KRG – The Kochi Reading Group

Poetry Session – Oct 23, 2026

2026-10-31T10:03:40.268+05:30

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.

The law of xenia has a parallel with the Gospel of Matthew Ch 25:35-36 in which Jesus announces six works of love (caritas) that will characterise those who will inherit the Kingdom of Heaven upon death. One of them is
For I was ... a stranger and you welcomed me.

In the Hindu scriptures in texts like the Manusmriti, there is a duty of Manushya Yajna prescribed, which requires feeding and welcoming strangers and guests before eating oneself.

In the Buddhist Canon also, there are several key terms stipulating hospitality:

Ātitheyya: The act of welcoming or honouring guests and strangers (atithi).

Dana: Generosity offered without expectation of return. Hosting travellers and providing for their physical needs.

Atithi-puja: Honouring the guest, ensuring that anyone arriving tired, hungry, or in distress is met with warmth and care.

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:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meGlJXtucdc

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:

https://kochiread.blogspot.com/2018/07/kamala-das-her-life-through-poetry.html

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.

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.

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

KumKum in the courtyard of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston

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:

http://oyc.yale.edu/english/modern-poetry

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.

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:

https://allpoetry.com/Elizabeth_Bishop

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/elizabeth-bishop

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Bishop

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.

https://www.lcenglishhub.ie/elizabeth-bishop/at-the-fishhouses-elizabeth-bishop/

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

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.

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 Mount Olympus from The Odyssey, about its beauty. Here are the relevant passages from Book 6, lines 42-46 in the Wilson and Mendelsohn translations:

Evocation of Mount Olympus “where the gods will have their home forever”:

The place is never shaken by the wind,

or wet with rain or blanketed by snow.

A cloudless sky is spread above the mountain,

white radiance all round. The blessed gods

live there in happiness forevermore.

(Book 6, lines 42-46 in Emily Wilson’s translation)

The same description in Daniel Mendelsohn’s translation tells of “Olympos – where, they say, the gods' steadfast abode Stands forever.”

… The winds never shake it, nor is it ever soaked

By rain, nor do snows pile up. Instead, a clear and cloudless

Sky stretches far and wide, gleaming whitely in the sunlight,

And there the blessed gods spend all their days in delight.

Mount Olympus is situated in northern Greece on the border between the regions of Thessaly and Macedonia

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

Consolidated Poems of KRG Poetry Session Oct 23, 2026.pdf

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, Sep 25, 2026

2026-10-04T19:49:02.430+05:30

First edition cover (1980), illustration by Ed Lindlof published by Louisiana State University Press

Several of the readers found this novel indigestible. It is not that they have not met with comedic or eccentric characters in other novels, but an Ignatius Reilly who walks around illustrating so many psychosomatic disorders is a unique novelistic find. Dyslexia, which one of the readers claimed was his major shortcoming, was probably not among his scourges, because it was not with words or numbers that he had problems. The verdict of Gemini, the AI program, is that “Ignatius J. Reilly is not formally diagnosed with a single, real-world medical affliction. Instead, he is a dramatic composite of various physical, psychological, and behavioural traits that rarely – if ever – occur together in a single individual in the manner Toole presents.”

Ignatius Reilly’s stubborn persistence in his quirky behaviour and his conviction that “I’m not the problem, the world is the problem,” leads to a series of mishaps with other people, many of whom have heir own behavioural problems. The unrelenting march to doom in the novel is supposedly lightened by ‘humour’ but it is not of the kind where you laugh with the character in a jokey situation, but at the pitiable character. Who is this blunderbuss of an idiot who adopts the pose of a philosopher in the mould of the 6th-century philosopher Boethius who had the concept of a Wheel of Fortune? And eats a vendor of hot-dogs out of his entire cart’s supply?

It was all too much. Even the cockatoo undressing an exotic dancer in a saloon in Bourbon Street, New Orleans, did not lend much fun.

The Cockatoo Act

Out of a sense of duty several readers did plough through the academic essays of Ignatius Reilly and survive his buffoonish behaviour on display in the novel throughout. As one reader put it, the novel has no plot, but offers a series of disjointed incidents in the life of a ridiculous man.

But it all ends well:

Myrna Minkoff driving off with Ignatius Reilly just as the ambulance arrives to take him to the asylum

Author Bio

John Kennedy Toole

Priya gave a brief on the author John Kennedy Toole. The name Kennedy is from his mother's family – they were French. And Toole is the name from the father's family, who were of Irish origin, and and had come to New Orleans. His nickname was Ken. He is best known for this novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, published posthumously in 1980, more than a decade after his tragic suicide at the age of 31.

He was born in 1937 in New Orleans, Louisiana. Toole demonstrated literary talent from a young age. His first novel was written at the age of 16, called The Neon Bible. In that novel the end is very different; it's a violent end with no relation to the story.

Toole's suicide at the age of 31 happened because the book was rejected by Simon and Schuster. He was unhappy about it, and had a big argument with his mother. He left home, he drove in his car, and went to a particular place and ended his life. Exactly a year before he did that, he had taken a friend there and shown him the place, saying, “this is where I will die, I'll be buried here.”

If you read about him as a young boy and a young man, there is no hint that this person will end his own life. Because he was full of life and a brilliant student.

He received his higher education from Tulane University and Columbia University, eventually teaching English while pursuing a PhD during his military service. During his military service, he began writing A Confederacy of Dunces, which tells the story of the eccentric, lazy Ignatius Riley.

Toole was born to a middle class family in New Orleans. From a young age, his mother Thelma taught him an appreciation of culture. She was thoroughly involved in his affairs for most of his life. And at times, they had a difficult relationship.

Many people attribute his suicide to his mother being very controlling and bossy. He had a good relationship with his father, but not with his mother. Yet it was finally his mother who brought him all this fame by hawking his novel around to publishers until it was placed.

As a child, Toole had a great affection for his black nursemaid, Willa Matthews, who cared for him when his parents were both working. An excellent student, Toole curtailed his stage work when he entered high school. He concentrated on his academic work. Toole wrote for the school newspaper, Silver and Blue, worked on the yearbook, The Tarpon, and won several essay contests. Toole spoke at gatherings of civic organisations.

His father had given him an old Oldsmobile car when he was 13, and he used it to deliver newspapers at that age, despite the legal age of driving being 18. In high school, he was like any other young boy, dating his girl friends. Nowhere do you get a hint that this boy was under any kind of depression.

His mother was absolutely convinced that he was without flaw, and in him she entertained great hopes. It was an extreme form of maternalism, where all your pride and all your hopes are focused in one person. He had to grow up with that burden. She was very ostentatious, shrill and loud-voiced, a bossy braggart of a woman.

He had an academic scholarship during his undergraduate years at Tulane University in New Orleans. He did very well. Then he was drafted into the army. He had a short stint of military service, during which he was inducted to teach English to the Spanish recruits. After receiving a promotion, he got a private office and began writing A Confederacy of Dunces there.

That was 1968. And then he went around with the manuscript to publishers. It was rejected.

It was rejected also by Robert Gottlieb, the legendary American literary editor and publisher who started his career at Simon & Schuster in 1955. He went on to nurture authors like Joseph Heller, Toni Morrison, John le Carré, John Cheever, Doris Lessing, and biographer Robert Caro. He was looking at the manuscript of Heller’s Catch-22 at the time he rejected A Confederacy of Dunces.

Toole couldn't accept the rejection. He ended his life and died by suicide by running a garden hose from the exhaust pipe in through the window of his car on March 26, 1969. His car and person were clean and the police officers who found him reported that his face showed no sign of distress. An envelope discovered in the car was marked ‘To my parents.’ The suicide note inside the envelope was destroyed by his mother, who later gave varying accounts of its details. She said it expressed his feeling for her. Later she said that the letter was bizarre and preposterous, violent, ill-fated, full of nothing but insane ravings. He was buried at the Greenwood Cemetery in New Orleans.

A Confederacy of Dunces has been described as a grand comic feud and is considered one of the seminal works of 20th century Southern literature. It has received praise for its accurate use of various New Orleans dialects, including the YAT dialect. The title of the book is from a quote by Jonathan Swift's essay, Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting: “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”

It was his mother, Thelma Toole, who refused to let her son's genius be forgotten. For years, she shopped carbon copies of the manuscript to various publishers, getting rejected every time. In 1976, she marched into the office of the prominent author, Walker Percy (who later wrote a foreword) at Loyola University and demanded he read it. Once he started reading it, he found it so brilliant that it just sucked him in. Percy helped get the book published by the Louisiana State University Press in 1980.

It became a massive literary sensation, and in 1981, Toole was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Thomo told about the comparisons of Ignatius Reilly with Billy Bunter. When Thomo was thinking about this character, Ignatius Reilly, the image of Billy Bunter came to his mind.

You may know Billy Bunter from our school days when we read Billy Bunter comic stories. Billy Bunter is a famous fictional English schoolboy known as the “Fat Owl of the Remove.” He first appeared in a boys' weekly magazine called The Magnet in 1908 which ran until 1940. In appearance he was very overweight, wore glasses, and tight checkered trousers. He was lazy, greedy, selfish, and often got into trouble. Later Billy Bunter starred in novels, comic strips, and a 1950s BBC TV show.

Billy Bunter, the fat boy

Billy Bunter and Ignatius Reilly are surprisingly close as comic characters, according to ChatGPT, even though they belong to very different literary worlds. Both are larger-than-life parasites who create chaos, while remaining convinced that the problem is everyone else's. Billy Bunter was created by Charles Hamilton, and Ignatius Reilly by John Kennedy Toole.

Billy Bunter stories take place in Greyfriars School. A Confederacy of Dunces takes place in New Orleans.

One is a schoolboy, the other is an adult. In physical presence, both are extremely fat, obsessed with food.

And Ignatius is very large, poorly groomed, and physically eccentric. The central obsession for Bunter is food and money. And central obsession for Reilly is food, comfort, and his elaborate ideas about society.

Bunter constantly borrows money, begs for food, and avoids paying. Ignatius, lives with his mother and repeatedly exploits other people. Honesty, habitual lying and bluffing, that's Bunter. Self-serving, manipulative, and frequently dishonest, that is Ignatius.

Bunter thinks he's cleverer and more important than he really is. Reilly believes himself to be a profound intellectual and cultural critic.

Obsessed with work, Bunter does everything possible to avoid studying. And Ignatius avoids conventional work and regards ordinary employment as beneath him.

Billy Bunter creates comic trouble and financial inconvenience, and Ignatius creates much more serious social disruption and misery.

The comic method in Bunter is slapstick repetition and schoolboy mischief. Ignatius' satire, irony, grotesque behaviour, and intellectual absurdity is characteristic of A Confederacy of Dunces. Both characters are masters of self-deception. Bunter can be caught red-handed and almost immediately invent a story explaining why he is actually the victim. He has an extraordinary ability to turn his own selfishness into an apparent virtue.

Ignatius does much the same thing, but on an intellectual level. He constructs an elaborate philosophy to justify his laziness, hostility to modern society, and refusal to accept responsibility. In his mind, he's not a failure who refuses to work; he's an intellectual refusing to participate in a corrupt civilisation.

Both characters operate on the principle, “I’m not the problem, the world is the problem.”

Ignatius is a much darker creation, according to ChatGPT.

Geetha was the first one to read. Sadly, she confessed she had not completed the novel.

It brings a certain society to light and also probably certain off-beat personalities. Very seldom do we meet such people in real life. Is there a single medical affliction that Ignatius Reilly suffers from in the novel A Confederacy of Dunces? Or is he a composite of many medical afflictions that seldom are manifest in one person?

Joe asked Gemini AI app this question and here is what it returned:

Ignatius J. Reilly is not formally diagnosed with a single, real-world medical affliction. Instead, he is a dramatic composite of various physical, psychological, and behavioural traits that rarely—if ever— occur together in a single individual in the manner Toole presents.

While Ignatius frequently attributes his erratic behaviour, physical outbursts, and dramatic bodily complaints to a single, hyper-specific organ—his famous pyloric valve—this serves primarily as a satirical device rather than a clinically recognised medical condition.

The "Pyloric Valve" as a Satirical Construct

Ignatius constantly claims that his “pyloric valve” opens and closes unpredictably in response to the atrocities of the modern world, trapping gas and causing severe internal pressure. In actual human anatomy, the pyloric sphincter controls the passage of food from the stomach into the duodenum. While conditions like pyloric stenosis (a severe blockage) or functional dyspepsia exist, Ignatius’s self-diagnosed, volatile valve—which opens or shuts based on his moral disgust, television shows, or aesthetic offense—is entirely a figment of his theatrical hypochondria.

A Composite of Psychological and Physical Manifestations

Rather than representing one distinct disorder, Ignatius exhibits a constellation of symptoms and behaviours that span multiple clinical and physical profiles:

Severe Somatisation and Hypochondria: He translates emotional distress, anxiety, and social conflicts into extreme physical symptoms, constantly fearing immediate bodily collapse.

Agoraphobia and Social Withdrawal: He displays a intense reluctance to leave his neighbourhood or home, expressing profound fear and disgust toward the outside world and modern society.

Neurodivergent / Autism Spectrum Traits: His extreme adherence to rigid routines, intense fixation on specific historical periods (Boethius and the Middle Ages), sensory oversensitivity (loud noises, bright lights, crowds), lack of intuitive social cues, and highly formal, pedantic speech – all mirror traits associated with the autism spectrum.

Personality Disorders: He demonstrates strong narcissistic and paranoia-driven traits—harbouring a belief in his own intellectual and moral superiority while simultaneously convinced that society, his mother, and various acquaintances are conspiring against him.

Obesity-Related Complications: His severe obesity, extreme physical lethargy, and gastrointestinal distress reflect real physical ailments, though exaggerated for comic effect.

By weaving these disparate physical complaints, psychological fixations, and personality quirks into one character, Toole creates a uniquely eccentric figure who functions as a walking manifestation of medieval humorism—specifically an excess of “black bile” or classic melancholia—rather than a case study of any single modern medical condition.

Geetha read from chapter three in which Ignatius and Mrs Reilly have a conversation about Mancuso, the cop who is victimised by his boss.

Several appreciated the realistic reading by Geetha. Joe said ‘¥ou sound like the sympathetic mother.’

