Poet of the Week

[Shakthiprabha.]

I recall a lovely line from a different Shelley poem that I unable to place:

an ever moving joyless eye
finds nothing worth its constancy

It's from a fragment of a poem he never finished, which his wife published under the title "To the moon" The words are slightly different from what you remember:

Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionlessAmong the stars that have a different birth,
And ever changing, like a Joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?

Goodone ! I remember lot of such tamizh poems, where moon is tugged along as a companion, to describe poet's own plight.

I remember jeevan's confusion which, on acquisition, dismisses all earthly joys as "neti neti" to seeking something permanent.

[Shakthiprabha.]

We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

Suga raagam sogam thanE!!?!! Why?

Is it always because of 'other sides of coin' concept?

Belief! Faith! (which keeps the world rotating)

Always on wait for the next cycle, like those leaves waiting for another season with hope.

[P_R]

It's from a fragment of a poem he never finished, which his wife published under the title "To the moon" The words are slightly different from what you remember:

Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,
And ever changing, like a Joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?

Beautiful.
Thanks podalangai.

How did you get on with Ozymandias?

Must say we are not the best of friends
My strained relationship with Shelley can be attributed to the fact I was introduced to his poems in school. So I had to approach them with dread that I had to be prepared to paraphrase and innocent looking couplet. Plus something like Ozymandias so easily lends the teacher an opportunity to go on a didactic tangent. Immaterial whether the poet wanted to get moral.

While I have never had problems with didactism in Tamil, in English I was cynic just too early. Thinking about it, it is perhaps founded on some deep-rooted impression that Tamil is much more naive a language/culture. Till date naive's equivalent in Tamil is almost a compliment.

Actually, I had a similar difficulty when I encountered Shelley in middle school - the problem was that his poems are long, and definitely not modern in tone, which means it is often hard work at the start.

The verses you quote are indeed the ones that stand-out in Ode to a Skylark

[P_R]

We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

Suga raagam sogam thanE!!?!! Why?

Is it always because of 'other sides of coin' concept?

Belief! Faith! (which keeps the world rotating)

Always on wait for the next cycle, like those leaves waiting for another season with hope.

Wodehouse in the preface to his short story collection :"The Clicking of Cuthbert":

As a writer of light fiction, I have always till now been handicapped by the fact that my disposition was cheerful, my heart intact, and my life unsoured. Handicapped, I say, because the public likes to feel that a writer of farcical stories is piquantly miserable in his private life, and that, if he turns out anything amusing, he does it simply in order to obtain relief from the almost insupportable weight of an existence which he has long since realized to be a wash-out. Well, today I am just like that.

[podalangai]

podalangai, I don't quite get what you mean by not being able to agree to Shelley's attitude to life. Please elaborate on your opinion!

He had strong ideas about things such as free love, with which I don't agree, but which were an intrinsic component of his philosophy of what an ideal life should be like.

A character in one of Aldous Huxley's books calls Shelley a cross between a fairy and a white slug (Huxley didn't quite go that far himself - he was parodying some of Shelley's critics). I think I personally, like Huxley, love the intensity of Shelley's vision of what he called "intellectual beauty", but I don't always like the results of applying it in the real world.

[podalangai]

While I have never had problems with didactism in Tamil, in English I was cynic just too early. Thinking about it, it is perhaps founded on some deep-rooted impression that Tamil is much more naive a language/culture. Till date naive's equivalent in Tamil is almost a compliment.

Didacticism in Tamil is qualitatively different. Much of the body of didactic poetry in English carries the huge burden that English classicism is rooted in a different - and alien - tradition. Tamil classicism, on the other hand, is native to the Tamil soil and Tamil thinking - which gives much didactic poetry in Tamil a wonderful freshness. This isn't universally true - Tamil poetry, too, can be awful when it tries to artifically root itself in a foreign tradition, as a comparison of Manimegalai (incredibly bad didacticism) and Sivaga Sintamani (incredibly beautiful didacticism) shows. It's the same in English. Didactic Anglo-Saxon poetry, for example, has the same freshness to it that Tamil poetry had. Consider this beautiful example from the Seafarer:

gedroren is þeos duguð eal dreamas sind gewitene
wuniað þa wacran ond þas woruld healdaþ
brucað þurh bisgo blæd is gehnæged
eorþan indryhto ealdað ond searað
swa nu monna gehwylc geond middangeard
yldo him on fareð onsyn blacað
gomelfeax gnornað wat his iuwine
æþelinga bearn eorþan forgiefene

"All this splendour has fallen, visions have withered. The weak remain and hold the world, worn with toil. The leaves fall, earth's glories grow old and fade. And now every man, throughout Middle-earth, meets age bleak-faced and withered-haired, grieving, knowing that his old friends, children of noble ones, have been given to earth."

My translation is not perfect - the original has much more power - but I think even this should convey that it has much of the direct, unartificed ("natippaRRa") quality that gives Tamil didacticism its beauty. This is pretty common in Anglo-Saxon poems, and in the best Middle English didactic poetry, when there were still roots in the native tradition strong enough that poets could combine classical allusions with a very English (or Scottish) expression - Dunbar's "Lament for the makaris" (Lament for the poets) is a particularly fine example. Or for that matter, in contemporary poetry, which has more or less abandoned poetic convention in favour of directness of expression. In Shelley's time, though, things were different, which is why his poetry can seem a lot more artificed, and difficult to relate to, unless you're used to the classicised way of expression which was natural to the time.

[pavalamani pragasam]

That bit of info about Shelley's preference for the concept of 'free love' is news to me. Anyway, do we not wink at idiosyncracies, vagaries, waywardness or even serious personal 'weaknesses' of geniuses, for the sake of respecting their genius?

[podalangai]

That bit of info about Shelley's preference for the concept of 'free love' is news to me. Anyway, do we not wink at idiosyncracies, vagaries, waywardness or even serious personal 'weaknesses' of geniuses, for the sake of respecting their genius?

It took me a while to come around to that point of view. I was bitterly disappointed when I found out about his views on love!

[pavalamani pragasam]

Glad to see you concurring with me, podalangai!

[P_R]

Didactism-la ivvaLO matter irukkA. As always, thanks for the info podalangai.

This isn't universally true - Tamil poetry, too, can be awful when it tries to artifically root itself in a foreign tradition, as a comparison of Manimegalai (incredibly bad didacticism) and Sivaga Sintamani (incredibly beautiful didacticism) shows.

Ok. Haven't had the chance to read either.
I just read a SilappadhikAram-for-beginners book. And the last kaaNdam kind of dragged. Not entirely because of any didacticism but also because of repetitive, seemingly empty, paens and a near complete lack of drama (atleast in comparison to the previous kaaNdam).

But at the very end there is also a tightly packed and stuff didactic passage which seems like ThirukkuRaL quick-reader in the sense that there so much content overlap. But I didn't find it enjoyable at all. It sounded so much like a sermon and seemed to sucked out what makes the kuRaL beautiful. In the view of the lay first time reader, it left a bad taste for the whole epic. So much so that I was reluctant to start on ManimEgalai. I will ride on your dismissal to add justification to my postponing that epic :P

But I don't get what is the foreign-tradition in this whole thing.(i.e. Manimekalai vs. SivacintAmaNi). Thanks for the efforts to translates the poem, I get a feel of the difference (from Shelley). But I am still trying to see what is native about the poem you quoted which isn't there in Shelley.

To be precise...

combine classical allusions with a very English (or Scottish) expression

....which was not the case in Shelley's time, right ? An example....?