Open poetry sessions without a single theme offer a wonderful variety of poetry for readers to listen to and appreciate.
Sun and moon represent mother-daughter love
In this session one reader’s recent bereavement caused her to select a poem that extols maternal love:
Over my heart, in the days that are flown,
No love like mother-love ever has shone;
No other worship abides and endures,—
Faithful, unselfish, and patient like yours:
…
Clasped to your heart in a loving embrace,
With your light lashes just sweeping my face,
Never hereafter to wake or to weep;—
Rock me to sleep, mother, – rock me to sleep!
Generally we recite ghazals by Urdu poets, but here several short poems of Faiz were presented. One is title Word:
A word of affection :
Like a joyful glance -
One which carries the caress of soft ,warm lips .
Brilliant - like a surge of molten gold .
The very spring of excitement in the lovers’ embrace.
Vallathol Narayana Menon oil painting
Devika, though not practiced in the Malayalam recital of poems, took great care to chant the well-known poem of Mahakavi Vallathol whose theme is the primacy of the mother-tongue in attaining the full growth of the mind. He labels other languages as foster mothers (Dhatrimar) – only the mother tongue can speak one’s soul
Other languages are merely foster mothers;
One’s own mother tongue is the true mother.
Only by partaking of the nurturing milk of a mother’s affection
Can children attain full growth.
Kamala Das – ‘I speak three languages, write in Two, dream in one’
In direct opposition to this the modern Malayali poet, Kamala Das, asks to be left alone in her choice of English as the language of her poetry (though her essays and short stories are in Malayalam).
Why not let me speak in
Any language I like? The language I speak,
Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses
All mine, mine alone.
…It voices my joys, my longings, my
Hopes,
She affirms her identity in her choice of language.
The poet Wendell Berry describes the wondrous peace that nature brings:
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
Pamela chose a difficult poet, Vijay Seshadri, who has been recited before. The poet is describing disparate scenes – being ushered into a nightclub in Manhattan, watching a Guatemalan boy declaiming impressive texts in English on the subway, and
the angel with the flaming sword
bringing in the sheep and waving away the goats,
It seems there is some confusion in the mind, which is wholly legitimate in a poet. But it has one estimable quality: each reader can decide what the poet is actually saying.
Glistening fish scales ... are sequins on his vest
Elizabeth Bishop is a poet whose language has crystalline clarity. It describes ordinary scenes, smelly scenes, messy scenes, of fishhouses – but with the kind of evocation only a true poet can bring to a fishmonger’s job:
while he waits for a herring boat to come in.
There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb.
He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty,
from unnumbered fish with that black old knife,
the blade of which is almost worn away.
Another poet who found his voice in applying perspicuous language to daily events was William Carlos Williams, doctor and poet. Here he describes a Dawn and its colour –
stirring it into warmth,
quickening in it a spreading change,—
bursting wildly against it as
dividing the horizon, a heavy sun
lifts himself—is lifted—
bit by bit above the edge
Jacob's Ladder
Thomo’s selection of a religious poem by Francis Thompson produced some debate as to how true it is to assert that the ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ is visible on Earth to the attentive human. On the evidence, barring the unspoilt wonders of Nature, wherever humans have intervened there is mostly ugliness, death and destruction – so it was asserted by a contrarian. The apotheosis with which the poem opens –
O world invisible, we view thee,
O world intangible, we touch thee,
O world unknowable, we know thee,
Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!
– is something a mystic can declare, but not you and me. Clearly the poet has had a ‘vision’ and wants to share it, using extravagant phrases like ‘many-splendoured thing’ and the image of a ladder (Jacob's ladder) between London’s Charing Cross and Heaven on which angels are traipsing up and down! Being convinced depends on how credulous you are …
Odysseus
Two readers, including our own Talitha in Trivandrum who joined us, chose excerpts from Homer’s Odyssey impelled by the recent film of Christopher Nolan. Joe’s reason for the choice was that the film costing hundreds of millions to produce, did not contain even a few lines of poetry from the 12,110 lines comprising the entire Odyssey. How egregious is that!
Therefore he chose a passage from Book 23 where by a sema (a secret) Odysseus discloses something known only to him and Penelope so that she recognises him finally after 20 years of absence. Talitha’s passage from Book 1 evoked a lot of discussion about the law of hospitality (xenia), and the PTSD left by the destruction of Troy on Odysseus; not to speak of the nature of heaven. Parallels with the Indian epic of the Mahabharata were enlightening.
Therefore he chose a passage from Book 23 where by a sema (a secret) Odysseus discloses something known only to him and Penelope so that she recognises him finally after 20 years of absence. Talitha’s passage from Book 1 evoked a lot of discussion about the law of hospitality (xenia), and the PTSD left by the destruction of Troy on Odysseus; not to speak of the nature of heaven. Parallels with the Indian epic of the Mahabharata were enlightening.
Arundhaty
About the Poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz
Faiz Ahmad Faiz (13 February 1911 – 20 November 1984) was a Pakistani poet and author of Urdu and Punjabi literature. Faiz was one of the most well-known Urdu writers of his time and remains influential in Pakistan and India. He was also a teacher, military officer, journalist, trade unionist, and broadcaster.
Faiz was the first Asian poet to be awarded the Lenin Peace Prize (1962) by the Soviet Union and was also nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was posthumously honoured when the Pakistan Government conferred upon him the nation's highest civil award—the Nishan-e-Imtiaz—in 1990.
Faiz's poetry consistently voiced the struggles of the oppressed against tyranny.
His poem
Bol, ke lab azaad hain tere,
Bol ke Sach zinda hai ab tak,
Bol, Jo kuch kahena hai kah le
– became the anthem of freedom of speech and human rights. He was imprisoned for four years in the early 1950s accused in the Rawalpindi Conspiracy case for allegedly plotting to overthrow the Govt. Even in prison he continued to write.
Faiz Ahmad Faiz
Progressive Writers Movement
Faiz was a member of the Progressive Writers' Movement . This aligned him with intellectuals who believed that Art should reflect the struggles of common people. For Faiz poetry was not merely an aesthetic exercise but a means to awaken social consciousness.
Melding Romance with Revolution
One of his unique contributions was the blending of romantic imagery with revolutionary themes.
Chains and prisons: symbolise repression
Spring( Bahar): stands for revolution and renewal.
Beloved (Mehboob): frequently becomes a symbol for the motherland.
Such as his famous poem Mujh Se Pehli Si Mohabbat Mere Mehboob Na Maang
Another very famous poem is Ham Dekhenge
Hum Dekhenge
Lazim hai ki Ham bhi Dekhenge
Wo din ke jis ka wada hai
We shall see
It is certain that we too shall see
The day that has been promised.
Arundhaty read three poems: A Word, Let It Be, A Lover to His Beloved
“Very nice, so beautiful,” were the remarks of readers.
Pam said she would sing 2 lines from a ghazal by Faiz Ahmed, called Tum aaye ho na shab-e-intizar guzri hai. (Neither have you arrived, nor has the night of waiting passed). Consult:
Mehdi Hasan singing the ghazal
This ghazal was taught to Pamela by Ustad Bilal Ahmed Khan of the Delhi Gharana.
It's a very beautiful one and just as Arundhaty said, it sounds like a love song but it's actually to the motherland. It's contra the British. That's why he was considered a revolutionary.
Devika
This time Devika chose a Malayalam poet for a change. She does not read Malayalam, so it was quite a task. She chose the poem, then made her husband Achu read it out and then the poem’s transliteration into English.
A few mistakes may have cropped up but she did her best. Joe has translated the whole thing for everybody using Google Translate. The English version is on one side, the Malayalam with her transliteration is there on the other side.
We have so many famous poets in Kerala Devika thought why not just do one of them. She chose Vallathol Narayana Menon, who is a very well-known poet from Kerala. Vallathol was a Malayalam poet and one of the triumvirates of modern Malayalam poetry, along with Asan and Ulloor. The honorific Mahakavi was applied to him in 1913 after the publication of his Mahakavya Chitrayogam.
