CU-BA-Eng-SEM-IV-English-IV

Find – Fined Fir – Fur Flaw – Floor Flea – Flee Flew – Flu/ Flue Flex – Flecks Flour – Flower For – Four Foreword – Forward Fort – Fought Foul – Fowl Gait – Gate Gamble – Gambol Genes – Jeans Gored – Gourd Great – Grate Groan – Grown Hart – Heart Hear – Here Heel – Heal Hi – High Him – Hymn Hoard – Horde Hole – Whole Holy – Wholly Hour – Our I – Eye Idle – Idol Incite – Insight Knead – Need 151 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Knew – New Knight – Night Knot – Not Know – No Leak – Leek Lessen – Lesson Levee – Levy Links – Lynx Loan – Lone Loot – Lute Made – Maid Mail – Male Main – Mane Manna – Manner Marshal – Martial Mask – Masque Maw – More Medal – Meddle Meet – Meat Might – Mite Mist – Missed Moose – Mousse Muscle – Mussel None – Nun Oar – Or Overdo – Overdue Pail – Pale Pain – Pane Pair – Pear Passed – Past 152 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Peace – Piece 153 Peak – Peek Pedal – Peddle Plane – Plain Principal – Principle Profit – Prophet Rain – Reign Red – Read Right – Write Ring – Wring Rode – Road Role – Roll Rouse – Rows Rung – Wrung Sail – Sale Sauce – Seen Scull – Skull See – Sea Shoe – Shoo Side – Sighed Slay – Sleigh Soar – Sore Sole – Soul Some – Sum Sort – Sought Staid – Stayed Stalk – Stork Stare – Stair Stationary – Stationery Steal – Steel CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Stile – Style Sun – Son Tail – Tale Team – Teem Than – Then Their – There Throne – Thrown Tide – Tied To – Too / Two Toe – Tow Vain – Vein Vary – Very Wail – Whale Waste – Waist Way – Weigh Weak – Week Weather – Whether Where – Wear Which – Witch Who’s – Whose Won – One Would – Wood You’r – Your The all-important suffix of the word homophone is -phone, which means \"sound.\" Homophones are words that sound the same when spoken but have different meanings and are spelled differently. For example, consider the words \"heal\" and \"heel.\" Heal refers to recovering from an illness, while heel refers to the bottom back portion of someone's foot. Other homophone examples include: mat/matte two/too 154 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

8.3 DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HOMONYMS AND HOMOPHONES Some etymology will help here. The root homo-, you may already realize, means “same.” It’s the same Greek root that we find in homogeneous and homosexual, but not Homo sapiens, by the way. That comes from a Latin root meaning “human.” Homophones First let’s tackle homophones. The root –phone means “sound,” as it does in telephone and phonics. So, homophones are words that sound the same, such as doe a deer, a female deer, and dough that you bake into bread. Homonyms Now we can bring in homonyms. The –onym root means “name.” You also hear it in anonymous, which literally means “without a name,” and of course, in the word’s synonym and antonym. Homonyms are words that have the same name; in other words, they sound the same and they’re spelled the same. Homographs Next, let’s do homographs. The root -graph means “write,” just as it does in autograph and telegraph. So, homographs are words that are written the same—that is, words that have the same spelling. For example, there’s the verb tears, as in “Squiggly tears the speeding ticket in two,” and the noun tears, meaning the salty drops of water that ran down your cheek when you watched the movie Inside Out. They’re homographs because they’re both spelled T-E-A- R-S. For example, pen meaning the writing instrument, and pen meaning an enclosure for an animal, are homonyms. They have the same pronunciation, “pen,” and they’re both spelled P- E-N. To put it another way, homonyms are both homophones and homographs! You can even illustrate this with a cute little Venn diagram of two overlapping circles. One circle contains homophones; the other circle contains homographs; and the football in the middle contains homonyms. So, homophones sound the same; homographs are spelled the same; and homonyms do both. That’s all you need to know. At this point, if you already knew the difference between the three words, you might be saying, “Now hold on just one minute! Homographs are words that are spelled the same, and don’t sound the same! Homophones are words that sound the same but aren’t spelled the same!” This is where my fingers and thumbs analogy comes in. Sure, when somebody says, “Ow! I cut my finger!” you probably figure they cut their pointer, tall man, ring finger, or pinky. That’s because if they’d cut their thumb, they’d probably have been more specific and said, “Ow! I cut my thumb!” 155 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Even so, you agree that a thumb is a finger—a special finger, but still a finger. In the same way, it makes more sense to say that pen and pen are special homophones than to say they’re not homophones. And by the same reasoning, it’s simpler to think of pen and pen as special homographs than say they’re not homographs.Of course, if you really want to, you can write the definitions of homophone, homonym, and homograph so that there’s no overlap, but I suspect that definitions like that are part of the reason for people’s confusion.All homonyms are homophones because they sound the same. However, not all homophones are homonyms. Homophones with different spellings are not homonyms. What is the Difference Between Homophones and Homonyms? Meaning Homophone refers to words that have the same pronunciation, but different meaning. Homonym refers to two or more words having the same spelling or pronunciation but different meanings and origins. Examples Some examples for homophones include meat and meet, road and rode, see and sea. Some examples for homonyms include bear, coach and leave. Figure 8.1:Difference between homonym, heterograph and heteronym 156 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

