To a Little Girl

Is that leprosy that has stained

Your young brown skin

Or are these burns? Bad ones.

Don’t they hurt?

I can’t see well, the streetlights are bad.

I will tread softly past you.

Careful not to look at you.

Fearing you might catch a sign

Of forlorn empathy in my eyes.

You’ll run to me, and beg

For who knows what.

Your filthiness will make me cringe

And you will understand, I fear.

The light will be out forever then.

Are you not afraid?

Are you past fear of death,

Or pain, or an animal biting

Into you like a man?

Or is your misery more subtle,

Like watching a city burn down,

On the television, and just

Walking away?

How ugly we both look under the streetlight.

Thoughts After a Morning Dream

You will leave me, I know. You will

Go to every extent to deceive me in my knowledge

Of confusion.

You will rip me up, I know. You will

Let me rot in sweltering sunshine of ignorance and

Dismiss the vision.

And you will keep my stench away, you will

By planting a hundred thousand wild roses in

Your garden.

The thorns to doubly assure I lacerate,

I should, if I ever crawl back
Re-stitched.

Further notes on Poppies in July

Addendum to previous post: Interestingly, apart from the increasing physical recession, there is another thought structure going on in the poem Poppies in July. It is the methods of suicide: death by burning, a wound, and a drug.

Of the three, burning is the most, so to speak, physically involving mode of suicide, the most painful. Slitting a wrist involves comparatively less effort and a shorter duration of pain. A drug overdose is the most passive way of dying.

Orienting towards a poem: Poppies in July by Sylvia Plath

I remember an article I wrote for a university magazine back in 2006.  It was about how most readers find amateur poetry abstruse and even tedious, because of the very fact that it's abstruse. [I'll put a link to that article in a few days, after tweaking the editing a bit. :)] I was trying to explain why we published such poetry in the magazine and of course to encourage the young readers to give the young poets a chance by at least reading them out. This is what I wrote:

"In fact, poetry is an obscure medium. Most very popular poem are the most difficult to understand. I do not think anybody can appreciate Eliot's Wasteland without having a knowledge of the epoch. Most of Frost's poems are highly symbolic. We understand them, because we try. And trying is what we do not do when dealing with unfamiliar poets."

What I could not pin it down to, back then, was the problem of orientation.

Plath's Poppies: Women in October

Sylvia Plath's winter poppies are females. She wrote two poems about poppies: Poppies in July and Poppies in October. July poppies may be gender-neutral, but the winter ones are certainly women.

There are three gender references in the poem Poppies in October. Firstly, her poppy petals are like skirts. She first compares the skirts to sun-clouds, flitting and fluttering in the wind like a skirt, and then she compares them to an actual woman's skirt. Poppy is also a much less known Greek goddess.

The woman in the ambulance, maybe Plath herself, or any woman, is of course in pain. But for Sylvia, the woman's ability to feel pain raises her to a higher level among all things alive: The tortured heart is not bleeding, it's blooming, and that too, astoundingly. The blooming passion is her love gift to a man, who didn't ask for it, or doesn't care. Just like the poppies' flames are passions utterly unasked for by a sky.

Connecting to Poetry: Dover Beach by Mathew Arnold

Today I started my journey towards understanding poetry. The one genre I've always found hardest to understand. Let me tell you why. Later on, I'll tell you something that I picked today from an article by Ms Virginie Greene ["Three Approaches to Poetry", PMLA, 125, no 1, January 2005: 219-234. You'll be able to read it online if you have access to JSTOR].  The first poem I'm going to analyse is Dover Beach, by Matthew Arnold.

It will be great if you could sit in a garden with a poetry book and just read it and get it while clouds float in the blue sky and birds chirp. But that doesn't happen with people like me. First of all, people like me, say, those who don't know German, don't instinctively get what Plath's "Ich Ich Ich" means (Daddy, Sylvia Plath). I don't know other languages, I don't get Biblical references, I don't know absolutely everything about every Greek or Roman god. So for me, reading a poem, really reading, takes a lot of commitment.

The Circle

There was something fundamentally amiss

Though I could not locate;
Our home fell down like a house of cards,
While I was standing at the gate.

I put the key somewhere and forgot.
I was thinking how you waited
Outside my door when I wasn’t home.
Or when you wandered past my house,
Unknowing you were awaited.

Something to Remember by

I fished the twinkling crests
On the water, for you.
When the sea stood beneath us
I wanted to give you a present,
A trinket, to remember by.

But they just slipped through
The fingers of my empty hand.

I could not cast forever
Your smile. I could not
Keep it a longer while.

My hands got cold catching
A boxful of brightness
Something to remember by,
Lest you forget.

You watched me. You knew.
Your kind eyes sadly
Caressed my silhouette
Under the palm tree.

It was just the electric bulbs.
We could not find the moon that night.

The Importance of Names

Last week, I read The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde's much celebrated 1895 comic play. The play has a fictitious character by the name of Ernest, which two men claim to be, but neither really is. Of course the name Ernest (not earnest) means truthful, so there is an open irony, which is funny. But it's quite interesting that the names of other characters, names without such obvious intended meanings, also have something to tell.

Names are seldom meaningless. In some cases a name's selection is quite obvious: as Wilde's Ernest. Or in A Passage to India (E.M. Forester) Ms. Quest is out there soul-searching, literally questing. In other cases, a name doesn't directly label a character, but the reader absorbs a feeling of what the character is about.  A good example is the protagonist Pip in Great Expectations (Charles Dickens). The name Pip doesn't really mean anything (I even searched to be thorough!), but the moniker does have a a derogatory feel to it, especially when we see the rustic boy growing up to be a gentleman. Pip is a continuous reminder of his lowly descent.