The modern triumvirate shaped early 20th century Malayalam literature and ushered in the era of romanticism and social awakening.
Vallathol was a nationalist poet who blended classical Sanskrit tradition with freedom movement themes and founded the Kerala Kalamandalam to revive Kathakali.
Kumaran Asan, a philosopher, social reformer and a disciple of Sree Narayana Guru transformed Malayalam verse from traditional epic meta-physical styles into deep lyrical and humanistic expressions.
Ulloor Paramasivam Iyer was a classical scholar, historian and civil servant known for his epic work Umakeralam and the monumental literary history, Kerala Sahitya Charitram.
Vallathol was born in Malappuram district near Tirur. He did not receive any formal education but was trained in Sanskrit language, first by a scholar and later by his uncle Ramanunni Menon who also taught him Ashtanga Hridayam, a medical treatise. Vallathol soon began helping his uncle in medical practice.
Vallathol Narayana Menon statue in the Kerala Kalamandalam founded by him
He actively participated in the nationalist movement. He attended the All India Conference in 1922 and 1927. He rejected the Royal Honour bestowed upon him by the Prince of Wales during his India visit in 1922. Vallathol remained a great admirer of Mahatma Gandhi and wrote the poem Ente Gurunathan (My Great Teacher) in his praise.
Vallathol began losing his hearing due to a ear and nose condition in his early twenties. He became totally deaf by the time he was thirty. He turned his hearing loss into art by writing the famous poem Badhia Vilpam (Lament of a Deaf Person) in 1910. Despite becoming stone deaf, he continued composing rhythmically complex poetry, and founded the Kerala Kalamandalam to revive Kathakali. He travelled internationally. He is known as the Kerala Valmiki as he translated the ancient epic Valmiki Ramayana into Malayalam verse.
He was married to Madhavi Amma and had six children. Not much is known about his children except his youngest daughter Vasanthi Menon who was active in cultural spheres and the Kerala Kalamandalam.
The title of “Kavisarvabhauma” was conferred upon him by the Maharaja of Cochin, meaning Supreme King of Poets. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1954, and in 1978 a commemorative stamp was released in honour of Vallathol.
The poem Ente Bhasha exalts the mother tongue as a biological mother, while comparing other languages to a foster mother. It champions pride in Malayalam, arguing that true intellectual and emotional growth happens only through one's native speech. Every language will say that, but since Devika is a Malayali, she agreed with it! Not that she learned Malayalam in a literary way.
She recited the poem as though you were chanting a mantra.
KumKum asked why she was reciting in a sing-song way. That's how Malayalam poetry is recited, said Saras. Malayalam poetry is always chanted.
Devika listened to quite a few poems on YouTube to get it right. It sounded ‘adequately strange’ to KumKum so she said she would read the translation later.
Geetha
Geetha went next with the poem Introduction by Kamala Das.
Joe said her poem following on Vallathol’s Ente Bhasha is quite significant for the contrasting views between these two Malayali poets.
Kamala Das says
I speak three languages, write in
Two, dream in one
In this poem, she says, why don't you leave me alone to write in any language I please?
Why not leave
Me alone, critics, friends, visiting cousins,
Every one of you? Why not let me speak in
Any language I like? The language I speak,
Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses
All mine, mine alone.
It is half English, half Indian, funny perhaps, but it is honest,
It is as human as I am human, don't
You see? It voices my joys, my longings, my
Hopes,
Vallathol maintains an author can only be authentic in the mother-tongue; Kamala Das refutes him.
Both wrote in Malayalam. She wrote all her short stories and essays in Malayalam.
Geetha gave a short bio. She acknowledged Joe’s useful blog post on Kamala Das:
It showed so many aspects of the same person. She really enjoyed it.
Kamala Das, also widely known by her Malayalam pen name Madhavikutty, and later as Kamala Suraiyya, was a pioneering poet. She was born in Punnayurkulam, in present-day Thrissur district of Kerala on 31 March 1934, to V. M. Nair, a managing editor of the widely circulated Malayalam daily Mathrubhumi, and poet Nalapat Balamani Amma, a renowned Malayali family. Kamala got her family name, Nalapat, through matrilineal succession.
Her mother was a celebrated Malayali poet, grand-niece of writer Nalapat Narayana Menon. Kamala married a bank officer, K. Madhavadas, at the age of 15 but in her poem, she says 16. She had three sons.
Often called the mother of modern English Indian poetry, she was a prominent confessional poet who wrote candidly about female sexuality, love, loneliness, and patriarchal oppression. She authored works in both English and Malayalam. A notable collection is Summer in Calcutta. Today's poem and introduction is from this collection, which was written in 1965.
Then followed The Descendants in 1967, The Old Playhouse and Other Poems in 1973, Only the Soul Knows How to Sing in 1996.
Her autobiography was serialised and was known as Ennde Katha in Malayalam. It was published in English as My Story, and became a sensation known for its fearless and intimate revelations.
A short story collection called Thanuppa was published in 1967. And a memoir called Balikala Smaranagal, 1987. And the novel Alphabet of Lust.
She converted to Islam when she fell in love with a younger man, a Muslim. This was in December 11, 1999 at the age of 65, and she adopted the name Kamala Suraiyya.
She founded the Lok Seva Party and unsuccessfully contested in the 1984 Indian parliamentary elections. She passed away at the age of 75 on May 31, 2009 in Pune. Her body was brought to Kerala where she received full state honours and was interred at Palayam Jama Masjid in Thiruvananthapuram.
The key aspect of the poem Introduction is that she defends her choice to write in English. She replies to the critics around her. She asserts that English is natural to her inner life, famously stating that she speaks in three languages, writes in two and dreams in one. She also rejects patriarchal gender roles. The poem rejects traditional expectations placed on Indian women, including domestic confinement, wearing saris and passive behaviour.
She also adopts in the poem, she says, masculine trousers and short hair to defy societal traditions. But she has never been photographed in trousers to our knowledge. Here she is in a sari:
Kamala Das young in sari
Das recounts being married off prematurely at age 16 and facing emotional and physical alienation in a cold male dominated union. Towards the end of the poem, the speaker moves past personal suffering to claim a shared human and female experience. She embraces the duality of sinner and saint and proclaims her right to an independent identity by asserting herself:
I too call myself I
In the poem she's talking about herself only, but says others also could share the same individuality if only they would dare to express it. She is identifying herself with all the people, young and old.
It's the same with man. The man calls himself I, and finally, she's giving herself an identity equal to that of any patriarchal man. Geetha liked her for her boldness. She is very creative as a poet.
Priya has a line from her personal notes, said KumKum. She called herself, ‘a river in spate.’ When Priya asked her about this, and the man in her life, after she had just converted. She wore a burqa with mehndi and all that. And then she said, ‘Moley, let it be.‘ She liked to touch people. “She’s related to my brother-in-law,” said Saras, who has seen her a couple of times. She's a very, what the kids nowadays say, touchy-feely kind of person.
Priya asked her about her becoming a Muslim, and she replied “Who can take Guruvayurappan away from me? Guruvayurappan is there in my heart.” Note: Guruvayurappan is a form of Lord Vishnu worshipped in Kerala, and is the presiding deity of the famous Guruvayur Temple.
Kumkum might remember, the late Indira Outcalt told us the story about staying in the same building in Bombay. Indira's mother had warned her not to go there. “Don't go to that woman's place. She's not a good girl. She's not a good woman.”
Saras asked Devika, do you remember the Nair men and families, used to say, “How could she write things like that?”
Indira Outcalt said that she learned the word ‘semen’ from her. Indira's mother was shocked. Like, where did you learn this? She replied, “Come on upstairs with me,” for they lived in the same mansion in Bombay.
Her husband was working for the Reserve Bank of India there. But she was in Calcutta for a long time in her teens.
When she wanted to marry the Muslim person, who was much younger than her and already married, it created quite a furore. He didn't marry her, though she converted with that hope.
Joe
Joe was going to recite from the Odyssey., of which a new movie directed by Christopher Nolan came out recently. The reason he picked the Odyssey was because he missed the poetry of Homer in the movie, which did not have even two lines of poetry in the entire 172 minutes long movie.
