Puttaparthi’s
‘Leaves in the Wind’
V. SUBBARAYUDU
Sri Puttaparthi
Narayanacharyulu was one of the literary luminaries of India. A fourteen
language polyglot, he was a versatile genius and great poet. His muse is
multi-dexterous, capable of weaving poetry in many languages. His literary
fecundity and erudition are amazing. In recognition of his multi-faceted
genius, the Government has decorated him with “Padmasri”, while Sri
Venkateswara University has conferred on him an honorary doctorate.
As early as 1952 he
composed a book of free verse in English entitled “Leaves in the Wind”. It is a
work of a sensitive soul. The book contains forty-seven lyrics in all, and each
lyric is an “objective correlative” to “the secrecies of inner agony” of the
poet concerning one aspect or the other of life and human nature. Puttaparthi’s
poetic themes and poetic diction as seen from this work lean towards the
“romantic”. Romanticism is, according to Victor Hugo, “liberalism in
literature”. It is the expression of life as seen by imagination rather than by
prosaic common sense. Some of the salient features of romanticism are protest
against the bondage of rules, love of nature and intense sympathy for the
toilers of the world. Romantic literature reflects all that is spontaneous and
unaffected in nature and man. The spirit of romanticism is free to follow its
own fancy in its own way. The romantic poet invests the common life of nature
and the souls of common men and women with glorious significance. Like Wordsworth,
Puttaparthi chooses incidents and situations from common life and throws over
them a certain colouring of imagination, thus presenting ordinary things in an
unusual light.
With a wealth of
perception and freshness of expression, Puttaparthi writes intensely and
inventively. Endowed with a delicate sensibility and keen creative imagination,
he is able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness, to see the boredom, and the
horror, and the glory. “Leaves in the Wind” shows on every page the poet’s intense
sympathy for the toilers of the world. He is keenly alive to the “sighs of
empty hands” and the “flamy tongues” of poverty. He very sensitively evokes the
pity of hunger and the pity of poverty of the masses. See how he describes a
blind beggar-woman:
“Her hair was
dishevelled and dust-laden
Her frame a set of bones
Her life a desert.”
Her shrill voice “Can’t
you pity the blind beggar?” melts the poet’s heart. He sees in her
heart-rending cry the purity of Ganges:
“All the purity of
Ganges was speaking through her voice.
It led me into read-out
pages of our history.”
To the poet it is not
the beggar that is blind, but it is the country gloating over its past glory
that is blind. Seeing a woman coolie, he exclaims in another verse “What beauty
in poverty.” Puttaparthi is a champion of the underdog. His sympathy for the
unfortunate and the distressed, writ large on almost every page of the book,
reminds us of Goldsmith, Cowper and Burns, the poets of the unlettered human heart. Puttaparthi may
even be described as an angry poet, intolerant of the inhuman laws and
philistine ways which masquerade in the mask of culture and civilization. His
awareness of hunger around him is such that he makes stones also conscious of
it. In the poem “Speak to me Thou Queen of Beauty”, he tells a beautiful statue
that it must have life.
The statue coolie
replies:
“My friend, your world
is czarist
If we take a human form
we will die of hunger
As you do.”
The poet seems to say
that it is preferable to be a beautiful stone rather than a set of starved
bones. Filled with infinite pity for the poor and the needy, he calls religious
culture a vulture, God, the God of the wealthy.
The cut-throat
competition, the commercialism, the selfishness, the paltry-mindedness, the
deceit and cunning of people make him feel at times like an atheist:
“When I see the limpid
smile of a babe in a cradle
I would be reminded of
God.
When I see the cold corpse on a
bier
I would be reminded of
God.
But these men alive!
They force me to rebel
Against the very
existence of God.”
Once he seems to succumb
to a passing wave of pessimism and calls the world’s wide apartment of tears.
In “Weep Not My Child”, he tells a child that in this world.
“You cannot fly like a
bird,
Swim like a fish, live
like a flower!”
But his atheism and
pessimism are only a passing phase He believes in God and declares,
“The light divine is in
thyself.”
Though he is not very
happy about the technological advancement, he is not a poet without a vision.
In his declaration, “Man is evolving. He has evolved”, Puttaparthi seems to
believe in the possible evolution of mankind towards what Aurobindo in “The
Human Cycle” calls the Supermind. He regards man as “son of nectareous
Brahman”. He looks forward to utopia where he wishes to have
“Man to man, a free
affinity and love,
One
race, one world,
One God and plenty of
food”.
