When my book shelf broke into a speech one morning, I discovered I am a writer finding my space. My neck being held high up against the wall, the bookshelf spoke of imprisonment and infinite freedom and my faces moved with its whiplash, injuring my cheekbones. We all are reading something, be it poems or a prose, trying to understand what they connote, and of course living Literature by writing poems. When I try to look towards uniqueness it is always through stanzas which deal with a fair sense of strangeness providing an eerie feeling. Last year it was a sort of survey I dropped on my shoulders to go through poetry collections in the Kolkata pustakmela. Priorities were language which included incongruity and verses and that would resonate.
I found myself in a fuss when I entered stores. I couldn’t really make up my mind, what shall I read? What shall I buy? Whom shall I read? And then I entered the next store…
I must mention Kolkata has variety. The first few books I went through were Donne’s. I never knew much about writers and while just reading a short piece of his, I googled. What happened was I couldn’t move any further and the survey was called off immediately. John Donne’s metaphysical poetries were on topics like joys of lovemaking and humanities subservience to God. His energetic and rigorous uneven lines were characterized by complex witty vanity along with contrasts. The lines which reverberated were:
Now thou has loved me one whole day,
Tomorrow when you leav’st what wilt thou say?
Donne’s poem Woman’s Constancy is a quite dramatic monologue. It is full of questions and arguments and the basic meaning is quite clear from the very first lines. The wit of the poem did make it sometimes humorous. His poems made me question lyrics and he played a major role in modern development of notes. I realized when I searched, Donne’s poetry was written some four hundred years ago, inspiring not only Amit of Tagore’s The Last Poem but thousand others. A variety of amorous experiences could be related by me, though they were startlingly contradictory sometimes.
It is not my work to critically write anything on him. I don’t know him even a unit. What made me stop by him was the name A Valediction. Studying John Donne is a future decision but as of now questions after answers keeps on arising. Language was the finest discovery and amalgamation done, but poems? What are these? Just mere verses?
And then the one image of two people, that soul cannot be divided but only expanded and the triumph of love makes me wonder is this possible only through poems? Literature indeed can be only found through poems? Or as if I say for God’s sake just hold your tongue and let me love!