8.4 SUMMARY  Homophones are words that sound the same but have different meanings, whether they’re spelled the same or not.  There, their, and they’re are homophones. But so are bark (the sound a dog makes) and bark (the covering of a tree).  These two senses of bark can also be considered homographs. You can learn more about the difference in the next section.  As long as two (or more) words have the same pronunciation and different meanings, they are homophones.  Homophone, homonym, and homograph all start with homo-, which means “same.”  The -phone in homophone means “sound.” So, homophones are words that sound the same.  Homophones always have different meanings, but they may be spelled the same or differently.  Bear (the animal) and bare (meaning “uncovered” or “empty”) are homophones. So are bear (the animal) and bear (the verb meaning “to carry”).  The -graph in homograph means “written.” Homographs are words that are written the same—meaning they always have the same spelling—but have different meanings. Homographs can be pronounced the same or not.  For example, bass (the fish, rhymes with class) and bass (the instrument, rhymes with ace) are homographs. So are bear (the animal) and bear (the verb meaning “to carry”).  As you can see, the two senses of bear can be considered both homophones and homographs.  When words are both homographs and homophones—meaning they have both the same spelling and the same pronunciation, but different meanings—they can be called homonyms.  The –nym in homonym means “name.” The word homonym can also be used as a synonym (there’s that –nym again) for either homophone or homograph.  Overall, knowing what the word homophone means is a lot less important than making sure you use homophones properly so people can understand what you mean.  Though homophones can create problems in understanding the meaning of a sentence, it is not difficult to understand the true meaning if you pay attention to the context in which these words are used. 157 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

8.5 KEYWORDS  Eliminate- The act, process, or an instance of eliminating or discharging such as. a : the act of discharging or excreting waste products from the body.  Ruling Out- to stop considering something as a possibility.  Desire- A strong feeling of wanting to have something or wishing for something to happen.  Subjunctive- relating to or denoting a mood of verbs expressing what is imagined or wished or possible.  Sacked- tackle (a quarterback) behind the line of scrimmage before they can throw a pass.  Mnemonic- a system such as a pattern of letters, ideas, or associations which assists in remembering something.  Gallons- a unit of liquid or dry capacity equal to eight pints or 4.55 litres.  Scowling- frown in an angry or bad-tempered way.  Sullen- bad-tempered and sulky.  Clause- A unit of grammatical organization next below the sentence in rank and in traditional grammar said to consist of a subject and predicate. 8.6 LEARNING ACTIVITY 1. Describe Homonyms with examples. ___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ 2. What is the difference between homophones and homonyms? ___________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________ 8.7 UNIT END QUESTIONS A. Descriptive Questions Short Questions 1. What are homonyms? 2. What are the different examples of homonyms? 3. What are homophones? 158 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