Joe thought: are they serious? Would anyone make a movie of a Shakespeare play without a single line from its text? After he saw the movie on the opening day, he realised Nolan had a very different purpose – making a movie for its spectacular adventure scenes. They said he relied on Emily Wilson’s translation, but she panned the movie severely – see Emily Wilson’s Takedown of The Odyssey in The NYTimes
Wilson criticised the film for having “nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history, war“ and lacking overall “psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth.“ She characterised the script as “abysmal“ with a “gimmicky“ structure, remarking, “I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script.“ Despite Nolan citing her translation as the inspiration for an allegedly complicated hero, Wilson argued his version (with actor Matt Damon as Odysseus) felt like a “traumatised Jason Bourne“ driven by self-pity rather than multifaceted desires. “It’s a family-friendly audiovisual spectacle, like an elaborate Fourth of July fireworks display — and with about the same level of narrative and emotional depth,” she wrote. Here are further notes from the review in The Guardian newspaper.
Daniel Mendelsohn from whose translation Joe was reading wrote “Whatever his lifelong fascination with the epic, Nolan has merely remade Homer’s hero in his own image, just as he has imposed on Odysseus’s adventures values utterly foreign to Homer.”
In any case Nolan’s purpose was very far from celebrating Homer as a poet. Therefore Joe decided to celebrate Homer as a poet by reading one of the dramatic passages, and chose the translation by Daniel Mendelsohn. After reading both, Emily Wilson’s as well as Daniel Mendelsohn’s he saw that Mendelssohn had a far more luscious take on Homer’s actual words, expanding on the actual Ancient Greek, which he must have come to love. Mendelsohn was an expert in ancient Greece and its language which has little to do to do with modern Greek, as he tells us.
There are many passages which are quite dramatic and have beautiful descriptions. He chose this from the very end of the book, where Odysseus has already returned to Ithaca. He has gone through many levels of making himself introduced to the completely new scene that is in his palace, all the suitors of his wife feasting there and so on. Finally, he makes it through the bow test and he is with her, but she has not yet recognised him.
Penelope and her maid in the palace
In this is passage Odysseus, and Penelope, his wife, and Eurycleia, the maid of Penelope, are together. And this is what happens.
This is the final sign, the secret sign (sema), which is only known to him and her, by which she could identify her.
Nothing definitive can be said about Homer in the sense that we don't have all the facts of his life, so one can't tell where he was born and such details, and where he died here or was buried and where he travelled and so on. Everything is conjecture.
Of course, there are busts of him in marble and paintings done in modern times of him. The story is he was a blind person, he was a bard; that means he was a singer, who went from court to court, or house to house, wherever he was hired, and narrated tales in poetic language, chanting just as they did in ancient Greece. And not all his words came from him necessarily. They were gathered up from the tales of the past that had been recited by many others before him for hundreds of years. He is regarded as the one who assembled all these tales, and the folklore about gods, and men fighting and gods favouring this person over that person, and the adventures. He put a definitive poetic structure that has come down to us via manuscripts as dactylic hexameter. The two collections he made have gone down in the history of literature, the Iliad and the Odyssey, which have became classic texts in the Western tradition, and they will continue to be read.
The text was finally put together several hundred years after he lived sometime around 500 BCE. By that time, the language had developed. The Greek alphabet didn't come from them, it came from the Phoenicians.
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Odyssey 15th-century manuscript of Book I written by scribe John Rhosos (British Museum)
And then it was written down, and there are several recensions of that text. The first printed text was in the 15th century in Italy, an Illuminated Script. And then of course there are modern editions and so on and so forth.
,%20from%20the%20first%20printed%20edition%20of%20Homer's%20collected%20works,%20published%20in%20Florence,%20Italy,%20in%20December%201488%20by%20Bernardo%20and%20Nerio%20Nerli.jpg)
Page from Homer's Odyssey (Odyssea), from the first printed edition of Homer's collected works, published in Florence, Italy, in December 1488 by Bernardo and Nerio Nerli
The Odyssey tells the story of how one of the heroes of the Iliad, Odysseus, who planned the trickery of the Trojan Horse, and finally gets home after 10 years and many adventures en route.
The Odyssey is also a an inquiry into the nature of identity: who are you as you progress through time and life?
The Odyssey is a product of Ancient Greece which began circulating around 750 to 500 BCE, before the classical era of Greek tragedy, Athenian democracy, and so on. Tales about kingdoms that flourished long before in 1200 to 1150 BCE were circulating for a long time, sung by bards and poets. The only two complete epics about the Trojan War that have come down to us are the Iliad, about events that took place during the final year of the war, and the Odyssey, about the nostos, or “return,” of one particular hero.
Homer's Bust in the British Museum. It is a Roman copy of a lost 2nd-century BC Hellenistic original
The Homeric epics emerged from a long oral tradition of hundreds of years. They began as relatively short compositions by pre-literate bards who drew on legends about the Trojan War and myths about the various gods. The first definitive edition may have been written down in 500 BCE. Homer, the blind bard, was therefore by this accepted theory, not the sole author of the tales, but the transcriber and poet who recast the oral tradition into a strict form of verse called the dactylic hexameter (six feet of 3 syllables each consisting of one stressed and two unstressed syllables, DUM-da-da, though the metre varies). Homer in the process used all the traditional elements of poetic composition that have come down to us, namely:
Meter
Assonance
Alliteration
Enjambment
etc.
But no rhyming, as in the original.
Mendelsohn, the translator, took all these elements to heart and applied his immense scholarship, honed by associating with first class mentors, and his own reading of the extensive literature on translating Homer and Homer’s words. He wanted to make an accurate translation, that was line for line. And recreated the amplitude of the original.
Joe was struck by this edition. Daniel Mendelssohn is a professor at Bard College in New York, along the Hudson River, this college. He was quite learned in ancient Greek, and he decided to translate it in the same meter in which it had been written, namely a hexameter, each foot containing three syllables, 18 syllables per line, so very long lines. Whereas the other recent edition, Emily Wilson's, is done in iambic pentameter, which is a normal English metre for unrhymed poetic verse. Of course, iambic pentameter is more rapid in flow than the hexameter of the Greeks. I think Emily Wilson's is a very good translation. It flows rapidly, you can read it rapidly, but it doesn't have the amplitude of Mendelsohn’s more accurate translation.
Saras asked one quick question. Kavita's poem by Constantine Cavafy is also translated by Daniel Mendelssohn. The same person?
Yes, the same person. Much later in life, Mendelsohn learned modern Greek, so he could go to Greece and converse with the people. He learned by immersing himself in modern Greece. In our poetry sessions in KRG, it was the late Indira Outcalt who first introduced Cavafy with his famous poem Ithaca.
After that, KumKum’s reading expanded. She recalls Indira saying, “How could we be called literary readers if we don't read poems?” KumKum didn't know this lovely poet, so she read. KRG has done a lot of education for her, she said. Others chimed in with the same sentiment., “KRG has done a lot for all of us in reality.” Indira insisted KRG should not be a reading group confined to novels. It should have poetry. And everybody agreed then. And yes, here we are still reading poetry, thanks to Indira..
KumKum
Vallathol is not widely known outside Kerala. But with good translations into other languages, especially English (not his Bhasha), he can be read more widely.
KumKum chose a poet from the state of Kentucky in America. Her son-in-law, Herman and daughter Rachel went to Kentucky for a cycle ride on the Kentucky Bourbon Trail. The Trail ensures you can taste the signature whiskey of the state, Bourbon, at many distilleries en route. KumKum got interested in Kentucky and the news arrived on the 31st of August, this Kentucky poet Wendell Berry had died.
She read up all about him and then found a beautiful poem by him. Wendell Berry, an American poet and author in a variety of genres, died on August 31, 2026. He was 92 years old. He was born on August 5, 1934 in Kentucky, USA and lived most of his life there. Apart a short teaching stint in Stanford University and New York University, he never went out of Kentucky.