Saras

Shoba and she chose successive sections in chapter 4. This is when Ignatius goes to work at Levy Pants, and he's been asked to do the filing. He cannot bend down and open the file cabinet. So the administrator, Mr. Gonzalez, gives him a wheeled stool. Ignatius is propelled on this low-wheeled stool for rapid access to files at Levy Pants company, but falls flat and can’t get up. The other three people in the office are trying to hoist him.

This is so funny. Miss Trixie is also one kind of a character. It is definitely a comedy show at Levy Pants.

Likening his buttocks to the bottom of an eggplant is a good humorous simile, said Joe. ‘Eggplant on a thumbtack.’

Toole is good at writing such scenes – he just finds the right words to express these comic situations, said Shoba who read the continuation.

Shoba

Ignatius from his supine position instructs Gonzalez and Miss Trixie how to get him upright – meanwhile the owner Gus Levy walks in. This was a good passage to choose, said Zakia. Mr. Levy wanted to run out of his office, he did not want to spend time there. One likes the way he threw all the files into the dustbin.

He did not do any filing ultimately, said Pamela. Yes, he keeps throwing out the files, said Saras. And later he organised a protest like a union leader. He should have come to Kerala, mused Zakia.

Joe

Also from chapter 4, this is a conversation between the owner of this Levy Pants and his wife. It is a study of a nagging housewife who is disappointed in her husband

KumKum

In chapter 6 Ignatius foments rebellion among the workers at Levy Pants and organises a strike at the factory.

On a dirty bed sheet they wrote out the slogan of the uprising: Crusade for Moorish Dignity.

Thomo

This is from chapter 7 where Ignatius gets hired to vend hot-dogs after he tastes them at an old man’s cooking range. He becomes a hot dog vendor and winds up polishing off all the hot dogs himself. They are quite long and you have to cut out some stuff in the middle. John Toole, the author, apparently as a young boy, did have a go at this gig, working as a hot dog vendor.

The French Quarter backdrop of Toole's novel. Source-Bookpackers

Was Ignatius all that dysfunctional that he ate it up himself? The following comes from Gemini:
The character of Ignatius Riley may have been modelled on a professor of English, called Bob Byrne. John Kennedy Toole met Bob Byrne while teaching as an assistant professor of English at the University of Southwestern Louisiana (University of Louisiana at Lafayette or UL Lafayette, University of Louisiana) in 1959. Byrne served as one of the primary real-life inspirations for Ignatius. Byrne famously wore a green ear-flapped deerstalker hat—a signature part of Ignatius's wardrobe that Toole frequently teased him about. Byrne was a scholar of medieval literature who loved discussing the 6th-century philosopher Boethius and his concept of the Wheel of Fortune, both of which became central obsessions for Ignatius in the novel. Friends and colleagues noted that Byrne possessed a slovenly, eccentric appearance, played the lute, loved to argue, and had a penchant for eating hot dogs. So there, Toole borrowed a lot from his fellow academic’s quirks.

However, Toole also infused the character with elements of his own life (such as his real-life experiences pushing a street food cart and working briefly in a garment factory) along with a healthy dose of exaggeration for comedic purposes.

Thomo narrated that they had a guy in their office in Kochi, called Napoleon or something like that. This guy could just eat and eat and eat. He was a slightly fat, but not corpulent. If he went to a wedding, he would just continue eating from start to finish – there was no stopping him – how did he do it? There are people like that.

Ignatius goes around the town, and returns with an almost empty cart. He’s eaten the whole lot, and not sold even one!

Pamela

This was from Chapter 8, where Patrolman Mancuso loses his copy of Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy when he tries to arrest George.

Pamela took off on her commentary from Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy. Why was that contemplative book given to the policeman, and why is the book mentioned so many times in the novel?

Pamela delved into that book a bit. Boethius was a 6th century Roman senator, historian and philosopher of the early Middle Ages, known for this book which he wrote while in prison, awaiting execution.

It is a masterpiece, addressing fate, free will, evil and human happiness through a dialogue with Lady Philosophy. It became one of the most widely read books of the Middle Ages. Lady Philosophy tells him in answer to his queries to recognise his own identity. She tells him that life works like a Wheel of Fortune; it constantly spins, taking away wealth, fame and power.

Philosophy informs us that these worldly goods are unstable and cannot grant true happiness. Lady Philosophy argues that true happiness comes from God who is the ultimate good and source of good and the ultimate good and source of all wisdom. This reminds one of a saying of Jesus from the gospel of Matthew Ch 6: 19-21 ”Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and decay destroy, and thieves break in and steal. But store up treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor decay destroys, nor thieves break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there also will your heart be.”

Boethius asks why evil people thrive and then considers Chance, Providence and Free Will. Lady Philosophy keeps answering him and her answers seem to bring calm to his soul. Pamela concluded that the theme of this book is being connected to the theme of The Consolation of Philosophy.

The ending of the whole story comes about when Ignatius’ reconnects with Myrna Minkoff, Ignatius Reilly’s intellectual foil, former classmate, and ideological nemesis-turned-saviour. She was a radical Beatnik counterculture activist from New York City, who met Ignatius during their graduate studies in New Orleans. Throughout most of the novel, she is physically absent—having returned to New York—but remains a constant presence through an ongoing, furious exchange of letters. Minkoff is the one who actually understands his thinking and extracts him out of the whole situation that he is mired in. In the novel’s final chapters, when Ignatius faces imminent institutionalisation by his mother, Myrna drives down to New Orleans in her Renault and rescues him, driving him away to safety and providing the story's resolution.

His mother was not mature enough and objective to understand why Ignatius thinks in this odd manner. Pamela had a feeling he had dyslexia and the only person who could understand him was Minkoff. But as Gemini has pointed out earlier in this reading, Ignatius is a capricious composite of so many aberrations foisted on him by the author, that there is no medical diagnosis known that fits all his behavioural eccentricities.

Hence, Joe sensing this was an author’s imagination gone berserk questioned the dyslexia-only hypothesis

Priya added that he is dysfunctional, socially dysfunctional. And he is impossible in interpersonal relationships. That is the area of dyslexia, said Pamela. Priya noted he could not do even a simple job and the way he lived was extremely messy, starting with his messy personal hygiene.

But he wrote well, didn’t he, asked Pamela? When he wrote, he wrote well, Priya agreed. He wrote beautifully. But Joe said the person who wrote well in those snatches was the manifestation of Toole’s own essay writing – it is not easily ascribable to the character Ignatius.

Priya said it is an anarchist kind of a writing. He's like what they call an anti-hero. He's planning all the mischief with relish.

When these dyslexic children are tested for IQ, they are always rated as super IQ, said Pamela. But dyslexia, recall, is primarily characterised by difficulties with accurate and fluent word recognition, spelling, and phonological processing (the ability to match letters to their corresponding sounds). Ignatius has many afflictions but processing words is not among them. Regarding him as dyslexic is not only mistaken if you judge from the novel regarding his odd behaviour, but it may be a wholly false lead in assessing Ignatius.

No doubt today he would be definitely asked to go and see a therapist, as Priya said, but not for dyslexia, which is a learning disability concentrated in the areas of reading, writing and numeracy.

Zakia criticised his mindless eating of hot-dogs that didn't even look at or smell appetising. Priya commented on his needlessly confrontational attitude. He would fight, and argue about anything. The latter bogey of his did not permit him to get along with people, Pamela said.

Socially he was far from fitting in at home, at work, or among his associates and strangers.

Pamela insisted that only Myrna Minkoff understood him in this entire novel. She's probably as weird, Priya added. She was trying to tell the world that everybody must have sex because that is the answer to all problems. That was the consolation of her philosophy. Myrna felt that if that particular pleasure principle in him was satisfied, he would behave better.

That was Myrna’s answer for everything; it was her therapeutic method to cure him but he was against it.

Zakia

Her passage was a continuation of chapter 7, which Thomo read, about the hot-dog vendor, how Ignatius has to dress before he takes that cart out. He did not want to wear the assigned cap.

Zakia said Ignatius is stubborn about what he will do and what he will not do. Paradise Vendors are desperate and they actually employ him. One doesn't know what damage he's going to accomplish on his rounds by the time he comes back. So the owner gives him the cart – even the cart he's particular about which one he will trundle. Zakia said you can just laugh through some of this book, but it was quite frustrating to read it also.

It was quite difficult to continue on with it, one had to use a lot of determination to get through it. Priya noted people’s devotion to the reading group ensures they really finished the book; in the normal course you would drop such a book part way through. None of our readers would have got through this book without that external compulsion

Individual portions are quite funny, said Saras. There's no plot, there's nothing you are heading toward; this book is narrated as a series of disjointed incidents in a man's life. He's quite ridiculous in his ways.

But at the end, again, he doesn't get caught, said Priya. That’s the part Devika is reading. He gets away in the end.

Zakia was happy to see Devika was last in order of reading this time; it is a lot that usually falls to Zakia alphabetically. Devika's is usually at the top of the reading list; at any rate she is the first always to post her selection. This was a novel and it turned out Devika chose a passage toward the end. However, poetry is next, so she will be second in line after you-know-who.

The professor of English, who was Toole’s friend, Bob Byrne, used to dress up like this with a deerskin cap and fancy dress clothes like Ignatius in this novel, according to Priya.

This cop Mancuso was also wearing some costume, seated, disguising himself.

Priya

She read the nightclub scene from the French Quarter of New Orleans which is very famous among tourists. By coincidence friends of Priya were visiting America and chose to visit New Orleans and went to the French Quarter. Priya told them she was reading a novel which describes the scene in that quarter of NO which is full of cafes. Below are some details from Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Quarter

The French Quarter, also known as the Vieux Carré, is the historic heart of New Orleans and one of the most culturally distinct neighbourhoods in North America. Established by the French in 1718, it is famous for its Spanish-colonial architecture, vibrant music scene, French culinary heritage, and round-the-clock nightlife.

St. Louis Cathedral in Jackson Square is also part of the French Quarter

The French Quarter is bounded by the Mississippi River, Canal Street, Rampart Street, and Esplanade Avenue. Its defining visual style is a mix of Spanish, French, and Creole architecture: multi-storey brick buildings with wrought-iron or cast-iron balconies, hidden courtyard gardens, and pastel-painted facades.

Jackson Square: The central public square facing the Mississippi River, anchored by the iconic St. Louis Cathedral and flanked by historic government buildings. It serves as an open-air art market and gathering space for brass bands, street performers, and fortune tellers.

Royal Street: Parallel to Bourbon Street, Royal Street offers a quieter, more refined day-to-day experience characterised by antique shops, fine art galleries, luxury jewellery boutiques, and historic Creole restaurants.

Culinary Heritage: The district is home to iconic dining institutions offering Creole and Cajun classics, alongside landmark cafes like Café Du Monde on Decatur Street, famous for warm beignets dusted with powdered sugar and chicory café-au-lait.

Nightlife in the French Quarter is world-renowned for its diversity, energy, and open-container laws, which allow patrons to carry drinks outdoors in plastic ‘go-cups.’

Bourbon Street forms the epicentre of the quarter's rowdiest evening activity. Neon signs line the pedestrianised street, illuminating karaoke joints, dance clubs, piano bars, and historic watering holes. The street is famous for potent specialty cocktails served in souvenir cups, such as the Hurricane at Pat O'Brien's or the Hand Grenade from Tropical Isle. Joe remembered walking along the French quarter, full of these clubs. They hucksters outside the door trying to get you in and each is vying with others, shouting out the great sights you will see inside. One of them accosted Joe yelling “You'll never see such big bums and boobs. Come on in.”

A view of Bourbon Street

Revellers gather on elevated iron balconies above the street to watch the crowds below and toss beads to passersby.

Traditional Jazz & Live Music is preserved beyond the revelry of Bourbon Street. Preservation Hall, located on St. Peter Street, is an intimate venue which hosts traditional New Orleans jazz performances in an unpretentious, historical setting. Numerous historic hotels and lounges feature live jazz quartets, blues performers, and brass bands into the late hours.

Preservation Hall

A typical jazz club

Priya read about how Lana Lee, owner of the nightclub, who wanted hers to be different from the others. She comes up with the idea of an animal show and getting a cockatoo who will undress the performer Darlene on-stage.

Lana Lee is the ruthless, manipulative owner and manager of the Night of Joy bar. She serves as one of the novel's primary antagonists. She is coarse, and aggressively greedy. Lana runs her establishment with an iron fist. She underpays her employees and brutally exploits her janitor, Burk Jones, threatening to turn him over to the police as a vagrant if he steps out of line.

Beyond selling watered-down drinks, Lana runs a covert pornography ring, selling illegal photographic materials to high school students through a local newsstand run by an elderly man named George. Her illegal side business becomes the core focus of Officer Mancuso's undercover investigation. When Ignatius Reilly accidentally comes into possession of one of her pornographic photos (using the back of it to draft a manifesto for his political movement), it sets off the climax that leads to Lana's arrest and the dismantling of her ring.

Darlene is an optimistic, well-meaning, but endearingly dim-witted B-girl and exotic dancer working at the Night of Joy. Unlike the cynical characters around her, Darlene is warm-hearted, cheerful, and desperate to break out of her low-paying job. She dreams of becoming a famous exotic dancer by creating a unique, sophisticated stage act, The Cockatoo Act. Her big artistic breakthrough is this performance involving a trained, live cockatoo named Harmonic (which she buys from a local pet shop). The bird is meant to strip off her clothes during her dance routine, though the act routinely goes off the rails during rehearsals.

Darlene takes pity on Jones and tries to help him stand up to Lana. She manages to convince Lana to let her debut her cockatoo act at the bar, which unwittingly draws the entire cast of characters—including Officer Mancuso and Ignatius's mother, Mrs. Reilly—to the Night of Joy for the disastrous, climactic showdown where Lana's crime ring is finally exposed.

Joe said the jazz clubs are wonderful places to be entertained with original numbers from the NO jazz scene. The drummers especially are wild and electric. It's not very expensive considering such good food is thrown in. New York jazz clubs are quite expensive, by contrast.

NO is famous for fish and oysters.

Mancuso's aunt says that as a child, she worked prying oysters open for her mother. Mancuso's aunt goes to the bowling alley with Ignatius's mother. She match-makes for Ignatius's mother.

