Anna in The Siege

The Siege is a historical novel based on real events. Helen Dunmore makes it very realistic with her peculiar way of non-linear narration, descriptions and close study of human nature. The story happens during the winter of 1941 when Leningrad is under siege from the Germans as well as the Russians. Food runs short and death rates rises sky high.

It is in this background that we see Anna a 23 year old girl with her lost aspiration to become an artist takes charge of her family and manages to help most of its members survive as well as bring positive changes in the lives of other people.

Anna, the protagonist of the novel, lost her mother and gained a brother at once. He is 18 years younger to her and in Evgenia’s words clings on to her as if she is his own mother. He behaves with her the same way Anna behaved with her mother long ago. Even her father considers the young boy as Anna’s own liability and interacts with him only sparsely.

Marina, an ex-girl friend of Mikhail comes to Anna’s life mostly after her mother’s death. She meets Marina only once before her mother’s death. She meets her again when her father sends her to draw Marina’s portrait with a view to bring them closer to each other. Though it is not an instant success, when Marina later comes home, Anna extends her friendship which last a life time and Marina too make amends for the harm she unwittingly brought on Anna’s family.

Maria too is dreamy, romantic, artistic and imaginative but she is different from her father and his girl friend. She is more like her mother. She rises to the occasion and is sensitive to the needs of those around her and her family forms no boundary for her existence. She shares her son’s ration of sugar with her neighbour Zena for her child, even though Zena is not so fond of her.

She remembers her childhood friend Vasya who has gone away to Moscow with his family. She falls in love with Andrei so soon but restricts herself from getting to intimate with him so as not to risk having a baby. She understands how her father is fond of Marina and how her own mother was agonized by that. But she holds no hostile feeling towards Marina and in fact gives her shelter when she most needs it. She is not as Romantic as the rest of the characters and Andrei has to force her to agree with  him that she will sit with his dead body like Marina sat with Mikhail’s.

She is a typical Levin with her interest in books and knowledge thought it is fine arts that she really wants to pursue. A very perspicacious Evgenia tells her that she looks so academic. She is well informed about life science and her quick remedies come to the help of people around her. She is a person who can make tea with anything. She is highly skilled in drawing that she is able to catch people not only as they are but also as they want to be. This is because she is seeing more that ‘light’s scrutiny on form’. She sees deep into people. She observes them and tries her best to take care of the fragile Katinka while they go for digging trenches and when Katia dies, she is hurt more than anyone else.

Anna’s resourcefulness too is amazing. She thinks just like Pavlov and measures out rations very carefully and like him she too realizes that there should be some nutrition in leather articles and makes soup out of Kolya old school bag. She is good at farming and seasoning and uses every page in her skill book her mother taught her. She remembers poems like her father and keeps some fire in her mind all through the winter of discontent.

She is optimally optimistic and has no high hopes about Stalinism. She is known to rubbish it at times. Fredya, her neighbour, notices it. Her own boss knows she is efficient but refuses to acknowledge it. Her father, a writer who understands human nature, sees her almost as part of the furniture. He is caught much in himself. Her mother was very affectionate to her but her early death came as a blow to Anna. Incidentally, she has to guard Andrei from Marina like her mother guarded her father.

She is mentally and physically strong and nothing makes her fall sick. When she hears about the oncoming war, she rushes back from the dacha to their home in the city. She gets to work immediately. She had had two bad winters behind her but she stores whatever she can for the coming one as it is not just ‘General Winter but General Hunger’ too as her father has written. Her fight for a few chips of woods, her visit to the market to buy a heater, her meeting Marina at her dacha, her confrontation with the sentry on her way back from the dacha with the sack of potatoes, her passion for and resistance to Andrei, her understanding of her father’s relationship with Marina, her warm generosity to people who suffer with her in spite of their bitterness towards her are  all well portrayed vividly by the author to create one of the most memorable characters in English literature.

The only cruel act that she commits is when she destroys the excess produce in her farm so as not to be grabbed by the Germans. Though this act is done in self protection, she suffers later from shortage of food having been denied food to the hungry in the name of war and enmity. She too has all the frailties of a human being like exasperation and frustration, but she rises above all that when duty calls her, whether it is the duty to her nation, to her job or to her family. She always seems to know the right thing to do. Living in the long drawn shadow of her own mother’s death and with people around her falling off like flies, she looks fear at its face and conquers it. She is the symbol of life’s longing for itself. 

Why can I write?

True, this is a correct sentence. But something at the back of our mind tells us that something is not right. The question looks right if we use ‘can’t’ instead of ‘can’, right? There we have some clue to the strange sound of the title. When we can’t we want to know why and we ask why. When we can, we simply take the ability for granted. We never bother to ask why we can do something. When we can, we don’t want to know why we can, but how we can. Obviously it is a different question demanding a different answer.

This is a question that we should encourage the writers to ask themselves. They might be able to come up with some answers. I asked this question to myself recently though I can’t claim to be a writer of any notability or notoriety. But there is something that those who know me have figured out about me. I love writing. To me, the key board of the computer is better than that of the piano and for audible reasons too. I love to hear the tapping sound on the keyboard and surely, I have a preference for certain well sounding keyboards. After I learned touch typing, the sound of each key seems to be chasing each other with the backspace key coming in between and wiping it all out like a green monster in a child’s video game.

There, almost 250 words already and I have not said anything I intended to say. I am relishing it, revelling in it.  I also delete a lot of what I type, like a child making sand castles.

But the question remains. Why can I write, well or ill, while many can’t. Why am I different? Is it an ability to be proud of, a difference to be put right or a disability to be made use of? I asked this question to myself one of these days and came up with several reasons.

I write because I can. I can because I don’t fear. Growing up with people who didn’t know much English and among books which never had the guts to point out my errors, though they themselves were impeccably error-free, I was never a singed cat. I learned a little bit of grammar from a favourite teacher at school, just enough not to be laughed at. Nobody took the pain of making me feel bad about the errors. I corrected myself when I found that I didn’t mean what I had said and hadn’t said what I meant. I think the unsinged cat says it all.

