I re-read the following through last night, and I was wondering whether to delete the post: it's one mile-long self-obsessed post to write about a handful of poems, and I'm no poet. Anyhow, it's one of the few things that found it's way here and so it'll stay, I guess. At least I changed the title: now it sounds like an honest description for it's not a long poem post but a very long time-thread about a few poems and Julius Caesar pushed its way in...nothing I could do about it. I have made some edits too and I've gone and re-read some of the poems (I had made a mistake about how many soldiers there had been in the Light Brigade and had forgotten the poem's title - most fervent apologies. I also added a joke from the net...). 7/4/2011I've been wondering what to write about today since I have some time. Many thoughts have come in ....but then I've been thinking of poems for some strange or not so strange reason through the flurry of academic writing that has kept me absorbed in a strange and unusual way for a couple of weeks.
Now poems. Okay. One of the first poems I remember memorizing as a kid of Class II was Home They Brought her Warrior Dead by Walter M. Scott...(No! Tennyson. Tennyson. Lord Alfred Tennyson - gulp. I just about checked days after the 7th). I don't know why I had memorized the poem but it had something to do with school, and I had chosen that poem to recite. We had a fair bit of nice intra-class competitions back then. The poem had made perfect sense to me too, which is what I find rather alarming now. I remember there was a girl, a kind and well-read neighbour, who was probably in high-school back then, and I recited the poem in front of her (so that she could tell me whether I was reciting it right) and while reciting the whole poem in a very sombre tone for the last line "sweet my child, I live for thee!" I had smiled very widely and had at some point thrown my arms around her and she, even though she may have been perplexed, had smiled too. Now the poem when I'm reminded of it (I certainly cannot recite it any longer - I don't remember all the words all the way through) gives me the nightmares, even though right until college I could "see" the sense in it.
There were some other poems in Class II from a Bengali text-book on Vivekananda. I liked the poems: four liner poems which were as clear as day. Remember nothing from them now although one had to do with "saptarshi..." and Vivekananda...
Not to boast - but I could memorize poems when I was a child without any problems. I remember that bit quite clearly. I had to read them through a couple of times and then I really could rattle them off. I must have been a different human being back then (and then from Class VI, my memory started degenerating and rather rapidly...). I remember being scolded too as a kid, once, for not having memorized a poem and so I simply said it out-loud and so that was that. Next came Abou Ben Adham in Class III. I recently got to know (during the writing of the previous post actually) that that poem too is by Leigh Hunt. There were four girls who were practicing for a school performance, and they had been reciting the poem for rehearsals in class everyday. One day I realised I knew the poem myself after listening to them so many times and so I went up to the teacher (who really made no bones about how much she disliked me) and told her that I knew the poem and could I please be in the performance. I rattled it off with a couple of mistakes and to her credit she put me in the play-cum-recital immediately. I was pleased but the poem itself has always perplexed me. Why hadn't Abou Ben Adham's name been on the list in the first place...I never quite got that.
(*Got to read on the net (7/4/2011) that upon the question being raised in an audience: "Why indeed did Abou Ben Adham's name lead all the rest?" Asimov, from the audience, raised his hand, waved it wildly and yelled, "Alphabetical list! Alphabetical List!")
I won't go through the entire list of poems that I learnt but actually there weren't too many...But I remember in class-IV I had an odd book of poems I had gotten from Pondicherry (a couple of years before that). It had this strange assortment of poems. One was called Father Neptune and his Daughters (it felt like it should be a song and I could never recite it for in my head I used to sing it)...and other poems too (the one about children being born on different days and the sort of temperaments that they would have...and so the liner "Thursday's child shows in his eyes that he would soon be very wise" made me quite quietly smug for I had been born minutes past midnight on Thursday, I had been told)...but I don't remember any of the others and neither do I remember the poets. For the next five years for elocution whenever we had to recite a poem - I had my favourites and I used to read poems - funnily enough. There was an old I.C.S.E copy of the Panorama, with many fine poems and I liked reading quite a few of them. I learnt almost all of them in Class V. There was O, Captain, My Captain, A Solitary Reaper and ...Into the Valley of Dead rode the six hundred... The last and the second of the lot I used as my arsenal for elocution exams all throughout my school days when I hadn't prepared anything specifically (which used to happen ever so often and not always with any good reason).
In Class VII, I remember for some reason not remembered I learnt one of Mark Antony's famous pieces...Not the ultra famous one but the one that begins, "O, pardon me thou bleeding piece of earth..." A friend who had the whole Shakespeare collection, if I remember right, selected that piece. I knew nothing of Shakespeare back then or nothing that would fill up more than half a page anyway. I had been quite absorbed in learning that piece though...and was quite solemn too about the whole process but all of that was spoilt with the belligerent yells of either my brother or my friend or maybe both - I forget whose - which let me know that I was pronouncing "butcher" wrong. "Buh-cher!" What's buh-cher?! You're boochering the word!" Showing me a dictionary didn't make any sense because I didn't know how to figure out the pronunciation...but I relented and said the word the way it was supposed to be said (never been able to make peace with it) and all was well (I know I learnt the butcher, the baker and candle-stick maker poem way, way back...only nobody had heard me say it out-loud, I guess...).