Devika

She read the part where Ignatius seeks to escape New Orleans as Myrna arrives from New York and he decides to flee thither where Fortuna beckons. Devika read 10 or 15 pages of the novel a day, but started well in advance, and finished in July. When she reached the part where Ignatius was finally running away, she gasped in relief, “Thank God he's getting away from this place.”

It's good riddance as he realises that his mother is going to send him to a charity hospital, a kind of asylum. He wants to get out of the house and he's trying to figure out how to do it when Myrna Minkoff turns up, just in time.

When Myrna and Ignatius are driving away, he sees the ambulance coming also to pick him up. Devika confessed she had to skip portions of the novel to get through it.

But our reading passages got the essence of the story very well. Thank you to all the readers for selecting the featured passages.

The next session of Poetry was decided as 23rd of October. There are three readers’ birthdays coming up in October, soon after Joe and KumKum return from the USA. There will be a party in Devika’s house and everyone will bring a dish. Devika will get the biryani ready. And of course there will be enough vegetarian dishes.

The Readings

Geetha Ch 3 Ignatius and Mrs Reilly have a conversation about Mancuso, the cop victimised by his boss

Ignatius staggered up the brick path to the house, climbed the steps painfully, and rang the bell. One stalk of the dead banana tree had expired and collapsed stiffly onto the hood of the Plymouth.

"Ignatius, baby," Mrs. Reilly cried when she opened the door. "What's wrong? You look like you dying."

"My valve closed on the streetcar."

"Lord, come in quick out the cold."

Ignatius shuffled miserably back to the kitchen and fell into a chair.

"The personnel manager at that insurance company treated me very insultingly."

"You didn't get the job?"

"Of course I didn't get the job."

"What happened?"

"I would rather not discuss it."

"Did you go to the other places?"

"Obviously not. Do I appear to be in a condition that would attract prospective employers? I had the good judgment to come home as soon as possible."

"Don't feel blue, precious."

«Blue'? I am afraid that I never feel blue."

"Now don't be nasty. You'll get a nice job. You only been on the streets a few days," his mother said and looked at him. "Ignatius, was you wearing that cap when you spoke to the insurance man?"

"Of course I was. That office was improperly heated. I don't know how the employees of that company manage to stay alive exposing themselves to that chill day after day. And then there are those florescent tubes baking their brains out and blinding them. I did not like the office at all. I tried to explain the inadequacies of the place to the personnel manager, but he seemed rather uninterested. He was ultimately very hostile." Ignatius let out a monstrous belch. "However, I told you that it would be like this. I am an anachronism. People realize this and resent it."

"Lord, babe, you gotta look up."

"Look up?" Ignatius repeated savagely. "Who has been sowing that unnatural garbage into your mind?"

"Mr. Mancuso."

"Oh, my God! I should have known. Is he an example of looking up'?"

"You oughta hear the whole story of that poor man's life. You oughta hear what this sergeant at the precinct's trying.."

"Stop!" Ignatius covered one ear and beat a fist on the table. "I will not listen to another word about that man. Throughout the centuries it has been the Mancusos of the world who have caused wars and spread diseases. Suddenly the spirit of that evil man is haunting this house. He has become your Svengali!"

"Ignatius, get a holt of yourself."

"I refuse to look up.' Optimism nauseates me. It is perverse. Since man's fall, his proper position in the universe has been one of misery."

"I ain't miserable."

"You are."

"No, I ain't."

"Yes, you are."

"Ignatius, I ain't miserable. If I was, I'd tell you."

"If I had demolished private property while intoxicated and had thereby thrown my child to the wolves, I would be beating my breast and wailing. I would kneel in penance until my knees bled. By the way, what penance has the priest given you for your sin?"

"Three Hail Mary's and a Our Father."

"Is that all?" Ignatius screamed. "Did you tell him what you did, that you halted a critical work of great brilliance?"

"I went to confession, Ignatius. I told Father everything. He says, 'It don't sound like your fault, honey. It sounds to me like you just took a little skid on a wet street.' So I told him about you. I says 'My boy says I'm the one stopping him from writing in his copybooks. He's been writing on this story for almost five years.' And Father says, 'Yeah?

Well, don't sound too important to me. You tell him to get out the house and go to work.""

"No wonder I cannot support the Church," Ignatius bellowed. "You should have been lashed right there in the confessional." (640 words)

Saras Ch 4 Ignatius is propelled on a low-wheeled stool for rapid access to files at Levy Pants company, but falls flat and can’t get up

"In addition, my valve has been misbehaving and has prevented me from bending over to reach the lower drawers."

"I have just the thing for that," Mr. Gonzalez said and went into the little office storeroom to get, Ignatius imagined, some type of medicine. But he returned with one of the smallest metal stools that Ignatius had ever seen. "Here. The person who used to work on the files used to wheel back and forth on this along the lower drawers. Try it."

"I don't believe that my particular body structure is easily adaptable to that type of device," Ignatius observed, a gimlet eye fixed upon the rusting stool. Ignatius had always had a poor sense of balance, and ever since his obese childhood, he had suffered a tendency to fall, trip, and stumble. Until he was five years old and had finally managed to walk in an almost normal manner, he had been a mass of bruises and hickeys. "However, for the sake of Levy Pants, I shall try."

Ignatius squatted lower and lower until his great buttocks touched the stool, his knees reaching almost to his shoulders. When he was at last nestled upon his perch, he looked like an eggplant balanced atop a thumb tack.

"This will never do. I feel quite uncomfortable."

"Give it a try," Mr. Gonzalez said brightly.

Propelling himself with his feet, Ignatius traveled anxiously along the side of the files until one of the miniature wheels lodged in a crack. The stool tipped slightly and then turned over, dumping Ignatius heavily to the floor.

"Oh, my God!" he bellowed. "I think I've broken my back."

"Here," Mr. Gonzalez cried in his terrorized tenor. "T'll help you up."

"No! You must never move a person with a broken back unless you have a stretcher. I won't be paralyzed through your incompetence."

"Please try to get up, Mr. Reilly." Mr. Gonzalez looked at the mound at his feet. His heart sank. "TIl help you. I don't think you're badly injured."

"Let me alone," Ignatius screamed. "You fool. I refuse to spend the remainder of my life in a wheel chair."

Mr. Gonzalez felt his feet turn cold and numb.

The thud of Ignatius' fall had attracted Miss Trixie from the ladies' room; she came

around the files and tripped on the mountain of supine flesh.

"Oh, dear," she said feebly. "Is Gloria dying, Gomez?"

"No," Mr. Gonzalez said sharply.

"Well, I'm certainly glad of that," Miss Trixie said, stepping onto one of Ignatius' outstretched hands. (421 words)

Shoba Ch 4 (following on Saras’ passage) Ignatius from his supine position instructs Gonzalez and Miss Trixie how to get him upright – meanwhile the owner Gus Levy walks in.

"Good grief!" Ignatius thundered and sprang into a sitting position. "The bones in my hand are crushed. I'II never be able to use it again."

"Miss Trixie is very light," the office manager told Ignatius. "I don't think she could have

hurt you much."

"Has she ever stepped on you, you idiot? How would you know?"

Ignatius sat at the feet of his co-workers and studied his hand.

"I suspect that I won't be able to use this hand again today. I had better go home immediately and bathe it."

"But the filing has to be done. Look how behind you are already."

"Are you talking about filing at a time like this? I am prepared to contact my attorneys and have them sue you for making me get on that obscene stool."

"We'll help you up, Gloria." Miss Trixie assumed what was apparently a hoisting position. She spread her sneakers far apart, toes pointing outward, and squatted like a Balinese dancer.

"Get up," Mr. Gonzalez snapped at her. "You're going to fall over."

"No," she answered through tight, withered lips. "I'm going to help Gloria. Get down on that side, Gomez. We'll just grab Gloria by the elbows."

Ignatius watched passively while Mr. Gonzalez squatted on his other side.

"You are distributing your weight incorrectly," he told them didactically. "If you are going to attempt to raise me, that position offers you no leverage. I suspect that the three of us will be injured. I suggest that you try a standing position. In that way you can easily bend over and hoist me."

"Don't be nervous, Gloria," Miss Trixie said, rocking back and forth on her haunches.

Then she fell forward onto Ignatius, throwing him on his back once again. The edge of her celluloid visor hit him in the throat.

"Oof," gurgled from somewhere in the depths of Ignatius' throat. "Braah."

"Gloria!" Miss Trixie wheezed. She looked into the full face directly beneath hers.

"Gomez, call a doctor."

"Miss Trixie, get off Mr. Reilly," the office manager hissed from where he squatted beside his two underlings.

"Braah."

"What are you people doing down there on the floor?" a man asked from the door. Mr.

Gonzalez' chipper face hardened into a mask of horror, and he squeaked, "Good morning, Mr. Levy. We're so glad to see you."

"I just came in to see if I have any personal mail. I'm driving back to the coast right away. What's this big sign over here for? Somebody's going to get his eye knocked out on that thing."

"Is that Mr. Levy?" Ignatius called from the floor. He could not see the man over the row of filing cabinets. "Braah. I have been wanting to meet him."

Shedding Miss Trixie, who slumped to the floor, Ignatius struggled to his feet and saw a sportily dressed middle-aged man holding the handle of the office door so that he could flee as rapidly as he had entered. (493 words)

Joe Ch 4 A study of a nagging housewife who is disappointed in her husband

"You've thrown your father's business down the drain. That's the tragedy of your life."

"Christ, who wants that old factory? Nobody's buying the kind of pants they make anymore. That's all my father's fault. When pleats came in, in the thirties, he wouldn't change over from plain-front trousers. He was the Henry Ford of the garment industry.

Then when the plain front came back in the fifties, he started making trousers with pleats.

Now you should see what Gonzalez calls 'the new summer line.’ They look like those balloon pants the clowns wear in circuses. And the fabric. I wouldn't use it for a dishrag myself."

"When we were married, I idolized you, Gus. I thought you had drive. You could have made Levy Pants really big. Maybe even an office in New York. It was handed all to you and you threw it away."

"Oh, stop all that crap. You're comfortable."

"Your father had character. I respected him."

"My father was a very mean and cheap man, a little tyrant. I had some interest in that company when I was young. I had plenty interest. Well, he destroyed all that with his tyranny. So far as I'm concerned, Levy Pants is his company. Let it go down the drain. He blocked every good idea I had for that firm just to prove that he was the father and I was the son. If I said, 'Pleats,' he said, 'No pleats! Never!' If I said, 'Let's try some of the new synthetics, he said, 'Synthetics over my dead body."

"He started peddling pants in a wagon. Look what he built that into. With your start you

could have made Levy Pants nationwide."

"The nation is lucky, believe me. I spent my childhood in those pants. Anyway, I'm tired of listening to you talk. Period."

"Good. Let's keep quiet. Look, Como's lips are turning pink."

"You've never been a father figure to Susan and Sandra."

"The last time Sandra was home, she opened her purse to get cigarettes and a pack of rubbers falls on the floor right at my feet."

"That's what I'm trying to say to you. You never gave your daughters an image. No wonder they're so mixed up. I tried with them."

"Listen, let's not discuss Susan and Sandra. They're away at college. We're lucky we don't know what's going on. When they get tired, they'll marry some poor guy and everything will be all right."

"Then what kind of a grandfather are you going to be?"

"I don't know. Let me alone. Go get on your exercising board, get in the whirlpool bath. I'm enjoying this show."

"How can you enjoy it when the faces are all discolored."

"Let's not start that again."

"Are we going to Miami next month?"

"Maybe. Maybe we could settle there."

"And give up everything we have?"

"Give up what? They can fit your exercising board in a moving van."

"But the company."

"The company has made all the money it's ever going to make. Now is the time to sell."

"It's a good thing your father's dead. He should have lived to see this." Mrs. Levy gave the shower shoe a tragic glance. "Now I guess you'll spend all your time at the World Series or the Derby or Daytona. It's a real tragedy, Gus. A real tragedy."

"Don't try to make a big Arthur Miller play out of Levy Pants." (571 words)

KumKum Ch 6 Ignatius foments rebellion among the workers at Levy Pants

"Friends!" Ignatius said grandly and lifted the arm that was not holding the sheet. "At last the day is ours. I hope that you have all remembered to bring your engines of war." From the group around the cutting table there issued neither confirmation nor denial. "I mean the sticks and chains and clubs and so forth." Giggling in chorus, the workers waved some fence posts, broomsticks, bicycle chains, and bricks. "My God! You have really assembled a rather formidable and diffuse armory. The violence of our attack may surpass my expectations. However, the more definitive the blow, the more definitive the results.

My cursory inspection of your arms, therefore, confirms my faith in the ultimate success of our crusade today. In our wake, we must leave a sacked and pillaged Levy Pants, we must fight fire with fire."

"What he say?" one worker asked another.

"We shall storm the office very shortly, thereby surprising the foe when his senses are still subject to the psychic mists of early morning."

"Hey, Mr. R., pardon me," a man called out from the crowd. "Somebody tell me you in trouble with a po-lice. Is that right?"

A wave of anxiety and uneasiness broke over the workers.

"What?" Ignatius screamed. "Where did you hear such slander. That is totally false.

Some white supremacist, some upstate red-neck, perhaps even Gonzalez himself no doubt began that vile rumor. How dare you, sir. All of you must realize that our cause has many enemies."

While the workers were applauding him soundly, Ignatius wondered how that worker had learned of the mongoloid Mancuso's attempted arrest. Perhaps he had been standing in the crowd before the department store. That patrolman was the fly in everyone's ointment. However, the moment seemed to have been saved.

"Now this we will carry with us in the vanguard!" Ignatius shouted over the last sprinkled applause. He dramatically whipped from his pelvis the sheet, flapping it open.

Among the yellow stains the word ForwArD was printed in high block letters in red crayon.

Below this Crusade for Moorish Dignity was written in an intricate blue script.

"I wonder who been sleepin on that old thing," the intense woman with the spiritual bent, who was to be the leader of the choir, said. "Lord!"

Several other prospective rioters expressed the same curiosity in more explicitly physical terminology.

"Quiet now," Ignatius said, stomping one foot thunderously on the table. "Please! Two of the more statuesque women here will carry this banner between them as we march into the office."

