II SEMESTER (POEMS) SUMMARIES

Digging – Seamus Heaney

The most covetous Nobel Prize winner of 1995, Seamus Heaney expresses his feelings in his typical poem ‘Digging’ extracted from his first volume of poems called “Death of Naturalist”. His poetry mostly deals with the history of his family. The opposing natures and backgrounds of his parents caused considerable tension in his mind. The poet considered that the agriculture is the noblest of all professions of a man by which a farmer could feed the nation. The farmer strives hard both day and night throughout the year to grow more food to shun the hunger from the face of this earth.

“But I’ve no spade to follow them”

The poet worried himself that he could not follow his for fathers’ work. Similarly, the modern youth is also slowly drifting away from these agricultural activities and had fallen behind the white collar jobs. In this context the opening lines of the poem say….

                        “Between my finger and my thumb

                          The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.”

The poem ‘Digging’ begins with our speaker at his desk, his pen poised to begin writing. Heaney gives us an image of a hand holding a pen as a gun. The pen rests between the poet’s fingers as warm and comfortable as a gun with a filled magazine of bullets like words and novel ideas to awake the people. Suddenly, he gets distracted by the rasping sound of his father outside, working with a spade in the garden. This sends our speaker into a spiral of memories about his father working in the potato fields when the speaker was young boy. The poet looks down from his reading desk through the window as hears the unpleasant sound of a spade digging the gravelly ground. Through which the poet could see the rhythmic movements of up and down of his father’s straining rump among the potato drills digging potatoes.   The poet recalls that his father was doing same type of agricultural work since his infancy. His work is so hard as his body is old enough to comply his work. As a child the poet enjoys the cool and hardness of potatoes when he picked the scattered ones.

“By God, the old man could handle a spade,

Just like his old men.”

The memory stretches even farther back to his grandfather whose hard-work as a peat harvester. His grandfather was also engrossed in the same kind of job. He proved that he could cut more turf in a day than any other man on Toner’s bog. He fondly recalls, once he carried his milk in a bottle. The bottle was sloppily ‘corked with paper and straightened up to drink it then he fell right away. Eventually, our speaker snaps out of his day-dream and comes back at his desk to get on to his writing work.

“Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I’ll dig with it.”

The concluding lines of the poem gave us an idea that the poet could not copy the same type of his father’s farming of potatoes but farming the ideas in the farmland of his brain. Instead of the spade his pen is used to harvest the ideas that have been growing up in his mind. The pen is mightier than anything else and a small idea can change the world.

When I have fears……. – John Keats

John Keats is a celebrated romantic poet destined to die too young owing to his tuberculosis. He was only 25 when he died in 1821. Like most tragic heroes, Keats never lived to see the public appreciation on his works¸ In fact, during his life, all publishing houses have rejected to publish all his poetic endeavours. It was only after his death that his poetry collections like ‘Ode to Nightingale’, ‘Endymion’, ‘Ode to Grecian Urn’ etc. received the critical acclaim from all quarters.

“A thing of beauty is a joy forever;

Its loveliness increases; it will never

Pass into nothingness; but still will keep

A bower quiet for us; and a sleep

Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing,”

This small illustration shows the spirit of Keats’s romanticism, with its perfect finish and melody, John Keats was not only the last but also the most perfect of Romanticists. While Walter Scott was merely telling stories, and William Wordsworth reforming poetry or upholding the moral law, and P. B. Shelley advocating impossible reforms, and Byron voicing his own egoism and the political discontent of the times, Keats lived apart from these men and all political measures, worshipping beauty like a devotee, perfectly content to write what was in his own heart, or to reflect some splendour of the natural world as he saw. His reputation as a poet grew steadily after his death with the increasing popularity of Romanticism. He is now seen as a key figure of the Romantic Movement in English Literature. His works greatly influenced his later writers and his letters and poems are still very popular even today and studied in detail by the students of English literature.