4. What are the different examples of homophones? 5. What is the difference between homonyms and homophones? Long Questions 1. What is a homophone? 2. What are homonyms? 3. What are the different examples of homonyms? 4. What are the different examples of homophones? 5. What are the homographs? B. Multiple Choice Questions 1. Which is the correct option for the following sentence: If you do not allow students to chew gum, _____ they will _____ to break the rules. a. Than, choose b. Then, chose c. Than, chose d. Then, choose 2. Which is the correct option for the following sentence: I _______ the fact that everyone will get candy ______ Joe Schmo. a. Except, expect b. Accept, except c. Except, accept d. Accept, expect 3. Which one is the correct option for the following sentence: is self-________; she is always checking her hair to make sure ____ perfect. a. Conscious, its b. Conscience, it's c. Conscience, its d. Conscious, it's 4. Which one is the correct option for the following sentence: The ______ of not getting enough sleep is that your participation in class will be __________. a. Effect, effected b. Affect, effected 159 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

c. Effect, affected d. Affect, effect 5. Which one are the correct option for the following sentence: ______ going to be ____ joyful when ____ June? a. Whose, quite, it's b. Who's, quiet, it's c. Who's, quite, it's d. Whose, quiet, its Answers 1-d, 2-b, 3-a, 4-a, 5-c 8.8 REFERENCES Reference Books  Murphy, Raymond (2009), Grammar In Use, London, Cambridge University Press.  Redman, Stuart (2010), Vocabulary In Use, London, Cambridge University Press.  Singh, Lalit; Anand, P.A (2016), Wiley's Verbal Ability and Reasoning for Competitive Examinations, New Jersey, Wiley Publications. Textbooks  Aggarwal, R.S. (2018), A Modern Approach To Verbal & Non-Verbal Reasoning, New Delhi, S. Chand Publications.  Sijwali, B.S; Sijwali, Indu (2014), A New Approach to REASONING Verbal & Non- Verbal, New Delhi, Arihant Publications.  Rao, Prasada (2017), Wren and Martin, New Delhi, S. Chand Publishing.  Bakshi, S.P. (2014), Objective General English, New Delhi, Arhant Publications. Websites  https://www.proprofs.com/quiz-school/topic/homophone  https://www.proprofs.com/quiz-school/story.php?title=homophones_21  https://examples.yourdictionary.com/examples-of-homonyms.html  https://www.businessinsider.com/the-difference-between-homophones-homonyms- and-homographs-2015-9?IR=T 160 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

 https://pediaa.com/difference-between-homophones-and-homonyms/ 161 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