He was from a farming family, and all his life he championed the interconnectedness of nature, local community and responsible farming. He lived a very simple life, advocating his philosophy through his copious writing. He was considered a spiritual heir to Henry David Thoreau of Massachusetts. He followed Thoreau's transcendental philosophy and sought the joy of living in nature, just as the English romantic poets did.
Wendell Berry
He was the first living author to be inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame in 1913. He was also awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama in 2010. He published 40 books, including several collections of his poems.
Not many people read his poems beyond Kentucky, but KumKum felt happy to introduce him to our reading group.
She read a popular poem of his called The Peace of the Wild Things.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
Every line speaks to you. You feel blessed to read about the stars. The distant stars during the day are called blind because daylight from our nearby star, the Sun, overpowers them.
Mention of the stars reminded Pamela of a 10-minute stargazing ride in Rajasthan. They had a camel ride during sunset and a dinner on the sand dunes. And after dinner, they went stargazing. All the lights were switched off, the sounds silenced, and everybody was asked to turn their heads up and look at the sky.
It was such a beautiful experience. Pamela was able to recognise the constellation Orion. It was so clear, the sky was so clear, and the stars all around, and perfect silence reigned.
We hardly see any stars in cities. But in Madhya Pradesh, in the summertime, people used to sleep outside, pull out camcorders and sleep on the lawn. That was one time when everyone would be looking at the stars and discussing who can identify which star.
We do see, because when we walk around 7:30 or 8 at night, it's not as clear as what you would see in the other places. But there are stars, and you can see the satellites, said Devika, but only at uncertain times of the year when it is not cloudy. Tall trees or buildings may obstruct the view.
Priya said her grandmother knew the names, like Sapta Rishi, and the stories about the stars. “Arundhaty is also the name of a star,” chimed in our reader by that name.
Geetha said there's an app called SkyView using which you can point your phone up to see star names, constellations, planets, and satellites overlaid on your mobile screen. Saras used it for the longest time.
One of Priya’s friends who went to Kailash in Tibet for the Parikrama said it was mesmerising how the stars seemed to have come down to the earth when looking up from that region. They are that big and so close, you feel as if you can touch them. In fact, the more you look at them, the more close you feel to them, said Pamela.
Atacama desert - night sky
Another place where you get the same feeling of closeness is the Atacama Desert. The same friend of Priya who made the Kailash tour then went to see the Atacama Desert, which covers roughly 120,000 square kilometres across a narrow strip of northern Chile between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes Mountains. The exceptional clarity, high altitude, and lack of light pollution make it home to major optical facilities like the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) and European Southern Observatory telescopes. During rare heavy rainfall years, the desert erupts into a blanket of wildflowers (known as desierto florido). Wildlife includes vicuñas, guanacos, vizcachas, Darwin's leaf-eared mice, and mountain flamingos.
And she mentioned the cactus are huge, rising in the sky, as if the stars had come down to meet them. The huge, towering cacti found in the Atacama Desert are known as the giant cardón. Often called the candelabra cactus, these massive plants are a signature feature of the high-altitude ravines and canyons near San Pedro de Atacama. They routinely grow between 5 to 10 meters (16 to 33 feet) tall and can reach diameters up to 70 centimetres. They grow incredibly slowly—only about 1 centimetre per year—meaning the largest specimens are over 1,000 years old.
Cardon cacti in the Atacama Desert
It was a beautiful description.
Pamela
Pamela chose Vijay Seshadri's poem, Trailing Clouds of Glory. The last part of the poem has a connection to a poem by William Wordsworth.
The meaning was related to Pamela’s experience in Agra when she met the artisans who are descendants of those who had done the inlay work of semiprecious stones in marble for the Taj Mahal. The descendants, the children who are now carrying on the same art, are doing an amazing job, excelling the original work on the Taj Mahal. The smallest item sold there is Rs 15,000. They don't allow you to take photographs because every piece is unique, it's hand done and they don't want anyone to copy it.
Something in this poem by Seshadri struck her imagination and connected it with what she had experienced in Agra.
Vijay Seshadri was born in 1954 in Bangalore and went to North America five years later, first to Ottawa and then to Columbus, Ohio, where his father taught chemistry at Ohio State. His second book, The Long Meadows, centres on a prose meditation about his father's obsession with the American Civil War. His poetry makes use of classically rhymed stanzas, relaxed blank verse and the elastic prose-like line evident in some of the poems in this selection.
The tone is inevitably and unashamedly American, as are the ranges of reference, though there is often a faint but persistent Indian hint and fugitive flavour in his writing. There is a consistent interest from his first book through the selections included here in migration, understood as physical, metaphorical, moral, political and spiritual experience. He is currently a professor at Sarah Lawrence College in New York City.
Vijay Seshadri – Photograph by Beowulf Sheehan
His work has been recognised with a number of honours, including the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. He lives in Brooklyn. So this poem is from a book that was gifted by KRG.
The poem is called Trailing Clouds of Glory. The last line “The Child is father of the Man" is a famous paradoxical line from the 1802 poem My Heart Leaps Up (also known as The Rainbow) by English Romantic poet William Wordsworth.
And the title also, Trailing Clouds of Glory, comes from William Wordsworth's poem Ode: Intimations of Immortality from the collection Recollections of Early Childhood.
There are some parts in the middle which Pamela did not really understand.
“m.c. in heaven spats” – m.c. has the usual meaning Master of Ceremonies.
F train, Joe confirmed is a train connecting Brooklyn (where the poet lives) to Manhattan. It goes under the East river and then comes to Manhattan.
But Pamela really liked the way it was written. Beautiful, almost prose like. However, the last bit is a little puzzling. Is this boy three years old? How could he make erudite statements like this?
I will do such things, what they are yet I know not,
A three year old can't say such words, surely. The meaning is as in Wordsworth’s ending line: your childhood experiences form you as an adult. What you become as an adult is the result of your childhood experiences.
But could that boy have said these words? asked Talitha. It's not realistic to believe that, said Arundhaty. It's an imagined phrase. The poet is visualising the boy saying it.
Look Who's Talking is a movie, you may have seen. It's about how a baby is reacting in his mind to everything that the adults are doing. The baby is not really talking. The baby is observing. And what the baby must be observing about the adults, causes thoughts in its mind. It's a sort of commentary that the movie is doing it.
So the poet here is speaking for the boy. But Arundhaty thought the poet is also talking about some newborn baby, his own newborn. What his son will be or would be or whatever. Something in his mind.
Our children have a mind of their own and they may imbibe something from us. But what they'll do is what they want to do, said Devika.
Geetha said some parents will impose on the child what they themselves missed in life. That is very sad, said Devika. Geetha has seen this amongst her family circles. It is not a futile effort. The children become very good at something because the parents missed that train, like being a tennis star or a musician or whatever, through constant practice and the rigours of training. There is pressure.
KumKum said she wanted to make a nice, likeable husband. (Laughter) Devika said obviously, you are fine with him, for you married him – it was your choice. Some conversation ensued on KumKum’s mostly futile attempts to reform Joe after marrying him.
Priya
Priya said she was still so much drowned in mother-love after the recent death of Ragini, her mother, that she thought she’d choose a poem about mothers. That's sweet, said Geetha.
Elizabeth Akers-Allen is a Victorian American poet. She was a journalist also. She was born in 1832 and died in 1911. She was from Strong in Maine. She started writing poetry quite young, between 12 and 15 years of age. She wrote poetry under the pen name called Florence Percy. Later her first book of poems that brought her fame was called Buds in the Forest Woods of Maine. That was around 1855 and the second book came out in 1866.
She was also a journalist and a poet, one of the women writers of that time. There weren't many. She married one Mr. Taylor and that marriage wasn't a good one. Then she married a sculptor called Benjamin Paul Akers. That's how she got her middle name. But he died within a year.
Elizabeth Akers Allen – bust by her husband Benjamin Paul Akers, ca. 1860
With him she traveled to Italy, where she got tuberculosis and he died. But she began reporting for the Boston Evening Gazette and for the Portland Transcript and the Portland Tribunal. Meanwhile she was working on her poems. This particular poem Rock Me to Sleep became famous because it was set to music and made into a song.