The present poem “When I have fears….” expresses his fear of dying young. At the age of twenty-one he wrote,

“Oh, for ten years that overwhelm

Myself in poesy.”

By the age of twenty-four there is only three years later, he had stopped writing because of his ill health. There were times he felt confident that his poetry would survive him, “I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death.” Nevertheless, the inscription he wrote for his headstone was, “There lies one whose name was writ in water”.

Keats poetry was morbidly fascinated with the thought of his own demise. He spent most of his youth and adulthood suffering from tuberculosis that brought him into frequent contact with the possibility of death.

The ‘fear’ of his death worried him that he could not fulfill his strong wish of writing poetry. He may not use his genius capabilities that have been endowed with him from the high piling books in different charactery. His knowledge and his new fertile ideas gathered from various sources. His collection of ideas represents that a farmer collecting ripened seeds of wisdom from his harvest. He felt starry nights and huge clouds in the sky created by magic hand of the ‘Time’ are often initiate with high romance. Suddenly he felt his advancing death may not allow him to trace at least their shadows again. Nature appears to him so beautiful and he was magically enchanted by its beauty. But those creations may remain only for a short time and disappear forever. He may not enjoy such ‘Faery Power’ of the Nature of the full length of his life. Hence the poet does not want to miss every opportunity to enjoy personally all alone before his advancing death. He concludes the poem with a remark,

“Of the wide world I stand alone, and think

Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.”

He would never be able to relish the charms of passionate love and beauty of nature. He feels lonely in this wide world all alone. He fears that his love and his fame would sink into nothingness if death comes before the fulfillment of his wish.        

However, Keats is trying to reflect upon his feeling that he achieves some distancing from his own feeling and ordinary life. This distancing enables him to reach a resolution. He thinks about human solitariness (‘I stand alone’) and human insignificance (‘the wide world’). The shore is a point of contact, the threshold between two worlds or two conditions of land and sea (life and death). So Keats is crossing a threshold, from his desire for fame and love to accepting their unimportance and ceasing to fear and yearn (desire).

Gandhi – Niranjan Mohanty

The father of our nation, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, popularly known as Mahatma Gandhi, is compared to great saints of the world. His love for nation and exhibiting fearless and undaunted bravery in the freedom struggle is known to every human being of the world. The ‘Truth’ and ‘Non-violence’ are the two invincible weapons with him to fight against British Empire to secure freedom to the nation. In this poem titled ‘Gandhi’ Niranjan Mohanty recounts Mahatma Gandhiji’s sacrifices and sufferings during India’s struggle for freedom. Gandhiji is ready to shed tears, suffers pains and even give his life for the sake of the Nation.

The poet, Niranjan Mohanty imbibed with patriotic feelings of Gandhiji, has expressed Gandhiji’s through this poem. “They” refers here the people of India who have been divided among themselves in the name of religion, caste, creed, regionalism and language besides socio-economic challenges like ignorance, illiteracy, poverty and untouchablity before Gandhiji to achieve unity among the people. He wanted to eradicate these votive egoistic self-centered demonic people at the time of freedom struggle by sacrificing everything even his flesh and blood. Flesh and blood is the rich and fertile manure for the growth of Liberty.

Gandhiji had sacrificed everything his personal possessions, wishes, joys, happiness and every possible good moment for the sake of united India. He shed his tears, blood to satisfy the dirty monstrous selfish dividers of the nation. Probably Gandhiji’s aims and ambitions for harmonious nation were supposed to be unwanted. Finally, Gandhiji fell to the bullets of a haughty fanatic and his body is laid to rest as a martyr, honouring him as Mahatma (the Great Soul) of the nation. Nobody was in a position to understand his great motivation to build a mighty nation.

“O’ Lord of the universe

Save them”

The last two lines of the poem reveal the magnanimity of the Mahatma who seems to say, as Jesus Christ actually about his tormentors, “Forgive them for they know not what they are doing.”

