POETICA : 1

 

The magic of poetry

 

I am not a poet. I am an ordinary human being. But even I can’t escape the snare of poetry. Poetry is like air. Everyone breathes it. It is like our life breath. It’s part of our life - every moment of it. It is inseparable from our existence. Even when we don’t realize it’s inseparability from our living, it is in and around each one of us. To that extent everyone who lives is a poet. We have our sensory and super- sensory experiences, waking or asleep. Just as our breathing doesn’t stop even for a moment, all our experiences are subservient to our breathing. We experience because we live and we live because we breathe. Poetry, therefore, is passively and unmanifestedly always with us.

 

But we can be aware of it, just as we can be aware of our breathing if we concentrate and focus on it. Suddenly we realize its being; we become aware of its regular inhalation and exhalation. We then start hearing the soft pounding of our heart beats. We can feel our pulse. We feel the rush of blood in our veins. We become aware of our being alive. We can feel all our senses awake and working. Our consciousness has been internalized. That’s when we glimpse the faint outline of poetry in the swaying of branches, or in the clouds changing their shapes.

 

Poetry similarly does not make itself visible. It only half appears in symbols. Then we see it like Wordsworth’s Lucy or Shelley’s West Wind or Keats’ Nightingale. Then it suddenly manifests itself in a tangible form, and yet only momentarily.

 

A violet by a mossy stone

Half-hidden from the eye!

-       Fair as a star, when only one

Is shining in the sky

            *  *

O Wild West Wind,…

Thou on whose stream, ‘mid the steep sky’s commotion,

Loose clouds like earth’s decaying leaves are shed,…

             *   *

That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,

            In some melodious plot

Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,

Singest of summer in full throated ease.

 

Suddenly you see poetry transformed into metaphors and symbols. You see Lucy as a violet - as a lone star. Or the Wild West Wind playing with loose clouds in the sky’s commotion.Or the Nightingale in some melodious plot of beechen green. But you hardly notice, as you fall in poetry’s snare, that you have, unknowingly, trodden into a different world of the 'inside' in you. Poetry thus has transformed the ‘outside’ into your ‘inside’. You are no longer in the outside world. You have gone inside. That is the magic called poetry.

Introduction to a series on poetry to appear every Sunday or oftener.

 

© Dr BSM Murty