The Shadow of Light: An Album of Poems

By Sibaprasad Dutta

Sibaprasad Dutta (born 31 August 1951) hails from an obscure village in India. He majored in English Literature from The University of Calcutta and then did M.A. in English Literature in Jadavpur University, Calcutta. After teaching for some time he joined a bank and as a bank officer earned the diplomas in banking like CAIIB (Bombay) and ACIB (London). He gave up the job in the bank as Assistant Regional Manager at the age of forty-nine in 2001 and joined Ramakrishna Mission Residential College as a Guest Lecturer. Now retired, Dutta is engaged in guiding students, doing research work, writing poems and short stories and translating into English ancient Indian scriptures written in Sanskrit.
Poetry is the chief passion of Dutta, and to it, he devotes much of his attention. He believes in the spontaneity of poetical works, and does not write unless he is fully inspired and haunted. Although his poems contain allusions, he is not after uncommon mythological allusions and carefully, yet spontaneously, avoids complexities in thoughts and images. As a follower of Wordsworth, he believes in simplicity of diction sans colloquialism and slangs. His is a refined and polished language, rhythmical and melodious. Sometimes, he writes in free verse but even when he writes in free verse, he has a surprising rhyme scheme. To Dutta, poetry has a definite character marked by rhythm and rhyme. He believes that poetry without rhythm and rhyme is a belle with a flat chest.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing India
• Release date: Apr 29, 2015
• ISBN: 9781482842531

Sibaprasad Dutta

Sibaprasad Dutta, with an MA in English and an ACIB in London, taught poetry in colleges. He is an avid admirer of the romantic poets, especially Wordsworth and also of T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats. He has an internationally famous publication, The Gita in Rhymed English Verse with Full Sanskrit Text (2008), and also another, The Twilight Songs (2010), mainly a book of poems. The present volume, a book of poems, has been written over ten years. The poems in this volume touch on the chord of the heart and charm the mind.

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Copyright © 2015 by Sibaprasad Dutta.

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SEGMENTATION

SEGMENT I: Love, Languishment, Fulfilment

SEGMENT II: Chaos in the Cosmos

SEGMENT III: Hope Amidst Dejection

SEGMENT IV: Shakespeare Redesigned

SEGMENT V: Encomiums

SECTION VI: Resignation and Submission

With Love

to

Avishikta

Sankha

Suditi

Preface

'Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.' - Charles Baudelaire

I am not as great a poet as to introduce a new paradigm for poetry. I love to read the poems of the famous English poets, and among all of them I love Wordsworth profoundly. While his two poems - Tintern Abbey and Immortality Ode - will remain exquisite and never to be excelled over, his poetic theory appeals to me most. Besides Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, and Shelley, modern poets like T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Dylan Thomas and Ezra Pound impress me both highly and deeply.

Matthew Arnold says: 'Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.' There is no doubt about Arnold's opinion, but we must have an idea of the poetic process - the process of creation of poetry. Here Wordsworth helps us. 'Poetry', says Wordsworth in Preface (1800) to Lyrical Ballads (1798), 'is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.' 'The emotion', Wordsworth continues without a break in the sentence, 'is contemplated till, by a series of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.' At another place, Wordsworth says: 'However exalted a notion we would wish to cherish of the character of a Poet, it is obvious, that while he describes and imitates passions, his employment is in some degree mechanical.' The poems that I have written have artlessly flown out of my heart, and they are not laboured exercises. I have composed them when my thoughts and feelings were overwhelming me for expression in words; and I would not be calm unless they were written down. Since poetry is a different, yet artistic mode of communication that requires rhythm and rhyme in order to provide pleasure to the readers, I have had to take recourse to some efforts. Letting that aside, my compositions are sincere, heartfelt and spontaneous effusions. I feel very sincerely what Keats said about spontaneity of poetic effusion: 'If poetry does not come as leaves come to a tree, it had better not come at all.' Well, the poetic process works best when it is spontaneous, but the poet being an artist, he needs to exercise his imaginative power - the power that shapes the feelings, thoughts and images that come chaotically and turns them into a design, an organized whole. Coleridge resolves this issue by explaining wonderfully how the poetic process, and for that matter, the process in all works of art involves imaginative faculty. ' The imagination,' Coleridge says,' I consider either as primary or secondary. The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. (So'ham - 'I am He'- Vedanta: S.D.). The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, on order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still, at all events, it struggles to idealize and unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.' Coleridge means to say that primary imagination is present in one and all, but without the aid of secondary imagination no creation is possible. Poets' experiences (feelings, emotions and thoughts) are not uncommon by themselves, but unlike ordinary persons, they are able to give shape to their experiences with the aid of secondary imagination - building cosmos out of chaos. Unless the poets could do it, their experiences would remain as stray experiences, appearing and then vanishing. With the aid of Secondary Imagination, they idealize and unify them into a concrete whole. So while spontaneity matters, Secondary Imagination, called higher Reason by Kant, is the creative tool to be used by the poet as the poet does not replicate his experiences but recreates them, the poet being a 'maker' in Aristotle's opinion. So matter and manner or theme and style are equally important. To make this point clearer, Coleridge contrasts imagination (especially secondary imagination) with Fancy. Fancy is a lower faculty which, as Coleridge says, has no other counters to play with but fixities and definites. 'The fancy', Coleridge contends, ' is no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space; and blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will which we express by the word CHOICE. But equally with the ordinary memory it must receive all its materials readymade from the law of association.' What Coleridge means to say and what everyone must admit is that poetry is the recreation of experiences with the aid not of fancy but of secondary imagination. Else it would not be artistic, but an ensemble of loose and discordant materials, incapable of giving pleasure to the readers. All said and done, poetry is inherent in human nature, and even the most illiterate person cannot but use metaphors in his daily language. When a person says that one is agile like a cat or that he slept last night like a log, their expressions are quite poetic because of the use of metaphors. Johan Georg Hamann is quite correct when he says: 'Poetry is the mother tongue of the human race.'

