Paramita Banerjee delves into the art of poetry and learns that it is one of the most universal of languages and that it traverses all boundaries and emotions.
“Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular” – says Aristotle in his Poetics. Certainly, but I would also want to add that poets say in a few words what philosophers need volumes to write about, as a friend of mine used to say. Think of Ghalib’s couplets in this context. Taking advantage of the non-existence of copyright complexities about his writings, I would like to quote one particular couplet in my own rough translation:
“Love has rendered me worthless, Ghalib!
Or else, I, too, was a useful man.”
(“Ishq ne nikammaa kar diya, ‘Ghalib’
Warna hum bhi aadmi the kaamke.”)
For me, these two lines encapsulate an entire range of emotions: the anguish of unrequited love; self-loathing; the remnants of self respect caught through the desperate attempt at self-justification; and the ultimate glorification of love and romance in the end. Of course, there is no clear indication in the couplet that the poet’s love is unrequited – but that’s how it strikes me. And, that is the beauty of poetry. That it allows itself to be felt differently by different people; evokes varying emotions; lends itself to a spectrum of meanings that the poet may or may not have had in her/his mind when s/he penned the lines.
Poetry is the ultimate in linguistic expressions within the capacity of the finite beings called humans, I would say. Perched against a gigantic and well-ordered body of institutionalised knowledge caught in tomes – all of them urging us to know ourselves and the universe that shelters us through rational understanding – the little world of poetry challenges us to feel our beings; to be in touch with our emotions; to soar far above what the human reason is capable of understanding and expressing. It is perhaps because of this very essence of poetry that it needs to say so little. Its challenge is not to win an argument and prove anything. Rather, its challenge is to urge us to just feel whatever the poet’s words say to us; in whatever way every individual experiences a poem – it is fine; there is no issue of right or wrong; validity or invalidity. Maybe that is why poetry is the natural language for expressing love – whether in celebration of fulfilment or in the heartache of rejection.
That is not to say that poetry refrains from looking at the rather sordid world around us, choosing instead to remain confined within individual passions and emotions only. Think of Pablo Neruda’s famous lines:
“Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
The blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
In the streets.”
This is about war; about killings; about the human quest for freedom – but felt with passion and expressed passionately. There are the war poets who wrote in English between the two world wars – fervently appealing to the soft contours of human emotion to stop the madness called war. In fact, poetry – by itself or melodised into a song – has constituted one of the strongest weapons of protest all over the globe. India, our homeland, is rich in her own repertoire of poems and songs of protest, of freedom and dignity, for social justice. Starting from the pre-independence days, poems and songs have continued to inspire people during all the major political movements in the country, particularly those that were left leaning. Just the other day, during the first phase of the students’ movement in Jadavpur University, one must have read and watched reports of highly agitated students screaming that if guitars were weapons, then yes – they were carrying weapons; if songs were abuses – then yes, they had been hurling abuses… One of the slogans chanted in the memorable protest march following the police attack on students engaged in a sit-in demonstration ran (in rough translation) as follows: ‘The melody of songs while facing the baton/ The students of Jadavpur have now shown.’ (The original Bangla slogan was: ‘Laathir mukhe gaaner sur/ Dekhiye dilo Jadavpur’)
But then, poetry does not stop there either.Poetry traverses the worlds of faith and philosophy as well. Think of the psalms and the hymns in this context. Nearer home, the entire saga of Radha and Krishna’s love story has been captured in poetry of different forms and genres over several centuries.Which form of expression other than poetry could capture such absolute rapture; or sorrow as deep as a bottomless abyss? These poems, however, form the basis of one of the main tenets of philosophy of religion in India: that the experience of the Divine Being can be caught only through utter devotion and complete submission. Kabir preached his theosophical canons through spiritual songs known as bhajan, which literally means ‘worshipping’ or ‘prayer’. Mira, the queen of Rajasthan (Rajputana back in her days) who left everything to just be with her God only knew one way of worshipping him: composing and singing bhajans.
Never mind how materialistic the world is becoming, how ravaged by hunger and war. Never mind how many politicians and others with power across how many countries of the globe are screaming that poetry is useless and it is time for the youth to concentrate more on the applied sciences so that technology can continue to take huge strides forward. Poetry will live. It is bound to, until and unless the emotionality of human beings is completely lost – and that is not even a probability. An emotionless being just like us would be a living robot – a being of some other name – not a human being, since our emotions are as central to us as reason is. And, poetry is the supreme expression of that core of ours: our feelings and emotions and passions. “Precious to me/ She still shall be” – as Emily Dickinson would say.
