The elemental force of great and powerful poetry was poetically presented with sensitive precision by John Keats (1795 - 1821) in the following lines:
'A drainless shower
Of Light is Poesy;
It's the supreme of power
It's might half slumbering on its own right arm'
All great poetry must be viewed basically as an emotional rather than an intellectual experience. We should realize that it is difficult (if not almost impossible) to put poems into rigid categories. Yet for the sake of easy understanding, I would like to classify poems into the following four broad divisions:
GENTLE ' Poems that reflect the beauty of man, life, love, nature, and so forth as perceived by the poet.
HARSH ' Poems that contain a cynical or caustic comment on life, love, man, society, morals, and the like.
LIGHT ' Poems that usually contain a humorous, witty, or satirical comment on human activity or some weakness of human nature.
HEAVY ' Poems that require several readings and provoke serious thought, feeling, and consideration about the human experience.
Categories like 'Gentle', 'Harsh', 'Light', and 'Heavy' reflect the various tones or moods of the poems.
One of my favourite poems under the 'Harsh' category is the following poem by Roland Tombekai Dempster titled 'Africa's Plea'. He was an African writer and literary figure. He was born in 1910 in Tosoh (on the banks of Lake Piso), Grand Cape Mount County in the Republic of Liberia.
AFRICA'S PLEA
I am not you '
But you will not
Give me a chance,
Will not let me be me.
'If I were you'
but you know
I am not you,
Yet you will not
Let me be me.
You meddle, interfere
In my affairs
As if they were yours
And you were me.
You are unfair, unwise,
Foolish to think
That I can be you,
Talk, act
And think like you.
God made me me.
He made you you.
For God's sake
Let me be me.
This great poem by Roland T Dempster is in the nature of a grand impeachment of the WESTERN WHITE MAN and his racial and colour prejudice. No wonder that Martin Luther King (1929 - 1968), the civil rights leader, said �I look forward to the day when every man in America would be judged not by the colour of his skin but by the content of his nobility, goodness and character'.
Let me now present a 'Light' Poem by Morris Bishop (1893-1973) called the 'The Perforated Spirit'. He was associated with Cornell University as alumnus, Professor of Romance Literature, and University Historian.
He also wrote the biographies of Pascal (1623-1662), Champlain (1567-1635), La Rochefoucauld (1613 -1680), Petrarch (1304 -1374), and St. Francis of Assissi (1181 -1226). Morris Bishop wrote one of the best English translations of 'The Love Rhymes of Petrarch'.
During the late 1950s and early 1960s Bishop's reviews of books on historical topics often appeared in The New York Times. His obituary in The New York Times noted the fact that he was a very facile composer of limericks, and notes. It was professor Bishop who discovered the literary talent of Vladimir Nabokov (1899 � 1977), whom he brought to Cornell in 1948 as a teacher at a time when the Russian-born novelist was just making his mark in America. Nabokov regarded Professor Bishop as one of his closest friends in the United States and as a sort of spiritual father. Bishop and Nabokov shared a fondness for exactitude in language and for japery as well as a common commitment to literature.
Taking up Trevelyan's challenge to write didactic poetry, like Virgil's Georgics, on a modern subject, Bishop produced �Gas and Hot Air.� It describes the operation of a car engine; �Vacuum pulls me; and I come! I come!� cries the gasoline, which reaches the secret bridal chamber where
The earth-born gas first comes to kiss its bride,
The heaven-born and yet inviolate air
Which is, on this year's models, purified.
The Perforated Spirit
The fellows up in Personnel,
They have a set of cards on me.
The sprinkled perforations tell
My individuality.
And what am I? I am a chart
Upon the cards of IBM;
The secret places of the heart
Have little secrecy for them
It matters not how I may prate,
They punch with punishments my scroll.
Monday my brain began to buzz;
I was in agony all night.
I found out what the trouble was:
They had my paper clip too tight.
This beautiful poem brings out the fact as to how we as live human-beings are being continuously fed into the computer as a mass of inert data. The lines �The files are masters of my fate, They are the captains of my soul� resonate in our ears because it contains an allusion to a famous poem written by the English poet William Earnest Henley(1849 - 1903) entitled INVICTUS. The last lines in Invictus were:
'It matters not how strait the gate
How charged with punishment the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul'.
Illness, poverty, pain and suffering .... endless treatments and surgical operations testing human courage to its limits�that was the tragedy of William Earnest Henley's life. He promised himself on his hospital cot �I won't give up, no matter what happens. I thank God for man conquerable soul�. Out of the pain and suffering of his personal life, out of the courage, and faith and fortitude with which he accepted the cruel blows of fate, came the glorious poem INVICTUS � one of the most emotionally powerful and uplifting poems ever written. Naomi Shihab Nye
I have just finished reading a beautiful poem by an American woman poet Naomi Shihab Nye. The poem is called 'FAMOUS'. Here is her poem:
'FAMOUS'.
The river is famous to the fish.
The loud voice is famous to silence which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.
The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds watching him from the birdhouse.
The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.
The idea you carry close to your bosom is famous to your bosom.
The boot is famous to the earth, more famous than the dress shoe, which is famous only to floors
The best photograph is famous to the one who carries it
And not at all famous to the one who is pictured.
I want to be famous to shuffling men who smile while crossing streets, sticky children in grocery lines, famous as the one who smiled back.
I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular, but because it never forgot what it could do.
The above poem simply re-examines the word �FAMOUS� In today's soulless mechanical world of information technology, most men and women are seeking or chasing the emptiness of ephemeral FAME. The poet Naomi Shihab Nye says �whenever I go to any school, the first question they will ask is 'Are you famous?'. I have written this poem in response to this question. Everything is famous if you notice it. This leaf right here is FAMOUS if you picked it up�.
Naomi Shahib Nye, the daughter of a Palestinian father and an American mother, grew up in St. Louis (USA), Old Jerusalem (then in Jordon) and Texas (USA). Her poetry reflects this textured cultural heritage, which enabled her to have an openness to the experiences of others and a sense of continuity transcending all barriers.A reviewer of her poetry wrote 'In the alchemical process of purification, Nye often pulls gold from the ordinary', including pulleys, buttonholes and brooms.
When Bill Moyers , a critic of poetry, asked Naomi Shihab Nye about what she thought of poetry, she replied: 'Poetry is a conversation with the world; poetry is a conversation with the words on the page in which you allow those words to speak back to you; and poetry is a conversation with yourself�.
(To be contd...)
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