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Musings of Poets on Poetry
By B Hrdaya Kumari
Professor B. Hrdayakumari is a noted
writer, researcher, scholar and critic. She retired from a
prestigious teaching career and lives at Thiruvananthapuram. She
has many published articles and books to her credit. She is a
scholar in Shakespeare Studies and held in high esteem by her
students.
Poetry is pure happiness for those who love
it, for others it is something that does not matter. To me who loves
poetry, a good poem is a total experience like a sunrise or the moon
at the edge of the sea. You see it as a whole, you feel it as a
whole, and after the first shock of joy, after the first long thrill
of discovery you consciously enjoy it bit by bit, line by line,
stanza after stanza.
How you enjoy it depends much on your taste, on inbuilt preferences,
on the conscious and unconscious levels of the culture you have
imbibed all your life. You may linger on the sonorous flow of
Milton’s blank verse, or the delicate yet full toned music of Keats
or the haunting melody of certain passages in Dylan Thomas. Every
genuine poet has his own genuine music, even a standard verse form
like the blank verse varying from poet to poet. Not only stanzas,
but lines and phrases also have their music, for example, Tennyson’s
“there gloom the dark broad seas” or the “the Wave cry, the wind
cry, the vast water / of the petrol and the porpoise”, in Eliot. A
whole poem can have an orchestral force or be like nature’s own
orchestra as in Shelley’s “West Wind”. Whether in English or in
other languages, a subtle and sure enjoyment becomes yours when you
can relish the music of words, of phrases, of lines, of an entire
structure. As the rhythm of a fine piece of sculpture can be felt at
its finger tips or the curve of its nose as in its total form. So
the Music of a poem too pervades every part.
The Choice of words or making of phrases or the unfolding of a whole
line and of line after line is almost magical. Thought and feeling
and imagination blend into a single force and it is this force which
chooses words and organizes often spontaneously into the whole of a
phrase or the whole of a poem. The poet knows the words he uses are
older than he and older than the books he has read. They have a life
which frightens him, an authority which commands his respect and a
beauty which enchants him. When Shakespeare’s Macbeth asks-
“cans’t thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow…?”
Or
Blake sings-
“Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forest of the night”
Or Keats complains of “the dull brain” that “perplexes and or
retards” or Shakespeare’s Hamlet muses “to be or not to be – that is
the question” we can feel the power of right word, the only possible
word. But examples isolated like these are no substitute for reading
the whole poem and fingering the waft and web of words.
What is all this for? What does the poem say? A poem is a new
creation like a flower or a leaf or a human being. It may say many
things or nothing; it is what it is. A being and its meaning are not
separable. It lives in the reader’s mind communicating may be with
his thoughts , may be with his feeling, may be with his sense of
history or his sense of his contemporariness with the past or
present . But beyond all this it communicates with his sense of
himself and of life. If his sense of himself and life is rich, the
richer the poem communes with him, grows with him and becomes his
ever as he becomes its. It is a mutual give and take, and the
process ends only with the reader’s death. The poem lives on.
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