And there is the passion too. There is music in the words, apart from the tapping of the keys. This is not new knowledge to anyone. Everyone knows there is something in writing like humming an old song. But there is many a slip between the cup and the lip. Something inhibits their motivation, external or internal, to write. They do want to write and many satisfy themselves by talking or talking about the writing they are going to do. As I see it, it is just the fear of standards we set for ourselves or we let other set for us that prevent us from playing on this Apollo’s harp which can raise not just cities but an entire world, the Middle Earth for one.

Thus I believe that the magic potion that makes a prolific writer out of any kid we meet is nothing but our forbearance or shedding of our fastidiousness. When we think of the occasions when we correct them, if it is an honest introspection, we may find new answers. Were we trying to show them an error or show off our knowledge? Pedagogue of pedantic?

We should try to see a child’s writing just the way we see his drawing. It is not correct. But then his drawing is not realistic either, though he intended it to be. Bear with them. Let it come. Let it gush out and remove the clogging in the conduit. Let it come out in quantity and then we can work on its quality and accuracy. That is, if it has not gained them by then and in all probability it would have. 

Marina Petrovna in The Siege

Marina Petrovna in The Siege

Marina Petrovna is an important character in the Siege. She is an artiste and finds it hard to put up with things happening around her. It is hard for others to understand her. Even the heroine takes time to come to terms with her.

We are told about Marina in the very first chapter itself. Anna’s earliest memory of her is how he mother felt mortified after a casual meeting with her. She was trying to be nice to Vera and asked about her and her husband whom she lovingly refers to as Misha. But Vera could not tolerate such niceties coming from her husband’s girlfriend. In the following chapter we see Anna going to meet Marina and paint her portrait as demanded by her father. The first sentence of this chapter which describes where  Marina lives is striking.

                                    The track narrows down to a path.

This sentence in a way summarizes the life of Marina. She used to be a famous actor like Mikhail was a well acknowledged writer. They both lost their stature. But it Marina was more hurt by that.

                        Her name was wiped from posters, programmes and reviews.

She was lucky in that she was sidelined by the Soviet regime before it became too brutal. If she had been questioned a year later, she would have disappeared along with her name.

But an actress can’t burrow down and work alone, hidden. She’s got to have a stage, cast,   

director, lighting, and above all an audience.

But very few are willing to associate with her now. Even Anna doesn’t want her father to correspond with her and when a letter comes, asks he father not to keep it in the house. Marina too doesn’t use the Postal system anymore. She sends the letters only though people she trusts. Vera never read those letters even when they were handed over to her. ‘It is you she writes to, isn’t it?” Vera used to ask Mikhail when he asked her to read Marina’a letter.

Obviously, it was Anna’s father’s strategy to bring her and Marina close to each other that made him ask Anna to go to Marina’s place and paint her portrait. Anna is unwilling to go to see Marina and she has an argument with her father about it. He tells her Marina was a friend of her mother. But she knows it is not true. Her mother had explicitly told her so.

‘Isn’t she your friend as well mammy?’

‘Not really. She’s your father’s friend. He’s known her for a long time.’

‘But she wants to be your friend, or she shouldn’t write to you.’

‘I daresay. But friendship doesn’t work like that.’

This chapter and the next are written in such a way that we are intrigued about this character who appears to be living outside the main frame of the other actions in the story. The description of the dacha where Marina lives and how Anna tries to find her way into the house reminds us of Kafka’a novel The Caslte.  She lives thirty kilometres away from Leningrad and twenty kilometres away from the dacha. She lives with her own nurse and does not mingle much with the public. She has been blacklisted in her own profession in the theatre, just like her old time love Mikhail in his profession as a writer. Even those who associate with her could get into trouble. Her dacha is within a forest area and she is very discrete about whom she contact lest the state should take her away and imprison her. But it is Marina’s life that reminds us more of Kafka’s castle than her dacha itself. All her life she has been trying to reach something, finish something and dies without reaching there.

As Anna tries to finish Marina’s portrait and Marina tries to strike a warm conversation with Anna, we get to see a lot about their characters as if one is a touch stone for the other. Anna is trying to be as professional as she can, forget the old problems between Marina and her mother and concentrate on her work while Marina is trying to snatch every chance to get closer to her. Anna does her work and Marina is much impressed with it. She does she a lot of her feature for the first time only in Anna’s drawing. Towards the end of the day, Marina talks about Anna’s father but Anna shows the least interest.

Among other things, we forget about Marina and then she suddenly comes back to Anna’s life. The war has begun and Anna’s father is away at the battlefield making fortifications. Marian comes to Anna’s house when she finds that her own dacha is about to be attacked. She has brought a lot of food for Anna and tells her that food is the most important thing in war. Though she comes only for two days she neverl leaves and finally dies there. After two days, she asks Anna that she is free to go as volunteer to dig trenches and that she can take care of Kolya. Thus begins her close association with Kolya.

Both the women try their best to keep the rest of the family alive after Anna comes back from the trenches at the onset of winter and her father also returns wounded. There is a Andrei too living with them and he too is much impressed by Marina. Marina is still very energetic and she does a lot of domestic chores, quite a new thing for her who lived always with her old nurse.

Later in the story we find that she was pregnant from Mikhail. She met a doctor and effected an abortion. She had known it was a male foetus. She tells a fantasy about this to Anna and then she tells her what really happened. We feel that it was to win over her by giving Mikhail a son that Vera went ahead with her pregnancy so late in her life. But it is Marina who had the good fortune to bring take care of Vera’s death. Kolya has the same feelings for her and Mikhail, his father.

Marina fulfils one last thing in her life. She takes care of her lover till his death and even after his death for days since it takes several days for them to bury her. Before he is buried she too dies. Before she dies she gives them two bottles of jam which she was resisting to touch. But she dies without being able to touch the jam. Through her death she was able to help the rest of the family, with her rations and those two bottles of jam.

Marina’s is a tragic story which reminds us of what happens to artists in a totalitarian state and how they make is even worse by not being able to manage their emotional instability. In the present day society where family is the boundary of relationships, her love for Mikhail was not recognized even by Mikhail. She is able to hear his thoughts but he is quiet reticent near her. Everyone found fault with her. Only death was kind to her by putting an end to her life soon after Mikhail’s. They get to lie together in the same mass tomb, close to each other, a privilege she won over Vera. 

