A SPECTATOR OF HIS OWN PAST
Kanwal Sibal’s powerful poetry is marked by amplitude of imagination and a thoroughly Indian sensibility
The publication of former foreign secretary Kanwal Sibal’s book of poems titled Snowflakes of Time is a landmark occasion for lovers of poetry in the English language written by Indians. Sibal’s poems are marked by extraordinary power and amplitude of imagination and a thoroughly Indian sensibility. In thought and emotion, idiom and imagery, and in other embellishments that enrich a poem, Sibal’s lyrics are an important, authentic Indian contribution to English poetry.
“If poetry, wrote Keats, “comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all”: There is an echo of this in Sibal’s own theory of poetry. In the preface to his book he writes: “An inspirational mood suddenly creates the urge to write. Why and how such a mood is generated cannot be explained. When the mood is on, words, thoughts and images flow with ease”. He is also of the view that a poem should speak to the reader without undue complexity. His poems faithfully follow that prescription; spontaneity and clarity are their hallmark. Sometimes poetic excess in a phrase or metaphor, or even in a whole poem, will cause surprise to the reader but the resultant curiosity in him about the poet himself helps establish a rapport between them and enhances the former’s understanding of the poetry without testing too much his patience or academic competence.
Snowflakes of Time, also the title of the first poem in the volume, symbolises memories. Both are ephemeral and fragile to the touch; melting snowflakes leave moist hands, vanishing memories leave behind moist sentiment and “pangs of nostalgic discontent”. Time, past and present, runs through the book as a shadow theme. The following stanza from the first poem sets the tone for several of Sibal’s reflections on Time and Memories:
To denuded branches of time, The flitting flakes were clinging fast, He was an actor past his prime A spectator of his own past. From skies within him undefined Fall moments gone in layers congealed, Crystals like particles of mind Through passing seasons lie concealed.
(The unnamed ‘He’ in this and other lyrics is the poet himself; it could also be any sensitive human being.)
The metaphors are notable; ‘denuded branches of time’ invests impalpable Time with the solidity of a tree branch. In congealed moments falling from the ‘skies within him’ and ‘particles of mind’ are, I think, unconscious reflections of scattered Vedantic thoughts on both the permanent and transitory aspects of existence. I shall revert to this aspect later in another context.
For its striking phrase and metaphor another short lyric titled Awakening Memories is even more impressive in its imagery. In the following 10 lines from that poem Sibal brings Memories to life: Memories wake up and rub their eyes Stretching their limbs long in repose, From their deep bed of time they rise And on its edge they themselves pose With hand on chin they stare ahead, Should they get up or linger more? The thoughts are fluid in their head As they put their feet on the floor. They get up ready for the day,
Brisk shower of the present take And dressed up in clothes of today, Walk through the door of the awake.
Here is a scene from a silent movie that a painter could not paint. There is a wealth of such pictures in the book. The originality, picturesqueness and surprising metaphors are the striking qualities of Sibal’s poetry. In another poem titled Death of Winter, written in Moscow, image follows image in a breathless rush ending with a startling portrayal of a familiar event in India: Pierced by the shafts of the sun’s rays, The snow began to weep;
Drops of tears fell from its countless crystal eyes
And icicles of agony like teeth of reptiles Bared by the grimace of throes of death appeared.
Winter in its white shroud was being slowly cremated
With the heat from the blazing sun.
The book is divided in seven main sections of which the first five titled Moscow, Memories, Reflections, Nature’s Bond, and Dilemmas, contain lyrics which will charm the reader with their rhyme and rhythm, similes and metaphors and also intrigue him by the poet’s complex and intricate treatment of themes of homely familiarity such as car ride, crow, tree, road, rain and wall.
Sibal’s Nature poems are a blend of idea and emotion, dream and delusion in which man becomes Nature and Nature man. In the poem titled “Swimming in Pools of
Light”, he writes: I distilled the redness from the evening skies/ And with a mental syringe/ injected it into my blood; I rolled the sunlight into a tiny pill/ and swallowed it. Then, after a few harmless exertions he concludes: I swam thousands of miles around the corners of the room,/ And stretched upon the turf,/ I felt the greenest grass grow from the million pores of my body.
This mingling of Man and Nature, with each regenerating and renewing the other, is this dream or delusion? It is a matter of common observation that poets do sometime slip into delusion. But dream or delusion, the result is still poetry. In another poem he says “he always felt one with the sky” which, sometimes, he also sees in his mind. He proclaims that “the birds ecstatic in branches” are him. In another leap of the imagination he sees not only Nature but the entire universe in him – The atoms of his smallest cell/ The solar system replicate!
In these and other such expressions, of which there are many, there are philosophic insights and intended or unconscious echoes of Vedantic thought. The Mahanarayana Upanishad, for example, asserts in Verse 7, section 13, that Man’s heart is the great abode of the Universe. Poetry and philosophy are akin, one to the other, and as Aristotle, the first to lay down the rules for critical appreciation of poetry, authoritatively says, poetry is the most philosophic of writing.
One poem, filled uncharacteristically with much romantic longing and the poet’s regret at the missed opportunities of fulfillment moved me deeply. ‘The Wall’ tells the story of a chance the poet let go of a paradise of beauty and love which he saw by entering through a door, which seemed shut for ever but was opened just this once, perhaps by an inmate’s design, for his benefit. Having seen the vision, he withdrew from it for fear that the door behind him might get shut, cutting him off from the familiar everyday life. The guilt of committing trespass on what was not his because of “temptations that rose in his mind” also troubled him. He now asks, “How he should make one more ingress,/ even when he knows he can’t possess/ the beauty that the wall surrounds”. Alas, neither love nor fate offer again the chance once spurned.
The best answer to the dilemma lies in C Day Lewis’ lines: Selfhood begins with a walking away And love is proved in the letting go. Maharajakrishna Rasgotra is a former Foreign Secretary and a well known Hindi poet.