Ornateness in the Poetry of Keki

Ornateness in the Poetry of Keki. N. Daruwalla

Author’s Name: Goutam Karmakar

Assistant Teacher, Department of English, Bhagilata High School (H.S)

Raiganj, Uttar dinajpur, West Bengal, India. Email:

ABSTRACT:

Keki Nasserwanji Daruwalla is one of the greatest poets of Indian English Literature. He is truly a genius poet. He describes beauty in a new way and in order to do so, he changes his emotional phrasing and images in his poetry. His poetry consists of picturesque description, allusion to various places, analogies, nature and landscape with Indian ethos and sensibility. Not only this, his poetry has a musical quality as his uses of different rhetorical expression in his poems give his poetry a different shape, rhythm and musical quality. His poems actually transcend his readers to his created imaginative world and enable the reader to see and feel with him. This paper attempts to highlight the pictorial quality and musical elements in his poetry.

KEYWORDS: Image, Nature, Landscape, Alliteration, Repetition

INTRODUCTION:

So many poets came to the arena of Indian English Literature. But very few of them of them can portray image and musical quality in poetry than Daruwalla. His poetry is an outcome of his observation and extensive consciousness of Nature and environment. He wants to show many pictorial elements in his poetry especially nature, landscape, dark images, images of animals and many more. These images create multiplicity of meaning, concreteness of poetic texts and often sensuousness. He mixes his images with the thought and language of his text which also help in the discourse formation with the medium of emotion, thought and perception. Apart from images, his poetry bears a unique musical quality through his use of alliteration and repetition of words, lines and sentence structure pattern.

Daruwalla in his poems tries to capture nature and landscape on a large scale. As he often says, “My poems are rooted in landscape, which anchors the poem. The landscape is not merely there set to the sense but to lead to an illumination, it should be the eye of the spiral, I try that poetry relates to the landscape, both on physical, and on the plane of the spirit” (Daruwalla,21).Actually Daruwalla like English romantic poets takes nature, landscape and its surrounding as source and inspiration in his poetry, And his pictorial elements in his poetry bears the stark reality and naked truth of the contemporary surroundings. In a broader sense, these poems show his intellectual level and pictorial thought process. In his ‘Mandwa’, he shows nature on a large scale in a summer season wiyh schorching sun in coastal area in a beautiful way. As he says:

“Mostly when I arrive at places, it is Winter. Here it isn’t

The sea pants, the islands smoulder,

the sun is an egg-yolk frying in the sky.

And so to this anointed strip of coast,

dark with shrub,

the beach white with fish-scales,

girdled by islands that seem to float

like pieces of a broken carafe.” (Mandwa)

Daruwalla even shows nature and his ability to create pictorial element trough artificial things. And these are shown in his ‘Mandwa’. His pictorial description of sea side is so real that it brings the picture of real sea cave before the eyes of his readers. As he says:

“The sea and the sky, two concaves

mirroring each other

two giant wings of a purple moth,

a rose-pink oar

looking for a boat,

a lilac axe-blade looking for a tree line.” (Mandwa)

Daruwalla being an Indian poet wants to show some places of India in such a beautiful graphic and passionate way that at once it creates a beautiful pen picture before us. One such poem is ‘Rumination at Verinag’. Here he shows the place Verinag at its best. Hre he uses serpent image and also Shiva-Parvati myth with the combination of nature. Here are some lines which show this place, nature and landscape with typical Indian touch and sensibility:

“ Across the road, mustard-stalks lie heaped in meadows

and pear-groves.

The eye is used to this now, the fields layered

with water

and mountains axing down two thousand feet deep

across the wet sheath.