Who is Who 

Anna Mikhailovna Levin	Protagonist, Kolya’s mother, Vera’s and Mikhail’s father, nursery assistant at the local nursery school and works under Elizaveta Antonova, falls into a relationship with Andrei, her childhood friend, befriends Maria Petrovna, her father’s lover later in life, works hard at the dacha and saves her own and her brother’s life, very practical and hopeful, strong and aware of her own feelings and emotions and limitations, determined and persevering. She is 18 when her mother dies and 23 when the blockade happens.
Andrei	A dedicated doctor, talks medical science all the time, Romantic and falls in love with Anna. He comes from Siberia and stays with the Levins during the worst part of their life. He is very romantic and has great respect for Anna’s father and his work. One day on his way to hospital he almost gets lost in the snow storm. He is much loved by Kolya too.
Maria Petrovna	An actress, fall in love with her long time friend Mikhail after her gets married, tried to befriend Vera, her lover’s wife and fails, befriends her lover’s daughter Anna, lives with them during the siege and dies before it is all over. We are introduced to her through Anna’s memories of her childhood and then when Anna really goes to her dacha to draw her portrait as directed by her father. It is also interesting that Marina forces Anna to draw the portrait of her father as he lies dead. She was pregnant from her relationship with Mikhail before Anna was born, it was a boy but she opted for abortion. She was seeing a doctor who fell for her and she told Mikhail that she had had an abortion and he was upset and wrote some poems of grief and Vera found the poems insincere. She is not a supporter of Stalin and lives in her past glory. She is suspected to be a rebel and it is true. She later sort of sacrificed her life for Anna’s family by saving two bottles of jam for her and she couldn’t use them. A very interesting character, very much like Andrei and when Andrei hears that she sat near Mikhail’s dead body for days, he asks Anna whether she also would do the same. Anna refuses first and then yields.
Mikhail Ilyich Levin	A passionate writer, he speaks good German and French apart from Russian. The time he spent in two European countries as early as 1912 has enriched him and also made him a suspect. The government can always label him as man with suspicious foreign connections. He writes stories and lives on his translation and editing work. The writers’ committee has put a ban on his works. They found that his work is not as optimistic as Stalin expects it to be. It is full of gloom and doom. So, he keeps on writing and keeps them to himself. He is a lover of Pushkin’s poems and can recite most of them. When he dies Marina places a book in his hands and it is a book of poems by Pushkin. Marina sits near his dead body for days and when she dies, Anna and Andrei place their dead bodies together on the same bed and they are buried close together in a mass grave. They could never unite like this while they were alive. Anna says that Marina loved him but he only loved the fact that Marina loved him. He was very devoted to his wife and admired Marina for her artistic qualities and he is happy to see those qualities inherited by his daughter. His second child Kolya is very affectionate towards him as if he is his grandfather and not his father but we don’t see him showing much affection to his son Kolya. He dies after getting wounded in bombing. Andrei brings him home and the whole family takes care of him till he dies. His body is left like that for more than ten days since there is not one strong enough to drag it to the cemetery.
Kolya	He is only five or six and is unhealthy in several ways. He considers his sister like his mother and his father like his grandfather. His mother died at his birth. He is a typical child with his interest in war games, stubborn nature, hunger, insensitivity to the harsh realities of life. Anna says he is a typical Levin because of his studious nature. It is by pure luck and the care shown by the adults around him that he survives the blockade. When he is hungry, there are three things that Anna is able to provide him with during the blockade; a root of liquorice, her own fingers or a piece of his old leather school bag which was already used for soup a few days before!
Vera	Vera is a radiologist and she is totally aware of health issues but she relents to her husband’s need for a full fledged family and opts to get pregnant and dies delivering a child. Probably, when Mikhail heard that the foetus Marina aborted was male, it would have promoted Vera to try her luck at giving him a male child. A very amiable person, scholarly, unrelenting in personal matters, not so much of an artist, Vera is always upset about Marina and refuses to have anything to do with her. Paradoxically, it is Marina who gets to be with Mikhail on his eternal sleep. Anna has some sweet memories of her two-week life with her mother at the dacha during a vacation.
Olya	A student Vera was very fond of. After Vera’s death she lost her job and was suspected as a rebel and faced much hardship in life.
Elizaveta Antonova	Anna’s boss at the childcare centre; a typical bureaucrat who is not at all creative or sensitive and ironically she is in charge of very small children; she is a stern administrator as she throws her weight around; being a turncoat she manages to get to Moscow when the blockade gets worse and lives there safe and secure
General Hunger and General Winter	Though these are made to sound like the fantasy names of two kinds of hardships, later we find that the word general is used literally. Hunger and Winter affects everyone in general and they prove to be lacking in several humane qualities. They are the characters in a story written by Mikhail and it becomes a prophesy in his own life.
Darya Alexandrovna	She is Anna’s neighbour and she is the first one to inform Anna of the coming catastrophe. She demonstrates how people are going to behave from then onwards by refusing to giver  Anna  jar of honey she had promised.
Vasya Sokolov	Vasya Sokolov is one of the Sokolovs in Leningrad. He played building a dam with Anna when he was young. They had built it across a stream fed by melting snow. Anna’s hair grip falls into the dam and it disappears as their tiny dam breaks letting the water flow through. Later in life as Vasya is driving a government truck loaded with food for the starving village, his truck breaks down and all he needs is a hair grip to lengthen a circuit. He can’t find it and he dies in the snow with a small girl wail about a lost hair grip still ringing in  his ears.
Katya	She is a little 15 year old absent minded girl who dies in the trenches dug by the volunteers when a wall collapses on them. Being slow in movement, she is not able to move out of harm’s way. She was digging with Anna for more than a week and used to be very nice to her. They wrap her body in a some rag and throw it on the roadside.
Katinka	This is another young woman who is digging with Anna.
Evgenia	Evgenia another young woman used to be very optimistic about herself. She become a prostitute later on and comes to Anna’s help whenever she has some trouble in the market place or in the street.
Pavlov	He is in charge of the food supply or the rations during the blockade. His position is far from being a covetable one in that he is the one to take decisions about how much they are allowed to eat each day. He is the one has to prevent people from dying and at the same time hope that more people die to leave their rations for the living.
Zina	She is Anna’s neighbour and her husband who works at a factory in Leningrad has convinced her that the Levins are rebels and that they should have nothing to do with them. When her baby is weak, Anna decides to share Kolya’s ration with her though Mariana objects to this. A few days later she brings her baby who has been dead for three days to Anna and asks her to draw a portrait of her baby.
Fedya	Feyda, once against the Levins, is later moved by Anna’s selfish act of giving Kolya’s ration of sugar to his and Zina’s baby later patches up with her. He contacts kidney disease but he survives the blockade more dead than alive. His wife adores him.

