Oneiric Visions by O.P.Bhatnagar

Oneiric Visions by O.P.Bhatnagar

By: Bijay Kant Dubey

Oneiric Visions is one of the best collections of O.P.Bhatnagar which he brought it out for the first time in 1980 with so many admirable poems telling of the use of irony, wit and satire, logic, reasoning and intellect. Herein he speaks about emotions and thoughts, fossil feeling, poems as smile and the dead men walking as skeletons. Poetry to Bhatnagar is mushrooms, fossils; a visit to the Jurassic Park. A Poem Is A Smile is the first poem with which the collection begins. Human want and scarcity, food problem and living conditions, grief and despair, trouble and tribulation second his poetry. First of all, he is an ironist than a humanist. Though the influence and impact of Alexander Pope, John Dryden and others of that type is apparent, but instead of it he tries to take a slanting view rather than sticking to the verses of reason strictly. Morning shows the day is the proverb and it applies to Oneiric Visions as because what he expresses in it remains with him unto the last. Small poems so meaningful and short when revealed lay it bare the cocoons of meanings layer after layer. Personal grief and sorrow rake the life of Bhatnagar from his early childhood and it swaps places in between personal loss and the faculty of reasoning power.

A Poem is a Poem, Of Death and Life, Reality Born of Romance, The Last Supper, Ulysses, Man is Lived, I Can Question Only My Dreams, What is the Difference, A Framed Sand  Dune, If One Starts Asking Questions Like Hamlet, On The Cross-Road, Who is Afraid of Fear, Don Quixote, The Hangover, Questioning Life, Reconciliation, To Live and Die For, From a window Frame, To Hamlets, From Puri Temple, The Territory and the Road, Moon Olympics, Oneiric Visions, Of Emotions and Thoughts, Feeling Fossils, Of Death and Suicide, Of the Copy and the Original and The God Game are the poems which lie in included in the collection named Oneiric Visions.  Poems to Bhatnagar are either fossils or sand-dunes making and unmaking.

Man Is Lived is a small poem:

The man

Whose dear one dies

Is bereaved.

Others keep sun in a bag

And distribute griefs

Dipped in moonwater.

But the man who dies knows

That man does not live

But is lived

And dies only as thoughts

In an image.

 (Oneiric Visions, Rachna Prakashan, Jaipur, 1980, p.12)

Even the godmen, dhongis as saints, characterless yogis and fakirs and bad tantrics have taken the poetic space of the poet which we mark it in a small poem named Saint. The stories leak when truth comes to light. Such a thing has always ruffled our space. Many fraudsters posing as yoga teachers are bluffing the foreigners. We should be on guard against such people. 

Let us see how he puts before the theme of the poem, Saint: 

He preached abstinence 

All his life

Keeping women away 

At a light’s distance

In an absolutely purity of thought.

People ensainted him:

And when he died

More prostitutes came

To mourn the loss.

 (Ibid, p.49)    

The age of reason and its eclipse in poetry forms the crux of modern poetry as he too is a remnant of the same trend and tradition. It is but words which salvage fossils. Poetry is not merely emotion and feeling, but inclusive of fact and fiction, logic and reasoning faculty too. 

Feeling Fossils is a small poem which tells of how fossils can be turned into the substance of poetry:

The age of reason 

Overshadows feelings 

Like moon shadowing sun.

The eclipse lasts a small hour

But feelings sink to the shadow:

Fail to reappear like sun 

And go fossil

Till they are broke open

And salvaged by words 

Resolving mysteries 

By miracles of thoughts.

 (Ibid, p.35)

Pablo Picasso is no doubt a very good poem from the pen of the poet and without being tuned to him, one cannot write such a piece which is audio-visual obviously: 

Pablo Picasso

Was not a visionary 

But a divisionary 

Who set everything apart 

Making harmony from images depart.

He made suns sweat

And eyes like horizons part.

Rejecting the myth of mystic forms

He presented the dissociation  

Of perceptive norms

And exploded the pretentions pose

Of profundity in art.

 (Ibid, p.50)

Is it the love for a Japanese girl or one from the moon land of poesy? The Land of The Rising Sun can be taken as an example:

We met 

When the sun was setting.

She was in a hurry and said

She was from the land of the rising sun 

And left me to search her in the moon.

When dream ran dry 

She real came to me

And stayed with me 

Till me sun rose in land.  

 (Ibid, p.55)

A Poem Is A Smile is the first one to open the vistas of thought and reflection:

What can a poet say

That words cannot feel

In similes, metaphors,

Symbols or wits

In any suggestion of art.