There was another claimant to the same poem, and finally she had to go through legal cases to fight and prove that this was her work. Then there was another poem of hers which became very famous as a song. Her works are now with the Colby College and also the University of New England.
The poem is very simple. It's about the mother. And it's a song also – very moving. Priya felt very nice to read this. It is very popular.
Many of the readers would have either read it or heard the song.
Saras
Saras read a poem by Elizabeth Bishop. She was quite chuffed thinking she was reading Bishop, and introducing a new poet to KRG – but Bishop has been read many times before, starting with Joe in Jan 30, 2009, (https://kochiread.blogspot.com/2009_02_01_archive.html) when Joe took the uncharted step of wading into her work after listening (partially) to the online course on Modern Poetry by Prof Langdon Hammer of Yale at their Open Yale Course site:
Elizabeth Bishop Bio
Bishop (February 8, 1911 – October 6, 1979) was an American poet and short-story writer. She was born in Worcester, Massachusetts and grew up there and in Nova Scotia. Her father died before she was a year old and her mother suffered seriously from mental illness; she was committed to an institution when Bishop was five. Raised first by her maternal grandparents in Nova Scotia, Bishop’s wealthy paternal grandparents eventually brought her to live in Massachusetts.
During her lifetime Bishop was a respected yet somewhat obscure figure in the world of American literature. Since her death in 1979, however, her reputation has grown to the point that many critics, like Larry Rohter in the New York Times, have referred to her as “one of the most important American poets” of the 20th century. Bishop was a perfectionist who did not write prolifically, preferring instead to spend long periods of time polishing her work. She published only 101 poems during her lifetime. Her verse is marked by precise descriptions of the physical world and an air of poetic serenity, but her underlying themes include the struggle to find a sense of belonging, and the human experiences of grief and longing.
Nova Scotia Landscape by Elizabeth Bishop
Bishop worked as a painter as well as a poet, and her verse, like visual art, is known for its ability to capture significant scenes. Sshe was independently wealthy and thus enjoyed a life of some privilege; yet much of her poetry celebrates working-class settings: busy factories, farms, and fishing villages.
Bishop attended Vassar College where she majored in English although she had originally intended to major in music composition and piano. "You had to perform in public once a month. Well, this terrified me. I really was sick. I played once and then gave up the piano because I couldn't bear it. The next year I switched to English."
In addition to working on the school newspaper, The Vassar Miscellany, Bishop founded a literary magazine, Con Spirito, with fellow students Mary McCarthy, Eleanor Clark, and Muriel Rukeyser. It was as a Vassar student that Elizabeth Bishop met the poet Marianne Moore in 1934. Bishop was greatly influenced by Marianne Moore. Regarding Moore's influence on Bishop's writing, Bishop's friend and Vassar peer, the writer Mary McCarthy stated, "Certainly between Bishop and Marianne Moore there are resemblances: the sort of close microscopic inspection of certain parts of experience. However, I think there is something a bit too demure about Marianne Moore, and there's nothing demure about Elizabeth Bishop." Moore helped Bishop first publish some of her poems in an anthology called Trial Balances in which established poets introduced the work of unknown, younger poets. Other influences were American poet Robert Lowell, French poet and critic Charles Baudelaire and English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.
After graduating, Bishop lived in New York and traveled extensively in France, Spain, Ireland, Italy, and North Africa. Her poetry is filled with descriptions of her journeys and the sights she saw. In 1938, she moved to Key West, where she wrote many of the poems that eventually were collected in her first volume North and South (1946). Her second poetry collection, Poems: North & South/A Cold Spring (1955) received the Pulitzer Prize.
In 1944 she left Key West, and for 14 years she lived in Brazil with her lover, Lota de Macedo Soares in Pétropolis, a prominent self-taught Brazilian landscape designer and architect.
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Maria Carlota ‘Lota’ Costallat de Macedo Soares (1910–1967)
After Soares took her own life in 1967, Bishop spent less time in Brazil than in New York, San Francisco, and Massachusetts, where she took a teaching position at Harvard in 1970. That same year, she received a National Book Award in Poetry for The Complete Poems. Her reputation increased greatly in the years just prior to her death, particularly after the 1976 publication of Geography III and her winning of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature.
Elizabeth Bishop in 1940
Elizabeth Bishop won virtually every poetry prize in the country although she insisted, "They don't mean too much." Her first book, North & South, won the Houghton Mifflin Poetry Award for 1946. In 1955, she received the Pulitzer Prize for a volume containing North & South and A Cold Spring. Her next book of poetry, Questions of Travel (1965), won the National Book Award and was followed by The Complete Poems in 1969. Geography III (1976) received the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1976, Miss Bishop became both the first American and the first woman to win the Books Abroad/Neustadt Prize for Literature.
In addition to her volumes of poetry, she translated a famous Brazilian diary, The Diary of Helena Morley, edited and partially translated An Anthology of Contemporary Brazilian Poetry (1972), and was a prolific contributor to The New Yorker. In 1967, Bishop was the recipient of two Guggenheim fellowships. She received honorary degrees from Adelphi, Brandeis, Brown, Dalhousie, and Princeton Universities, as well as from Smith and Amherst Colleges. A chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Bishop was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress in 1949-50.
Sources:
At the Fishhouses is a free verse poem, was published in Elizabeth Bishop‘s collection A Cold Spring (1955). It is one of Bishop’s longest and most ambitious poems, blending precise description with philosophical depth. The poem is set in Nova Scotia, Canada, where Bishop spent part of her childhood. It describes the speaker visiting fishhouses along the shore and talking with an old fisherman who was a friend of the speakers grandfather.
The poem opens with an evening scene at the fish houses. Bishop’s descriptions are extraordinarily detailed. Everything is covered in a patina of silver from the iridescent herring and mackerel scales. The benches, the buildings, the lobster pots, the old man’s vest and thumb are all coated with this silver residue. The effect is both beautiful and slightly eerie.
The speaker’s conversation with the old fisherman is affectionate and gently comic. He is a man deeply rooted in this place and its traditions. Their exchange about the decline of fishing introduces a note of loss and change, themes that run throughout Bishop’s work. The speaker then walks to the water’s edge and encounters a seal who seems curious and responsive. She sings to it, and it seems to listen. This encounter is tender and slightly surreal. The seal acts as a bridge between the human world of the fish houses and the natural, elemental world of the sea. It marks the poem’s transition from description to deeper reflection.
The final section is the poem’s philosophical heart. The speaker looks at the dark, cold water and imagines what it would be like to touch it. It would burn like fire, she says. Bishop describes knowledge as something like the sea: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free. It is always in motion, always shifting. The famous closing phrase, “flowing, and flown,” captures this perfectly. True understanding is not a fixed thing but a process, always arriving and always departing. This is one of the most celebrated passages in all of Bishop’s poetry.
Saras loved the imagery in the poem. At the same time, she was reading a book called The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger which is also set in the fishing community of Massachusetts in the 1990s. Massachusetts is south of the area that Bishop describes in her poem and would by populated by the similar fishing community. As a vegetarian she had always found the Fort Kochi fishing area around the Chinese nets dirty and smelly but somehow this poem made a similar area sound surreal and beautiful. Saras also loved how Bishop moved from the physical to the metaphysical in the last portion of the poem.
Her description of this place was so absolutely perspicuous you could just see the place in your mind. The way she talks about the fish scales, saying
There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb
You can imagine the fisherman scaling those fishes and all those scales sticking to him. It's a beautiful description and also the way that suddenly from this she goes to knowledge right at the end
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
…
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
– from the physical to the metaphysical, she moves so suddenly.
And then you're wondering what about where the knowledge is coming from.
Saras could see so many parallels in this description of hers, of this fish house that she's talking about. Bishop has made fish houses sound so beautiful, and that is what really drew Saras to this poem.
The seal is a character by itself.
One seal particularly
I have seen here evening after evening.
He was curious about me. He was interested in music;
like me a believer in total immersion,
And her wrist is aching because the water is cold.