The Song of Troy

Colleen McCullough's novel ' The Song of Troy' was a chance find at a book fair. The author is better known for her best-selling work ' The Thorn Birds'. For anyone who has given up reading Greek mythology having got mired in difficult to remember names and complicated genealogies here's a wonderful re-working that is hard to put down as told from the point of view of some of the protagonists themselves in Homer's Illiad and Odyssey.
The author has meticulously researched the characters and the time they lived in to create a rivetting, realistic account that makes it live up to the claim of the sub title of the book as 'A story that will outlast History.'
The abduction of Helen, the legendary beauty of Greece and wife of Greek king Menelaus, by Paris, son of King Priam of Troy is 

the widely believed reason for the decade-long war between the two countries that resulted in the loss of countless lives and some of the finest warriors on both sides. Recall the famous opening lines of Homer's epic - The face that launched a thousand ships and burnt the topless towers of Illium...Though this is made out to be the immediate cause of the war, the lesser known fact is the ambition of Menelaus'  brother, King Agamemnon  who had designs to enrich himself from the sack of Troy and carve an empire for himself in Asia Minor.
Hector remembered Menelaos' description of his wife Helen in superlative terms. But he always had his reservations when men called queens or princesses beautiful because too many of them inherited that epithet along with their titles! Yet, even Hector had to succumb to Helen's charms when she made her first appearance in Priam's court. This is how he describes her:
'...As I remember her on that day, she was just...beautiful. Masses of pale gold hair, dark brows and lashes, eyes the colour of springtime grass rimmed with kohl drawn outward in the manner of Cretans and Egyptians.
But how much of it was actual, how much of it a spell? That I will never know. Helen  is the greatest work of art the Gods have ever put upon Mother Earth.
For my father she was fate. Not so far gone in old age that he had forgotten the pleasures to be had in the arms of a woman, he looked at her and fell in love with her. Or in lust. But because he was too old to steal her from his son, he chose instead to take it as a compliment to himself that a son of his could lure her from her husband, her children, her own lands. Swelling with pride, he turned his wondering eyes upon Paris.
They were certainly a striking pair: he as dark as Ganymede, she as fair as Artemis of the forest. Without doing more than take a stroll, Helen won the silent room completely over. No man there could continue to blame Paris for his foolishness.'
The ancients believed in a sacred code of conduct even though their battles were brutal and steeped in blood. Any violation of this code spelt doom. Achilles was driven to fury when he was mocked at during a duel with Kyknos as duels between members of the Royal Kindred were as sacred as rituals  till one was killed and the ritual continued till the body was stripped, the head speared and exhibited and the carcass fed to the dogs. At nightfall all hostilities came to an end. An oath taken was  equally sacred and broken at peril to oneself.
When Priam finally gives the go ahead to his pride and joy to attack the Greeks, Hector cannot wait for the dawn. McCullough describes in detail the armour as Hector accoutres himself:
'...My armour lay ready. Andromache (his wife who tried in vain to dissuade him) forgotten as my excitement rose. I clapped my hands. The slaves came, put me into my padded shift, laced on my boots, fitted the greaves over them and buckled them on. I swallowed down the desperate eagerness I always felt before combat as the slaves went on to dress me in the reinforced leather kilt, the cuirass, the arm guards, the forearm braces and the sweat leathers for wrists and brow. My helmet was put into my hand, my baldric looped over my left shoulder to hold my swords on my right hip; finally they slung my huge, wasp-waisted shield over my right shoulder by its sliding cord and settled it along my right side. One servant gave me my club, another assisted me to tuck my helmet beneath my right forearm. I was ready.'
The biggest blow for the Greeks was the fall of the mighty Achilles as a result of Paris' cowardly treachery. Very poignant is the fate of old Nestor who already lost two sons in the course of the war and now with a heavy heart has to bury his youngest son who wouldn't be left behind at home and sneaked into Troy without his father's permission. Achilles had a premonition and had already entrusted his mistress Brise, a Trojan princess who fell to his lot, to the safe keeping of Agamemnon and others to be handed over to his son Neoptolemus.
The mighty giant Ajax, turns violently mad after the death of Achilles and kills himself upon his sword. In the words of Automedon, 'In eight days they were both gone: Achilles and Ajax, the spirit and the heart of our army.'
Read on to find out how the suspense-filled scheming of Odysseus finally brings to an end the ten-year long war and the fates of Helen and the survivors.

Sandpiper

Ahdaf Soueif was born in Cairo and educated in Egypt and England. She studied for a PhD in linguistics at the University of Lancaster. Her debut novel, In the Eye of the Sun (1993), set in Egypt and England, recounts the maturing of Asya, a beautiful Egyptian who, by her own admission, "feels more comfortable with art than with life." Her second novel The Map of Love (1999) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, has been translated into 21 languages and sold over a million copies.  She has also published two works of short stories, Aisha (1983) and Sandpiper(1996) - a selection from which was combined in the collection I Think Of You in 2007, and Stories Of Ourselves in 2010.

Soueif writes primarily in English,  but her Arabic-speaking readers say they can hear the Arabic through the English. 

 She was married to Ian Hamilton, a famous English literary critic.

She lives in London and Cairo.

