HEALING POWER OF POETRY
Satendra Nandan on how certain poetry is meaningful in COVID-era
Last month I attended a Zoom seminar on my favourite poet, William Wordsworth (17701850).
This year marks his 250th birth anniversary. The lecture was delivered by my friend Professor Will Christie, the Director of the Australian Humanities Consortium and the Humanities Research Centre, ANU.
Will and I have coffee virtually every week on Tuesday. His generosity is overwhelming as he pays for coffee at Morning Glory, near the university campus.
Professor Christie began his conversation by mentioning how William Wordsworth was parodied by many of his contemporaries for writing simple verses on most mundane themes and characters.
Today Wordsworth is regarded as the greatest English poet who revolutionised both the subject and language of poetry with his friend and collaborator, ST Coleridge, an extraordinary poetic genius in his own right.
We all read the haunting poem, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, in our college days. It’s set in the South Pacific and has a message for all of us who care about creatures big and small. He was prophetic about the catastrophic climate crisis and how nature is so intimately interrelated to all living things – you harm one, you diminish your own life in some invisible way.
This essence is captured in the epic Ramayana with the idea of Dharma that gives balance to our lives in one form or another. Unfortunately the idea of Dharma is now conflated and confused with some monolithic religious ideologies.
The Ramayana was created out of that ever deepening ethos of the mystery of life and the magic of living in our wondrous world suffused with a divine light like the sun’s rays that rolls through all things.
The question at the heart of Will Christie’s talk was – William Wordsworth had two voices; one egotistically sublime and the other the simplicity of the common human theme that we encounter daily in our lives as we make our daily rounds on familiar grounds in our rapidly changing environment.
But there was a third voice, I feel, from which most of his most sublime poetic emanations emerged and enveloped the readers as incense.
His autobiographical poem, Prelude,
is over 300 pages long. Wordsworth called it the Growth of a Poet’s Mind.
Few people today read such a massive creation in poetry.
As students many of us grew on ‘ Daffodils’, ‘The Solitary Reaper’,’ Lucy’, ‘Michael’, ‘Simon Lee’, ‘The Idiot Boy’,
– themes that many would have found unimaginable as poetic subjects for memorable poems in English.
Writing epic poetry in ornate language was the fashion of the times. But Wordsworth’s great gift was that while others searched for subjects to write about in mythologies, especially Greek and Roman, he made his egotistical subjectivity the heart of his creative endeavours.
He imbued the simplest lines with so much feeling which we ignore in the din and hubhub of our daily preoccupations.
I was particularly moved by my friend’s resplendent presentation on a COVID-infected evening on our island continent deepened everyday by reports of fires and destruction of Aboriginal shrines for coal mines.
Shaping our world with poetry
Years ago I was taught three poems of Wordsworth by my Form Six teacher at Natabua High School. My teacher’s name was Frederick Earnest Joyce. He lived up to his famous name and introduced me to a couple of works by James Joyce. Only yesterday I began re-reading his masterpiece ULYSSES, around 700 pages long.
Earnest Joyce awarded me the Joyce Prize for Literature. Perhaps nothing has meant more to me than this remarkable teacher’s gesture so many years ago.
He had introduced me to the world of reading and writing of literature; a priceless gift given to me by a stranger in the republic of human imagination. I’d grown up in a home which had no books in English although my mother read a lot of Hindi magazines and Hindi detective stories which I read avidly while grazing my grandmother’s cow Lali and grandfather’s horse named Charlie.
Life can begin in the rows of sugarcane and we grow like grass and wild berries.
I must confess that my mind was saturated by the ocean of stories contained in the two epics the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.
And whatever space was left was filled by Bombay films made on these myths and legends.
Perhaps that is why in my teens I went to India to study, of all places, in Delhi. That journey changed my life and enriched my life as nothing else. When I arrived in Delhi on a summer’s day, the world of Gandhi was vanishing in the smoldering ruins of Partition and the mahatma’s unforgivable assassination.
But Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was still alive and under his Prime Ministership India attained an international moral voice and expressed the soul of his nation in numerous writings. It was in the heat of Delhi, 50C, that Professor DD Gupta taught us Romantic Poetry: Wordsworth was his favourite poet among the Romantics.
Guptaji was nothing if not philosophical as he thumped his balding head on which wisps of hair occasionally stirred in the loo, hot wind, blowing through the cracked windows of Hindu College.
In William Wordsworth he found the deepest spirituality of his dharma most powerfully embodied and expressed.
Like a sage he saw the healing power of nature in a single neem tree under which Bacchoolal had tied his cow, sitting in its holy dung chewing cud contemplatively, blissfully unaware of the progress the world’s largest democracy was making under one of the modern world’s finest statesman and a fabulous writer.
Guptaji would point to that lonely tree, dust-laden with wilted leaves, and go into a trance telling us of nature’s healing power. Few of us shared his vision as our attention was distracted by the only girl in the class nick-named Dynamite.
It’s only now I realise what Guptaji was trying to instill in us something special in our arid world.
Meaningful in the COVID-era
Today William Wordsworth’s poetry is more meaningful both in the COVID-19 terror and the impending disasters of climate change.
Wordsworth’s poetry, I feel ,should be taught in every class and read on the radio.
He has a lot to tell us about our environment and the life of ordinary people. The care we take of little plants and animals, of birds and bees, the splendour in the grass. I can see it daily from my window how beautiful nature really is even in the endless fields of wild flowers that seem to raise their heads like daffodils which became the poet’s bliss in solitude.
In moments of despair how often he turned to nature; it springs, rivers, lakes,cliffs, trees, people and animals.
And like the solitary reaper we sing that eternal song which we carry within us until our breath becomes air:
As if her song could have no ending. The music in my heart I bore, Long after it was heard no more.
That is the music of humanity we share with the humblest of our fellow human beings.
Perhaps that is why I found Will Christie’s timely lecture so exhilarating: to remind us what great poetry lies buried within us and how a poet can ignite our inner imagination or make us see the fragile goodness of human life and the vulnerable beauty of the world around us.
The journey inwards in these times is the longest journey and one often finds the healing within.
It is here that the burden of mystery of life is confronted and the unintelligible world enlightened and we see into the life of things. Our lives.
One doesn’t have to grow up in Lake District to behold the magnificence of the natural world and its deepest connections with the living beings. Or in the foothills of the Himalayas where ancient sages sang of the magnificence of the mountains and rivers and the magic of forests and the enigmatic energy of flora and fauna.
I’ve travelled in the quiet beauty of the Lake District. And trekked in the foothills of the Himalayas but I still feel the colours of Fijian sunsets across the Pacific Ocean I beheld has its unique glory reflected in the radiant blue waves.
Certainly COVID-19 has made us aware of a world within our worlds which we share together in its infinite variety with the freshness of a dream and ripples in a little stream.
Every dawn has that revelation for each of us. It’s a prayer of life itself.