The Romantic Poets

"Hail to thee , blithe spirit !  / Bird thou never wert / That from heaven , or near it / Pourest thy full heart / In profuse strains of unpremeditated art."  - Shelley, "To A Skylark"

Now you and I wouldn't think of squawking ,cawing or even cooing as any form of art unpremeditated or otherwise. In fact , a bunch of crows cawing during siesta time on a hot afternoon is the worst thing that could ever happen to one and how different could skylarks be ?

But that was Percy Shelley . (Now that's who I was thinking of when I wrote William Percy Shakespeare (read here) )

Percy Bysshe Shelly. William Wordsworth.Samuel Taylor Coleridge.And Blake and Browning and Keats and Yeats.

Well , Yeats is not on that list because he came later - though I suspect it's really because Yeats is pronounced 'Yates' as opposed to Keats' 'Keats'.

(By the way : Bysshe ? How's that pronounced ?)

The Romantic poets were some of the greatest minds in human history. Imagine thinking beautiful thoughts in rhyme using 'thou', 'thee' and 'thine'. Not to mention 'o'er' , ''ere' and 'e'en'. Where one usually walks past daffodils without knowing them from Daffy Duck, Wordsworth writes a poem about them. Where one settles in to a state of agreeable inertness after a pinch of opium , Coleridge not only composes a million lines about an ancient mariner but also has it in him to spell it '... Ancyent Marinere'. And show me a guy who knows Ozimandias from Ozzy Osbourne and I'll show you a blank verse (after first finding out what it means)   

My only criticism of the entire movement is that Blake didn't pull off the rhyme on his famous The Tyger.  " ... What immortal hand or eye / Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?".  'Eye' so doesn't rhyme with 'symmetry' !  What was Blake thinking ? Probably about flowers or something. 

Whyrus Virus ?

What led to this abrupt awakening so late

Of a virus ancienter than Cyrus The Great ?

Perhaps, bored stiff under subterranean ice,

It thought a microscope would be nice.

It doesn't know the internet nor Justin Bieber
Deprived for 30,000 years without amoeba

It looks odd , somewhat like the footprint of a yeti

(Not that anybody's seen a yeti, not even a Veti)

The virus' non-virulence comes as a relief

Although I'd still culture a germ of disbelief 

Are we sure that this little old Rip Van Winkle 

Is incapable of causing a crinkle or a wrinkle ?

Mind. You don't want to get too close or thick !

An infection could get you feeling very Jurasick.

("30,000 year old giant virus comes back to life")

(C) Bhaskar Khaund

Prosaic musings on poetry

The poet and I are strangers.

Where the poet plumbs the sunken depths of the human condition , I get a plumber to fix the condition of the sink. Where the poet soars to the loftiest heights of the human spirit , I take the nearest elevator to the bar. Where I struggle with common sense , the poet shines with uncommon sensitivity. Where I have mere myopia , the poet has vision. (Not that I could find any even with glasses on)

Any wonder , then , that I just didn’t get Shelly’s ‘Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought’ from To A Skylark ? I have somehow never quite managed to equate sad and sweet without recalling an article I had once read on binge eating apparently brought on by depression. Not when the accompanying visuals could have been a Damien Hirst installation or something out of Naked Lunch.

Or take the line before that “Our sincerest laughter / With some pain is fraught”. This idea is also mirrored in that fabulous Kaifi Azmi ghazal from Arth “Tum itna jo muskura rahe ho / Kya gam hain jisko chhupa rahe ho” . The poignant old Laughter- in-Pain motif.

Funnily enough , I can’t think of too many instances of people laughing in pain. Or of people - not least the superior sex - concealing their pain behind a gleeful smile or three. Quite the contrary. Shorter the joy longer the face about describes the average equation.The missus, for instance , was certainly not flashing me any smiles when I accidentally dropped that electric iron on her foot the other day. My instant and very foolish laughter though turned out to be with much pain fraught.

On a parting note :
How would you describe mystery- genre poems of early 19th century America?
- Edgar Allen Poetry !