Shoba
William Carlos Williams (WCW) was born in 1883 as the elder of two sons of an English father and a Puerto Rican mother. He grew up in Rutherford, New Jersey. He was a medical doctor, poet, and novelist. He has been referred to as the most important literary doctor since Chekhov. With Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle, Williams was a leading poet of the imagist movement.
He often wrote of American subjects and themes. He was known as an experimenter, an innovator, and a revolutionary figure in American poetry. Williams lived the remarkably conventional life of a doctor for more than 40 years, serving the citizens of Rutherford. He relied on his patients, the American milieu around him, and his own imagination to create a distinctively American verse.
Williams' father introduced Shakespeare to his sons and read Dante and the Bible to them as well. John Keats and Walt Whitman were his poetic heroes. WCW’s early, uncompleted, and heavily derivative piece – often referred to by scholars as Philip and Oradie – was structurally and stylistically modelled on the 1816 mythological poem of Keats, Endymion.
Williams later shifted away from Keats' traditional rhymed and metered style toward free verse influenced by Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound. Whitman's verse offered an impulse towards freedom and release of the self.
Williams' friendship with Ezra Pound early in his poetic career was a watershed event. Pound introduced him to Hilda Doolittle and painter Charles Dimmer, who became his kindred souls. Under the sharp influence of Pound, Hilda Doolittle, and the Imagist movement, Williams slammed the door on his Keatsian past. He realised that replicating 19th-century British structures could never capture the reality of 20th-century America.
He rejected iambic pentameter in favour of the rhythmic cadences of everyday American speech. He began treating the poem as a visual object on the page, using sharp enjambment and white space to force readers to see words anew. Williams' first book, Poems, was published in 1909 and then The Tempers in 1913. By 1917, and the publication of his third book, Al Que Quiere! The Spanish title translates literally to “To Him Who Wants It”. Williams, who grew up speaking Spanish at home, intended the title to mirror a soccer player calling out for a passed ball.
Williams found his own style. The democratic spirit remained the driving force behind the text. The book’s publication was funded by Williams with a modest $50 and published by Four Seas Company. He adopted the imagist principle of the “direct treatment of the thing,” discarding formal rhyme schemes and meter. Williams looked with his poetic eye at the immediate environment of Rutherford, New Jersey. He dealt with the gritty reality of it and the spoken language of ordinary working-class people he met as a doctor, and this directly shaped the collection's colloquial rhythms.
William Carlos Williams
Williams' profession as a doctor allowed him to write what he chose, free from any kind of financial or political pressure. The trade off was less time for writing. His stamina exceeded that of people with only one occupation. He was willing to live the kind of rushed existence, learning from his first profession as a doctor, and understanding life through his second profession as a poet.
He succeeded in both. Williams' deep sense of humanity pervaded both his work in medicine and his writing. His 1923 book, Spring and All, is considered one of his finest. His collection, Pictures from Brueghel, won a Pulitzer Prize in May 196 (two months after Williams died on March 4, 1963). The collection opens with a title sequence of ten poems based on the paintings of Flemish Renaissance painter Pieter Brueghel the Elder, and also includes two of his earlier collections, The Desert Music (1954) and Journey to Love (1955).
He died in his sleep on March 4, 1963.
This poem Dawn is a description of the sun coming up. The second poem, Dedication for a Plot of Ground, is actually about his grandmother who sailed from England to the USA. The ship ran aground in Azores, a group of islands, in the North Atlantic roughly 1,600 km west of mainland Portugal. This poem is about the grandmother and her rough life as an immigrant.
You can picture a tough determined lady. The poem is almost like a capsule biography of her life., a little prose-like. Saras read one of his poems long ago, The Red Wheelbarrow, a very famous poem. Pamela noted that poem was actually read by Ankush.
Thomo
Thomo chose a poem by Francis Thompson. He's an English poet whose deeply religious and mystical poetry is considered among the most distinctive of the Victorian period. He was born into a Roman Catholic family in 1857. His father was a doctor, and his parents hoped that he would follow the medical profession. In fact, he entered Owens College in Manchester to study medicine, but left after realising that he had no enthusiasm for the profession.
Francis Thompson the poet (image cleaned up)
He then went to London, intending to be a writer. But he experienced extreme poverty and ill health, and spent several years living a precarious existence, sometimes sleeping rough and doing menial work. He also became dependent on opium, which he used partly to deal with severe neurologic pain.
His life changed dramatically when the Catholic magazine Merry England (launched by the author Alice Meynell in 1883) recognised his poetic talent and helped him escape his desperate circumstances and supported his writing.
His first collection, Poems, came out in 1893, which contained The Hound of Heaven, which brought him considerable recognition. His health remained poor, and he suffered from tuberculosis, and he died in London in 1907, aged only 47. He was buried in the Roman Catholic cemetery at Kensal Green in London.
The poem Thomo chose is The Kingdom of Heaven from his 1897 collection, In No Strange Land. It essentially says that God is present everywhere, even when we fail to recognise his presence. According to Thompson, the Kingdom of Heaven is not merely a place the lucky few may enter after death, but a spiritual reality that surrounds us here and now.
This last verse connects directly with the poem's central message, which is that there is no place where God is a stranger. He connects Gennesaret, which is actually the Sea of Galilee, with the river Thames. The divine presence is not confined to biblical landscapes or sacred places. Thompson is suggesting that what appears to us to be an ordinary secular world is actually permeated by the presence of God. It is an eloquent example of Thompson's mystical vision.
Galilee and London, biblical times and modern times, sacred and ordinary, they are all brought together in a single moment. The poem's central thought can be summed up thus: Earth is crammed with heaven. For Thompson, the sacred is not confined to churches, miracles, or a distant afterlife. The ordinary world can become transparent to God's presence if we have the spiritual eye to perceive it.
There are many lines that reminded Thomo of songs he had learned in his childhood at Sunday school like the Negro spiritual We are climbing Jacob's Ladder.
We are climbing Jacob's ladder
We are climbing Jacob's ladder
We are climbing Jacob's ladder
Soldiers of the cross.
Another striking phrase occurs in the stanza:
The angels keep their ancient places;—
Turn but a stone, and start a wing!
’Tis ye, ’tis your estrangèd faces,
That miss the many-splendoured thing.
Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing was a popular song which appeared first in the movie Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955) starring William Holden and Jennifer Jones. It won the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1956. Here is the inimitable Nat King Cole singing it.
Francis Thompson reminded Thomo of Gerald Manley Hopkins. Thomo added that like Blake, who used to see visions of angels, Francis Thompson also had visions. Even in this poem, he keeps mentioning angels several times. The angels may be considered messengers of God at the edge of heaven, whisking into our sight and vanishing from sight. Even the traffic along Jacob's ladder, this ladder from earth to heaven, is actually angels running up and down it, said Talitha. It’s a dream vision of Jacob.
O world unknowable, we know thee,
Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!
The verses remind one of Rupert Brooke’s poem The Great Lover in which he uses the expression “the inenarrable godhead of delight,”
Whom I have loved, who have given me, dared with me
High secrets, and in darkness knelt to see
The inenarrable godhead of delight?
What Thompson says, is
The drift of pinions, would we hearken,
Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.
This means if only we would listen, we could hear the gentle movement of angels’ wings. The poet even suggests there is a ladder for angels between Charing Cross in London and Heaven! Charing Cross and Thames are both references to London.
Joe thought the poem also connects with the prayer of the Our Father, of which the opening lines are
Our Father, who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name;
thy kingdom come;
thy will be done;
on earth as it is in heaven.
Joe said the last is a wish which is not realised really. For when you look around the world today, or in any era, you do not see the kingdom of heaven on earth or the will of the Father being done. Anywhere you look, life is very bleak and wars and alarms of wars and killing and so on dominate the world's news. So far from seeing the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, we mostly see hell on earth. Will we ever see the Kingdom of Heaven on earth?
“We will, Joe, we will”, assured Geetha.
It also reminded Thomo of Amir Khusrau, the poet who is associated with the Persian couplet describing the gardens of Kashmir as a paradise on earth:
Agar firdaus bar roo-e zameen ast, Hameen ast
o hameen ast, o hameen ast
If there is a paradise on earth, it is this, it is this, it is this.
