Bad revolutionary poetry

We recognize beauty instinctively but it is much harder to describe it. Some say it is symmetry and proportion but that couldn’t be the whole truth since cleverly broken symmetry itself appears beautiful.

In performance art, technical virtuosity may appear powerful to the novice, but for the aesthete, that cannot be enough. The aesthete wants the art to be like a resonance that transports one to an other-worldly place.

Cleverness, in music, voice and action, provides a different kind of enjoyment. Modern entertainment depends more and more on acrobatics-like technical effects. The classical conventions of any art-form are an easy yardstick of excellence but they also freeze the creative expression.

The mind wishes to possess what is beautiful. It is roused by words that evoke powerful emotion.

Words lose power

But familiarity makes words lose their power. In our age of information, the old literature is not only fingertips away in its original form but also in its many transformations and veilings by other artists. Lines that might have sounded fresh once now look stale as in the examples below:

Love is…an ever-fixed mark, that looks on tempests and is never shaken.

There is no first, or last in Forever — It is Centre, there, all the time.

You are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing.

I dreamed you bewitched me into bed and sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.

Love one another, but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

Love is about heartbreak, longing and separation. It is a challenge to go beyond time-worn metaphors and similes. Contemporary songs use incongruity to associate love with things:

Love is firing neurons, an impossible puzzle, a force-field, a glue, gold mine, something to be allergic to, durable like tungsten, like drive-time radio, like a locomotive built for aeronautical travel, like a piano dropped from a fourth-floor window, love is a game that you were late to since you were probably busy buying some ice-cream, and so on.

The conventions in Indian poetry are stricter with love often compared to the transactions at the tavern invoking wine and the cup-bearer, with feminine beauty likened to the moon. Here is a typical stanza:

O Saki, gone is the spring of youth
There’s but one regret in this heart of mine
That you never pressed a goblet in my hand
And I protested “I’ve had enough of wine.”

Love is reified to the spiritual, and the poem is to be interpreted at different levels. It leads either to the erotic or prescriptive and didactic. An example of the latter by a major poet of the 19th century is below:

Do not believe that all is in the lines of the hand
those without hands have their own destiny.

Some famous lines, which are kept alive as much as by simplicity of the words as the music to which they are sung:

During troubles, everyone remembers [the lord]
but in happiness no one does
If in happiness one were to remember
why would troubles arrive.

I searched for the crooked person, but found no crooked one
When I searched my own mind, I saw no one as crooked as me.

Slowly, slowly, O mind, things happens at their own pace,
The gardener may water with a hundred pots,
but the fruit only arrives in its season.

A couplet by a leading poet of the 20th century:

You are the sun, I spin around you as a planet
One sight of you and I am lit from head to foot.

The “progressive” poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz has been popular in both Pakistan and India for many years, not as much for the originality of his poetry as for his politics. Consider the love poem:

Raat yunh dil mein teri khoee hui yaad aayee
Jaise veeraaney mein chupkey sey bahaar aa jaye
Jaisey sehra on mein howley se chaley baadey naseem
Jaisey beemaar ko bey wajhey Qaraar aa jaaye

Last night, your lost memories crept into my heart
as spring arrives secretly into a barren garden
as a cool morning breeze blows slowly in a desert
as a sick person feels well, for no reason. (Translation at allpoetry.com)

Notice the banality of the comparisons. Faiz uses stock phrases: spring in a ruined place (how can it change the ruins?), cool morning breeze in a desert (isn’t that common and inevitable?), and a sick person feeling well for no reason.

Revolutionary poetry

Writing good revolutionary poetry is hard for unlike true love which is driven as much by the desire to possess as by the impulse to give up everything, the revolutionary drive is fundamentally asymmetric. It may have elements of love and courage, but it also has anger, disgust, and the desire to take terror to the real or imagined enemy. These latter emotions diminish the poet.

Great revolutionary poetry must focus on the heroic and the sorrowful, but very few poets manage to do so.

Here’s Sudama Pandey “Dhoomil”, known for his revolutionary poetry in Hindi that shows the weakness of this genre:

One person rolls the bread
Another eats it.
There is a third who neither rolls nor eats
He only plays with it.
I ask, who is this third.

Why is my nation’s parliament quiet?

Dhoomil is merely repeating empty slogans that are used at rallies. There is no emotion in these lines.

Faiz’s well-known “revolutionary” poem Hum Dekhenge was written as protest against Pakistani President Zia Ul Haq’s dictatorship and it has since gained a cult-following in leftist circles as a song of resistance and defiance. But it is a concatenation of old and tired tropes on the believers triumphing over idolators.

Jab arz-e-khuda ke kabe se
Sab but uthwaaiy jaenge
Hum ahl-e-safa mardood-e-haram

Masnad pe bithaaiy jaenge

taaj uchalay jaenge
Sab takht girae jaenge

Bas naam rahega Allah ka
Jo ghayab bhi hai hazir bhi
Jo manzar bhi hai nazir bhi
Utthega an-al-haq ka nara
Jo mai bhi hoon tum bhi ho
Aur raaj karegi khalq-e-khuda
Jo mai bhi hoon aur tum bhi ho

“When from this God’s earth’s (Kaa’ba)
All idols will be removed
Then we keepers of faith,
Will be made to sit at the altar —
After crowns are thrown off and thrones overturned.

The Allah’s name will remain
Who is invisible and visible too
Who is the seer and is seen
There will rise one cheer- I am truth
That I am too and so are you

Then the people of God will rule
That I am too and so are you.”

With the slogan Hum Dekhenge “We shall see”, Faiz invokes the day that has been promised and written in God’s ink to overturn the unjust regime. After this the poem is rather insipid stuff about snuffing out idols and their beliefs.

Note

A link to my recent book of poems Arrival and Exile