"I ain puttin my hand on that," one woman answered.

"Quiet! Everyone!" Ignatius said furiously. "I am beginning to suspect that you people are not actually deserving of this cause. Apparently you are not prepared to make any of the ultimate sacrifices."

"How come we gotta take that old sheet with us?" someone asked. "I thought this suppose to be a demonstration dealin with wages."

"Sheet? What sheet!" Ignatius replied. "I am holding before you the proudest of banners, an identification of our purpose, a visualization of all that we seek." The workers studied the stains more intensely. "If you wish to simply rush into the office like cattle, you will have participated in nothing more than a riot. This banner alone gives form and credence to the agitation. There is a certain geometry involved in these things, a certain ritual which must be observed. Here, you two ladies standing there, take this between you and wave it thus with honor and pride, hands held high, et cetera."

The two women whom Ignatius indicated ambled slowly to the cutting table, gingerly took the banner with their thumbs and index fingers, and held it between them as if it were a leper's shroud.

"That looks even more impressive than I had imagined," Ignatius said. (637 words)

Thomo Ch 7 Ignatius gets hired to vend hot-dogs after he tastes them at an old man’s cooking range.

He stepped into the garage and looked around. In a corner an old man was boiling hot dogs in a large institutional pot whose size dwarfed the gas range upon which it rested.

"Pardon me, sir," Ignatius called. "Do you retail here?" The man's watering eyes turned toward the large visitor.

"What do you want?"

"I would like to buy one of your hot dogs. They smell rather tasty. I was wondering if I

could buy just one."

"Sure."

"May I select my own?" Ignatius asked, peering down over the top of the pot. In the boiling water the frankfurters swished and lashed like artificially colored and magnified paramecia. Ignatius filled his lungs with the pungent, sour aroma. "I shall pretend that I am in a smart restaurant and that this is the lobster pond."

"Here, take this fork," the man said, handing Ignatius a bent and corroded semblance of a spear. "Try to keep your hands out of the water. It's like acid. Look what it's done to the fork."

"My," Ignatius said to the old man after having taken his first bite. "These are rather strong. What are the ingredients in these."

"Rubber, cereal, tripe. Who knows? I wouldn't touch one of them myself."

"They're curiously appealing," Ignatius said, clearing his throat. "I thought that the vibrissae about my nostrils detected something unique while I was outside." Ignatius chewed with a blissful savagery, studying the scar on the man's nose and listening to his whistling.

"Do I hear a strain from Scarlatti?" Ignatius asked finally.

"I thought I was whistling "Turkey in the Straw.'"

"I had hoped that you might be familiar with Scarlatti's work. He was the last of the musicians," Ignatius observed and resumed his furious attack upon the long hot dog.

"With your apparent musical bent, you might apply yourself to something worthwhile."

…

The old man looked at Ignatius and then at the massive pot, the gas range, and the crumpled carts. He said, "I can hire you right here."

"Thank you very much," Ignatius said condescendingly. "However, I could not work here. This garage is particularly dank, and I'm susceptible to respiratory ailments among a variety of others."

"You wouldn't be working in here, son. I mean as a vendor."

"What?" Ignatius bellowed. "Out in the rain and snow all day long?"

"It don't snow here."

"It has on rare occasions. It probably would again as soon as I trudged out with one of these wagons. I would probably be found in some gutter, icicles dangling from all of my orifices, alley cats pawing over me to draw the warmth from my last breath. No, thank you, sir. I must go. I suspect that I have an appointment of some sort."

Ignatius looked absently at his little watch and saw that it had stopped again.

"Just for a little while," the old man begged. "Try it for a day. How's about it? I need vendors bad."

"A day?" Ignatius repeated disbelievingly. "A day? I can't waste a valuable day. I have places to go and people to see."

"Okay," the old man said firmly. "Then pay me the dollar you owe for them weenies."

"I am afraid that they will all have to be on the house. Or on the garage or whatever it is.

My Miss Marple of a mother discovered a number of theater tickets stubs in my pockets last night and has given me only carfare today."

"T'll call in the police."

"Oh, my God!"

"Pay me! Pay me or I'Il get the law."

The old man picked up the long fork and deftly placed its two rotting tongs at Ignatius' throat. (612 words)

Zakia Ch 7 The old man who owns Paradise Vendors equips Ignatius with a fitting dress before he goes out

"Just don't ever try to rob a hot dog man again."

"You've just made your point. Actually, you have made two of them, literally in my throat and muffler. I hope that you are prepared to compensate for the muffler. There are no more of its kind. It was made in a small factory in England that was destroyed by the Luftwaffe. At the time it was rumored that the Luftwaffe was directed to strike directly at the factory in order to destroy British morale, for the Germans had seen Churchill wrapped in a muffler of this sort in a confiscated newsreel. For all I know, this may be the same one that Churchill was wearing in that particular Movietone. Today their value is somewhere in the thousands. It can also be worn as a shawl. Look."

"Well," the old man said finally, after watching Ignatius employ the muffler as a cummerbund, a sash, a cloak, and a pair of kilts, a sling for a broken arm, and a kerchief, "you ain't gonna do too much damage to Paradise Vendors in one hour."

"If the alternatives are jail or a pierced Adam's apple, I shall happily push one of your carts. Though I can't predict how far T'll go."

"Don't get me wrong, son. I ain't a bad guy, but you can only take so much. I spent ten years trying to make Paradise Vendors a reputable organization, but that ain't easy. People look down on hot dog vendors. They think I operate a business for bums. I got trouble finding decent vendors. Then when I find some nice guy, he goes out and gets himself mugged by hoodlums. How come God had to make it so tough for you?

"We must not question His ways," Ignatius said.

"Maybe not, but I still don't get it."

"The writings of Boethius may give you some insight."

"I read Father Keller and Billy Graham in the paper every single day."

"Oh, my God!" Ignatius spluttered. "No wonder you are so lost."

"Here," the old man said, opening a metal locker near the stove. "Put this on." He took what looked like a white smock out of the locker and handed it to Ignatius.

"What is this?" Ignatius asked happily. "It looks like an academic gown."

Ignatius slipped it over his head. On top of his overcoat, the smock made him look like a dinosaur egg about

to hatch.

"Tie it at the waist with the belt."

"Of course not. These things are supposed to freely flow about the human form, although this one seems to provide little leeway. Are you sure that you don't have one in a larger size?

"Upon close scrutiny, I notice that this gown is rather yellow about the cuffs. I hope that these stains about the chest are ketchup rather than blood. The last wearer of this might have been stabbed by hoodlums."

"Here, put on this cap." The man gave Ignatius a little rectangle of white paper.

"I am certainly not wearing a paper cap. The one that I have is perfectly good and far more healthful."

"You can't wear a hunting cap. This is the Paradise vendor's uniform."

"I will not wear that paper cap! I am not going to die of pneumonia while playing this little game for you.

Plunge the fork into my vital organs, if you wish. I will not wear that cap. Death before dishonor and disease." (576 words)

Pamela Ch 8 Patrolman Mancuso loses his copy of Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy when he tries to arrest George

Patrolman Mancuso looked at the tiles on the floor. They were out of focus. He felt panic. Then he stared at them more closely and saw that the haze was only the moisture that formed a gray film over almost every surface in the rest room. He looked again at The Consolation of Philosophy, which was opened on his lap, and turned a limp, damp page.

The book was making him more depressed. The guy who wrote it was going to be tortured by the king. The preface had said so. Now all this time the guy was writing this thing, he was going to end up with something driven down into his head. Patrolman Mancuso felt sorry for the guy and felt obliged to read what he had written. So far he had only covered only about twenty pages and was beginning to wonder whether this Boethius was something of a gambler. He was always talking about fate and odds and the wheel of fortune. Anyway, it wasn't the kind of book that exactly made you look up to the brighter side.

After a few sentences Patrolman Mancuso's mind began to wander. He looked out through the crack in the door of the booth, which he always left open an inch or two so that he could see who was using the urinals, the lavatories, and the paper-towel box. There at the lavatories was the same boy that Patrolman Mancuso had been seeing every day, it seemed. He watched the delicate boots moving back and forth from the lavatory to the paper-towel dispenser. The boy leaned against a lavatory and began drawing on the back of his hands with a ballpoint pen. There might be something in this, Patrolman Mancuso thought.

He opened the booth and went up to the boy. Coughing, he tried to say pleasantly,

"What's that you're writing on your hand, pal?"

George looked at the monocle and the beard at his elbow and said, "Get the hell away from me before I kick your nuts in."

"Cawd the police," Patrolman Mancuso taunted.

"No," George answered. "Just get away. I ain't making trouble."

"You afred udda police?"

George wondered who this nut was. He was as bad as that hot dog vendor.

"Look, kookie, move it. I don't want no trouble with the cops."

"You dote?" Patrolman Mancuso asked happily.

"No, and neither does a screwball like you," George said, looking at the watering eye behind the monocle and the moistness at the mouth of the beard.

"You udder arrest," Patrolman Mancuso coughed.

"What? Boy, are you out of it."

"Patrodeman Madcuso. Uddercover." A badge flashed in front of George's pimples.

"Cubb alogg wid me."

"What the hell are you arresting me for? I'm just standing here," George protested nervously. "I ain't done nothing. What is this?"

"You udder suspiciudd."

"Suspicion of what?" George asked in panic.

"Aha!" Patrolman Mancuso slobbered. "You rilly afred."

He reached out to grab George by the arm and handcuff him, but George snatched The Consolation of Philosophy from under Patrolman Mancuso's arm and slammed it into the side of his head. Ignatius had bought a large, elegant, limited edition of the English translation, and all fifteen dollars of its price hit Patrolman Mancuso in the head with the force of a dictionary. Patrolman Mancuso bent over to pick up the monocle, which had fallen from his eye. When he straightened up again, he saw the boy scraping rapidly out of the door of the rest room with the book in his hand. He wanted to run after him, but his head was throbbing too badly. He returned to his booth to rest and grew even more depressed. What could he tell Mrs. Reilly about the book?

Priya Ch 12 Ignatius has a run-in with a cockatoo in a night club in New Orleans

Lana Lee appeared on the stage in what looked like gold lamé overalls.

"Oh, my God!" Ignatius spluttered. The doped Negro had tricked him. He wanted to bolt from the club, but realized that it would be wiser to wait until the woman had finished and left the stage. In a moment, he was crouched down against the side of the stage. Over his head, the Nazi proprietress was saying, "Welcome, ladies and genitals." It was so dreadful a beginning that Ignatius almost knocked over the table.

"You are pay me now," the woman was demanding, sticking her head under the table to find the face of her customer.

"Shut up, you slut," Ignatius hissed.

The band stumbled into a four-count version of Sophisticated Lady. The Nazi woman was screaming, "And now that pure Virgin-ny Belle, Miss Harlett O'Hara." An old man at one of the tables clapped feebly, and Ignatius peered over the rim of the stage and saw that the proprietress was gone. In her place stood a stand decorated with rings. What was Miss O'Hara up to?

Then Darlene swept onstage in a ball gown that trailed yards of nylon net. On her head was a monstrous picture hat and on her arm a monstrous bird. Someone else clapped.

"Mira, you are pay me now or else, cabron."

"There sure was plenty balls at that ball, but I still got my honor," Darlene said carefully to the bird.

"Oh, my God!" Ignatius bellowed, unable to remain silent any longer. "Is this cretin

Harlett O'Hara?"

The cockatoo noticed him before Darlene did, for its beads of eyes had been focusing on Ignatius' hoop of a novelty earring ever since it had come onstage. When Ignatius bellowed, it flapped from Darlene's arm to the stage and squawking, hopping, dashed for Ignatius' head.

"Hey," Darlene cried. "It's the crazyman."

As Ignatius was about to dash from the club, the bird hopped from the stage to his shoulder. It sank its claws into his smock and snagged his earring with its beak.

"Good heavens!" Ignatius leaped up and beat at the bird with his itching paws. What avian menace had depraved Fortuna spun his way? The champagne bottles and the glasses shattered on the floor as he sprang and began staggering to the door.

"Come back here with my cockatoo," Darlene cried.

Lana Lee was on the stage now, screaming. The band had stopped. The few old male patrons moved out of the way of Ignatius, who was floundering around among the little tables making moose calls and beating at the mass of rose feathers welded to his ear and shoulder.

"How in the hell did that character get in here?" Lana Lee asked the confused septuagenarians in the audience. "Where's Jones? Somebody get me that Jones."

"Come here, you big crazyman," Darlene hollered. "On opening night. Why you hadda come here on opening night?"

"Good grief," Ignatius gasped, feeling for the door. In his wake he had left a trail of overturned tables. "How dare you fiends inflict a rabid bird upon your unsuspecting customers? You may expect to be sued in the morning."

"Come! You are owe twenty-four dollar to me. You are pay right now"

Ignatius knocked over another table as he and the cockatoo lurched forward. Then he felt the earring loosening, and the cockatoo, the earring firmly in its beak, fell from his shoulder. Terrorized, Ignatius bounced out of the door just ahead of the Latin woman, who was waving the check with great determination. (589 words)

Devika Ch 14 Ignatius seeks to escape New Orleans as Myrna arrives from New York and he decides to flee thither where Fortuna beckons

Escape. Escape.

Ignatius looked in his wallet. The thirty dollars was gone, apparently confiscated by his mother at the hospital. He looked at the clock. It was almost eight o'clock. Between napping and assaulting the glove, the afternoon and evening passed rather quickly.

Ignatius searched his room, flinging Big Chief tablets around, mashing them underfoot, dragging them from beneath his bed. He came up with some scattered coins and went to work on the desk, where he found a few more. The total was sixty cents, a sum that limited and blocked escape routes. He could at least find a safe haven for the rest of the evening: the Prytania. After the theater had closed, he could pass along Constantinople Street to see whether his mother had come home.

There was a slipshod frenzy of dressing. The red flannel nightshirt sailed up and hung on the chandelier. He jammed his toes into the desert boots and leaped as well as he could into the tweed trousers, which he could hardly button at the waist. Shirt, cap, overcoat, Ignatius put them on blindly and ran into the hall, careening against the narrow walls. He was just reaching for the front door when three loud knocks cracked against the shutters.