The eyes drugged with willow and waterscape can take

no more.” (Rumination at Verinag)

He shows nature and myth in a beautiful way in his poems and creates a harmony between them. His imagery, pictorial elements often combines of rituals, rites and surrounding atmosphere. In his ‘Vignette II’, he shows all these along with Ganges Ghat on a large scale. As he shows:

“You go the rounds of the Panchtirath

starting from the ghat where Durga

had dropped a sword

to where she dropped an earring

and the Panchganga Ghat where four rivers

are said to meet the Ganga,

like this river of faith going down

the stone-steps to meet the river.” (Vignette II)

In his ‘In My Father’s House’, he shows the theme of death, mystical image of death before his readers with the help of winds, dusk, trees, knoll and everything around the grave. Actually he shows his pictorial ability in such an extent that naked truth like death is also combined with nature. Here are the lines which show this:

“At night the wind

still hacked at doors

bristling with knife,

and nail and fang:

but this was dusk;

vespers had a human ring:

the wind was a rhyme,

a chime, an echo.” (In My Father’s House)

Daruwalla often in his poems tries to show death in such a way with natural process that we easily understand the living world and the ugly eternal truth lies in it. Images ogf gloom,darkness are also showed with the help of nature in ‘Nightscape II’. As he says here:

“Votive lights are muzzled in the fog:

bloodstains on a frosted window

As the night grows older

as flesh turns to carbon on the ghats

and the river keeps moving

dark as gangrene.” (Nightscape II)

Daruwalla’s presentation of nature and pictorial elements often mix with human passion and sensuousness. In ‘The Round of the Seasons’, he shows every season of India and changing human passion and love in every season. One section of the poem is Grishma and here the poet shows the scorching sun through the God of Lust,Kama. As he says here:

“Kama, in this torrid summer

Let some things remain cool:

Her eyes, reflecting the waters,

The smell of jasmine in her hair,

Her body dripping with the cold river

As she steps out on the ghats.” (The Round of the Seasons)

Through nature,he wants to show his emotional state of mind,his aesthetic experiences and sublimity of mind. Through the careful and nurturing aspects of nature,he also wants to show the energy of nature and its relation with men. In ‘Suddenly the Tree’, he shows these:

“while you slept and the quilt heaved

with your even breathing,

winter came like a bearded goatherd.

armed with a crook and barefooted.

suddenly the tree near our window shook,

its whiskers twitched,

its leaves, yellow and ochrous

. . .

the tree is now all bark and bough.

leafless twigs scratch

against the glass

. . .

there is a smell of hail

in the air and lightning- burns.

the just-widowed wind

beats her head against the glass-panes.” (Suddenly the Tree)

In his ‘Old Map Maker II’, he shows the beauty of nature on a large scale. Actually he is really a worshipper of beauty and nature. As he shows:

“The world’s richest place

was in the African interior,

between the Sahara

and the rain forest, dark as cumulus

between the brown savannahs

and the grey scrub of the Sahel” (‘Old Map Maker II)

Daruwalla’s imagery and pictorial elements also consist of animal images. As R.N.Sinha aptly comments, “They perform different functions depending on the context of the poem, but whenever they have been used, they have been etched with a sureness of touch, so typical of Daruwalla” (Sinha 138). His animals are full of fearful qualities,strong in physical power with deadly attitude. Actually he combines the untamed power of nature with the animals. As in ‘Hawk’, he shows:

“Riding an ascending wind

as he drilled the sky.

The land beneath him was filmed with salt:

grass-seed, insect, bird nothing

could thrive here. But he was lost

in the momentum of his own gyre,

a frustrated parricide on the kill.

The fuse of his hate was burning still.” (Hawk)

He loves nature so much that even his revolutionary ideas, motives, idealism and his raising concern for new social order find expression in natural images. He in this case echoes Shelly’s ‘Ode to The West Wind’. He is really a modern rather postmodern poet in this aspect. In his ‘Revolutionary’, he shows:

“It had never come

burning across his skin

like a hot dye.

