Importance of Short verse in modern times 

- Dr. Srinivasa Rangaswami 

To begin with first things first, poetry to me is not merely putting together a few lines cleverly and feeling important about it. Poetry, said Dr. Krishna Srinivas once ‘is a state of being’. In other words, a distinct way of approach to life, a whole way of living. That was why, perhaps, Milton said long ago, “He who would do laudable things in verse, himself ought to be a great poem”. A Poet is one who is at one with all of God’s creation, one who can reach out to identify himself with the joys and sorrows around him, be capacious in his love to be compassionate, is uncombined, uncribbed. Lord Krishna in the Gita declared : “He who doth not shrink from the world, and from whom the world doth not shrink, is dear unto me.” To my mind, a poet is one who answers to this description. I cannot think of an arrogant or loveless poet. It is a contradiction in terms. A poet and his poetry are bound together, and any piece of poetry is significant to me mainly as a poetic document mirroring the poet. 

Poetry is all about perception, a unique perception of a sudden awareness of an aspect of truth or reality. And every poet – nay, every individual – is a unique amalgam of several influences and legacies that make him so different from every other individual. It is this uniqueness that makes the poetry of any individual as fascinating and worthy of attention. 

For this very reason, I believe in the autonomy of the creative spirit and would recognize no fetters to genuine artistic expression. There can be no prescription as to its form or content. Whatever the mode you employ, it must be integral to your poetic impulse and there should be nothing contrived about it. And every poet has to find his own creative form. 

It is not the form that distinguishes a poetic piece from one that is not. To illustrate this with a striking example, let us look at these lines from Sarojini Naidu’s poem The Coromandel fishers”

What though we toss at the fall of the sun 
Where the hand of the sea –god drives ;
He who holds the storm by the hair 
Will hold in his breast our lives. 

These lines are in perfect prose order. But it is difficult for me – or, for that matter, for anyone – to read them as a straight piece of prose. The lines sing themselves. And, you have in a nutshell, the Saranagathi Tatwa – the attitude of total surrender to the Supreme Power and an implicit, absolute faith in its power to protect. 

For all the freedom he may enjoy, still a poet has his obligations to his reader. The bottom line is intelligibility. The reader must understand a poem before he can give himself over to it – ‘understand’ not in the sense of intellectually understanding it, but recognizing it at once as something he could, or would like to, share with. A poem should at once ring the bell. Profoundest truths have been uttered in words of utter simplicity. To recall but one example, we have Shakespeare declaring “There is a destiny that shapes our ends / Rough hew them how; you will.” Then there are others. “What is virtue, if unassayed”(Milton). “Old order changeth yielding place to New Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.” Tennyson. “Love was given, encouraged…. That self might be annulled” (Wordsworth). 

“If winter comes, can spring be far behind ?” (Shelley). 

As for the content, though poetry can be, and is written at many levels, what will survive beyond one’s time, in the hearts and minds of men, is that poetry which is nourished by the vitality of universal truth and endorsed by frontierless human experience. 

Coming to the theme of short verse it may be asked what is so special, why this importance, to the short verse forms, particularly in the new genres like Haiku, Zen and the rest. In our days of fast food and instant communication, when man is all the time in a hurry with very little time to spare, the attraction of the short verse forms is only understandable. Shortness can at times be alluring too; But a little reflection will show that there is more to it than shortness. In the case of these short verses (especially Haiku and zen), not only the prosodic prescriptions are important, but also, as much or even more, the spirit of the genres as originally conceived is important – as Dr. Mohammed Fakhruddin has always been at pains to emphasise. For example, as Dr. Fakhruddin would brilliantly put it, ‘What is below the surface is important in a Haiku – the words float on the surface, the emotions below.” 

The prosodic and other parameters of these short verse forms, instead of being looked upon as shackles, have to be viewed and availed of as welcome disciplining or channelising factors. For, severe brevity is the soul of these forms, even as suggestiveness is. It is well known that poetic imagination is luxuriant and needs to be curbed. By their demand for severe brevity and adherence to other norms, these short verse forms help discipline the mind to eschew all non-essentials and focus on the core idea. In the white – heat of poet’s creativity, all the gross gets burnt out and what emerges is only the pure glow of truth. This involves a state of deep meditation, ‘sadana,’ not unlike penance. As the outstanding practitioner Dr. Fakhruddin would tell you, it is an elevating, self-enriching experience. Therefore, far from being a light-hearted preoccupation, a serious engagement with these verse forms is a kind of spiritual exercise.