Mr. Levy returned? His valve sent out a distress signal that established communication with his hands. He scratched the bumps on his paws and peered through the shutters, expecting to see several hirsute brutes from the hospital.

There on the porch stood Myrna in a shapeless olive drab corduroy car coat. Her black hair was braided into a pigtail that twisted under one ear and fell on her breast. A guitar was slung over her shoulders.

Ignatius was about to burst through the shutters, splintering slats and latches, and wrap that one hemplike pigtail around her throat until she turned blue. But reason won. He was not looking at Myrna; he was looking at an escape route. Fortuna had relented. She was not depraved enough to end this vicious cycle by throttling him in a straitjacket, by sealing him up in a cement block tomb lighted by florescent tubes. Fortuna wished to make amends. Somehow she had summoned and flushed Myrna minx from a subway tube, from some picket line, from the pungent bed of some Eurasian existentialist, from the hands of some epileptic Negro Buddhist, from the verbose midst of a group therapy session.

"Ignatius, are you in that dump?" Myrna demanded in her flat, direct, slightly hostile voice. She beat on the shutters again, squinting through her black-rimmed glasses. Myrna was not astigmatic; the lenses were clear glass; she wore the glasses to prove her dedication and intensity of purpose. Her dangling earring reflected the rays of the streetlight like tinkling glass Chinese ornaments. "Listen, I can tell there's somebody in there. I heard you stomping around in that hall. Open up these crummy shutters."

"Yes, yes, I'm here," Ignatius cried. He tore at the shutters and pushed them open.

"Thank Fortuna you've come."

"Jesus. You look terrible. Like you're having a nervous breakdown or something. Why the bandage? Ignatius, what's the matter? Look how much weight you've gained. I've just been reading these pitiful signs out here on the porch. Boy, have you had it."

"I've gone through hell," Ignatius slobbered, pulling Myrna into the hall by the sleeve of her coat. "Why did you step out of my life, you minx? Your new hair-do is fascinating and cosmopolitan." He snatched at her pigtail and pressed it to his wet moustache, kissing it vigorously. "The scent of soot and carbon in your hair excites me with suggestions of glamorous Gotham. We must leave immediately. I must go flower in Manhattan." (621 words)

Reading the Romantic Poets – Aug 3, 2026

2026-08-08T12:34:52.500+05:30

The origins of Romantic Poetry though nominally confined to a small group of poets in England had such a vast influence that its effervescence may be detected in the poetry of nations across Europe. So special is the delight in their poetry that KRG devotes a whole session every year to mining the untold riches of what those poets left behind, though several of them died very young.

The usual suspects were represented – Wordsworth, Keats, Byron – but so were three women poets and a dashing representative from Spain. It was a thrilling experience. The joy comes through in the accounts supplied by several readers, especially in the verse casually appended to a letter of Keats to a friend where the poet recounts his spontaneous reaction to the song of a thrush floating into his study through a window.

The song thrush

The poem by Wordsworth concerned a hero of Haiti whose leadership in mounting a revolt of the slaves against their exploitative slave-owning plantation masters won the independence of the island (western part) from France – but, at the cost of Toussaint L'Ouverture’s imprisonment and death in a French prison. The poem excited discussion about the subsequent impoverishing debt imposed on Haitians by France to compensate the French landowners for their losses.

Lord Byron, Cleaned up Image of a large statue of Lord Byron erected in the courtyard of Byronei Messolonghi. The statue shows him in Greek costume of the time, standing, gazing at the waters

A poem by Byron demonstrated how committed he was to the cause of the independence of Greece from Ottoman rule. HIs poem was written only a few months before his death from a mosquito-borne fever in Messolonghi – the historic town in located about 250 km west of Athens on the edge of a rich ecological lagoon. Byron seems to have had a presentiment of his death as he ponders his thirty-sixth birthday in the poem, filled with a determination to fight on.

It was invigorating to listen to the Spanish verses of Bécquer, the very embodiment of the spirit of Romanticism in the soil of Sevilla. His famous Rima LIII was recited by Thomo, attempting to learn Spanish through the effort of decoding the pathos of the poem.

Read on and savour the pleasure of reading the Romantic Poets … to whom KRG returns every August.

Full Account and Record of the Romantic Poetry Session

Devika

Devika was quite surprised, actually, that nobody had read Casablanca so far in our group, because it's a poem we have all read in school. We've only read one another poem by her. This is such an iconic one, by the poet Felicia Dorothea Hemans.

Felicia Dorothea Hemans Bio (September25, 1793 to May16, 1835)

Felicia Dorothea Hemans was an English poet regarded as the leading poet of her day. She was immensely popular during her lifetime in both England and the United States, second only to Lord Byron in terms of book sales. Two of her opening lines “The boy stood on the burning deck” and “The stately homes of England” have acquired classic status. Born on September 25, 1793 in Liverpool, the Romantic poet Felicia Hemans was the daughter of the Tuscan Consul in Liverpool and the fifth of seven children. The family shifted to Wales following a period of financial difficulty in 1800. Hemans was a voracious reader, and she made use of the extensive home library and was instructed by her mother in several languages – Welsh, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.

Hemans first published her collection Poems in 1808 at the age of fourteen. She married Captain Alfred Hemans in 1812, had five children by him before separating when her husband moved to Italy in 1818. She had to support her children with the income from her poetry. Despite her illustrious admirers, her stature as a serious poet gradually declined, ironically on account of her success in the literary market place. Her poetry was often assigned for school children to read, as it was considered morally exemplary.

The poem, Casabianca, is sung in ballad form and consists of a boy asking his father whether he had fulfilled his duties, as the ship continues to burn until the magazine catches fire. Hemans adds the following note to the poem: “Young Casabianca, a boy about thirteen years old, son to the Admiral of the Orient, remained at his post (in the Battle of the Nile) after the ship had taken fire, and all the guns had been abandoned, and perished in the explosion of the vessel, when the flames reached the powder.”

From 1831 onward Hemans lived in Dublin which was recommended for being healthier than Liverpool. Despite the change, she continued to experience poor health. She died on 16 May 1835. Sources suggest that she had suffered from an attack of scarlet fever, followed by a ‘consumptive decline‘, or by ‘dropsy’. She was regarded as a leading an English poet of her day.

It's a tragic poem. It gives you goose bumps when you read it. And the other one we often read in school is The Charge of the Light Brigade by Tennyson. Do the children learn these poems nowadays? Every year, there would be at least one child reciting the poem at elocution competition in school. These poems were par for the course and another was Lord Ullin’s Daughter, the ballad by Scottish poet Thomas Campbell.

Geetha

Usually Geetha choses poems from Byron or Keats or Shelley for this session, but she chanced upon a lady poet who's actually older than all of these and was an inspiration to them.

Her name is Charlotte Turner Smith, known as Charlotte Smith (CS). She was born on May 4 in London, Great Britain, 1749, died October 28, 1806. She was born 200 years before Thoreau. She was a pioneering English poet and novelist who helped to revive the English sonnet and heavily influenced the early poetry foundation of the Romantic movement.

Indeed, she can perhaps be rightly called the first of the Romantic poets, influencing those who followed, including William Wordsworth, John Keats, and so on. Outspoken for the time, she once described her early marriage as nothing more than prostitution because her father sold her to the richest suitor; her father was a spendthrift.

But although it was not the happiest of relationships, she still managed to have 13 children by her husband. OMG, someone exclaimed.

Her early life was marked by the untimely death of her mother and the poor spending habits of her father. She loved to read poetry as a child and even submitted some of her own work to local publications, only to have them rejected. Her father, finding himself in severe financial difficulties, then married her off at age 15 to Benjamin Smith who hailed from a very well-off family, landed family. He was a violent and financially reckless West India merchant.

From the beginning she didn't get on with her in-laws, whom she thought rather uncouth.They, in turn, thought her frivolous for spending so much time reading poetry. It turned out that Benjamin was nearly as bad with money as her own father had been and ended up in a debtor's prison. As was a custom at that time, Charlotte went to join him in King's Bench Prison in 1783, where she wrote her first collection of poetry called Elegiac Sonnets.

The poems were a great success and gave her the chance to pay for their release. They fled to France in order to avoid any further debt collection. She separated formally from her husband in 1787 in order to live independently.

Literary Career

Charlotte Smith published her breakthrough poetry collection, Elegiac Sonnets, in 1784, which became immensely popular and helped revive the sonnet form in English poetry. CS transitioned to writing novels for financial stability, publishing her debut fiction, Emmeline, or the Orphan of the Castle, in 1788.

She also authored radical works of social criticism, including Desmond (1792) and her finest novel, The Old Manor-House (1793). She also wrote educational books for children, notably Conversations Introducing Poetry (1804).

Despite eleven novels, four children's books and other works, she saw herself mainly as a poet and hoped to be remembered for that.

Death and Legacy

CS died on October 28, 1806, in Tilford, Surrey, broken in health and financial distress. She was praised by William Wordsworth and Sir Walter Scott for her profound sensitivity to nature and melancholic lyrical style.

What Geetha read was an excerpt from The Emigrants, a two-book blank verse poem published in 1793. It describes French Catholic and royalist refugees fleeing the Reign of Terror and arriving on the cliffs of Sussex, England. The speaker blends their national grief with her own personal financial and marital displacement. It's in sympathy of the French Revolution and what the people suffered. And this excerpt is just a part from the second book.

The setting is a Spring landscape of the blossoming Sussex countryside in April 1793. There is a contrast between Nature and Violence. Spring arrives with blooming flowers, but the speaker cannot enjoy nature because she is haunted by the human bloodshed and political madness of happenings in France.

CS is all-in for true liberty that will bring peace rather than terror and chaos. She condemns radical tyranny and war.

The excerpt ends with the words ‘for employment.’ Those are the needy. Somewhere, Geetha felt the poet is siding with the monarchy. She was initially for liberty and freedom, the call of the revolutionaries. But during Robespierre's reign of terror, all that wanton killing and beheading, turned Charlotte Smith against the revolution. She laments that, actually.

The readers were glad that Geetha introduced an old lady’s poem that we haven't heard before. To think that she's one of the first poets of the Romantic period. A bit of it reads like modern poetry towards the end.

Joe

Joe read a poem that Lord Byron wrote toward the end of his life. called, On this Day I Complete my Thirty-Sixth Year.

Lord Byron wrote the poem on January 22, 1824, in Missolonghi (now mostly spelled Mesolongi), Greece. He died less than three months later on April 19, 1824, of a severe illness while still in Missolonghi.

He wrote this while he was on his single-minded vision to help the Greek people win freedom from the Ottoman Turks. After selling his English estates he invested his own money into the revolution. He took command of a brigade of soldiers, intending to lead an attack on the Turkish-held fortress of Lepanto.

The swampy, damp environment of Missolonghi severely worsened his health. Doctors used bloodletting to assuage his fever, but they bled him to exhaustion and it hastened his death.. The Greeks deeply mourned him, and he remains celebrated as a national hero in Greece to this day, with numerous statues erected to him in Greece.

Lord Byron statue in Messolonghi Garden of Heroes

Byron faced severe political chaos in Greece because the Greeks were fighting a brutal civil war against each other while simultaneously trying to fight the Ottoman Empire for independence. Main regional factions included the military chieftains of the Peloponnese, the wealthy shipowners of the islands, and the politicians of Central Greece. The primary internal struggle was between a Western-educated politician and a powerful guerrilla military leader.

The first stanza reads –

Tis time this heart should be unmoved,

Since others it hath ceased to move:

Yet though I cannot be beloved,

Still let me love!

Here Byron, Joe thinks, is expressing his failure in love among the women he knew – it was not for lack of trying. This handsome flamboyant man of wit and with a heart large enough to embrace several women at once, had only encountered failures in love:

1. Mary Chaworth – A distant cousin and teenage muse who rejected him, inspiring many of his early melancholic poems.

2. Lady Caroline Lamb – A passionate aristocrat who famously described Byron as "mad, bad, and dangerous to know." She caused public scenes about their volatile affair.

3. Lady Oxford – A politically minded, older married woman who provided Byron with a peaceful refuge =after the chaos of Caroline Lamb

4. Lady Frances Webster – A married woman whom Byron courted in a tense game of psychological seduction.

5. Annabella Milbanke – A mathematical heiress whom Byron married in 1815 in a disastrous attempt to reform his life. She left him in just one year on account of rumours of incest with his sister. By Millbanke Lord Byron had his only legitimate child, Ada Lovelace (born Augusta Ada Byron); she went on to become the world’s first computer programmer under the tutelage of Charles Babbage, the ingenious British engineer, who invented the Differential Engine to solve mathematical problems by automatic programming.

Byron left England four months after his daughter’s birth, never seeing her again. Byron famously dedicated the opening of Canto III of his epic poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage to her with the lines:

Is thy face like thy mother's, my fair child!

ADA! sole daughter of my house and heart?

When last I saw thy young blue eyes they smiled,

And then we parted, -- not as now we part,

But with a hope. --

Lord Byron was rumoured to have had an incestuous relationship with this older half-sister, Augusta Leigh.

The second stanza of Byron’s poem in Missolonghi begins

My days are in the yellow leaf;

– which will remind the reader of Shakespeare’s sonnet 73:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

The third stanza is where we hear the sad cry from the heart when ‘Volcano Isle’ and “funeral pile’ are used as rhyming phrases. The first refers to his heaving heart, the emotional state of longing and fighting for an independent Greece. The second is probably the premonition of his death to come. He is feeling prematurely old at 36, exhausted from his affairs of the heart, and now mired in a fight.

But in a later stanza he recovers his spirit and cries out

The Sword, the Banner, and the Field,

Glory and Greece around us see!

The penultimate stanza begins in a sinking mood but ends singing the Glory of valorous death:

If thou regret'st thy Youth, why live?

The land of honourable Death

Is here:—up to the Field, and give

Away thy breath!

Joe was reminded of Captain Bikram Batra who died in the Indo-Pak Kargil War of 1999. He wrote to his family:

या तो तिरंगा लहराकर आऊंगा, या तिरंगे में लिपटकर आऊंगा, लेकिन ज़रूर आऊंगा

I shall return with flying flag

Or wrapt in the flag –

But return, I shall!

For Byron it was the latter alternative. We still mourn him, a flawed romantic hero whose heart was in the right place.