According to him
religion should be a help, not a cause of strife and destruction. Religions
that fan the flames of division are in his view irreligious. His is the
religion of large-hearted humanity. He says he dreads to have in him, the
element of cunning;
“I dread to have the
politic that plots
To ruffle the air for
his own ends
I am a poet, if you
please,
A human man.”
His is the religion of sympathy.
“God, if you are
Give me this boon!
Give me this boon!
Make me a poor man,
But never poor of heart.
You may give me a life,
But never to live among
the heartless.
Never make my life a toy
of their devilism
……………………………….
Make me crystal clear
Make me human.”
To him people without
‘milk of human kindness,’ without compassion are ‘visible walking ghosts’. He
does not believe in the distinctions of caste and creed. He means that the
lowborn are the favourites of God:
“He messed with a
paraiah
He is a sinner,”
Complained a petulant
Brahmin.
He smiled at him.
“He is married to a
savage girl,
A scamp”, cried another
of scant study.
He smiled at him.
“He goes to church,
A scar on religion”,
Growled intolerance.
He smiled again.
He died
And became a diadem of
God.
“Leaves in the Wind”
contains some verses also on nature, love and the anguish of separation
experienced by lovers. His scenic pictures with their rhythmic facilities
reveal his peculiar power of actualising sound and its converse silence:
“My heart sings and
sinks into silence
And searches for re-echo
On hearing the bridal
song of the cuckoo
Walking to the love of
morn;
On hearing the symphony
of withered leaves
Kissed by the rhythmic
feet of running deer;
And the flowery murmurs
of vernal beauties,
And the melting melodies
of mountain streams
Running to unknown
goals.”
Puttaparthi as a nature
poet is fully alive to the
witchery of sound. Like Wordsworth he is a poet of the ear. His love verses are
full of tender sentiments. In one song the lover tells his love,
“You and I, my love! let
us mingle
like song and sentiment
On the strings of lyre.”
Max Eastman regards
poetry as a “pure effort to heighten consciousness.” A journey through this
book does heighten our consciousness. We can cull a fund of wisdom from these
verses.
An individualist,
Puttaparthi hates insincere yesmanship. He was a lover of liberty, sincerity
and child-like innocence.
What is Puttaparthi’s
idea of poetic composition? In his view poetry is a product of inspiration:
“Poetry is vital turned
towards
By an unknown chemist in
an unknown laboratory
As the strings of a lyre
Responding to the kisses
of the winds
Some heart with some
mood
Might grasp the unhidden
treasures.”
What Robert Browning
makes Andrea del Sarto say of Raphael’s art is true of Puttaparthi’s English
verse in “Leaves in the Wind”:
That arm is wrongly put
– and there again
A fault to pardon in the
drawing’s lines,
Its body, so to speak: its
soul is right,
He means right – that, a
child may understand.
Yes. Composed in free
verse in the early ’Fifties, the lyrics in “Leaves in the Wind” have the soul
of great poetry, though here a leg or there an arm is wrongly put. With a
careful revision the poems may gain the inevitability of a classic, the
memorableness and the competency of great literature. Some of the lyrics –
‘Days are Ahead’, ‘The King is Sleeping in the Grave’, ‘The Moghul Emperor was
on his Throne’. ‘When I see the Limpid smile of a Babe in a Cradle”, ‘He messed
with a Paraiah’ are already worth prescribing to Intermediate Classes. They
have simplicity and clarity of expression and profundity of thought. Once
Tennyson said of himself, “They will read me in schools and they will call me
that horrible Tennyson”. Puttaparthi need not have this Tennysonion anxiety.
They will read him in schools and colleges and call him that lovable
Puttaparthi. It is because the poet has the power to bounce the reader into
accepting what he says. He achieves what is called the ideal aesthetic distance
in these verses.
Harindranath
Chattopadhyaya in his preface to “Leaves in the Wind” says that it is a book of
sensitive poetry, in spite of an unripeness of style and expression.
Notwithstanding this lack, the poet displays an abundant native gift for poetic
expression. He is sufficiently a master of evocative, connotative and
metaphorical exploitation of language. Such phases as ‘unfathomable oratory of
silence’ ‘moonlit smiles of stony rocks’, ‘flowery murmurs of vernal beauties’,
‘naked buds meditating upon creation’ do reveal the nature of his poetic style.
It is language charged with meaning.