B.A. (Programme) Semester-II English DISCIPLINE SPECIFIC CORE COURSE (DSC 1-B) Selections from: Modern Indian Literature B: POEMS Jibanananda Das, Muktibodh, Nissim Ezekiel, Jayant Mahapatra, Sri Sri SCHOOL OF OPEN LEARNING UNIVERSITY OF DELHI Department of English Prepared by: Dr. V.P. Sharma Graduate Course B : POEMS I. JIBANANANDA DAS ..... 1-23 Introduction Windy Night : Analysis; Comments I Shall Return to this Bengal : Introduction; Analysis Select Criticism Winter Landscapes : Remembering Jibanananda Jibanananda Das : Chidananda Das Gupta A Certain Sense : Sisir Kumar Das II. MUKTIBODH ..... 24-38 Introduction The Void : Introduction; Analysis; As a Fantasy So Very For : Introduction; Analysis Select Criticism A Note on Fantasy III. NISSIM EZEKIEL ..... 39-65 Introduction Enterprise : Analysis; Study Notes Goodbye Party for Miss Pushpa T.S. : Introduction; Study Notes IV. JAYANT MAHAPATRA ..... 66-72 Introduction Hunger : Introduction; Analysis Dhauli : Introduction; Analysis Grandfather : Introduction; Analysis V. SRI SRI ..... 73-90 Forward March : Introduction; Analysis; Comments Select Criticism A Note on Modernism in Literature SCHOOL OF OPEN LEARNING University of Delhi 5, Cavalry Lane, Delhi-110007 JIBANANANDA DAS Introduction There is a brief introduction to Jibanananda Das the poet in your textbook. Read that. In Part Two of this Study Material you will also find extracts from some of the critical essays on the poetry of Jibanananda Das which should help you form an estimate of the poetic achievement of Jibanananda Das as a modern Bengali poet. You have only two of his poems prescribed for study. But you would do well to study some of his other poems too, which have been translated into English and are available in a SahityaAkademi selection. 1. WINDY NIGHT In this poem the poet gives cosmic dimensions to the experience of a storm at night. His feverish imagination travels across time and space bringing back long dead civilizations, and the countless human beings that shaped them, into a single moment of time. And then his own soul travels to those distant stars. ANALYSIS Stanza I: The very first line prepares you for a cosmic experience by bringing together the ‘deep winds’ and the ‘countless stars’. The night is the time when everything is quit and still. But the high winds disturb the rhythm of life and unsettle everything. Everything now is invested with a life and uncontrollable energy. The wind derives its power from the vast sky, from where it comes and is therefore an ‘expansive wind’ and a ‘blue wind’. It infuses some of its own life and power into the mosquito net and the bedclothes. And they, too, seek the freedom of the wind to range over the sky and the ocean for a union with the Swati. Swati causes the birth of a pearl – there is thus hope of creation out of chaos. In the final stanza the poet will himself reach out to the stars for a cosmic union–the union of the earth with the stars to restore harmony in the universe. Stanza 2: Leaving the tumult of the terrestrial region behind, the poet’s imagination moves into outer space. As the stars shine brightly, the poet imagines the winds have awakened the long dead stars to life. Here he is referring to a long-held belief that human souls, after they leave the dead body, turn into stars and take their place in the sky. In a rather unusual and far- fetched simile, he compares the twinkling light of the stars to the gleaming eyes of a male kite. Das revels in such unconventional and ‘unromantic’ comparisons. But in the next comparison that follows immediately, the Babylonian queen replaces the lonely humble kite. The star-studded sky becomes the leopardskin stole across the shoulders of the glamorous queen. The change is sudden like the wind itself. Stanza 3: From the journey in space it is time for the journey across time. The Babylonian queen reminds the poet of the civilizations and the beautiful princes that died thousands of years ago. In the dead stars that have come alive he can see assembled ancient civilizations of Assyria, Egypt and Vidisha. Das merges in the lines ‘The stars who died in the sky’s lap thousands of years ago/...frontiers of the skies’ (lines 21-23) the scientific fact of the light 1 from remote stars in the universe reaching the earth thousands of years after their death, and the myth already referred to—of human souls re-incarnating in the stars. To the poet the streaks of light from the stars are like spears. Do they, the poet wonders, proclaim the victory of life in the battle against Death? In Blake’s ‘Tiger’ the stars throw down their spears in surrender to the dark forces that govern human life but Jibanananda Das is more optimistic. After