Trance of Waiting by Sri Aurobindo critical analysis

 

Trance of Waiting

Sri Aurobindo

*         Sri Aurobindo Ghose (1872-1950) was an Indian, yogi, guru poet and naturalist

*         During his stay in jail, he had mystical and spiritual experineces after which he moved to Pondicherry, leaving politics for spiritual work.

*         Sri Aurobindo developed a spiritual practice, he called Internal Yoga

*         The central theme of his vision was the evolution of human life into divine life

*          at the center of Aurobindo’s metaphysical system is the supermind, which means an intermediary power between the  unmanifested Brahman and the manifested mind

*         Sri Aurobindo was a prolific writer writing some of the most detailed  and comprehensive discourse on spiritual evolution. He said that his inspiration to write came from his inner pilot, from  a higher score

Works

*         Synthesis of Yoga : Practical guidance of internal yoga

*         Savitri : A legend and a symbol, an epic poem

POEM

 

Lone on my summits of calm I have brooded with voices around me,

Murmurs of silence that steep mind in a luminous sleep,

Whispers from things beyond thought in the Secrecy flame-white for ever,

Unscanned heights that reply seek from the inconscient deep.

Distant below me the ocean of life with its passionate surges

Pales like a pool that is stirred by the wings of a shadowy bird.

Thought has flown back from its wheelings and stoopings, the nerve-beat of living

Stills; my spirit at peace bathes in a mighty release.

Wisdom supernal looks down on me, Knowledge mind cannot measure;

Light that no vision can render garments the silence with splendour.

Filled with a rapturous Presence the crowded spaces of being

Tremble with the Fire that knows, thrill with the might of repose.

Earth is now girdled with trance and Heaven is put round her for vesture.

Wings that are brilliant with fate sleep at Eternity’s gate.

Time waits, vacant, the lightning that kindles, the Word that transfigures:

Space is a stillness of God building his earthly abode.

All waits hushed for the fiat to come and the tread of the Eternal;

Passion of a bliss yet to be sweeps from Infinity’s sea.

 

EXPLANATION

*         Trance of Waiting is a mystic poem

*         The poet has shown himself to be in a state of waiting to have a communication with the divine spirit.

*         To have a communication with God (Divine soul) he has kept himself away from the din and bustle of human society and goes to the contact of nature and in  the silence of nature.

*         He broods over the objects of nature and feels like the object of nature also waits for the command from God.

 

The Freaks by Kamala Das detailed analysis, summary and criticism

 

The Freaks by Kamala Das

KAMALA Das (1934-2009)

ž Kamala Surayya, Madhavikutty

ž Indian poet as well as leading Malayalam author

ž Her contribution to Malayalam literature are her short stories and autobiography whereas her oeuvre in English, written under her name Kamala Das, is for her poems and explicit autobiography.

ž Her open and honest treatment of female sexuality, free from any sense of guilt, infused her writing with power

ž She was marked as an iconoclast of her generation.

ž The directness of her voice led to comparisons with Margaret Duras and Sylvia Plath

Works

NOVELS

ž Alphabet of Lust (1976)

ž My Story (Autobiography 1976)

POETRY

ž The Sirens (1964)

ž Summer in Calcutta (1965)

ž The old playhouse (1973)

ž Only the soul knows how to sing (1997)

ž My mother at sixty six (1999)

ž Yea Allah (2001)

AWARDS

ž PEN’s Asian poetry prize 1963

ž Kerala Sahitya Award 1969

ž National Sahitya Award 1985

POEM:

He talks, turning a sun-stained
Cheek to me, his mouth, a dark
Cavern, where stalactites of
Uneven teeth gleam, his right
Hand on my knee, while our minds
Are willed to race towards love;
But, they only wander, tripping
Idly over puddles of
Desire. .... .Can this man with
Nimble finger-tips unleash
Nothing more alive than the
Skin's lazy hungers? Who can
Help us who have lived so long
And have failed in love? The heart,
An empty cistern, waiting
Through long hours, fills itself
With coiling snakes of silence. .....
I am freak.  It’s only
To save my face, I flaunt, at
Times, a grand, flamboyant lust.

ž The poem the Freaks by Kamala Das is about the poet’s marriage in which there is no love between the couple.

ž The poem dramatizes an abnormal situation in love making which exposes the futility of loveless relationships

ž It also brings to light the agony of the female persona who remains a non participant in the act of love making because it denies her the emotional and intellectual thrills of life.