And yet he shook, a leaf in the wind,

sweated like the floor-plinth of stalactite

at the mere thought of it,

a lash-burn smoking on his back.” (Revolutionary)

Often we find dark images in his poems.Actually he shows all drab expressions through natural elements in such a way that they seem real. And here lies the sheer talent of Daruwalla.His pictorial description here is here rather fearful and terrifying. As in ‘Meher Ali, the Keeper of the Dead’, he shows”

“nine generation scorched

like dying melons on a withered vine.

And now with

a face like a patch of fissured fissured bark

and eyes: pools dulled with a film of moss,

. . .

his days slowly embering into ash.” (Meher Ali, the Keeper of the Dead)

Daruwalla in his poems shows and uses images with variation. Somewhere we find visual images and somewhere auditory and olfactory images. In ‘The Night of Jackals’, he shows a white almond tree’s strength and the rapid movement of fierce wind. An untamed natural force is very much present in the poem:

“For a moment I am amazed

that the almond tree

all dressed up in white

does not sway on its black roots

in the wail and the wind

of these vulpine hungers.” (The Night of Jackals)

Visual images are found again in his ‘Pestilence in Nineteenth-Century Calcutta’. Here again the dreadful situation of people in Calcutta is shown with vivid natural images. And the poet even shows how their dead body find its place in wind. These lines clearly show his pictorial quality and elements:

“The fires burnt higher,

and the dead went up

like fragments of liturgies

lost in a great wind.” (Pestilence in Nineteenth-Century Calcutta)

In some poems we can smell his images and these images convey various symbols and senses. Even a fine touch of nature is seen sometimes in these images. As in in his ‘In the Tarai’, we can feel it:

“but take a tip, don’t get your

bush shirts starched

they will hang limp all the same

and smell like an Insemination Centre.” (In the Tarai)

His poetic images are sometimes quick in movement and the rapid changes in society and in his poetic mind and thought. As in ‘Calender,starting with June’ he says:

“First the clouds flashed past like migratory birds.

Then in answer to some unheard utterance

From the parched lips of this land

They settle like birds come to roost.” (Calendar, Starting with June)

The discussion regarding Keki. N. Daruwalla and ornateness in his poetry will be incomplete without the discussion of musical elements in his poetry. He in his poems often creates musical rhythm and sometimes he creates it with the use of auditory images. In his ‘Migrations’, sound of a moving train is made by the word ‘R’ in train”, “streaming”, “frying”, “lurching”, “frying”, “streaming”. Here are the lines:

“Do you see trains streaming out,

ten thousand frying on the lurching roofs?

It is our carts rolling today,

our villages walking out with their headloads,” (Migrations)

In his poems auditory effects are made by his typical use of some words. These words create a rhythm, auditory sensation and work of an action. As in ‘The Night of the Jackals’, we find same auditory images which create music in poem:

“I park my car eleven blocks away.

People scurry off the roads

as the sky crackles.

I press the buzzer hard

and tap at the glass door

along with the thunder.” (The Night of the Jackals)

Often we find in his poems repetition of phrases, words, and sentence and structure pattern. Repetitions of words are found in ‘Chopper Poems’. Here are the lines:

“desert, desert, desert

you hear the thud of its affirmation.” (Chopper Poems)

And again in ‘Poem 8’ we find the word ‘night’ several times:

“The long nights of the Urals,

sidereal in expanse.

The white nights of the Urals

night smeared with rain,

rain smeared with the night.” (Poem 8)

In ‘Bombay Prayers’, same lines and same words are found. All these create a peculiar music and rhythm in his poems. As he says here:

“One cannot escape you

as one cannot escape light

one cannot escape you

as one cannot escape the night.” (‘Bombay Prayers)

Not only the words but repetition of sentence and its structure is also found in his poems. As in ‘Dream Log’ we find these and these create a very beautiful rhythmic effect in this poem. Here are the lines:

“I say aloud to no one in particular,

if I can’t find my face

let the mist find it,

let the river find it,

let the spirit of the mountains find it. (Dream Log)