Kavita

It so happened that Kavita selected another poem of Byron’s, Stanzas to a Hindoo Air.

Though Byron was a Lord by heredity, he didn't depend on his lordship for his fame, which spread far wider than that of any other Lord of the time as a result of his poetry.

Stanzas to a Hindoo Air (written in Pisa, 1821) is a lesser-known yet fascinating lyric. Written toward the end of his life before his departure for Greece, the poem reflects both Byron's characteristic dramatic intensity and the 19th-century British Romantic fascination with Orientalism.

The poem was composed to fit a popular Hindustani tune of the time titled "Alla Malla Punca", which Byron's mistress, Countess Teresa Guiccioli, was fond of singing. During the early 19th century, returning British colonial officials brought back popular Indian melodies, which were arranged for piano and sung in European salons.

Like today, we sing, Parda Hai, Parda, from the film Amar Akbar Anthony; but Hindi film songs are so popular that they are sung in many parts of the world – here is an Uzbek group singing that number:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVpRGt4ostM

Somebody else gesturing to our Priya, cited the song Pretty Pretty Pretty Priya from the 1970 film Priya. In the film the character of Priya is played by the actress Tanuja (younger sister of actress Nutan, and also famous as the mother of actress Kajol). So one could sing here Lonely, Lonely Pillow. Our Hindi translation would be so funny, said Priya. But it will make a good Bollywood song if set to lilting music.

Byron adopts a female voice, turning the pillow into a confidant while her lover sails away over the ocean.

The poem makes use of repetition and incremental refrain (e.g., "Oh! my lonely—lonely—lonely—Pillow!"). This repetition echoes the rhythmic cadence of a musical song or "air," mimicking a mournful chant or lullaby.

Byron weaves typical Romantic motifs – dreams, ships ("bark"), waves ("billow"), and drooping flora ("willow") – to emphasise physical isolation and emotional agony.

The speaker addresses an inanimate object—the pillow—transmuting a domestic item into the sole witness of her grief:

Oh! my lonely—lonely—lonely—Pillow!

Why must my head ache where his gentle brow lay?

The contrast between the past (where the lover's head rested) and the present (where the speaker's head aches in isolation) reinforces the pain of sudden absence.

Because daytime reality offers no comfort, the speaker relies on the nocturnal realm:

Send me kind dreams to keep my heart from breaking,

In return for the tears I shed upon thee waking;

The dream becomes the only site of potential reunion, a common trope in Byron's poetry where real-world exile is countered only by subconscious escape. In classic Byronian style, extreme emotional states collapse into one another:

In one embrace let these arms again enfold him,

And then expire of the joy—but to behold him!

The emotional intensity reaches a peak where the speaker desires to die not from sorrow, but from the overwhelming sensation of seeing the lover again ("expire of the joy").

Byron’s poem is often compared to Shelley's famous Lines to an Indian Air (also known as I Arise from Dreams of Thee), composed around the same period.

Byron had a clubfoot, but he was a very handsome man. Among the romantic poets, he was the rich one. The others had no money, except Shelley, who was born into a wealthy, landed gentry family that attained minor nobility when his grandfather received a baronetcy in 1806. Shelley grew up in a privileged aristocratic environment, with his father serving as a Member of Parliament. During his life he had a good relationship with Byron.

Joe said Byron had all the characteristics of a romantic poet. He not only romanced several women, but embraced lost causes. He was a failure in love. These things conspire to make him uber-romantic, in Joe’s opinion. And then just imagine, that he sold his estates and invested in a cause which would not be realised for many years afterwards. Greece formally won its independence when it was recognised as an independent sovereign state by major European powers via the London Protocol on February 3, 1830, concluding a revolution that began on March 25, 1821.

KumKum

KumKum read a poem by Keats, What the Thrush Said. It's a sonnet. But he didn't write it as a poem in the first instance. He was writing a letter to a friend, and at the end, casually subscribed this verse.

These last three lines are beautiful:

He who saddens

At thought of idleness cannot be idle,

And he's awake who thinks himself asleep.

Joe noted that it seems rather irregular because it doesn't have a rhyme scheme. Sonnets, whether they are Shakespearean or Petrarchan or whatever, do follow a certain rhyme scheme. But this doesn't have one. It does have 14 lines, though.

Poets are rather finicky. They won't call a poem a sonnet unless it follows one of the established sonnet forms. KumKum said “Maybe Keats didn't call it a sonnet. But those who included it in collections called it a sonnet.”

Geetha noted the footnote says ‘lines from a letter to John Hamilton.’ KumKum replied that Keats was writing a letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, the poet, satirist, critic, and playwright who was a close friend and correspondent of Keats. At the end of the letter, he added this gift of a poem.

Keats heard a thrush outside his window and spontaneously added on these lines. Recall that Keats composed rapidly. But he didn't have time to polish it, remarked Joe.

Later KumKum added this appreciation:

John Keats: My Favourite Romantic Poet

Regarding What the Thrush Said

Sculpture of John Keats seated on bench by Vincent Gray, in Chichester, West Sussex, UK

Among the Romantic poets, KumKum’s first choice has always been John Keats. The great figures of that movement are Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats – but there is something particularly appealing about Keats. Perhaps it is his extraordinary sensitivity to beauty, his love of nature, or the way he could transform an ordinary moment into something magical.

Keats lived a remarkably short life. Born in 1795, he died in 1821 at only twenty-five years of age. Yet in those few years, he produced poetry that has continued to speak to readers for more than two centuries. Though his life was marked by illness, financial hardship, and personal sorrow, his poetry remains filled with beauty, music, and an intense awareness of natural existence.

Keats believed deeply in beauty. However, his idea of beauty went far beyond aesthetics; for him, beauty was intimately tied to truth, imagination, and the very experience of being alive. His poetry compels us to stop, look, and listen to the world around us. Yet, Keats was also acutely aware of impermanence – he recognised the fleeting nature of beauty at the very moment he found it.

Consequently, a wistful melancholy runs through his odes, sonnets, and shorter lyrics. They seem to remind us that even though “A thing of beauty is a joy forever,” nothing in life or nature lasts. The present moment is what truly matters.

This fragment was originally included in a letter Keats wrote to his friend John Hamilton Reynolds on February 19, 1818. Though written as a sonnet apparently inspired by a thrush's song, its concluding lines cited above carry a profound philosophical weight:

He who saddens

At thought of idleness cannot be idle,

And he's awake who thinks himself asleep.

It is a short poem, but she found it deeply moving. It draws us into the quiet stillness of nature where a thrush is singing. There is no grand story or dramatic spectacle – simply the bird, its song, and the poet listening.

Yet in Keats’s hands, this simple moment becomes expansive. The thrush seems to speak through its song, and Keats listens as if receiving a revelation. Nature is not merely a passive backdrop; it becomes a living presence. The bird has something meaningful to say, even if its language transcends ordinary human understanding.

What she loves most about Keats is his willingness to remain open to mystery. He does not force explanations; instead, he allows himself – and us – to simply dwell in the experience.

The thrush’s song also reminds us of how brief life is. The bird sings entirely in the present, unconcerned with yesterday or tomorrow. Keats, who certainly sensed that his own time was short, was especially attuned to such moments. The song becomes a celebration of life precisely because it is transient.

There is also a gentle restraint in the poem. Keats does not try to dominate nature or impose a heavy-handed message upon it. He simply listens. That is perhaps the greatest lesson of this small poem: sometimes we understand more by listening quietly than by trying to analyse everything.

This is what makes Keats such a special poet for KumKum. His work invites us to pause – to notice the bird, the flower, the season, the sound, the light – and to recognise that these quiet moments hold something profound.

Rather than viewing Keats merely as a figure from literary history, KumKum prefers to experience what the poet offers directly: his love of beauty, his sensitivity to nature, and his ability to find wonder in a fleeting moment. Perhaps the thrush is telling us what Keats understood so well – that life is short, but while we are here, there is always beauty to be experienced.

Priya

We've read Sir Walter Scott before, said Priya. She gave a brief recap on the poet.

Biography:

Scott Monument on Princess Street, Edinburgh

Statue of Sir Walter Scott within the Scott Monument on Princess Street, Edinburgh

Walter Scott was one of the earlier romantics, 1771 to 1832 was the time frame. He falls in the romantic era and was one of the most important men of letters of his time.

He was born in Edinburgh, and is famously known as the pioneer of the historical novel, the Waverley series, which he wrote starting in 1814. The Waverley series is a group of 26 historical novels, published anonymously, The books explore Scottish, English, and European history, shaping the modern historical fiction genre. Scott did not admit he wrote them until 1827.

He spent his early childhood years in Edinburgh, studying at the Edinburgh High School. He got a law degree at the University, and at the age of 25, started writing.

At first he wrote poems. He was very prolific. He wrote a lot of poetry and lots of novels, particularly the historical novels, for he had a great interest in history.

In 1797, he married the daughter of a French refugee, Charlotte Carpenter, with whom he had four children. In his legal career, he became the Sheriff Deputy of Selkirk, a position that he occupied till the end of his life.

He championed Scottish traditions, history, culture, and stories of the highlands and the lowlands. In 1820, when King George IV visited Edinburgh, he was asked to handle the entire grand event. People were amazed that he made the king wear tartan and kilt and pink stockings.

Scott became famous because of his literary output. But in 1825, his financial state deteriorated drastically.

He was very successful in his writing. So how did this happen? His dramatic financial ruin was caused by secret business partnerships in printing and publishing, and by lavish overspending on his estate. In addition a major 19th-century banking crisis exposed his web of debt.

He lived in Abbotsford near Melrose in Edinburgh and died there in 1832. Among the tributes, a splendid one is the prominent Scott Monument on Princess Street in Edinburgh. There was also a laudatory biography by his son-in-law, John Lockhart, which speaks volumes about him. You can read more about him on the Britannica site:

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Walter-Scott

The Lady of the Lake was written in 1810. All his poems are narrative poems, rather long. This poem, is as large as a book, with four cantos as subdivisions.

Priya’s choice was from stanza 29. You need to know a little bit about the story behind this to understand it. The importance of this poem is that the hymn Ave Maria by Schubert was inspired by this poem. For the connection between The Lady of the Lake and Ave Maria, the hymn, see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ave_Maria_(Schubert)

“In Scott's poem, the character Ellen Douglas, the Lady of the Lake, has gone with her exiled father to stay in the Goblin's cave as he has declined to join their previous host, Roderick Dhu, the chieftain of Clan Alpine, in rebellion against King James. Roderick Dhu sets off up the mountain with his warriors, but lingers and hears the distant sound of the harpist Allan-bane, accompanying Ellen who sings a prayer addressed to the Virgin Mary, calling upon her help. Roderick Dhu pauses, then goes on to battle.”

In Schubert’s oeuvre it is known as Ellens Dritter Gesang Opus 52, the 6th in a collection of 7 lieder he wrote inspired by Sir Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake. The Latin version of it, the Ave Maria, has words from the Gospel of Luke when the Angel Gabriel appears to Mary and announces that she will be the mother of Jesus. It was set to this same music of Ellens Dritter Gesang. You can hear it below:

Mezzo-soprano Dorothea Fayne sings Schubert’s Ellens dritter Gesang (Ave Maria)

The story behind it, of course, is The Lady of the Lake. James Douglas was a nobleman, and the king of Scotland at the time was James V. This nobleman has been exiled, because he's fallen out with the king. The king disguises himself and goes around the highlands and the lowlands. He goes near the lake, where this girl and her father, James Douglas have been exiled, and are living in a cave.

There is another nobleman called Michael Green, who she's in love with. Then there is another rebel (Dru) who's at war with King James. The story is about all of them. There is a big battle. James Douglas, though exiled, is loyal to the king. So he says he will fight for the king, and the battle happens.

This stanza 29 is about Ellen Douglas, the daughter, whom the king also finds very attractive, very kind and a sweet-hearted girl, who rescues him. When the battle is going on, there's a storm. The romantic elements of the storm, the battle, and the kindly girl, all combine with the thunder and lightning.

The girl in the cave is praying to Mother Mary, addressing her in the prayer Hail Mary (Ave Maria, in Latin) , to protect her father, to protect her country. That's the poem which Priya read. You can imagine this girl inside the cave with a storm brewing outside, and the battle in full swing. She is trembling and shivering, and her only hope is Mother Mary.

Very nice, said KumKum, when Priya finished reading, but she could not believe it was such a long poem. This much is good enough. It's beautiful, said Zakia.

You can listen to Luciano Pavarotti sing Schubert’s Ave Maria.

Priya was surprised about the connection between these stanzas and the music composed by Franz Schubert, using the words of this and other stanzas of the poem to compose seven of his lieder comprising his Opus 52. It's so beautiful.

I love the hymn as well, said Priya. “And it's so romantic.”

Shoba

Shoba read the poem titled Toussaint L'Ouverture by William Wordsworth,

Toussaint (short for Tous les saints) means all saints. All Saints' Day in French is la Toussaint. It is a public holiday celebrated every year on November 1st. It is meant to honour all faithful people who have reached heaven, including both famous and unknown saints. It reminds believers of the spiritual bond between the living on Earth and those in heaven, and it encourages everyone to live a holy life.

In the poem Toussaint is the name of a French general, from Haiti, a Caribbean island and a colony of France.

It's the second biggest island after Cuba, which was called Hispaniola, at the time, made up of Dominican Republic, in the eastern part of the island, and Haiti was the western part.

At first the island was taken over by the Spanish. The portion which is Haiti was taken over by the French in the 1600s. They brought in slaves from West Africa and it with slaves in order to cultivate sugarcane and make sugar there and export it to Europe and other parts of the world.

Almost 60% of the sugar that the Western world was using came from Haiti because the soil was very good. 9 out of 10 people in Haiti were slaves. The rest were the rich landowners who owned these plantations.

The slaves were treated very poorly. They worked in the fields and operated the machines used to crush sugarcane. Often there were accidents and some slaves would lose their hands and die there. They were treated most cruelly.

The slaves banded together to fight against the French colonisers. The Spanish who controlled the Dominican Republic gave some help to overthrow the French.

Toussaint Louverture, the subject of the poem, was born into a black household. Fortunately, the slave-owner was kind. He gave this boy a chance to spend time in the library and learn to read. He educated him somewhat. Toussaint grew up literate, unlike the slaves around him. He became a leader.