The short story Sandpiper by Ahdaf Soueif reads more like a poem than a short story. The basic elements air, water, fire and earth interplay with one another in this story highlighting the events that happen in the life of the main character. There are very few specifics; even the names of the main character are not mentioned. The place names are mentioned very rarely which gives this story a certain universality and timelessness.The story is told from the first person point of view of the central character, Lucy's mother and Um Sabir's daughter-in-law. This is a typical example of feminist writing.
There is no intriguing plot in the story and the conflicts are mainly internal. Marital discord due to cultural differences can be cited as the theme of the story.
The narrator, Lucy's mother, herself a writer, takes us into her first short utterance itself. It is a simple sentence which sounds like part of a private casual conversation and it sets the mood of the story.

                                      Outside, there is a path.

The rest of the story is about how she is unable to find her own path to happiness. She had met her husband, an Egyptian, in her own country. After a long courtship of four years, they got married and every year she has been six months in her husband's place at Alexandria near Cairo, Egypt.

"...:twelve years ago, I met him. Eight years ago, I married him. Six years ago, I gave birth to his child."
This cold objectivity is also heard when she talks about her motherhood.

As the story opens we see her at the beach near her husband's home in Alexandria. She is describing how she used to spend her time at the beach. Her description tells us a lot about how she loves to see the basic elements interacting with one another. They are very gentle to each other. They chase, cajole, fondle, unite, get into each other's being. This even forms a cycle. She is very passionate about everything in her life. She takes an interest in everything around her. The stranger the subject of her interest, the stronger her involvement. She is hungry for more and more varied experiences.

On the other hand her in-laws are very protective of her like they are generally of the women folk. It has been spelled out to her at the Cairo airport that women are considered second sex in Egypt. Coming from a more liberal land like Europe, it mattered much to her though she managed to adapt herself  to that.
After her first child was born, he husband became less passionate about her. He would have tried to harmonize her with his culture for long and then gave it up when he got really frustrated. She would have lavished all his love and time on her child, ignoring him. From the way she talks about how expectant she was when she was expecting this sound only natural. The part where she talks about how she played with her child even when it was still inside tells us that certain things are universal and do not pertain to any single culture.




  

Pied Beauty by Gerald Manley Hopkins: an analysis

Gerald Manley Hopkins brought into the world of poetry some new methods and theories of his own. A few of them are used in his poem Pied Beauty too.
The poem is in praise of God who crated this world with unimaginable variety. Hopkins uses his own phrases, words, rhythm and ideas to express his awe and wonder at the greatness of the Creator.
He begins the poem with a clear and straight forward statement.

             Glory be to God for dappled things-

Then he goes on to list and describe some of the things in his own way. He believed that, just like the landscapes which refer to the beauty of nature out in the open, everything had its own inner beauty also. He referred to this as the inscape, or the inner world of things. He also believed that through several methods which he referred to as instress, the poet brings out the inscape in everything they write about. So though the poet is writing eulogies and eulogies on God, this is done through bringing to light the real beauty in things.
Hopkins uses some traditional methods like figures of speech and comparisons and well chosen words and sound to show things in a clear light. He also uses rhythm, stress and alliteration to make his lines beautiful. He also invents new words when he finds the old ones inadequate.
For example, he compares the sky which has more than one colour to a cow which has more than one colour. The patterns on the body of a cow are very similar to cloud formations. Hopkins uses the word 'brinded' to refer to the way the cow is coloured. This is a word he coined for the purpose of shedding  new light on the pattern of colours on a cow and in the sky. The new and strange words make the readers look more deeply into the objects of comparison. We do so to get a better meaning of the word but we are actually getting a clearer idea of the objects of comparison.
Hopkins also juxtaposes things of different nature. Just after he describes the sky he talks about the patterns of the body of trouts. After referring to God's greatness as seen in two basic elements, air and water, Hopkins refers to fire indirectly when he says,

 fresh fire-coal chestnut-falls...

In the next line he makes a direct remark about the fourth element, the earth when he says,
Landscape plotted and pierced - fold, fallow and plough;
We can also see that the poet breaks the conventions of language use to keep us alert about his utterances. Since words and phrases easily become cliches, the novelty in expression and the shocking way in which the poet has dared to move away from the conventional usage, help the poet hold our attention while he shares his thoughts with us.
Hopkins uses sprung rhythm as his meter. In this meter the first syllables are stressed and it gives each line its energy and power when we read it out loud. Another device used by the poet is the use of special sounds like sibilance and alliteration as in lines like,

                   Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches wings

which shows alliteration and

                   with swift, slow, sweet, sour, adazzle, dim'

which shows sibilance

After showing us a list of things which are examples of pied beauty, the poet goes back to his original intention of praising the glory of God who created all this. He admits that he doesn't know how God makes all things beautiful. He states that God's own beauty remains eternal and unchanged.
Thus the poem raised from mere eulogy or a simple prayer to the level of a work of art since the poet has managed to shed new light on our experiences of life. The thought content remains simple but the way the poet describes the world around makes us see the world as we have never seen it before.

Preludes by T S Eliot: an introduction

        Most of us understand, appreciate and enjoy some poems though not all kinds of poems. When we are taught poetry, we learn it as if it is yet another page in the physics text book. The teacher knows the answer and we don’t.

       We learn poetry by analyzing it before we enjoy it. But to write a critical appreciation one needs to enjoy and appreciate a poem. When we do so we should be open and not compare. We should deal with poems the way we (should) deal with kids. Each one is great in its own way.

Poets are great because of their honesty. A dishonest poet is in no way great even if he agrees with great people and their thoughts. So, when we discuss a poem we only have to look at how well the poet has brought it all out on paper and conveyed to us even though he is far away and long ago from us.

         T S Eliot's great work is The Waste Land. It changed overnight the way poets wrote poems or discussed about the old ones. Echoes of this wonderful work of art can be heard in The Preludes too. One may disagree with Eliot’s view of life and literature. He was a great scholar and spoke several languages including Latin and Greek. Later in his life he changed his sect of religion from Protestantism to Catholicism. We may wonder how such a great poet could insist on changing from one sect of a religion to another and that too officially and ceremoniously. We may even wonder how a great person could have several spoiled and spoiling relationships. But we have to remind ourselves that we are judging the poetry of a poet and not the propaganda of a citizen.

