Soft Lyrics

Mahesh Paudyal 

My first encounter with Santosh Pokharel’s poems—’first’ because of the limitation of my reading horizon—through his anthology Modesty Poems which inspired me to draw two quick impressions about him. First, he was perhaps exposed to English poetry before the advent of postmodern times, when diction started taking shape more from the hubbub of the day-to-day affairs in the marketplace, instead of from a lexicon or from the classic work of a master artist. Second, he leaves a contemporary reader baffled by the in-ward looking contemplations his poems present, mysteriously keeping themselves away from what is happening around the world, except in one or two occasions, when his poems borrow from some terrorist incidents in the Middle East and Africa or issues of earthquake and Indian embargo on Nepal. The rest of the time, he is complacent, looking inward and talking about love, nostalgia and peace. He appears like a distant grandchild of the nineteenth century British romantics, both in diction and in content. 

My claim about his possible introduction to poetry before the advent of postmodern times has two logics. One, the diction he has used in his poems is a direct influence of that time, when poetry used to be—I deliberately use the past tense ‘used to be’—the genre that used the highest, most ornate, indirect, figurative and the most metaphoric language. With the passage of time, poetry has moved from these brackets and situated itself in the marketplace, where people from every quarter come and convene. There are cyber merchants, technocrats, food and taste engineers, movie makers and goers, spurious gold merchants, non-straight sexualities, migrants, divorcees, cross-genetic progenies, and big and small screen celebrities. As language is the common domain where each of them find themselves best expressed, language today has more or less become ‘fragmentary’, and people speak in phrases, where even a short utterance has words flowing in from multiple quarters. One of the impacts of this ‘salad-bowl syndrome’ of language has been that, great  works like epics, which call for the richest and the most standard variant of a language, are dying out, not only in Nepal but also around the world. Poetry, in the classical sense is facing the same problem. Anyone sticking to the ornate language today sounds archaic, and there is a lot of risk practicing the same language for poetry published today for contemporary, digital, globalized and heterogeneous audience. In these poems, I found Santosh Pokharel taking that risk. It requires a lot of courage to do that, and I congratulate him for doing so. 

His diction, which is musical and figurative, borrows also from French, and they are words we the students of English literature have come across in books of great European masters. This makes me think, Santosh is a voracious reader of classical literature, and he derives his vocabulary from there, and not from the air. 

And now, my second claim: the inward looking tendency! Much of poetry today is loud and heavily inflected with political sloganism. It has become a form of propaglit—propaganda literature—because, poetry has not ramained an artistic maneuver alone; it has become a tool to express political dissent, and to plead for rights by advocacy groups. In that, poetry in most of the cases has become a medium of expressing socio-political realities, commentaries and reflections. Judged against this very character of the latest trait of poetry, Santosh appears quite immune to such ‘externalities’ and is complacent exploring his internal world. Thus, love, eternality of life, man-god relations, man-nature relations, nostalgia for home and the past, love for his father and the missed fairs and festivals, description of women’s beauty, etc. make the domain of his poetry, and by that very token, he is a romantic writer, only occasionally influenced by the immediate political present. This is confirmed by his own claims in the “Foreword”, which is also placed in verse: 

Those who sing the nature’s song
Poet they are, may lives prolong!
Love and beauty they adore
Cease to nature with this lore. 

An inquiry into the range of his issues and subjects brings us the reason for classifying him among the romantics. A few of his poems, like “My Solemn Vow” are observations of nature, not only its positive and bright aspect, but also its grimmer side. As for example, after mentioning the bright side of the sun, the moon and the stars, he says, “By fate they all go off likewise.” This empathetic engagement with nature is indicative of the fact that he is not just emotionally overwhelmed by the sublime character of nature; he is also conscious of the nemesis that plagues nature as it plagues the human world. By that token, his romanticism has a realistic edge as well. We find several poems in the anthology, which certify that edge. 