I have followed Wordsworth in another aspect. This is in respect of diction. Wordsworth writes in Preface: 'What is a Poet? To whom does he address himself? And what language is to be expected of him?' To the first question, he answers: A poet is 'a man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the Universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them. To these qualities he has added a disposition to be affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present.' Here, it would be pertinent to quote from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream:

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,

Are of imagination all compact:

One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,

That is the madman; the lover, all as frantic,

Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth

To heaven; and, as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen

Turns them into shapes, and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name. (Act V Scene I)

To the second question, Wordsworth says: 'He (A poet) is a man speaking to men.' About language, he asserts:

'… there cannot be a doubt that the language which it (poetical exercise) will suggest to him, must often, in liveliness and truth, fall short of that which is uttered by men in real life, under the external pressure of those passions, certain shadows of which the Poet thus produces, or feels to be produced, in himself.' What Wordsworth means to say is that poetry being a work of art, some polish in language is required - the polish that is not found in everyday expressions. Wordsworth did not favour colloquialism or slangs that leak into the language even of those who speak standard English. Otherwise, he would have validated Coleridge's erroneous charge that his language was 'rustic'.

Words ordinarily used by men of refined taste should be used by the poets not only to communicate their feelings, thoughts and emotions but also to build up easily conceivable images, 'the purpose being that of giving pleasure.' I have selected mostly common words and arranged them in different stanzaic forms. Frankly speaking, when I composed the poems, I acted, as Shelley says, like an inspired idiot. Still, 'poetry is not a turning loose of emotion,' as T.S. Eliot comments, 'but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.' Again, poetry gives expression to emotions no doubt, but the emotions must go through the process of stabilization, to pass into the stage of feelings and then into the stage of thoughts. Only then, a pattern of expression emerges. This aspect is emphasized by Robert Frost who says: 'Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.' Socrates' observation about inspiration is noteworthy. '… It is not wisdom', cogitates Socrates, 'that enables poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.' With regard to poetic inspiration, Shelley says in A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays: 'A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness, and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.'

Sound, sense and suggestion are the three chief ingredients of poetry and 'to read a poem' as Octavio Paz thinks, is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.' Paz seems to echo Simonides who remarks: 'Painting is silent poetry; poetry is eloquent painting.' - Plutarch: Moralia. While it requires the exercise of reason to understand the sense and the faculty of imagination to understand suggestions and visualize the images, the sound-effect depends entirely on the poet's arrangement of words to generate rhythm and rhyme. With regard to sound-effect, W.H. Auden remarks: 'A poet, before anything else, is a person who is passionately in love with language' and Edgar Allan Poe says that 'Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.' As to suggestion, Voltaire highlights: 'One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.' This fact entails that while a poet writes under compulsion issuing from the heart, some kind of craftsmanship is essential. Poetry is, after all, a form of literary art; and if a poem lacks artistic finesse, it will fail to appeal to the reader, however pleasant be the theme. This aspect of poetry I have taken care of to the best of my ability, and now it is up to the readers to pronounce the final judgment.

Not always, modern poetry is easily understandable. 'Poets in our civilization, as it exists, must be difficult,' writes T.S. Eliot. This is because the human psyche that produces poetry is much more complex today than it was in the bygone days. What matters is that poetry of today, like a modern novel or a modern drama, is not for fire-side reading with music filling the room. Modern poetry does not reflect either a 'return to nature' or to the hallowed Middle Ages to seek relief from the turmoil of our modern day existence. It deals with the features of existence - a rather chaotic arrangement of life. Actually what Matthew Arnold says is quite appropriate: we are 'wandering between two worlds - one dead and the other powerless to be born.' This chaos intensified by the erosion of values is going to stay and thicken. Human endeavour has no direction, and ours is a split world. Prosperity is not global and the earth is bereft of peace. Even while living in such a state of affairs, man cannot give up poetry, poetry being the life blood of our world flowing beneath the surface. Walter de la Mare points out this fact in Behold the Dreamer (1939): 'Burdened with the complexities of the life we lead, fretting over appearances, netted in with anxieties and apprehensions, half smothered in drifts of tepid thoughts and tepid feelings, we may refuse what poetry has to give; but under its influence serenity returns to the troubled mind, the world crumbles, loveliness shines like flowers after rain, and the further reality is once more charged with mystery.' Actually, poetry not