             During the time when Eliot was writing his main poems, the First World War was on the anvil. The quick gun leaders of Industrialization had gone in for legal looting. Religion no more held sway. People didn’t know what to look forward to or where to go to find peace of mind. They all waited.

            We do like some poems because the thoughts expressed agree with our own. But at times we like them even though we dislike what they tell us. The reason is their beauty. Sometimes this beauty is the result of the images in the poem. When we say beauty of the images we don’t mean that they are all pretty to look at. We mean that they are effective in reaching out to our mind, without bothering our brain much. In fact, poems taste better when they go around our brains and enter our mind directly.

So when we read Eliot, we should not see his images or lines as codified statements. Poets don’t do that.

            If you need a method, imagine that you have failed in an exam which was very crucial to you. You want to see some people who are as hopeless as you are. Now read the poem. Without thinking about the images, see them in your mind. You will find the poem highly communicative.

           The poem talks about everything disgusting. Before Eliot’s time the poets were disgusted with what they saw around them and wrote about things which were far away and long ago. People took it up and they too began to feel disgusted of what was around them. However, this is like running away from reality. Eliot is only expressing how the squalor, depression, loneliness and other feelings of desolation have worked their way into people too. Those are seen in people’s manners and ways of life as well as in their thoughts and thoughtlessness. 

The Cockroach : An Analysis

The Cockroach
Kevin Halligan

       The poem The Cockroach provides an interesting view of human life as compared to that of a cockroach . It is about a cockroach which is a dirty and repulsive little insect foreshadows the author’s projection of himself. At first glance it may appear to be boring and seems like he’s just talking about a cockroach pacing around the room, but there is more to it. At the very end of the poem, the last line works as a mirror which reflects the rest of the poem in a new light. From a mere observation of a cockroach, the poem rises to the level of a true reflection on life in a highly philosophical way.

The poet observes every movement of a cockroach. Each of the movements matches with our own stages of life. We get stuck at some point in our lives in which we want better things or we rush into things not knowing what we really want.  

“At first he seemed quite satisfied to trace

        A path between the wainscot and the door.”

These lines tell us about how the cockroach is satisfied with his current situation, but then it quickly gets bored of it and begins to crave for something more, something new and fresh.

“But soon he turned to jog in crooked rings.”

This tells us, he was moving around with bigger ambitions. After he reaches this ambition he comes up in life and doesn't know what to do from there.

“After a while, he climbed an open shelf

                   And stopped. He looked uncertain where to go.”

He becomes restless and then finally finds something exciting new in the “open shelf”. His actions match with those of humans at a late stage in life, when we suddenly get greedy and want more, instead of realising to be happy with what we’ve got.  

“A former life had led to? I don’t know.”

These are moments of hesitation and uncertainty.  Is the risk worth it? And finally the poet ends is by saying

“Except I thought I recognised myself.”

This line acts as a interpreter for the whole poem.  The poet sees all the similarities between the cockroach and himself as he rushes through life frantically, not wanting to experience life as it is, but by rushing into things without no true goal or purpose. We are constantly looking for choices but then we realise we don’t even know what we truly want.

         

                                                        

Ode to a Grecian Urn

O my dear Urn,
Lemme see how I can greet you properly.
You, the unspoiled bride of Quietness, the adopted child of Silence and slow-moving Time, history written as beautiful paintings (and so can express a beautiful story more beautifully than my poems).
I know I’ve already messed up. Hate talking about me and my poems.
I wonder what stories found in old dog-eared, torn and tattered books, can be found on your surface. Are these stories of goddesses, of men and women, or of all? Are these stories from old cities or from remote valleys? Who are these men or gods painted on your surface? Who are these women who are ever so reluctant to compromise? What are they chasing and why? What are they struggling to escape from and why? Why are they beating their timbrels and blowing their pipes? Why is their happiness so intense and wild?
The songs we have heard are all so sweet, but surely there must be better ones which we can imagine. The unheard ones ought to be sweeter since they exist only in our imagination and imagination can make anything cho chweet. So, I imagine the pipes I see on this urn as playing on. I can’t hear their music but I imagine it to be sweeter than what I have ever heard. When they play, they are not playing to my real ears, for sure, but more to my soul (love it!) and the songs have no particular tone.
Hey, I see a young man under this tree. Painted figures, they all are. See, this young man can’t stop singing. The trees around him will never shed their leaves. In this picture it is always spring. Nothing changes and everything stays fresh. Simply awesome.
I also see a bold lover, trying to kiss his beautiful girl. Bold and beautiful. But he can only try. And she can only be expecting (no pun intended). They will never kiss. They are painted in that position on the surface of this urn. They are close to winning their goal or reaching their aim. But the real act of kissing won’t happen. This should not worry them. She is not going to run away. Though the young man cannot enjoy the bliss of a kiss, his girl is going to be there for him anytime and he can love her eternally. Moreover, she will always be this fair and lovable forever and ever.
I see some trees that can bring happiness to the scene. They can never shed their leaves and look ugly. It will be always spring for them. Caught and arrested as images, they cannot change like the rest of the world. There is a man playing on a flute. He is happy and so are his songs. He will never get tired. He will be playing on that pipe beautiful music forever and ever. The songs will never get old and stale (unlike last year’s chart-busters). His songs aren’t heard and so will never be too familiar or old.
I see a lot of love pictured on this urn. Such love will be warm forever and enjoyed eternally. It is far above the love of human beings like us. It is above any passion that we all have. Our passions often leave us sad. Either he loses interest or she loses interest or they both get fed up. Our passions always end in frustration and leave us with a fever or a headache, and a bitter taste in the mouth. The pain gives us a parching tongue as if we are really sick. But this love pictured here is above all that. It is totally unlike ordinary love since it is ever lasting. Never changes or fades. Never loses its colour.
I wonder who these people pictured here are. They seem to be going to attend an animal sacrifice in some unknown forest under the guidance of some mysterious priest. Where is he leading the young calf to? It is lowing at the skies. Its sides, silver in colour, are decorated with garlands. These people have left some little town by a river or a sea shore. Or even a hillside with a small fort. They have left that place deserted on this pious morning. Pious, because, obviously, it is some kind of a holy ceremonious day for these people. The streets of that town they have left are not pictured on this urn. But I can imagine that there is such a street in some town. It will remain silent till these people have gone back and (OMG!) they won’t and can’t go back. Not even a single man can return to that place and tell us why all the people have left the town. It will always remain a mystery even in our imagination!
My dear Urn, what wonderful shape you have and what ambiance you spread around! You are covered all over with decorations and images of men and women in marble; with branches of trees found in forests and weeds that have been stepped on by wayfarers.
By being silently enigmatic and parrying our questions, you sting us out of our commonplace worries (thoughts). This is exactly what eternity does for us. We are taken out of our daily worries and left to awe and wonder at the bigger picture, something far beyond us, bigger than all of us.
You are a piece of frozen countryside. Decades and centuries later, when this generation grows old and becomes insignificant (wasted) you shall remain as you are. Being a work of art, you will remain as such in the midst of the sorrows, (of course, different sorrows of a different generation) but still a friend to man. That is what a piece of art does. It pleases us generation after generation. (Just like this poem.) You will keep preaching to us the importance of beauty, the only good thing we need to know on this earth. Beauty is the truth about things or the truth about things is what beauty is all about. This is all we know and all that we need to know and remember.
Beauty takes us beyond our petty concerns. It exhilarates us and stills our thoughts. This is why we are speechless when we encounter something beautiful. It is in that moment that we stop worrying. It is the only moment that we fully live in. At all other times we are dying or waiting to die.