ž The narrator of the poem presents the male partner in love in a very dark light

ž His way of talking is selfish, he has no fascination for her

ž She knows that he cannot go beyond the satisfaction of lustful desires

ž She finds him not only ugly but extremely repulsive

ž His cheeks are sun burnt and brownish in appearance. His mouth looks very horrible like a dark cavern and his shining teeth are uneven and calciferous. The man places his right hand  on the knee of the female in a gesture of love making.

ž Their minds, especially of the woman keep wandering to avoid any sign of emotional involvement in it.

ž The lovers are filled with puddles of desire  ie lust without love. It is purely sensual relationship full of dirt and filth.

ž The poet dramatizes the pangs of sorrow of a woman involved. She has to bear this torture because of social compulsions. She is not against the spiritual love

ž The woman finds herself totally isolated and ignored in the sexual act. She is all fed up with the lustful desires. She feels emotionally and spiritually starved in this type of sensual relationship

ž Their hearts are like an empty cistern filled with snakes of silence waiting to be filled with love not lust

ž The woman has to bear the pangs because of the social compulsions to honour marital commitments

ž At the end she calls herself a freak or abnormal person who makes a show of being lustful inorder that she may be regarded as a normal person.

ž Kamala looks very determined to revolt against the conventional society’s definition of womanhood. Even she challenges the traditional sex roles. In many of her poems, she brings out the emotional emptiness and sterility of married life and the intensity of misery of the wife who surrenders to her husband who is repulsive, and with whom she has no emotional contact at all. 

 

ž The poem 'The Freaks' begins with a slow movement,  representing her indifference to sex and ends on a n impulsive note, in keeping with the compromise. She must not only surrender herself to his love making however she hates it, she must also pretend to like it. Her self-respect insists it; the social customs require it. This is a male dominated world.

ž The motivating force of her notion is love that is frustrating experience. All her efforts to establish meaningful relations with other show to be fruitless. In Freaks, poet depicts the disappointment, senselessness and the torment of a woman who longs for true love but it is denied by her husband who is insensible to her psychological desires. She is revolted by cruelty of her companion. She feels trapped by her male ego. Therefore she refused to play the traditional role as a wife. It is natural that her poems represent a rebellion against male dominated social system .It shows that in a male dominated world she has courage to emphasis her feminine sensibility and to revolt against the system. She is proud of her femininity and does not fail to claim it.

ž She is conscious of a primary need for true love, psychological need and a desire for liberty within the family system. In this sense, she is truly liberated woman and a representative of modern woman who identify her right to sexual fulfillment and psychological security.

 

Background Casually by Nissim Ezekiel, critical analysis and summary

Background Casually

NissimEzekiel (1924-2004)

—  Indian Jewish poet, actor, playwright, editor and art critic, foundational figure in postcolonial India’s literary history

—  Awarded Sahitya Akademi Award for 1983 poetry collection “Latter Day Psalms”

—  He is applauded for his subtle restrained well crafted diction, dealing with common and mundane themes in a manner that manifests both cognitive profundity and as an unsentimental, realistic sensibility that has been influential on the course of succeeding Indian English Poetry.

—  He enriched and established Indian English poetry through his modernist innovations and techniques which enlarged Indian English literature, moving it beyond purely spiritual and orientalist themes to include a wider range of concerns and interest including mundane familial events individual angst and skeptical societal inspection.

—  He is described as “the father of post-independence Indian verse”

—  His famous poems are “ Night of the Scorpion” and Anti- jingoism poem “The Patriot”

Works

—  Time to change (1952)

—  The unfinished man (1960)

—  The exact name (1965)

—  Snakeskin and other poem translation of Marathi poet Indira Sant

—  Hymns in Darkness (1976)

—  Latter day Psalms (1982)

PLAYS

—  The three plays 1969

—  Do not call it suicide (1993)

PROSE

—  Naipaul’s India and mine

POEM

A poet-rascal-clown was born,
The frightened child who would not eat
Or sleep, a boy of meager bone.
He never learned to fly a kite,
His borrowed top refused to spin.
I went to Roman Catholic school,
A mugging Jew among the wolves.
They told me I had killed the Christ,
That year I won the scripture prize.
A Muslim sportsman boxed my ears.
I grew in terror of the strong
But undernourished Hindu lads,
Their prepositions always wrong,
Repelled me by passivity.
One noisy day I used a knife.
At home on Friday nights the prayers
Were said. My morals had declined.
I heard of Yoga and of Zen.
Could 1, perhaps, be rabbi saint?
The more I searched, the less I found.