The slaves would run away to the mountains, and there, they formed a small army to attack the French. Meanwhile, the French Revolution happened – that gave an impetus to these slaves to also demand freedom from the colonisers.

When the fighting was going on England sent forces to take over Haiti, because they also were avid colonisers. But the English were defeated.

Then finally, after the French Revolution, Toussaint Louverture, made a constitution for a free Haiti and he declared independence. Once he did that, he began to have a relationship with the United States. Napoleon Bonaparte was very unhappy and he wanted to capture Toussaint and put him in prison. He sent his brother-in-law with soldiers to Haiti to capture him.

They told Toussaint that they were going to have friendly talks with him. He innocently, he believed them. When he came to speak to the brother-in-law of Napoleon Bonaparte, he was captured, taken to France and put in prison. This happened in 1802.

William Wordsworth (1770 - 1850)

It was while he was in prison that Wordsworth wrote this poem in support of Toussaint. He was in a French prison only for one year and died while incarcerated in 1803, before Haiti won full independence. This poem was written in the year following his death. Haiti became independent just one year after his death.

When Haiti declared independence another cruel man became the leader of the blacks. They killed about 5,000 French people. They made gallows all along the coastline and left the French landowners hanging there to show the passing ships what they had done.

It was extracting bitter revenge for slavery. The slaves took back the country into their own hands with a lot of violence.

Sugar made France rich because they were controlling almost 60% of the world’s production. Later on, coffee also was grown there. Ultimately it all ended badly for them.

The original native people were native Indians of the Arawak tribe who died out. Now the population is entirely black. Unless we know this background the poem won't make sense.

It's amazing to think Wordsworth wrote this. It’s a kind of tribute. He was upholding liberty when Toussaint was unjustly imprisoned. It was Wordsworth protesting. There was no television or radio to convey news but there were papers, probably one month old when received in England, said KumKum. By boat and ships sailors carried the news.

The French don't regard Toussaint kindly because he was a revolutionary.

KumKum recalled the poem of Keats On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer. Keats compares his amazement at reading Chapman’s translation of Homer, to that of the Spanish explorer “stout Cortez” staring at the Pacific Ocean with his men in silent wonder upon a peak in Darien. But as commentators have pointed out the Spanish explorer who stood on a peak in Darien (the Isthmus of Panama) and first beheld the Pacific Ocean was Vasco Núñez de Balboa, not Hernán Cortés, the “stout Cortez" of Keats.

But you might ask how did Keats learn of that fact in order to use it in his poem as a metaphor for his own amazement at reading Homer through Chapman?

In a similar way Devika was surprised when she read the poem that Joanna Baillie wrote about Rani Ahalya Bai of Indore. She lived in Britain, and Ahalya Bai in Indore was 8,000 kms away.

Yet Joanna Baillie wrote a poem of 22 lines about Ahalya Bai, which was amazing, thought Devika. Today, we can just type a query into Google and get voluminous information and scores of original references to sources. How did people in those times learn about happenings?

Joe thought of Haiti as one of the worst and most despicable cases of colonialism. In return for granting them their independence in the 1820s the French foisted a huge debt on Haiti. They stated that unless Haiti paid hundreds of millions of francs, in recompense for plantations lost and future income foregone, France would not give them their liberty.

Consider, said Joe, this colonial nation of France, which has profited for centuries from slavery and extraction of Haiti’s wealth, now demanding that in order to free them, they must further compensate the slavers too.

After the landowners had extracted the wealth and stashed it in foreign banks Haiti was left as an impoverished nation. It could not pay that amount. It had to take on debt by borrowing from banks in France in order to pay the compensation. And of course, France profited from those debts in turn.

Joe read that it was not until the 1950s or so that the debt incurred in 1825, with interest, could be paid. By that time, Haiti had paid out a further half a billion dollars to France. And it became bankrupt, a charge on the charity of other nations and the UN. Here are the details from Google Gemini:

Haiti’s 1825 “Independence Debt”

In 1804, after a 12-year war against Napoleon Bonaparte’s armies, Haitians defeated French forces to establish the world's first free Black republic and the only nation created by a successful revolt of enslaved people. However, colonial exploitation transformed from physical slavery to financial bondage:

• Gunboat Extortion: In 1825, French King Charles X dispatched warships to Port-au-Prince and demanded Haiti pay 150 million gold francs (equivalent to tens of billions of dollars today) to compensate former French slaveholders for lost "property"—including the human beings who had liberated themselves.

• The "Double Debt": Threatened with total trade embargoes and military re-invasion, Haiti was forced to sign the treaty and borrow money from French banks at exorbitant interest rates just to make the initial payments.

• Century-Long Stagnation: Paying off this indemnity consumed up to 80% of Haiti's national budget for decades. It took Haiti until 1947—over 120 years—to fully pay off the debt and interest to French and American banks, leaving the nation utterly incapable of building public infrastructure, schools, hospitals, or modern agricultural systems.

And that is what Haiti is today, an impoverished, denuded nation. The country became so poor because were bled dry by their erstwhile colonial masters. This is the most disgraceful thing that France could ever do. Of course, analogues of this have been done by all the other colonial nations.

You should read the economist, Dr. Utsa Patnaik of Jawaharlal Nehru University, and ponder the research she has done to uncover the sly underhand means used by the British to extract the wealth of India, and spirit it away to the British Treasury. It's something on the order of $45 trillion worth in modern equivalent wealth that they pillaged.

“Do you mean the Bengal famine, and Churchill“, asked Priya. No, said Joe; the Bengal famine was something else, demonstrating the callous racist disregard for the lives of Indians by Mr Churchill. That is a different aspect of colonialism. What one is talking of here is about the ransacking of the economy of a colonised nation to enrich its colonial masters. One is talking here of pillage, of revenues from taxes levied in India being spirited away to a foreign land, instead of benefiting the Indian people – more than a third of those taxes left India to benefit the British treasury. Read Utsa Patnaik. That's how the British got rich.

To consider a theoretical converse: how many years would it take to reduce Britain to penury? – if one-third of its current tax revenues (estimated as £1,232 billion), that is £411 billion, were paid out as a due annually to an external entity, instead of being used for the benefit of British citizens. Joe estimates Britain would be bankrupt in 10 years; and reduced to the current living standard of sub-Saharan Africa, if the theft continued for another 50 years.

That is what Haiti has been reduced to today, an impoverished nation.

If Britain has lost much of its former glory today, and become a second rate power economically and militarily, that's because they've lost their colonies, of which India was chiefest source to pilfer riches.

Joe said all colonial nations – Germany, Belgium, Holland, France, Spain, Portugal – in their heyday stole the wealth of colonised nations on a massive scale. If they ever paid reparations, they'd be paying reparations for the rest of their existence. Of course, they never think of reparations for their crimes.

France still does not recognise its major culpability in the impoverishment of Haiti.

They grandly proclaim Liberté, égalité, fraternité (LEF). But over its entire history, France controlled about 80 to 90 distinct colonial territories and major possessions, making it the second-largest colonial empire in modern history behind Great Britain. At its peak around 1938, the French Colonial Empire spanned roughly 13.5 million square kilometres, about 25 times the size of mainland France.

What France offered abroad would amount to

Emprisonné, Discriminée, Diminuée (EDD)

Geetha said LEF was what her poet, Charlotte Smith was supporting. She was lamenting, actually. She had some bias, a soft corner for the monarchy initially in the poem. But only because they were butchered afterwards. The Haitians killed their French oppressors and hanged them; that too was cruelty.

Geetha mentioned that on the previous day, they saw a video. It showed the 15 rulers who had massacred the most people. One was Leopold II of Belgium. King Leopold II gained the Congo as his own private land at the Berlin Conference in 1885. He privately owned and brutally ruled the Congo Free State from 1885 to 1908. Driven by extreme greed for rubber and ivory, his regime used forced labor, starvation, and mutilation, causing an estimated 10 million deaths – halving the region's population. He annihilated the people there.

According to that Top 10 list, the top is Mao Zedong. He erased about 60 million of his own Chinese compatriots, it is estimated, by his policies. KumKum and Joe attended a session of the Hay Festival in Trivandrum in Dec 2011 at which Jung Chang, a Chinese author settled in Britain recounted her detailed history of the times in a 832-page biography titled Mao Zedong, Mao: The Unknown Story, written with her husband, the Irish historian Jon Halliday. The most shocking news was that the great famine of 1958-1961 in China was a deliberate starvation of the people by sending grain from China to the Soviet Union and its satellites to pay for armaments; it was paid in grain to the extent of 7% of China's GDP at the time.

There are so many Maoists, so many communists who speak so highly of Mao. Jung Chang at the 2011 Hay Festival said “In the 50s, 60s, 70s, you could be excused for being pro-Mao, but being pro-Mao now is inexcusable ignorance.”

Pol Pot is on the list, as one of the most brutal despots in modern world history, who headed the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia after seizing power in 1975. Over the next four years, the Khmer Rouge perpetrated the Cambodian genocide, in which an estimated 1.5–2 million people died – approximately one-quarter of the country's then population.

Hitler and Stalin are there too on the list, and after them in rank comes Leopold II of Belgium.

Thomo

Thomo mentioned his exercise regimen these days. In the morning, he climbs seven stories to his rooftop terrace, then comes down by the lift, and walks around the condo property, listening to the sounds of nature. To this listening he has added Spanish songs.

It occurred then to him why not use YouTube to learn some Spanish. When this poetry session came up, he found a Spanish poet, who by Joe’s reckoning doesn't actually fit neatly in the Romantic era – he’s a little past that time. But that was fine; he had other characteristics that made him a good fit.

Birthplace of the poet Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer on what is now Conde de Barajas Street, Seville

The poet Thomo chose was Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, born 1836, and died 1870. He is considered to be Spain's greatest romantic lyric poet. In fact, he's the second best read of all Spanish writers after Miguel de Cervantes, famous as the author of Don Quixote, spelled Don Quijote in modern Spanish, and pronounced dohn kee-HOH-teh.

Portrait of Bécquer

Gustavo Adolfo was also a playwright and a literary columnist. He was talented in drawing and painting. His father was a noted painter, from whom he must have inherited his talent.. Unfortunately, his father died when he was five. His mother died six years later when he was 11. He and his younger brother, Valeriano, were brought up by their uncle.

His collection of work is called Rimas y Leyendas. It transformed Spanish poetry with its simplicity, musicality, and emotional depth. Rather than using grand declarations, Bécquer wrote with quiet intensity about love, longing, memory, and loss.

His influence on later Spanish poets, including Antonio Machado and Federico García Lorca, were profound. His work remains among the most widely read in the Spanish speaking world.

He married Casta Esteban Navarro and had three children by her. He died very rather young at age 34. They say it was of tuberculosis. His final months were clouded by the painful loss of his brother and artistic collaborator, Valeriano.

His last words were, “Acordaos de mis niños“ (remember my children).

Statue of Becquer in Maria Luisa Park in Seville

Thomo read out the English translation of Rima LIII before the Spanish original. But he read only 3 of the 6 stanzas. Refer to Joe’s selection of Oct 2010 for the full poem.

Thomo agreed this was not the whole poem but could get a translation only these 3 stanzas. There are many translations of the entire poem, Joe said. When he recited it in 2010 a translation by Kate Flores was provided. There is also a translation by Brian Cole.

Thomo then read the poem in Spanish. Thomo expanded his knowledge of Spanish by selecting this poem. That’s a major benefit of making the effort. ‘Golondrinas’ means swallows. What is the ‘Volverán’?

Opening line of the poem by Bécquer – Volveran las oscuras golondrinas (The dark swallows will return)

It is interesting that Bécquer uses the word volveran, meaning to ‘return’ as a refrain in alternating stanzas. The poet is reminding his lover everything will return again (the swallows, the honeysuckle, words of love) but NOT in the way they experienced it once. The sixth stanza offers deep pathos when he tells his lover:

But mute, enraptured, kneeling,

As God before His altar is adored,

As I loved you … be not deceived:

You will be loved no more!

Geetha then volunteered an unpoetic reminder that ‘Voveran’ is the name of a painkiller. It is a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) containing diclofenac that treats pain, swelling, and inflammation. I hope none of you have had to take this to suffer my reading, said Thomo (laughter …)

Zakia

Zakia read a sonnet by William Wordsworth. It's a simple, charming and romantic one.

Wordsworth wrote this Petrarchan sonnet in 1835. It explores the emotional vulnerability and anxiety of a distant lover. He is painfully alienated. An agonising void has been left by an uncommunicative loved one. It was composed while he was on a walk with his daughter, Dora. He saw an empty nest on this snowy winter’s day, in the leafless tree.

Petrarch (1304-1374) perfected the sonnet form in his famous Canzoniere, which is why it bears his name, rather than that of Giacomo da Lentini who invented it a hundred years earlier

The poem strictly follows the Petrarchan (Italian) sonnet structure, divided into an octave (first 8 lines) and a sestet (final 6 lines). The rhyme scheme of the Octave is ABBA ABBA, and of the Sestet, CDE CDE. The meter is iambic pentameter with subtle variations to reflect emotional agitation.

That was what inspired him to write these lines. It's a sweet poem expressing the devotion of a lover and the sudden desolation he feels. Wordsworth has used his signature imagery of nature (plants, frost, wind) alongside classical stone imagery (marble, grave) to contrast organic, living affection with deadened silence.

Such was Zakia’s poem for the day. Joe noted the reference in the penultimate line to the flower eglantine

a forsaken bird’s-nest filled with snow

‘Mid its own bush of leafless eglantine—

Eglantine – admired as a country rose, acquired all sorts of romantic associations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

The eglantine (also known as sweetbriar, Rosa rubiginosa) is a Eurasian wild rose known for its delicate pink petals and apple-scented leaves. It has long served in Western poetry as a symbol of rural beauty, sweetness, and delicate romance. See below how many English poets have used it as a signpost.

This flower occurs in Shakespeare‘s play A Midsummer Night's Dream (Act II, Scene 1) where Oberon describes Titania’s lush, enchanted arbour:

Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,

With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine.