death, the soul triumphs over Death. Which reminds you of Donne the metaphysical poet’s ‘Death Be Not Proud’. Forces of chaos and disintegration will be defeated, the poet hopes, by the power of love. These ‘beauties’ or rather the civilizations they represent are there not in confrontation but in togetherness, and this togetherness is a monument to the power of love. Stanza 4: The ferocity and the energy of the ‘blue torture’–the high winds in the skies–seems to overwhelm and possess the poet’s imagination completely, and similes and metaphors of epic proportions pour out to create an image of cataclysmic disaster: the sky is transformed into a creature of awesome proportions which swallows the ‘grub’ (worm) that is the earth. It is an image of the end of the world. Das’s imagination darts about wildly in the uncontrollable fashion of the storm itself: the storm was ‘blue torture’ a moment ago that blanketed the earth, now it whistles through his window reminding him of the flight of the zebras across the African plains terrified by a lion’s roar. The imagery here works by association as in the stream of consciousness technique. Das delights in coming up with the unexpected: after the violent and fearsome images of the sky swallowing the earth and the terror-stricken zebras, there is, suddenly the soft sensuous image of the ‘scent of green grass on the sprawling veldt’ and the ‘scent of robust horizon flooding sunlight’ only to be followed once again by the image of a sex- charged tigress roaring in the dark – the wind has changed into a lustful tigress but it now carries with it the ‘blue madness of life’ (=infinite love of life); it symbolizes creative energy. As in the earlier stanza Jibanananda Das sees in this chaos the triumph of life over death. Stanza 5: After the dystopic vision of life, comes hope. The upheaval unleashed by the storm has been a traumatic experience for the poet. It has released his imagination for a journey beyond the earth. His heart or rather the soul disengages itself from the body, from the earth and sets out on a visit to the distant stars in the cosmos as the representative of the human race on earth. It is a journey across space to the new worlds as well as across time, for, among these stars are the homes of ancient civilizations. Hope has triumphed once again -hope for the end of man's loneliness, hope for unity of the present and the past. COMMENTS 1n ‘Windy Night’ Das describes a night of strong, ferocious winds in which he presents an image resembling the end of the world. The poem presents a nightmarish vision when chaos rules theuniverse and the earth’s identity is erased. And a fantasy takes shape. But the poem ends on a positive note - there is hope for a new order to emerge out of chaos. ‘Windy Night’ is very different from ‘Before Dying’. The soft, sensuous images and the languorous ambienceof ‘Before Dying’ are replaced by the violent imagery of powerful winds sweeping across the sky and the earth. The Keatsian landscape of haunting beauty in 2 ‘Before Dying’ gives way to a terrifying spectacle of nature, ‘red in tooth and claw’, to borrow a phrase from Tennyson. The ‘tranced night’ is replaced by ‘an amazing night’. The poem begins by erasing the distance between the sky and the earth, between the terrestrial and the cosmic: Last night was a night of deep winds-a night of countless stars and every stanza repeats this motif till the poet sets out to end the earth’s isolation in his space odyssey from ‘star to star, the mast of a distant star’. The winds have become the catalyst for that odyssey. The mosquito net seems impatient to meet the stars in the cosmos as it swells like the monsoon ocean’s underbelly to fly up. Up in the sky, the wind awakens the stars in which reside the souls of ‘earth’s dead loved ones’. The comparison with the glamorous Babylonian Queen is not incidental here. His poetry is ‘littered with reference to history’, both in a general way and in specific mentions of personalities and periods-Babylonian, Phoenicia, Assyria, Nineveh... Patanjali, Ambapali, Confucius, Attila, are among a few hundred historical names which keep making sudden appearances in his work ‘(Chidananda Das Gupta, p.19). But the reference expands further as the stars become other glamorous beauties from ancient civilizations of Egypt etc. and time and space lose their distinct identities. If in ‘The Streets of Babylon’, Calcutta suddenly transforms into Babylon, the sky here suddenly transforms into a showcase of ancient civilizations. Past collapses into present, large kingdoms contract into the stars in the sky. As in many other poems, death and man’s desire to conquer it, continue to haunt him here, too.