Twenty two: time to go abroad.
First, the decision, then a friend
To pay the fare. Philosophy,
Poverty and Poetry, three
Companions shared my basement room.
The London seasons passed me by.
I lay in bed two years alone,
And then a Woman came to tell
My willing ears I was the Son
Of Man. I knew that I had failed
In everything, a bitter thought.
So, in an English cargo ship
Taking French guns and mortar shells
To Indo China, scrubbed the decks,
And learned to laugh again at home.
How to feel it home, was the point.
Some reading had been done, but what
Had I observed, except my own
Exasperation? All Hindus are
Like that, my father used to say,
When someone talked too loudly, or
Knocked at the door like the Devil.
They hawked and spat. They sprawled around.

I prepared for the worst. Married,
Changed jobs, and saw myself a fool.
The song of my experience sung,
I knew that all was yet to sing.
My ancestors, among the castes,
Were aliens crushing seed for bread
(The hooded bullock made his rounds).
One among them fought and taught,
A Major bearing British arms.
He told my father sad stories
Of the Boer War. I dreamed that
Fierce men had bound my feet and hands.
The later dreams were all of words.
I did not know that words betray
But let the poems come, and lost
That grip on things the worldly prize.
I would not suffer that again.
I look about me now, and try
To formulate a plainer view:
The wise survive and serve–to play
The fool, to cash in on
The inner and the outer storms.
The Indian landscape sears my eyes.
I have become a part of it
To be observed by foreigners.
They say that I am singular,
Their letters overstate the case.
I have made my commitments now.
This is one: to stay where I am,
As others choose to give themselves
In some remote and backward place.
My backward place is where I am.

Analysis

—  “Background, Casually” tells about the struggle of the poet for identity in a country where he and his community are considered alien

—  3 sections

1.    Deals with childhood of the poet

2.    Throws light on his adult age

3.    Old age

Section 1

—  Ezekiel uses third person for himself. According to him he was born low. Being a member of alien community, he could never eat nor sleep and thus become weak. Due to this feeling he could not fly kite. Even the top also failed to spin in his hands

—  He was sent to Roman Catholic school, where he was like a prey before the wolves (Hindus and Muslims)

—  He was often taunted by Hindus and Muslims who accused him of the murder of Christ. They compared him to Judas who betrayed Christ

—  The same year he won Scripture Prize depicting he was quite good in his schooling

—  He was often beaten by a muslim boy and terror reigned in his mind during that stage

—  Hindu boys repelled him away with their wrong accent and use of language. Being enraged he even thought becoming violent and used his knife though he did not mention where how and why he used his knife

—  One night he heard prayers that made him believe that he is no morally so good

—  He thought if he could still become a Rabbi. But deeper he thought, the more confused he became

Section 2

—  Ezekiel talks about his adult age experiences. His family desired to send him to England for higher studies but being financially poor they could not afford his expenses. However one of his friends paid for him and he was able to go to England.

—  There he was alone and considered poverty, poetry and philosophy of his friends. Even after two years he was alone. A woman came and tried to motivate him and he tried to make his life better.

—  He recognized his failure which became unbearable thought. After spending some years there he desired to go back to India

—  After  coming to India, Ezekiel tried to be happy and feel at home again.

—  His father told him that Hindus are violent. He married changed his job, started writing poetry and knew that he had ample to write

Section 3

—  His experience as an old person

—  He recognized that writing poetry is also not safe and even the words can harm a person

—  He wrote poems and gave up his suffering , now he tried to write wisely without paying free play to his thoughts

—  He expresses his inner and outer suffering that he ultimately failed to defeat. He says he has become an integral part of India.

—  The foreigners consider him to be an alien but he decided now he will consider himself an Indian

—  The poem’s significance to Ezekiel’s oeuvre lies partly in it being an autobiographical poem, which is seen to indicate crisply his “official view of life”

—  Ezekiel’s general tendency in this poem is to be more communicative than be imagistic is evident

—  Similarly the ironic tone that swings between whipping the self and the society around it is also on abundant display in the poem.

Themes

—  Culture, identity, race, history and sense of belonging

—  It is up to the individual and not the society to decide where he most belongs and feels more comfortable with

—  Loss of identity in Indian society

—  Alienation

Recurrent motifs

—  Finding satisfaction in limited ambition

—  A set of experiences stated as providing deep insights

—  Use of unrhymed metrical lines

—  Probing the question of identity in a firm social content

—  Controlled fragmentation unlike the modernist tendency of obscurity.