Poetry | Five Poems, five poets, five days

Caterpillar Cafe is not a review site primarily because, being writers, we can't bear to give bad reviews especially when we know how hard it is to write anything at all. So we believe that 'Good writing lies in the eye of the reader.' So here at the cafe' we tell you what we love and why we think you will love it too. 

And one of us happens to love poetry. Yes, remember english classes- ' Tiger Tiger burning bright' ?Poetry is a lot more than memorising poems. It's perfect reading before bed as the rhythm of the lines act like a lullaby lulling you to sleep. This week I run through some of my favourite poems. 

I have to start with Donne. Donne was my introduction to how poetry can be completely absurd and yet make sense all at the same time. Donne manages to turn anything into a metaphor for love. A compass, death and now a flea. I think this is perhaps the cleverest poem written about a flea and perhaps the most erotic. Do you know another poem that combines fleas and sex. A perennial favourite, here is The Flea.

How to read? I am terrible at recognising iambic pentameters and tetrameters but here goes. This poem alternates metrically between lines in iambic tetrameter (4 iambs or syllables ) and lines in iambic pentameter (5 iambs). So it's 454545455. The rhyme scheme in each stanza is regular, in couplets, with the final line rhyming with the final couplet: AABBCCDDD.This makes the last three lines in the stanza read strange as you always think the last line remains hanging. Tell me if you think it reads differently. 

                                                 The Flea

BY JOHN DONNE

Mark but this flea, and mark in this,   

How little that which thou deniest me is;   

It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,

And in this flea our two bloods mingled be;   

Thou know’st that this cannot be said

A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead,

    Yet this enjoys before it woo,

    And pampered swells with one blood made of two,

    And this, alas, is more than we would do.

Oh stay, three lives in one flea spare,

Where we almost, nay more than married are.   

This flea is you and I, and this

Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is;   

Though parents grudge, and you, w'are met,   

And cloistered in these living walls of jet.

    Though use make you apt to kill me,

    Let not to that, self-murder added be,

    And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.

Cruel and sudden, hast thou since

Purpled thy nail, in blood of innocence?   

Wherein could this flea guilty be,

Except in that drop which it sucked from thee?   

Yet thou triumph’st, and say'st that thou   

Find’st not thy self, nor me the weaker now;

    ’Tis true; then learn how false, fears be:

    Just so much honor, when thou yield’st to me,

    Will waste, as this flea’s death took life from thee. 

Nuggets of Genius | The poetry of A K Ramanujan

Come lightly, love, let us wait – to be found, to be

lost

A.K Ramanujan came to me as a gift, literally. His Book of collected poems was the first birthday gift from my boyfriend, along with a book on Thai cooking. I got the hint! I had never read Ramanujan before and all of a sudden it was as if I had found a poetic mentor. He wrote in staccato and yet it was like a melody. Every word alternated between a punch in my face and a balm to sooth my bloody nose. You can tell why I did so terribly at literary criticism at my A Levels. I struggled with Allegory and Alliteration or to tell the Meter from the Cadence. When asked for what the The Flea by John Donne meant to me, I answered: “ Madame, it reminds me of that movie, Demolition man!” Rest assured, I did terribly. You couldn’t ask me to explain e e cummings- I carry you in my heart to save my life, but the following lines:

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows

higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

-are to me, like a prayer. The perfect love letter that encompasses everything I want to say. And sometimes I read it because my mind wants to be entertained and poetry is by far the most momentary of all reading pleasures. Which is why I have never understood why so few people partake in it.

A K Ramanuja’s poems can be compared to e e cummings in that they are little nuggets of genius. (Comparative literature PhD's are creating voodoo dolls of me as I write this) Like a box of Nehaus chocolates, tiny and decadent, each bite bursts in your mouth and coats it with concentrated pleasure that stays with you a lot longer than a mediocre bar of milk chocolate. Take for instance this:

The Striders

And search

For certain thin-

Stemmed, bubble-eyed water bugs.

See them perch

On dry capillary legs

Weightless

On the ripple skin

Of a stream.

No, not only prophets

Walk on water. This bug sits

On a landslide of lights

And drowns eye-

Deep

Into its tiny strip

Of sky.

Reading this always makes me smile. I envision a little bug on a lotus leaf looking up at its sky as if from a disney novel. The reference to Christ is something I am yet to decipher. As I mentioned earlier- terrible at literary criticism.

Another from the same collection “The Striders” perfect for reading aloud. It is called Self Portrait.

I resemble everyone

But myself, and sometimes see

in shop-windows,

despite the well-known laws

of optics,

the portrait of a stranger,

date unknown,

often signed in a corner

by my father.

I think it captures so succinctly how we change ourselves to fit the people we meet, not unlike sympathetic hearing. Until we do it so much that we forget what we are really about and have to go back home to where it all started so find the little bits of the original personality.

My cleaning lady often walks in on me sitting on my sofa reading his poetry aloud. She smiles and scowls simultaneously, possibly getting ready to ask for her wages and get the hell away from this mad woman who speaks to herself.

I know very little about the man, apart from the fact he was a native of Mysore and wrote in both English and Kanada. He won the Padma Shri and at the time of his death was the Professor at Linguistics at the University of Chicago. He left behind one hundred and forty eight poems on three computer disks, some of which were published posthumously, along with this book of Collected Poems. He joked that his poems were like his babies, they dirtied themselves and he had to clean them up. He took ten years to complete a collection.

I struggled to choose my favorite for today since there are so many I love. Very little is available online and I have had to type them out and have tried my best to place words correctly. It is a shame that no one has catalogued his entire collection, as it is a fantastic example of contemporary Indian poetry that straddles eastern and westerns views with no apologies. The following site lists about ten, along with his most critically famous-The River, that takes him back to Mysore.

http://allpoetry.com/poems/by/A.K.%20Ramanujan

For now , I leave you with the last two paragraphs of Two Styles of Love

Love is no hurry, love is no burning;

It is no fairytale of bitter and sweet.

Moons may turn at the full; we return without turning.

And no mouth shall have shadow for meat.

No, no love is sudden.

Coupling hands take time to kill the frost.

Even leaping Beast shall wait to be bidden

By Beauty. Come lightly, love, let us wait – to be found, to be

Lost

Sigh…had I paid more attention in literary criticism class, I would have been able to do this exquisite poetry so much more justice.

Buy Collected Poems: A. K. Ramanujan from Flipkart.com