In class V, at some point I remember I wrote a very nice poem - even though I say so myself. It was about a playground...and a happy and content and delighted playground it was too, at the beginning at any rate, because there were lots of children who used to come and play there, and there was a merry-go-round and a couple of swings and a slide and some grass and a sand-pit....but then there was doom and the sad playground contemplates upon how none of the children come by any longer....the poem remains no more (and after a bad experience here and there not a single other person knew or cared of what I wrote and stored back then) but the thoughts of that poem remain with me. Another poem begun at the same time never got to the end. It was about meeting a gypsy-man (shows the very hard impression that Enid Blyton had hammered into me with her books and stories...never having met a gypsy-man in my life...) and it rhymed and all and it was about the gypsy man and how he had come in a caravan and how he had deep eyes (don't remember whether he wore a ring in his ear...), and had a delicious secret....and he almost told me about it....but the thing is I couldn't ever finish the poem. I couldn't think of a secret and the poem with the dialogues kept going back and forth and so on and then there was nothing I could think of even when I was scratching my head and so I stopped. That note-book/diary was there for a long time and the half-finished poem kept taunting me, teasing me and just plain annoying me. Why didn't he just tell me what it was and get on with things!
In Class VIII, A Slave's Dream joined the three other poems that I had in my mind although by that time O Captain had fallen from his pedestal....why did the captain have to die for heaven's sake and it had joined, for different reasons, the other poem (which a girl in class would recite with much passion and I had heard her recite it in Class V for the first time and she had also won the first prize in the recitation competition), "The boy stood on the burning deck whence all but he had fled..." Fine, it's all about following orders but that seemed a little too extreme...although strangely enough "The Valley of Death" poem (The Charge of the Light Brigade) always, always brought the shivers, made me feel like I was in the middle of a battle zone where I had to keep going, and the poem has kept me hooked even after so many years. While reading George Orwell's collection titled "Unpleasant essays" some/many months ago, a liner in one of his hilarious essays brought back the poem to my head...
No more poems were learnt while in school although I think I remember learning Ulysses at some point and the memory of that line about the "arch" sort of shimmers in my head every now and again. In Classes IX and X we had Julius Caesar and I realised that all I needed to do was read through the Acts and the Scenes as though I were each of the characters. I'd do that twice through right before the exams and I could remember everything and although I did read the whole play (in fact that is the only whole unabridged Shakespeare play that I've read apart from The Merchant of Venice...it shames me to say this but it's better admitting to the truth. I keep thinking I'll read Hamlet and Macbeth at least and I have them now at home...but I never get around to reading them...) that double-reading before exams was what I enjoyed the most - funnily enough. I could never do the "enacting" at other times....I tried once but I sounded fake. One of the reasons I was sad that I couldn't go in for the Delhi Board for my +2 (instead of the West Bengal Board) was because I couldn't read/enact The Merchant of Venice the same way and I never have been. In Classes XI and XII there was Lucy - which always brought in two dominant double emotions (among others) of "ah-sigh" and "deep (minus expletive) annoyance"...and The Ancient Mariner, which haunted me and gave me the goosebumps and made me dream strange dreams for the longest time. I was in that man's skin...under his skin and some vaguely remembered liners haunt me still...and I'll never forget what an albatross means...it's not just any bird and it will never be just a bird for me. There was a bit from Paradise Lost as well but that is not something I very clearly remember partly because of yet another pronunciation gaffe I made with a friend over the phone while we were discussing the poem. It was to do with the word "Whilst"....I pronounced it as a soft "whistle" and her cackles of loud laughter and her explosions are all that I carry with me from that poem although I know for a fact that the some liners we had had had made an impression on my mind till that moment.
There were some Bengali poems and some songs that I learnt through the same point in time and some liners were learnt later....but about that - well let that be.
And then through the college years and through my Master's in India and for two years in between when I got myself stuck in my Bachelor's for longer than I thought I would - there was not a single poem I read or learnt or memorized. Absolutely none. Between 18 to almost 27, I read no poems...well actually, come to think of it, I'm reminded that I read a couple of Tagore's poems and then later on, close to 27 I did start reading poems - with new curiosity, however tentatively - but that's another story. Poems worry me - much like jokes - I always wonder worryingly whether I'll be able to understand them (and feel relieved and sometimes just rested when I do) but the thing that really saddens me is that even the few poems I like/understand (which can't be more than a handful) do not remain in memory.
In conclusion for this post: Some weeks ago while browsing the net, I chanced upon something that clicked. I have no idea about anything else or indeed who Fulke Greville is or what he was thinking - and I haven't looked at google at all for writing this post- but the poem liner makes sense...
I, with whose eyes her eyes committed theft.
Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke (England 1554-1628)
All I know is that I understand it as I understand three of Dickinson's (and more than 9/10th of her poetry I do not understand) poems,
Much madness is the divinest sense
To a discerning eye;
Much sense is the starkest madness.
Or the other one, which the friend whose blogs appear on the right had as a quote in a piece on poetry that he had written, and had sent to me,
This world is not conclusion
A Spirit stands beyond
Invisible - as music - but positive - as sound...
To guess it puzzles scholars
To gain it men have borne
contempt of generations, and - crucifixion shown....
And the other one (- other bit actually fits in the middle of the previous one....pointless now to provide an explanation), which I love too, which appears in the post on music on the same friend's blog on the right:
It beckons and it baffles
philosophy - don't know
and through a riddle, at the end, sagacity must go...
while this other one, which once again, I came across for the first time in a piece (which read like a poem of sorts - sort of timeless inspite of the angst - which one could clearly and closely identify with) written by the, yes, same friend (well - what can I do?!) , makes no sense to me.
Love at first sight, some say,
Misnaming the helplessness of twinn'd souls
'gainst the huge tug of procreation!
I've pondered on this one, scratched my head, pondered some more, thought/imagined that I "got" it...and for more than 8 years now but I don't get anything about it. Maybe it's like an abstruse zen poem or something. It baffles.
Anyway, so much for this post. Night-time, night-cap, and cigarettes et al beckon.
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