  

No Men Are Foreign – James Kirkup

James Kirkup tells us through this poem “No Men Are Foreign” that we should not consider any human being on this earth as ‘foreigner’ or ‘stranger’. Though Mankind is same all over the world, somewhere, someone is harming other one in the name of foreigner. It is in one way or in the other way we are only harming ourselves.  In the name of destroying another country, we are destroying our own mother earth which supports our life.  

  

To sum up the poem that there are no strange men, no foreign countries though the costumes or dresses may be different but people live them are same. The Land on which we walk, the air what we breathe, the water that we drink are same wherever we go on this earth. We share and live on the same land and of course we are buried in the same land. The sun, the air, the water and the food we consume are same all over the world.

All people are same all over the world and there is no difference from one to one. They are all similar in every aspect body activities and feeling a sense of pain and pleasure. We all have common life to lead. We all able to recognize and understand that hatredness begets hatredness.

The Unknown Citizen – W. H. Auden

How does W H Auden picturise a socially-regimented citizen in a materialistic Utopia of Modern Age in his poem ‘The Unknown Citizen’?

W. H. Auden is a sensitive citizen, a poet, lover of freedom and desires that every citizen should enjoy freedom. With his remarkable social and political awareness, he opposed totalitarianism which destroys the freedom of an individual by imposing too many controls on one’s freedom and reduces him to a mere ‘number’ on an identity card. According to him, modern society is like a goodly apple rotten at the core.

It is a mockery and irony that the state which is directly responsible for the dilution of individual freedom and appreciates the unknown citizen and makes him known, through a marble monument, to perpetuate his memory. The poet wonders that the monument might have been erected to commemorate his tolerance, even after losing his freedom under the controls of the state. Happiness and freedom for such citizens become words of no substance, and no significance. The actions of the state seem merely to mock these noble concepts.

Auden opens his poem ‘Unknown Citizen’ with reference to a citizen who is unknown. This ordinary citizen was remembered by a marble monument erected by the state in his honour. The bureau of statistics which is there to look after the citizens’ conduct and welfare, made no complaint against this particular citizen at any moment. All the reports on his conduct give him a clean chit. The old-fashioned word ‘saint’ can be used to regard him, although he belongs to the modern times.

Whatever he did, he did only for the benefit of the society. Auden certifies that he served the greater community till the day of his retirement. He worked sincerely in a factory where he was never found to be guilty and no one suspended him or dismissed him from his job. He always satisfied his superiors and his employers. Auden sarcastically describes the company where he works is Fudge Motors Inc.

The citizens never refused to give their opinion of his co-workers, nor did he owe any dues to the trade union. He was as popular with his colleagues as he was with others. Like many ordinary individuals he enjoyed a drink now and then. The press was happy that he read a paper, daily. He never over-reacted to any advertisements. His insurance policies proved that he was fully covered by the insurance. The health card maintained in his name showed that he was healthy. He visited a hospital only once during his long years of service.

He enjoyed all comforts which a common man could afford. He had a gramophone, a radio, a car and a Frigidaire. Public opinion surveys revealed that his opinions about men and matters had nothing offensive. In peace, he enjoyed peace and in war, he went to war when he was called upon. Like many ordinary citizens, he was also married and had five children and at that time population experts considered that this was the right number for any parent. Teachers reported that he never interfered with his children’s education.

Auden concludes his poem very sarcastically saying that he may not ask the citizen a question that whether he was happy. The question, the poet feels, is absurd. If anything had happened wrong, it would certainly have been reported.

Thus, Auden represents through the character of the unknown citizen, modern man who is reduced to a part of a machine. He has no individuality. He accepted the views of the state, without any resistance. So the government was happy with him, but the citizens cannot be called happy in any true sense of the word, as the citizen never enjoyed the benefits of freedom. He lived like a slave without any opinion which could be called his own.

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