POETRY
The glitter of his loss
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`If as writers we can learn from Moraes, it must be from his prose, and I think his greater achievements are in this form.'
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SOMETHING appears to be wrong with the title of this volume. If these are "Collected Poems", they must include all Moraes's published poetry; yet in the Contents each volume is represented: From A Beginning and so on. The reader who wants Moraes's oeuvre is advised to hang on to her copy of the 1987 Collected Poems, acquire the three subsequent published volumes, and buy this one too, for the ten "New Poems" (2003-04). Also for the too-brief Preface, which ends: "I would not want [my seventeen years without poetry] ever to recur while I am still alive."
The 1987 collection is hard to get, and this is a timely production. Much of Moraes's early work is practically canonical; of his poetry in the last decade it is too early to judge. But here, with history on our side, we can trace his journey.
In the 1957 A Beginning, we find Dommie, that marvellous boy who nowhere would abide. His skill and confidence are surprising in a 19-year-old, but so is his rootlessness: His idiom is rooted only in his imagination. The very first poem, about a piper losing his children, is prophetic:
Even their voices went away
And left an absence: glitter of his loss.
These are the themes that recur in his poems: absence, invasion, exile, loss. And the metaphors: song, stone, sculpture. And the myths, which are not of our land.
Through Poems (1960), John Nobody (1965) and Beldam Etcetera (1967) we follow an ambitious poet with the craft to record his visions accurately. Moraes was never afraid to tell the truth about himself. He was convinced others would find him interesting. Ally this certitude to an almost faultless ear, a sureness of touch, and his first three books are a remarkable achievement for a poet not yet 30.
Crowded with images
If we can complain of anything, it is of a stasis, a lack of happening. Crowded with imagery as much of this poetry is — to the point very nearly of being baroque — it rarely takes you anywhere. (But to be there often suffices.) The barbarian invaders are consumed by their conquest and become their own victims. The birds do not fly but are captured in flight. The song is not sung but is frozen in the ear. One of Moraes's most lasting images, which ends the poem "John Nobody", seems to sum up his own particular beauty:
The creature they observe sways where it stands,
Lifting uncertain arms as if to bless.
Even so great a gesture of the hands
Can hardly hold so vast an emptiness.
Moraes begins in himself, explores the void and returns within himself to sing of its loveliness.
After A Beginning he outgrew the pure imagination which had sustained him. Relationships take up more space, though more in loss than in fulfilment. In Collected Poems (1987), writing as a mature man after long silence, there are fewer iambs and more fury. He is trying to regain a lost assurance, and some of his concerns are metaphysical. His least successful poems perhaps are among these, and they sometimes sound like Eliot. But here too are some wonders, like "Gabriel" and "Babur".
Serendip (1990) returns to his old wellsprings of myth; In Cinnamon Shade (2001) has a new simplicity. Here and in Typed with One Finger (2003) are intimations of mortality and for the first time an absorption in someone else. I found many of these poems embarrassingly personal. But his persistence (as in "Twelve Days in April"), his relentless desire suspends disbelief and makes these love poems glow. Here he parts company with Donne; these are his first recitations of love that are not intellectual.
The last poems, written after his cancer was diagnosed, restrain a savage grief that is not for himself alone. If he had written more often like this, we in India would have been better pleased.
Dom Moraes set very high standards and they are not meant to be followed. Already possessed of a magical ear, he strove for an impossible purity of diction. If as writers we can learn from him, it must be from his prose, and I think his greater achievements are in this form. But it is disturbing to see how his writing is being packaged now.
The cover of his collected memoirs, A Variety of Absences (2003) flaunts a condescending quote from William Dalrymple:
Moraes is not only indisputably the greatest living Indian poet working in English, he is also probably the finest prose stylist writing anywhere in the subcontinent.
The first half of this quote is reproduced on the cover of Collected Poems. Now Dalrymple is hardly in Moraes's class as a writer of prose. He is even less competent to pronounce on Moraes's poetry. The 1987 Collected Poems was one of Penguin India's early bestsellers. Over 5,000 copies were bought. Seventeen years later, a greater compendium is not expected to sell without this faint and unnecessary praise.
VIJAY NAMBISAN
Dom Moraes: Collected Poems 1954-2004, Penguin Books India, p.355, Rs. 395.
Vijay Nambisan is a journalist and writer who has published poetry.
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