A poem is a smile 

That spreads

From eyes to heart

Using gestures 

That have hidden 

Their meaning 

In an ecstacy

Of being beautiful

Presenting visions 

After the femininity 

Of a woman 

Emerging from a happiness 

Locked in blue waters 

Revealing its unconscious beauty

In parts.

 (Ibid, p.7)

Poetry as the metaphor and simile of reality is the thing as and when we take up the poetry of O.P.Bhatnagar to discuss and analyze it. The Jurassic Park turns alive in him and we get tuned to fossil-feeling. The sand dunes, their making and unmaking also attract him and he inducts to impart to. Poetry is suggestion in art.

     

The romantic not, but the realistic side too has a part of its own. Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa’s smiles too cannot escape his comments and criticism. Reality Born of Romance catches the spirit and romance of the artist:

Mona Lisa’s smile is one thing

But the indifference she hides

Is different.

Romance is just one side 

Of the moon,

The other side is dark.

What begins as romance 

Always gives way to 

Children, kitchen, clinics and parks.

Gas, office and soaring prices 

Chase all dreams away

Like beauty 

Conceived by moss in sands.

Sun brittles even memories 

And breaks the nets

That romance once laid

On sands 

To hold what they could

And what they actually

Can.

 (Ibid, p.9)

Ulysses is autobiographical in nature:

My father was a wanderer 

Who took life to be o road

Viewing right  for future

And for past on the left.

He never looked back to see 

How much he had made

But always ahead 

With the vision

That he had so much 

To make.

All roads have their dead ends

But a living soul

Walks out of the body

As white as a crane

Flying off the arresting water 

Laying skyways of new hope

Dead ends can never ever dream

Of having new roads. 

 (Ibid, p.11)

‘What Is The Difference?’ as a poem is tragic, indifferent and personal too dealing with modern life and living, so hard to eke out:

  

What is the difference to me?

My presents used to live in huts

Outside the holinesss of the village:

I live under a makeshift roof of rags

And tin wastes hung on battered hopes  in the city

Aloft a filth choked drain.

Although I have no room on earth

I have a place in the sun:

Tragedy is not my fate

Because l do not belong to nobility 

Even by way of fun.

 (Ibid, p.14)

We may cite A Framed Sand-Dune which really explains his art and vision:

A poem is a vision

Which one can make 

And unmake it

Till it is lost. 

To find it

One must go

To the desert

With wide-eyed wonder

Looking for shapes:

For a poem is

A framed sand-dune.

 (Ibid, p.15)     

Questioning Life is a delving into the quagmire of life and its aftermath, the living present and the uncertain future and this shaky presence of ours:

If I were to wonder

What was I before 

And what would I be after

I could also simulate 

What might or would I have been!

Thoughts consume life

Like sun evaporating  water. 

Is it not enough for me 

That I think I was 

To vanish away

Like stars at daybreak 

Not knowing if it would be 

Dark again?

 (Ibid, p.24)

Go With A Smile is the only medium to be hale and hearty:  

Man is wounded 

Hurt, agonised and painted: 

Heaves a heavy heart

But finds it hard to go. 

The weight is heavy, 

Can’t lift it or leave it back

For it is his own.

Grief over fate

Or pity from heavens

Gather weight like cotton 

Soaked in water:

Saints, religion or philosophy

May enlighten him but 

Smile alone will lighten his weight

And make his going light.

So go with a smile 

Bleaching sorrow from your bones.

(Ibid, p.52)      

Don Quixote is another example of his art and craftsmanship:

   

For the brave 

There must always be

Something to conquer

For the generous beggar,

For the coward 

Something to shy from

For the sentimental a tragedy.

Man must act a Sancho Panza

To his unending dreams

Of visionary valour

Fighting fluid battles 

On cotton thick flakes.

We are indeed brave 

To seek reality 

And then nothing is left  to seek,

Tired of this stasis 

We look for something Kinetic

And recreate fresh illusions 

Till imagination joins the parted ends.

(Ibid, p.22)

Let us mark the title poem Oneiric Visions:

There will be fairies to live with 

After death: a fair deal

Granted  to our deeds.

Others assure of a rest 

Till the Day of Judgement

And yet many more visions 

To frighten or to please.

Poems of visions may be concrete

But the vision of poems may be vague

For half-seen visions act 

Facts sprayed with lies

Like poetry written in prose.

My visions are oneiric,

Visual, immediate  and self-owned 

Offering no mysticism 

Mixed with farce

Like bird songs

In cage enclosed.

 (Ibid, p.33)

Mysticism is not the priority or privilege of the poet as he has no deal to truck with it and he is not a mystic, but a realist and poems come to him as oneiric visions, feeling fossils and making and unmaking sand-dunes of the deserts.