Keats in his Ode to a Nightingale (Stanza 5) evokes the sensory richness of the dark woodland in spring:

The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;

White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;

Shelley weaves eglantine into a dreamlike bouquet of wildflowers in his poem The Question:

And in the warm hedge-growth bell-flowers, that keep

Their wet cups open to the embraced bees,

As their young mother Green Earth powers,

Keep the child happy; and eglantine,

In which the pale rose will not blue so soon

John Milton in L'Allegro links the flower to morning cottage life:

To hear the lark begin his flight,

And singing startle the dull night,

From his watch-tower in the skies,

Till the dappled dawn doth rise;

Then to come in spite of sorrow,

And at my window bid good-morrow,

Through the sweet-briar or the eglantine,

Arundhaty

Joanna Baillie has been read before. She's a Scottish poet and a playwright whose work challenged the prevailing literary trends of her time. While her plays were popular and critically acclaimed during her lifetime, Baillie is primarily remembered today for her poetry, particularly her series of plays on the passions, a collection of dramatic verse exploring the full spectrum of human emotions.

Baillie's writing is characterised by its psychological depth and focus on the inner lives of her characters. Unlike the sentimental poetry popular in the late 18th century, Baillie's work embraced a more realistic and unsentimental approach to human nature. This emphasis on psychological realism anticipated the work of later writers like Robert Browning and Alfred Lord Tennyson. It was influenced by the Enlightenment signalled by thinkers such as David Hume and Adam Smith.

Baillie was fascinated by the power of emotions and their influence on human behaviour. Her poetry often explored the complex interplay between reasons and emotion, showcasing the ways in which passions can both elevate and destroy individuals. Baillie's work contributed to the development of the romanticism by emphasising the importance of subjective experience and the power of the imagination.

Joanna Baillie

Baillie was born in September in 1762, and her mother was a member of the Physicians and Anatomists. her father, Reverend James Baillie, was a Presbyterian minister, and in his last two years, Professor of Divinity at the University of Glasgow. The Baillies were an old Scottish family, which claimed descent from the Scottish patriot Sir William Wallace. Wallace is not known to have had any children, however.

Joanna Baillie was the youngest of three children.

A Summer's Day is a very long poem (2375 words, as Joe pointed out). It talks about the summer's day, starting from the night and then moving on to the sunrise, and then moving on to noon, and finally to dusk again, and then sunrise.

It covers all the activities that human beings do during all these various stages of the day, but Arundhaty read an excerpt of 60 lines (about 460 words) – the part leading to the noon.

The Poems

Arundhaty – A Summer ‘s Day (excerpt) by Joanna Baillie

The dark-blue clouds of night in dusky lines,

Drawn wide and streaky o'er the purer sky,

Wear faint the morning purple on their skirts.

The stars that full and bright shone in the west,

But dimly twinkle to the stedfast eye;

And seen, and vanishing, and seen again,

Like dying tapers smoth'ring in their sockets,

Appear at last shut from the face of heav'n;

Whilst every lesser flame which shone by night,

The flashy meteor from the op'ning cloud,

That shoots full oft' across the dusky sky;

Or wand'ring fire which looks across the marsh,

Beaming like candle in a lonely cot,

To cheer the hopes of the benighted trav'ller,

Till swifter than the very change of thought,

It shifts from place to place, escapes his glance,

And makes him wond'ring rub his doubtful eyes;

Or humble glow-worm, or the silver moth,

Which cast a feeble glimm'ring o'er the green,

All die away. ––

For now the sun, slow moving in his grandeur,

Above the eastern mountains lifts his head.

The webs of dew spread o'er the hoary lawn,

The smooth clear bosom of the settled pool,

The polish'd ploughshare on the distant field,

Catch fire from him, and dart their new got beams

Upon die dazzled eye.

The new-wak'd birds upon the branches hop,

Peck their loft down, and bristle out their feathers;

Then stretch their throats and tune their morning song;

Whilst stately crows, high swinging o'er their heads.

Upon the topmost boughs, in lordly pride,

Mix their hoarse croaking with the linnet's note;

The village labourer, with careful mind,

As soon as doth the morning light appear,

Opens his eyes with the first darting ray

That pierces thro' the window of his cot,

And quits his easy bed; then o'er the field,

With lengthen'd swinging strides, betakes his way,

Bearing his spade and hoe across his moulder,

Seen from afar clear glancing in the sun,

And with good will begins his daily

Half naked children, half awake, are seen

Scratching their heads, and blinking to the light;

Till roused by degrees, they run about,

Or rolling in the sun, amongst the sand

Build many a little house, with heedful art.

The housewife tends within, her morning care;

And stooping 'midst her tubs of curdled milk,

With busy patience, draws the clear green whey

From the press'd sides of the pure snowy curd;

Whilst her brown dimpled maid, with tuck'd-up sleeve,

And swelling arm, assists her in her toil.

Pots smoke, pails rattle, and the warm confusion

Still thickens on them, till within its mould,

With careful hands, they press the well-wrought curd.

So goes the morning, till the pow'rful sun

High in the heav'ns sends forth his strengthen'd beams,

And all the freshness of the morn is fled.

Devika – Casabianca by Felicia Dorothea Hemans

The boy stood on the burning deck 

Whence all but he had fled; 

The flame that lit the battle's wreck

  Shone round him o'er the dead. 

Yet beautiful and bright he stood,

  As born to rule the storm - 

A creature of heroic blood,

  A proud, though child-like form. 

The flames rolled on - he would not go

  Without his Father's word; 

That father, faint in death below,

  His voice no longer heard. 

He called aloud: – 'say, Father, say

  If yet my task is done?' 

He knew not that the chieftain lay

  Unconscious of his son.

'Speak, father!' once again he cried,

  'If I may yet be gone!' 

And but the booming shots replied,

  And fast the flames rolled on. 

Upon his brow he felt their breath,

  And in his waving hair, 

And looked from that lone post of death

  In still yet brave despair; 

And shouted but once more aloud,

  'My father! must I stay?' 

While o'er him fast, through sail and shroud,

  The wreathing fires made way. 

They wrapt the ship in splendour wild,

  They caught the flag on high, 

And streamed above the gallant child,

  Like banners in the sky. 

There came a burst of thunder-sound – 

The boy – oh! where was he? 

Ask of the winds that far around

  With fragments strewed the sea!– 

With mast, and helm, and pennon fair,

  That well had borne their part – 

But the noblest thing which perished there

  Was that young faithful heart.

Geetha – from The Emigrants: A Poem by Charlotte Smith

[Disillusion with the French Revolution]

So many years have passed,

Since, on my native hills, I learned to gaze

On these delightful landscapes; and those years

Have taught me so much sorrow, that my soul

Feels not the joy reviving Nature brings;

But, in dark retrospect, dejected dwells

On human follies, and on human woes.—

What is the promise of the infant year,

The lively verdure, or the bursting blooms,

To those, who shrink from horrors such as War

Spreads o’er the affrighted world? With swimming eye,

Back on the past they throw their mournful looks,

And see the Temple, which they fondly hoped

Reason would raise to Liberty, destroyed

By ruffian hands; while, on the ruined mass,

Flushed with hot blood, the Fiend of Discord sits

In savage triumph; mocking every plea

Of policy and justice, as she shows

The headless corse of one, whose only crime

Was being born a Monarch—Mercy turns,

From spectacle so dire, her swollen eyes;

And Liberty, with calm, unruffled brow

Magnanimous, as conscious of her strength

In Reason’s panoply, scorns to distain

Her righteous cause with carnage, and resigns

To Fraud and Anarchy the infuriate crowd.—

What is the promise of the infant year

To those, who (while the poor but peaceful hind

Pens, unmolested, the increasing flock

Of his rich master in this sea-fenced isle)

Survey, in neighboring countries, scenes that make

The sick heart shudder; and the man, who thinks,

Blush for his species? There the trumpet’s voice

Drowns the soft warbling of the woodland choir;

And violets, lurking in their turfy beds

Beneath the flowering thorn, are stained with blood.

There fall, at once, the spoiler and the spoiled;

While War, wide-ravaging, annihilates

The hope of cultivation; gives to Fiends,

The meager, ghastly Fiends of Want and Woe,

The blasted land—There, taunting in the van

Of vengeance-breathing armies, Insult stalks;

And, in the ranks, “Famine, and Sword, and Fire,

Crouch for employment.”

Joe – On this Day I Complete my Thirty-Sixth Year

By Lord Byron (George Gordon)

On this Day I Complete my Thirty-Sixth Year

'Tis time this heart should be unmoved,

Since others it hath ceased to move:

Yet though I cannot be beloved,

Still let me love!

My days are in the yellow leaf;

The flowers and fruits of Love are gone;

The worm—the canker, and the grief

Are mine alone!

The fire that on my bosom preys

Is lone as some Volcanic Isle;

No torch is kindled at its blaze

A funeral pile.

The hope, the fear, the jealous care,

The exalted portion of the pain

And power of Love I cannot share,

But wear the chain.

But 'tis not thus—and 'tis not here

Such thoughts should shake my Soul, nor now,

Where Glory decks the hero's bier,

Or binds his brow.

The Sword, the Banner, and the Field,

Glory and Greece around us see!

The Spartan borne upon his shield

Was not more free.

Awake (not Greece—she is awake!)

Awake, my Spirit! Think through whom

Thy life-blood tracks its parent lake

And then strike home!

Tread those reviving passions down

Unworthy Manhood—unto thee

Indifferent should the smile or frown

Of beauty be.

If thou regret'st thy Youth, why live?

The land of honourable Death

Is here:—up to the Field, and give

Away thy breath!

Seek out—less often sought than found—

A Soldier's Grave, for thee the best;

Then look around, and choose thy Ground,

And take thy rest.

Kavita – Stanzas to a Hindoo Air by Lord Byron

Oh! my lonely--lonely--lonely--Pillow!

Where is my lover? where is my lover?

Is it his bark which my dreary dreams discover?

Far--far away! and alone along the billow?

Oh! my lonely-lonely-lonely-Pillow!

Why must my head ache where his gentle brow lay?

How the long night flags lovelessly and slowly,

And my head droops over thee like the willow!

Oh! thou, my sad and solitary Pillow!

Send me kind dreams to keep my heart from breaking,

In return for the tears I shed upon thee waking;

Let me not die till he comes back o'er the billow.

Then if thou wilt--no more my lonely Pillow,

In one embrace let these arms again enfold him,

And then expire of the joy-but to behold him!

Oh! my lone bosom!-oh! my lonely Pillow!

KumKum – What the Thrush Said by John Keats

(From A Letter To John Hamilton Reynolds)

O thou whose face hath felt the Winter's wind,

Whose eye has seen the snow-clouds hung in mist

And the black elm tops 'mong the freezing stars,

To thee the spring will be a harvest-time.

O thou, whose only book has been the light

Of supreme darkness which thou feddest on

Night after night when Phoebus was away,

To thee the Spring shall be a triple morn.

O fret not after knowledge -- I have none,

And yet my song comes native with the warmth.

O fret not after knowledge -- I have none,

And yet the Evening listens. He who saddens

At thought of idleness cannot be idle,

And he's awake who thinks himself asleep.

Priya – The Lady of the Lake, by Sir Walter Scott

Canto III Stanza 29

XXIX. Hymn to the Virgin.

Ave. Maria! maiden mild!

Listen to a maiden's prayer!

Thou canst hear though from the wild,

Thou canst save amid despair.

Safe may we sleep beneath thy care,

Though banished, outcast, and reviled—

Maiden! hear a maiden's prayer;

Mother, hear a suppliant child!

Ave Maria!

Ave Maria! undefiled!

The flinty couch we now must share

Shall seem with down of eider piled,

If thy protection hover there.

The murky cavern's heavy air

Shall breathe of balm if thou hast smiled;

Then, Maiden! hear a maiden's prayer,

Mother, list a suppliant child!

Ave Maria!

Ave. Maria! stainless styled!

Foul demons of the earth and air,

From this their wonted haunt exiled,

Shall flee before thy presence fair.

We bow us to our lot of care,

Beneath thy guidance reconciled:

Hear for a maid a maiden's prayer,

And for a father hear a child!

Ave Maria!

Shoba – To Toussaint Louverture by William Wordsworth 

Toussaint, the most unhappy Man of Men! 

Whether the rural Milk-maid by her cow 

Sing in thy hearing, or thy head be now 

Pillowed in some deep dungeon’s earless den;-- 

O miserable Chieftain! where and when 

Wilt thou find patience? Yet die not; do thou 

Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow: 

Though fallen Thyself, never to rise again, 

Live, and take comfort. Thou hast left behind 

Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies; 

There’s not a breathing of the common wind 

That will forget thee; thou hast great allies; 

Thy friends are exultations, agonies, 

And love, and Man’s unconquerable mind.

Thomo – Rima LIII Volverán las oscuras golondrinas (Excerpt) by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer

ORIGINAL SPANISH

Volverán las oscuras golondrinas

en tu balcón sus nidos a colgar,

y otra vez con el ala a sus cristales

jugando llamarán.

Pero aquéllas que el vuelo refrenaban

tu hermosura y mi dicha al contemplar,

aquéllas que aprendieron nuestros nombres...

ésas... ¡no volverán!

Volverán las tupidas madreselvas

de tu jardín las tapias a escalar,

y otra vez a la tarde, aún más hermosas,

sus flores se abrirán.

ENGLISH TRANSLATION

The dark swallows will return

to hang their nests upon your balcony,

and once again, with beating wings,

will tap upon your windowpanes.

But those that paused in flight

to gaze upon your beauty and my happiness,

those that learned our very names...

those... will never return.

The thick honeysuckle vines will return

to climb the walls of your garden,

and once again, at evening, lovelier still,

their blossoms will unfold.

Zakia – WHY art thou silent! Is thy love a plant. By William Wordsworth

Why art thou silent! Is thy love a plant

Of such weak fibre that the treacherous air

Of absence withers what was once so fair?

Is there no debt to pay, no boon to grant?

Yet have my thoughts for thee been vigilant—

Bound to thy service with unceasing care,

The mind’s least generous wish a mendicant

For nought but what thy happiness could spare.

Speak— though this soft warm heart, once free to hold

A thousand tender pleasures, thine and mine,

Be left more desolate, more dreary cold

Than a forsaken bird’s-nest filled with snow

‘Mid its own bush of leafless eglantine—

Speak, that my torturing doubts their end may know.