That's certainly true, Joe said. You can go to so many places on this earth and see fantastic beauty, like when you go nearby to the Nilgiris during the Neelakurinji bloom – it is heavenly. Those visions are heavenly, but we are very far from the kingdom of heaven on earth. And Joe thinks that’s how it will always be, an unrealised and unrealisable wish. It's an earnest hope we may pray for, but it is doomed. It's 2000 years we have been praying like that.
Talitha said “But Joe, I feel it's not about Our Father exactly. Here, Thompson is talking more about God as the ground of our being. So whether we are in misery or in joy or whatever our circumstances, he's saying we are living in Him.” Talitha quoted:
Does the fish soar to find the ocean,
The eagle plunge to find the air--
The fish is in the ocean. We don't have to look anywhere. We are already in God in a sense.
Not where the wheeling systems darken,
And our benumbed conceiving soars!--
Hence, not our imagination or our wishing or anything, but we can all, if we could just see it, then we would know that the angels are amongst us and the presence of God is all around us. It's not about an ideal situation or a utopia. It's a philosophical idea that God is ground of our being. We can't get away from him. So it doesn't matter what the circumstances are. Thus spoke Talitha.
As Thomo was reading Saras was thinking about one of our stories in which Prahalad, the son of an Asura, is always praying to God. His father asks him, why are you praying to God? Where is he? Show me where he is. So he says he's everywhere. I mean he's all around. So he says, is he here? Is he in this pillar? And Prahlad answers, yes, he's in the pillar. His dad says, show me. So then the pillar comes and breaks open. That's the story.
But, you know, it reminded Saras wherever we are or whatever you are doing, God is all around us. We don't have to go looking for him. That is what Saras understood from this poem.
That's probably an accurate interpretation, as Talitha says. But in Joe’s view this is abstracting yourself from the Earth, from this actual creation and saying, God is everywhere. God is in your soul. God is in everyone and so on and so forth. But the manifestation of God on the earth in terms of actual events, in terms of actual actions, whether by men on other men, or upon nature, or by men upon created animals, is still very ugly. Yes, you can philosophically abstract away from the reality on Earth. But this Earth is NOT a place, which is heaven. God is really far from the earth.
Seeing Joe’s perplexity, Talitha averred this poem says that when you are so sad why is it? Obviously, because of the misery of his life or the world around him. He says, when you are at the rock bottom, even there, upon thy soul loss shall shine the traffic.
But (when so sad thou canst not sadder)
Cry;--and upon thy so sore loss
Shall shine the traffic of Jacob's ladder
The angels actually shine upon that. You don't realise it, but this is the truth. And remember that Jacob when he woke up from his dream said, so God was in this place and I did not know it. That is the point. That He is there in every situation where we're not ruling out misery and pain and suffering at all.
But said Joe, “If I look at Gaza, there is NO God there. There is only the devil there. There's NO God there. There's only destruction, death, cruelty. I mean, it's complete animality. There is no God there, except it be in the angelic doctors who minister to the wounded in inhuman circumstances like Dr. Alaa al-Najjar.
Priya asked if she could contribute to this philosophy, perhaps the Hindu way of thinking. Destruction is so much a part of that cycle.
We will wait for God to come to men and women, said Joe.
You have to go through that. You have to wait for God to come for years and years and years, said Arundhaty.
Geetha said even in war zones some people go in there to save a child or to do something; there are acts of godliness even in the most terrible situations. Geetha quoted Kamala Das
I am saint. I am the beloved and the
Betrayed. I have no joys that are not yours, no
Aches which are not yours. I too call myself I.
We see that heaven and hell side by side, and we in Kerala definitely experience heaven, said Geetha. We are the lucky ones, actually, said Saras. We are so lucky in many ways. Pointing that out is really appropriate.
Talitha
Talitha hesitated and thought we must all be tired coming to the end of the session But Saras told Tabitha “We love listening to you. Let me tell you, I love listening to you analyse poems. I think it's such a pleasure. I wish you would join us more often.”
“I will when I can, thank you” replied Talitha. It was only when Joe said that he was reading something from the Odyssey that Talitha thought she’d like to read from the Odyssey too, because she was very interested in the figure of Ulysses (which is the Latin name for the Greek hero Odysseus). Her dad, who was an engineer and who knew no other poetry, was very interested in Ulysses for some reason. At every point in the children’s lives, he used to subject them to quotations from the poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson on Ulysses, The Lotos-eaters. It was a bit crazy. The character of Odysseus is therefore something which sparked Talitha’s interest.
The movie caught a lot of flak and criticism. And as Joe said, none of the poetry of Homer was in it, which is crazy. But even so, Talitha found it powerful, particularly scenes like the Trojan horse, which was basically Odysseus's solution to the problem of how to destroy Troy by trickery.
The Trojan Horse devised by Odysseus and seemingly abandoned is carted away by the Trojans and causes their downfall
We never think of the other side of it – the destruction visited on Troy. In this movie you could just see the way Odysseus later realises his accountability through all the sufferings that he goes through at a later point.
He hearkens back to the Trojan War, and thinks “Oh, my God, what did I do?” The director shows it through the silence. There's absolute silence as Odysseus envisions the destruction of Troy. It is harakiri plus wholesale massacre. As Joe was saying it was like Gaza 2023 all around.
The Destruction of Troy which leaves Odysseus with a permanent trauma
In the silence of his mind he's now realising this is what he has done. That is such a powerful scene. The other thing which Talitha loved in this in the book was was about his longing for home. For seven years or so he was kept captive by the goddess Calypso and surrounded by luxury. Everything was supplied, including sex. He was living with her with the promise of immortality.
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The nymph Calypso (played by Charlize Theron) mesmerises Odysseus
So why would he still want to go home? In Talitha’s excerpt today, there's a lovely little bit which talks about his longing to go home, tiny Ithaca, not one of the most prosperous islands in the in the Greek archipelago. It was a poor place. So why then would he want to leave Calypso’s seductions and go home?
That was very touching. The Greeks have this word nostos (νόστος), the root of the word nostalgia in English. It stands for “homecoming,” “return,” or a “safe journey back home.”
The other interesting thing, Talitha didn’t have time to talk about, is the gods. She always thought that the Greek gods were very capricious, which they are in many ways, like Poseidon refusing to let this guy go home and constantly putting hurdles in his way, a storm here, a shipwreck there, and so on.
Talitha didn't realise that they also had some laws of hospitality that were very sacred, and had to be followed and respected. Zeus has a law called xenia, about how you treat a stranger. That is cardinal and all the characters respected it, and those who didn’t like the suitors of Penelope who abused her hospitality, were liable for punishment, which ultimately Odysseus visits upon them.
Odysseus and his protector the goddess Athena
Coming to the reading we have the goddess Athena pleading with Zeus to remove the hurdles that Odysseus faces on his journey home in Ithaca. The poor guy spent 10 years in the exhausting Trojan War and a further 10 years wandering and he still hasn't got home.
… she keeps on coaxing him with her beguiling talk to turn his mind from Ithaca.
But such desire is in him merely to see the hard smoke leaping upward
from his own island that he longs to die.
Those two little sentences pack all his nostalgic desire to get back home to the dear little island where his palace lies. His wife has aged like him. Even Anne Hathaway in the Nolan movie is aged with wrinkles but still beautiful. On the one hand, you have this beautiful nymph/goddess Calypso, who holds him prisoner on the mythical island of Ogygia. And on the other hand, he's dying to return to his beloved virginal wife whom he left twenty years ago for the Trojan War.
Athena, the protector of Odysseus, is still advocating for him.
She asks Zeus:
Are you not moved by this, Lord of Olympus?
In the end Poseidon must relent says, Zeus, though Poseidon holds the grudge that Odysseus had poked out the eye of Polyphemus, the giant bred of Poseidon by Thoösa, daughter of Phorkys.
