingness, existentialism, nihilism in him which but we know it not, the drama of the absurd. This life is a waiting and we keep for the turn of things. Where we are going, what are we doing, we know it not. What is it false, what is it real, how to say it as the things keep swapping positions and places? The shape of the things continues to change and situations are not alike in the duration of time envisaged. Everything is but a matter of time, time all-powerful, all-pervasive.  

The twilight falling on the hospital panes, just as a pale flare, lighting up and picturing the children’s ward and the mothers sad and dejected wailing for the loss is scenic otherwise as it twitches us with a note of dejection. Again the same takes to a different recourse allowing the jasmines to crack open and bloom and spread sweet redolence all but in hide. Let us mark the images that lie in contrast.

Twilight

An orange flare

lights the pale panes of the hospital

in a final wish of daylight.

It's not yet dark.

In the children’s ward

under a mother's face

the dead, always so young.

Water startles in the river's throat.

Its cry:

a plea to share in its curse?

Somewhere, this twilight shall fall

and hide the whiteness of jasmines about to bloom.

Newly-lit lamps

in the houses across the street

make me look out at the wet August evening

that holds up the vast unknown

in such small delicate hands.

The Tiger and the Deer by Aurobindo

The Tiger and the Deer by Maharshi Aurobindo

BY

Bijay Kant Dubey

Brilliant, crouching, slouching, what crept through the green heart of the forest,
Gleaming eyes and mighty chest and soft soundless paws of grandeur and murder?
The wind slipped through the leaves as if afraid lest its voice and the noise of its steps perturb the pitiless Splendour,
Hardly daring to breathe. But the great beast crouched and crept, and crept and crouched a last time, noiseless, fatal,
Till suddenly death leaped on the beautiful wild deer as it drank
Unsuspecting at the great pool in the forest’s coolness and shadow,
And it fell and, torn, died remembering its mate left sole in the deep woodland,—
Destroyed, the mild harmless beauty by the strong cruel beauty in Nature.
But a day may yet come when the tiger crouches and leaps no more in the dangerous heart of the forest,
As the mammoth shakes no more the plains of Asia;
Still then shall the beautiful wild deer drink from the coolness of great pools in the leaves’ shadow.
The mighty perish in their might;
The slain survive the slayer.

Is it The Tiger of William Blake picked from Songs of Experience written in contrast with Songs of Innocence or a remix of the same with the experiences of sadhna and tantrical realization? Or, may be the vision of a saint and seer confronting a tiger into the hills and the mountains? Herein lies it the philosophy, the Hindu view of life held over down the ages, right from the start of civilization and culture. Though the influence of Milton hangs heavy over Savitri infusing in Western and Oriental philosophies, the version is Sanskritic, but the language and style derived from Paradise Lost and in that invocation and cadence, he starts and finishes the poem running into several editions and volumes and edited and revised from time to time as did they Wordsworth Tintern Abbey and Whitman Leaves of Grass. The poem is no exception to that as the influence of William Blake hangs heavy over it together with the imagery of the lamb and the tiger symbolizing innocence and experience. Toeing the same line and length, the poem is a variation from the same and can be called a parody of that. But something lies in added to it and that is Indian hermitage and the things associated with that. The poet as a sadhaka and yogi deals with mysticism; marks the elements of Nature and its wilds lying in contrasts and variations. The tiger and the deer elements have always engaged their mindscapes.Such a thing it is there in Hopkins’ Pied Beauty. The great saints and sadhus, yogis and fakiras of India have felt it while meditating in the forests and mountains. The tiger is the brute force bloody and brutal, ferocious and wild whereas the deer is splendid and serene.

The tiger waits for the deer to come and to pounce upon the poor creature into the wilds of Nature representing it what is dark in it, brutal and bloody, animal and horrific, wild and tempestuous, beastly and deadly, terrifying and cataclysmic. What it is that has crept through the green heart of the forest brilliant, crouching and slouching? What is that breaking the calm and splendor of it with a commotion and clamour turning noisy? The tiger lying in wait for to grab and catch the deer for a kill is definitely another perspective of life and the world, originating from the questions pertaining to the creation, the purpose and prudence of it, what the ways of the Divine, who can but say it, answer them to settle the odd scores? The gleaming eyes of the brute of the jungle, burning and sparking and it with the jaws and claws of its own coming slowly without making a sound, as when on the prowl. The chest is mighty and the paws of grandeur and murder and the beast coming with the soundless steps of its own. Tennysonian Nature red in tooth and claw, Shelleyian west wind swift, tameless and proud, Hughesian hawk going for a kill, these can never be upturned down. The wind slips through the leaves as if held in awe and suspense, tranquility to be ruffled strangely. Without disturbing the plan and scheme, it goes for a kill, a catch silently without making a noise and sound. The moment is one of hardly anyone daring to breathe, but to see in awe and astonishment, horror and terror what it going to take place and strike. The great beast is crouching and creeping, creeping and crouching to pounce upon and strike the poor creature while taking water at the pool or the stream in the wild unsuspectful of the coolness and shadows of the forest tract. The deer falls down and is torn to death while the mate of it straying far off in the deep woodland. This is but the law of Nature as the terror and the mild both form the facets of it. The mild harmless beauty is destroyed by the elements terrific and horrible which but the eyes cannot see it. But a day will come when the destructive forces will meet a disastrous and abrupt end, will never walk in the dangerous heart of the ignorant forest. But the deer will continue to drink water from the cool shade of the water pools into the forest of life. The mighty will perish in their might and the slain will survive the slayer.

The Tiger and the Deer is really one of the most beautiful poems of Aurobindo which remind us of the duality of Nature and Creation, what the purpose, how the ways of it to man and creatures, who can but say it? Nature at the same is swift, fragile and cool and calm, but at the tameless, swift and windy. Sometimes placid and sometimes horrific, tempestuous and terrible is it unexpectedly. The tiger and the deer elements are the aspects of the same creation. How to upturn the process? What it is beautiful remains it not so unto the last. What it strikes us is this that beauty is throttled and destroyed untimely. The mighty believing in the victory of the sword finish it all in prowess, taking them timid and cowardly. But that day too is not far from when the mighty will perish in their might. They will appear helpless before and will have to hang their swords.

The poem may be an anecdote of Indian sadhaka doing sadhna into the secluded domains of Nature and the wild or the mountainous regions. The poet wants to say that what it is bloody will meets its end in blood, what it is mild will remain appreciated unto the last. But how to strike the duality of the universe, the rule of the jungle? The law of the jungle is different from that of culture and civilization. The brute force too is an element of Nature, bloody, bestial and fierce combining with the horror and terror element.

The Tiger and the Deer is without any doubt a Blakian poem where the lambish element has been contrasted with the tigerly ferocity. Many great sadhakas of India have done sadhna in the midst of it all down the ages which is but a hidden fact. The mystical duality of the creation, how to explain it? The poem can make meaning if it is compared with Blake’s The Tiger and we think the one by the English poet more beautiful than that of Aurobindo.