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Feelings and emotions rarefied,
Are the stuff that the goddess of poesy
Feeds on.
The raison d'être of poesy
Lies not in the spontaneous
Vomiting of emotions raw,
Nor in the showcasing of fireworks
Of similes and metaphors.
II
The be-all and end-all of poesy
Be not to create the soda water effect.
A connoisseur with a catholic taste
May like many different things.
But to have a taste for things different,
Is not having a taste without discrimination.
Such a poesy, none with a catholic taste,
Shall ever swallow.
III
Only those that can,
Tame the spate of raw emotions,
Manage well through cool control,
And equipoise special,
Be allowed to tread the domain of poesy.
Mere use of phrases silken,
And open invitation to words vulgar,
To earn cheap cheers, applause and adulation,
Kills the purity,
That the philistines do not know of
philistines that are but,
Threats to culture and sobriety.
Poesy is no business mean.
It lies not in trading in ribaldry and buffoonery.
IV
Its creation is but an assignment,
Sacred to its creators,
Who have been assigned the sobriquet great:
‘Unacknowledged legislators of the world’.
Poets beckon to the nation’s future
And the humanity large,
Who have intimations of immortality as well.
V
Let all take note of this:
When this code be violated,
The cherubic maid of poesy
Shall stand cruelly raped,
And her chastity outraged.
The vulgar words go
To pierce her like anything.
She stands in shame,
With her body exposed,
And shameless onlookers gobbling her up,
Through their eyes.
VI
I know it well, some smirks are caused
By my words.
But I care not for the arrows of
Scorns and vitriols,
Of those that find my sayings frivolous.
But I pursue it,
With the vigour same,
Though it may not vouchsafe
The applause from the masses.
VII
I end with a message clear:
Let not foul words their entry get
Into the gates of the portals of poesy, my dear.
Such themes shall vitiate the minds of young and old alike.
I am sanguine,
Must there be some souls noble,
Imbued with feelings sublime,
Endowed with care and circumspection,
That look askance,
At professors of vulgarity,
Who pat themselves,
With an army of cronies behind them,
Who cry: “Bravo! Bravo!”
VIII
I repeat again,
Such a species of poesy
Is a bubble in the air,
No sooner does it appear,
Then it disappears in the thin air,
Which is the hallmark of poesy cheap.
For it gives out only titillations sensual,
For it provides not the delights enduring,
Nor such experiences that rise to ecstasy, eternal and enduring.
I end with questions to you all:
Have you found the footprints of such poesy
On the sands of time?
Can one stooping to conquer praise,
Be labelled as a worshipper of poesy?
(The trigger to this composition lay in a very strong reaction to the use of certain body parts of females in a poem and that too by a female writer herself in the year 2011 in a Facebook poetry group, hailing from a foreign country.) |