Yours

John Keats 

The City Planners: an Analysis

The City Planners by Margaret Atwood is a poem about the changing cityscapes. It conveys the poet’s thoughts feelings and ideas as she passes through a suburban residential area. She takes the reader along with her on the ride with a very common word- ‘these’. This word is followed by the strange phrase ‘residential Sundays’ which suggests routine and boredom. It talks of a group of people who live in their houses and stay away from work only on Sundays which were actually days of mirth and merriment in olden times. When we read ‘dry August sunlight’ the picture is fairly clear. The poet’s sensitivity has been offended by something she saw. She says it is the sanities.

                                      ‘the houses in pedantic rows, the planted

                                        sanitary trees…’

The urban landscapes keep expanding into the suburbs and changes take place overnight. Instead of the wild and chaotic growth of wilderness, the city grows in artificial rows. In the name of security and sanity at the expense of wild beauty, an uncanny order is brought into the cityscapes. She is amused and saddened in a way at the area’s orderliness, perfection and uniformity.  

The trees which were not planted for the sake of beauty but for sanitary purposes assert the mindset of the people. It is all pragmatic and unaesthetic. We hear echoes of Dylan Thomas’s poem ‘The Force That through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower’ and Robert Frost’s Mending Wall when Margaret Atwood talks about the invisible power against which human aggression seems to have no chance.

The poet is almost feeling intimidated by the perfection of the place. She thinks the levelness of the surfaces is sneering at a dent on her car door, an aberration which she thinks may not be accepted in a place like this. She describes the deafening silence there.

‘No shouting here, or

shattering of glass’

The only sound welcomed here is the mechanical whirring of the motor of a lawn mower which is cutting off the already ‘discouraged grass’ which suggests the insensitive nature of the place. The fact that the place is very quiet adds to its already ‘boring’ atmosphere. Words like rational ’, ‘straight swath and ‘levelness of surface’ suggest an eternally boring place. The silence of the area almost seems to kill the poet. It is too overpowering and unnerving. Shouting is not welcome nor is the sound of a sheet of glass breaking into pieces, however musical that sound may be. Glass is an artificial object but people don’t want to hear it being broken or destroyed while they are happy about a power lawn insensitively mowing down the tender leaves of grass. Even this is done for the sake of leveling and uniformity. This imagery, along with the earlier one of ‘the planted sanitary trees,’ shows man’s futile but dogged attempt to control nature.

The drive ways avoid the wild hysteria of nature by being even and the roofs are all slanted in the same way as if they are unwilling to face the sky directly. However, there are certain things which still keep the wildness of life: the smell of spilt oil, a faint sickness lingering in the garages, a splash of paint on bricks which looks like a bleeding bruise, a plastic hose coiled like the viciousness of a venomous snake.

even the too-fixed stare of the wide windows

give momentary access to

the landscape behind or under

the future cracks in the plaster

Mortar and cement have been thrown lavishly over nature and its beauty and the poet foresees that the past will come out one day in future. Through the cracks in the plaster, the poet sees what has been submerged and is waiting to show its head. She foresees that all these houses which are against chaos which is the golden rule of nature will one day collapse and like a ship sinking tilt to its side and disappear into the earth. 

Like the movement of glaciers, the change is slow and steady and hard to see. This idea is something that sprouted from the annoyance and frustration that is lingering in her mind. She predicts the destruction of perfection in the streets at the hands of the powerful forces of nature such as the earth, seas and glaciers. This destruction will come as a consequence of having dared to control nature and not allowing nature to grow wild. Restricted and controlled, nature strikes back. Natures anger brims up and at a certain point will just burst , throwing wildly its unrestrained forces of displeasure and annoyance which is shared by the poet in the first stanza. The image of the ship slanting and sinking obliquely into the clay sea reminds us of Titanic which also was a man made wonder and was famed as the unsinkable.  

The poet says that this is what brings in the City Planners, the urbanizers. They have the insane face of political conspirators.

‘…scattered over unsurveyed

territories, concealed from each other,

each in his own private blizzard;

When one world collapses they barge in to build another one right there. They guess directions and make plans which are rigid and stern. Uncompassionate (as wooden borders) plans (transitory lines) for humanity’s future are envisioned by them. The present vanishes like a cloud into thin air. The insane planners bank on the panic of a suburb which has lost its roots. They ring in (order in) the future as maddening sketches on sheets of white paper.