This passage is from the beginning of the book. Talitha went though a couple of translations and found Robert Fitzgerald’s to be good. She didn't choose Emily Wilson’s translation, thinking she's a woman and might inject an unnecessary bit of feminism into it. But she's very good, too. It reads rapidly, as Joe was saying. You can really race through her translation, whereas Robert Fitzgerald’s is somewhat slower.
The whole process of translation is really interesting. They talk about the words that they choose to use and the words that they do not. Homer had these little set pieces. Every character is introduced in a specific way way, by using certain adjectives or phrases that seem relevant to the character. For instance, Zeus is “summoner of clouds” and Odysseus is described in the Greek as polytropos. It occurs in the very first line where Emily Wilson, Robert Fitzgerald and Daniel Mendelsohn render it differently.
The word πολύτροπος (polytropos) appears in the very first line of Homer’s Odyssey (ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον... — "Tell me, Muse, of the man of..."), serving as Odysseus's primary opening epithet.
The word is an ancient Greek compound adjective built from two parts, πολύς (polys): "many" or "much" and τρόπος (tropos): "turn," "direction," "way," or "manner"
Literally, polytropos means “of many turns.“ Its genius lies in its inherent ambiguity, working on both a passive and an active level. On the passive level it would mean “Much-wandering“ or “driven far off course“ —referring to a man who has been turned around again and again across the seas by fate and gods. On the active level it would signify “Resourceful,“ “wily,“ or “adaptable“— referring to a man of many tricks, mind-turns, disguises, and strategies who can pivot to survive any situation.
English doesn't have an exact single-word equivalent that captures both the physical wandering and the psychological cunning; hence translators must choose which aspect of polytropos to emphasise.
Emily Wilson renders it as "complicated.” "Tell me about a complicated man." This echoes the concept of someone with many layers or twists. She frames Odysseus as a morally ambiguous, multi-faceted human character who is neither purely heroic, nor purely villainous, emphasising his internal psychological complexity.
Daniel Mendelsohn renders it as "many roundabout ways" / "man of many turns"
Mendelsohn focuses heavily on the spatial and behavioural dimensions of the word. The phrase captures both Odysseus's circuitous journey home (taking the long, winding path) and his indirect, deceptive manner of achieving his goals through misdirection and clever tricks. It maintains the physical metaphor of the "turn" (tropos) while highlighting Odysseus's habit of taking the non-linear route—whether in navigating the Mediterranean or outsmarting a enemy.
Robert Fitzgerald translates polytropos as "skilled in all ways of contending”: ”Tell me, Muse, of that man skilled in all ways of contending..." He bypasses a literal translation of tropos ("turn") entirely in favour of an expansive, heroic paraphrase. He interprets polytropos as an active mastery of struggle and conflict. This choice emphasises Odysseus as a heroic warrior and master strategist—someone capable of dealing with any form of hardship, opposition, or struggle (contending) that comes his way. It sets a high-poetic, noble, and epic tone characteristic of mid-20th-century classical translations.
Homer keeps using a few words again and again, like “the wine dark sea.” Why wine dark? The sea is not the colour of any wine, but a very deep blue, sometimes greenish. Another catch phrase in Homer is “rosy fingered dawn.” So every hero in all these all these passages opens with a “rosy fingered dawn.”
These you may see these as clichés of Homer. They're actually set pieces partly, injected so that people could pause and think about what the bard is going to say next.
Everyone of the readers said in unison that Talitha should at least join us for the poetry sessions.
While Odysseus was away many suitors showed up were trying to marry his wife Penelope, presuming Odysseus was dead. That's when she kept stitching a robe for her father-in-law, by day, and and unraveling it at night, claiming she would entertain suitors only when the robe was finished. Penelope would have been around 45 or something, because the son was around 20 when Odysseus returned. In those days that would have been a senior age. She's shown as beautiful in the book still.
Penelope & Telemachus, her son
On the one hand, Odysseus had this beautiful goddess Calypso, and on the other hand, he knew that he was going back to a woman who was as old as he was, similarly aged. Many people didn't recognise him in Ithaca when he finally arrived in disguise because he was old.
Athena, his protector, was always hanging around to make him look handsome and young. He wasn't young by any any means. It's not young love any more, but it's very touching. He doesn't let the fact that Penelope must be old as well, prevent him from wanting to go back. He really wants to go back to the whole set up in his ancestral home in Ithaca, where he expected his son and his wife to be waiting for him still.
It's clear that they really love each other. That comes across, even in what Joe read about the bed hewn out of the olive tree in situ. It was something unique. It shows how from the very beginning, they were a very creative couple. They didn't just have a bed. They had a bed, which was fashioned with his own hands by carving a living tree.
Joe narrated a story Daniel Mendelsohn tells as a professor at Bard College, where he taught the Odyssey often. One of the things that students couldn't understand is his long sojourn with Calypso. Seven years, it seems. He had the run of Calypso’s island. He had sex every night with the goddess. He had the promise of being turned into a god and living forever.
So how on earth, the students would ask him, could a guy leave that prospect and go back to where he has born in order to die?
“Home is where the heart is,” exclaimed Geetha. The phrase is a traditional proverb often popularly attributed to the Roman writer Pliny the Elder (23–79 AD).
But Talitha noted, maybe it wasn't only just the wife and son. His whole life was there. He goes to see the father who's still alive. In the land of the dead, he meets his mother and he wants to embrace her. It's very clear that his early bonds were very strong. He tries to embrace the mother who comes up as a ghost. She can't embrace him because she has no body. It shows how deeply connected he is.
The mother, they didn't show in the movie; they show another warrior. In the film The Odyssey, Odysseus meets the spirit of Sinon—the Greek soldier who was upset with him for betraying him and keeping the Trojan Horse plan a secret—in the Land of the Dead.
Many cohorts of Odysseus perish on the journey back and he's not able to give them a proper burial. Geetha suggested a whole session of KRG Poetry be devoted to the Odyssey, to try and cover all the important sections of it among 12 readers. It would be a nice, creative effort by KRG readers, to read sections of The Odyssey, said KumKum.
We must have Talitha and Joe and Saras at the core. “Me, I don't know anything,” said Saras. It's just that she read bits of it because when the movie was coming out, and she was a curious. She just wanted to understand what was the big spectacle about. She realised that in the movie Athena is is not visible to everybody else. Very often she's in disguise.
”There are a lot of parallels between this epic and our epics,” said Talitha. The feeling that Odysseus has when he sees the destruction he has wrought is just like what happens at the end of the Mahabharata. Exactly, said Saras.
The Mahabharata and Homer's Odyssey both began as oral traditions passed down by bards and minstrels before being collected and written down over the centuries (Saras). This is very interesting.
And Saras also went back and read a lot about the Bronze Age, because they talk about this epic being at the end that age. Actually Talitha got so interested she even started dragging her granddaughters into it. Talitha said there’s a lovely description about Olympus from this book, about its beauty.
There is no rain there, Olympus is above the clouds. It’s a really beautiful description of heaven, in a sense. Similarly, there are descriptions of heaven in our the Upanishads. For instance, the Kausitaki Upanishad provides a detailed description of Brahma-loka (the realm of Brahma), depicting it as an exceedingly radiant and beautiful plane situated by the Vijara river, featuring the immense palace of Hiranyagarva (Aparajita) guarded by Indra and Prajapati, illuminated by multiple suns, and centred around an assembly hall named Vichakshana
Saras has got it on her Kindle reader, but got distracted by many other things. One should read different passages and try different translations, though some of the translations are more difficult to get through.
“I have Stephen Fry's Odyssey on my Kindle,” said Saras. Stephen Fry is easy to read, Talitha noted, but he is not a learned translator who has studied the epic for years as classicists like Emily Wilson and Daniel Mendelssohn have done.
Thomo checked about the connection between Calypso of the Odyssey and Calypso music. There's only one connection. Both are associated with islands and the sea. There's absolutely no other connection.
“A lovely poetry session, very nice, very nice,” said KumKum.
“Well, yes, it was a lovely poetry session with lovely poems,” said Saras.
Lovely poems. Each one so different. And the grand finale were these excerpts from The Odyssey.
The Poems
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