Love is another dominant theme of his poems. Love, for him, is a spiritual experience, more akin to its Platonic side than on the carnal side. Though several of his poems including “She in her cold days”, “Always praise”, “Inamorata”, “Highland lass” “Maiden Inamorata” and “Hypnotic Beauty” are poems of this category, one binding thread of these poems, in spite of appearing physically infatuated at places, are the poet’s Platonic view of love. 

Nostalgia is another important tone we notice in Santosh Pokharel’s poetry. He is deeply nostalgic of the bygone days, when life was all but joy in his boyhood days. Such poems deeply move the readers, as they bind them with threads of memory with their own past. In recalling the past times, the poet has pulled in his family, especially his father, his playmates, a Peepal tree, those fairs and carnivals, those thrilling birthday celebrations, the serenity of his village, and what not! One poem, “My Village”, sums up all his nostalgia, for it brings to memory the missed universe with all its innocence and serenity against the hullaballoo and confusion of the urban space where the poet lives. He writes: 

My heart does boil
I love that soil
As then and always
But has been busy nowadays
In urban life and its run
And now
My intent and my vow
Nothing can stun! 

Other romantic engagements, like those dealing with women’s refreshing company, the cloud’s dynamic nature, the humming and flow of a stream, the growth of the bamboo shoot, and that distant rustic civilization are domains where the true poetic personality of the poet are to be sought. Besides these light-hearted, sentimental and emotionally-charged romantic poems, there are a few that present philosophical contemplations on the grave realities of life. One of them is “Tomb of a Sage”—a poem dedicated to Shivpuri Baba. The poem describes a still, solemn and chilling graveyard, where a corpse lies buried, and in rest. How the poet describes this stillness bears some similarity with the one Thomas Grey does in his “Country Churchyard”: 

As if everything is still
As if every knit in the reel
As if every way they untie
Our sighs for the wise do reveal. 

Another poem “Pyre”—in fact a thanatopsis, contemplating on death—describes a corpse awaiting cremation, and the poet suddenly concludes: “That may come out/Of the devout/That dies with this imagination.” 

Pokharel’s romanticism travels hand and hand in rationality. The contemporary and temporally aware citizen inside him, therefore, cannot always keep quiet in response to what is happening around the world today. He has responded, and the responses are not only emotionally charged, but also apparently extreme, as is the characteristics of the romantic writers. As for example, he advises the Boko Haram terrorists, “Don’t do follies/Don’t go mad” with an innocent imagination that they would listen so easily. The poem alludes to an incident where two hundred young girls were abducted by the terrorists. They have continued their madness in spite of global scale actions and appeals, but have given no heed to that. The poet’s innocent appeal, “Grant them emancipation/And he hailed warm” might still be a far cry and this might sound an over-romanticized emotionalism, but the appeal does reveal his soul that pines for peace. He has also furnished poems on the recent Indian blockage on Nepal, the terrible earthquake, and the war in Gaza. These are drift poems in his romantic mainstream, and they are those that save him from the allegation of escaping from the immediately reality. This confirms why critic Rajan Pokharel says, Satosh is less like Keats, who would suggest a way to escape by making use of ‘negative capabilities’. Poems on engineers and the Aryan Race—two typologies where the poet belongs—are eulogies on his profession and race, and I fear, they might invite him the allegation of being a soft chauvinist. 

Santosh Pokharel needs to do away with two things. First, his obsession with rhymes, and thus his attempt to find rhyming and alliterative words is his biggest weakness. In the first place, this doesn’t appeal a modern reader, trained in a language that has freed itself from archaic vocabularies, metaphysical conceits and distant metaphors. In fact, it sounds nothing more than the romantic hangover, and reveals that the poet is not much aware of the mentalities of his readers today. Musicality in today’s poems come more from their being near to the language of the everyday speaker, and close to the reality of their lives. Second, in his endeavors to be stylistically idiosyncratic, he has literally defaulted on the grammatical expectations of the English language, in the degree that it cannot be overlooked simply by saying, it is ‘poetic license’. Examples in the text are aplenty.