Thus, the poem extols the power of nature to take care of itself and build anew. It mocks at man’s sense of superiority. This is where the poet rises to the level of the great poets of nature who worshiped nature more as a power than as a sensual experience.

Continuum: an Analysis

                  Continuum by Allen Curnow is a deeply spiritual poem though it is written in a candid and casual style. Reading between the lines, we find the poet guiding the reader through his abstract thoughts. 
                 'Continuum' means the transition from one to another, or a seamless conjunction of two entities. This is a popular word in modern physics where time and space are considered as two entities which can change into each other and usually exist as a couple, with one flowing into the other. The poet has structured his poem in such a way that the stanzas, except for the introductory one, flow into one another and do not stand as individual, stand aloof pieces. The transition happens in language as well as in the thoughts that the language expresses.

                   In the first stanza the poet calls our attention to a common misconception. The moon looks like,

                  “(it) rolls over the roof and falls behind

                    my house, and the moon does neither of these things,

                    I am talking about myself.

                So, the poet cites a cliché commonly found in poetry, and unmasks it to tell us that when we say things which are not true, we in fact reveal ourselves. We see things the way we are and not the way they are. The poet warns us that everything that he has written is only his own perception.

                These first lines frame the poem and serve as an introduction. When read in this light, the poem is more about creation, the poet’s and God’s. In the second stanza, the poet tells us we are absolutely programmed in our behavior and that we are not blessed with free will. We can’t think thoughts. They are spontaneous. We can’t even change the subject of our thought or go to sleep when we wish to. It is all predestined for us.

                Having nothing better to do the poet goes out on barefoot in the darkness. He leans from the porch across the hedges in his front courtyard over to where it is darker and nothing is distinguishable (washed-out creation). In the dark sky he spies two bright clouds, with moon’s dust on them. He inserts the word query in brackets to ask whether it is not just another beautiful phrase at the expense of reality. He likes one of the clouds for some personal reasons.

                                                                        “one’s mine

                      the other is an adversary,”

                Which is which will depend on how it is shaped by the wind and other things.

                Time moves slowly for him. In a very cryptic expression he quips,

               “A long moment stretches, the next one is not

                on time.”

              This may sound absurd since moments refer to time and time is never fast slow. Time has a set pace. However, we are reminded of the new idea in physics that time is relative, presumably a fact known to poets for long!

               Being barefooted the poet feels the chill of the cold floor not only on his feet but right up to his throat. Suddenly the night sky pours down as rain or fog or even as darkness. The poet has no choice but to go in. He turns on his heel and goes in closing the door behind him. The door is closed on the real author, God, who created all this. God is such a good craftsman who picks up his tools and his litter when he  is done. God urges the poet quietly back to bed.

                Overall, Continuum is a spiritual poem which makes no distinction between fact and fiction. It also shows the seamless merging of perception and observation. Insomnia or sleeplessness is something that happens to most writers. Usually writers write something to get out of it. Here a greater author, God Himself, urges the writer to go back to bed. Ironically, the writer manages to write a poem out of this experience. The artist and God are also seamlessly connected. They are both creative. God keeps his workshop clean, his tools ready and he keeps creating.

                “the author, cringing demiurge, who picks up

                  his litter and his tools…”

 The poet, on the other hand, feels frustration and sleeplessness and they motivate him to write poems.

Telephone Conversation

Wole Soyinka

In Telephone Conversation, Wole Soyinka uses the format of a telephone conversation to express his thoughts and feeling about racial discrimination. The telephone is supposed to overcome distances, but ironically the telephone conversation here brings out the distance between people.

The speaker, an African is having a conversation with a British lady. He wants to take a house on rent and he has found one. He thinks the price is reasonable and the location is indifferent. The two words reasonable and indifferent are significant. Even such an abstract thing as price could be reasonable while some people are not. The location is indifferent. The location is not bothered who lives there but the people are. They could be indifferent to the point of being insensitive.

The land lady says ‘she lived off premises’. Even then she is bothered about who is going to reside in her house. The deal is almost settled when the man says he is an African. He wants to know whether she has a problem with that. She suddenly goes silent thus expressing her lack of good breeding. Her silence covers up her racial feeling. But it doesn’t cover it up for long.  She tries to tone it down and hide it. Her looks and habits become a mockery of her own culture. Her mind is still quite narrow.

                                                            Voice, when it came,

Lipstick coated, long gold-rolled

Cigarette -pipped.

When she resumes her conversation, she does not ask him anything about his education or his job. She asks him how dark he is. She is hoping that he may not be too dark for her to tolerate. She sees people as black men and white men, but she is trying to compromise if he is not ‘too dark’. With all her good breeding she fails to see that it is not just her aversion to black people that she should cure but her basic racial view point and discrimination that she should completely do away with.

Even if she says she is tolerant to dark and not to very dark, she is still a racist. Here, the poet makes a very subtle point that he is not attacking the discrimination against his race but the discrimination shown to any race for that matter, brown, yellow or light black.

‘ARE YOU DARK? OR VERY LIGHT?’ Revelation came.

‘You mean – like plain or milk chocolate?’

When the speaker says black, she sees ‘red’. Red is the colour of danger and wherever she is forced to share a spot with the public, she might be feeling horrified. By ‘Red double-tiered omnibus squelching tar’, the poet means how the black community is run over by the white because they sense danger lurking in them.

Obviously, the speaker scores over the lady in breeding, culture, decency and even in language. She does not even understand what ‘sepia’ means. The speaker now feels more confident and teases her in different ways.

Facially, I am brunette, but madam, you should see

The rest of me. Palm of my hand, soles of my feet…’

He tries to tell her how his body got that colour. He refers to his rear end and she takes offence and is about to hang her phone. After she has cut him off, he still manages to tell her to see it for herself. Thus, in every way he is able to outsmart her and make his message loud and clear. He would have lost his chance to be her tenant but he has succeeded in ‘giving it to her’.

The poet also has succeeded in destroying the myth of culture and breeding associated with the western world. He shows how discrimination rears its ugly head in subtle ways.