UNIT 9: LITERARY POETRY: GRANDFATHER, I SHALL RETURN TO THIS BENGAL STRUCTURE 9.0 Learning Objective 9.1 Introduction 9.2 About the Poet 9.3 Analysis of “Grandfather, I shall return to this Bengal” 9.4 Central Theme 9.5 Summary 9.6 Keywords 9.7 Learning Activity 9.8 Unit End Questions 9.9 References 9.0 LEARNING OBJECTIVE After studying this unit, you will be able to:  Comprehend Jibanananda Das as author.  Analyze the texts as the literary form of English literature.  Appreciate the text from readers' perspective.  Explain India through association of ideas in the texts and the external contexts. 9.1 INTRODUCTION Jibanananda Das (17 February 1899 - 22 October 1954) is an acclaimed Bengal poet. He is considered one of the precursors who introduced modernist poetry in Bengali Literature, notably when it was evidently influenced by Tagore's Romantic poetry. Alternate spelling Jivanananda Das. Literal meaning of name is Joy (ananda) of Life (Jivan). He was born in Barisal, Bangladesh on 17 February 1899. His grandfather, Sarbananda, and his school teacher father, Satyananda, were both part-time preachers in the Brahmo Samaj. His mother, Kusumkumari Das, started writing poems when she was very young, and some were published in magazines while she was a still a school student. 162 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Jibanananda was educated at Barisal BM College and Calcutta's Presidency College. He then worked as a teacher of English in Kolkata. In early 1930s, he was unemployed for several years, earning a meagre amount as a private tutor of school students. His uncles got him jobs, successively, in Assam and Punjab, but he refused to leave Bengal as the pursuit of literature was far more important to him than financial stability. He briefly held teaching posts in Bagerhat and Delhi before returning to Barisal. He was a teacher in the B.M. College in Barisal from 1934 to 1947. This was probably the most productive period of his literary life. After the partition of India in 1947, he returned to Kolkata. In Kolkata again he had to face unemployment for several years before getting a post of lecturer in the Howrah Girls' College in 1953. He died in 1954 after being struck by a tram. Jibanananda is among the most prominent modernist poets of Bengali literature. His commencement of modernism in Bengali poetry was contemporaneous with that of West. He is best known for his celebration of the natural beauty and the rural life of Bengal, although his work is shot through with an acute awareness of the evanescence of the soul, of death and decomposition. His poems have a lyrical beauty that have very few parallels in Bangla literature, and to many, his stature as a poet is second only to Tagore. His later poems, written in the 40s and early 50s, have far more complex character. The Second World War, the Bengal famine of 1943(in which over 3 million people died), the Hindu-Muslim riots, and the partition of India, all have reflections in his later poems. His humanism, his love of nature, and his observations about the failures of the human civilisation, gradually evolved into a style that relentlessly laments the human costs of modern civilisation. His later poems have a lot of comments about political issues and current affairs. The title of the book \"Sat-ti Tarar Timir\" actually refers to seven flashes from bombs or artillery shells. The \"timir\" (darkness) is the crisis of the human civilisation during the Second World War. Jibanananda was an active observer of politics. He visited political rallies of all major political parties to try to understand which way the country was headed after independence. But he observed dishonesty in all the political parties and even in the early years of independence, he felt that corruption was destroying the Indian society. “Poetry and life are two different outpouring of the same thing: life as we usually conceive it contains what we normally accept as reality, but the spectacle of this incoherent and disorderly life can satisfy neither the poet's talent nor the reader's imagination ... poetry does not contain a complete reconstruction of what we call reality: we have entered a new world. ” Jibanananda Das was born in 1899 in a Vaidya-Brahmin family in the small district town of Barisal, located in the south of Bangladesh. His ancestors came from the Bikrampur region of Dhaka district, from a now-extinct village called Gaupara on the banks of the river Padma. 163 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Jibanananda's grandfather Sarbananda Dasgupta was the first to settle permanently in Barisal. He was an early www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 1 exponent of the reformist Brahmo Samaj movement in Barisal and was highly regarded in town for his philanthropy. He erased the -gupta suffix from the family name, regarding it as a symbol of Vedic Brahmin excess, thus rendering the surname to Das. Jibanananda's father Satyananda Das (1863–1942) was a schoolmaster, essayist, magazine publisher, and founder-editor of Brôhmobadi, a journal of the Brahmo Samaj dedicated to the exploration of social issues. Jibanananda's mother Kusumkumari Das was a poet who wrote a famous poem called Adôrsho Chhele (\"The Ideal Boy\") whose refrain is well known to Bengalis to this day: Amader deshey hobey shei chhele kobey / Kothae na boro hoye kajey boro hobey. (The child who achieves not in words but in deeds, when will this land know such a one?) Jibanananda was the eldest son of his parents and was called by the nickname Milu. A younger brother Ashokananda Das was born in 1908 and a sister called Shuchorita in 1915. Milu fell violently ill in his childhood, and his parents feared for his life. Fervently desiring to restore his health, Kusumkumari took her ailing child on pilgrimage to Lucknow, Agra and Giridih. They were accompanied on these journeys by their uncle Chandranath. In January 1908, Milu, by now eight years old, was admitted to the fifth grade in Brojomohon School. The delay was due to his father's opposition to admitting children into school at too early an age. Milu's childhood education was therefore limited to his mother's tutelage. His school life passed by relatively uneventfully. In 1915 he successfully completed his matriculation examination from Brojomohon, obtaining a first division in the process. He repeated the feat two years later when he passed the intermediate exams from Brajamohan College. Evidently an accomplished student, he left his rural Barisal to join the University of Calcutta. Life in Calcutta: First Phase Jibanananda enrolled in Presidency College, Kolkata, then as now a prestigious seat of Indian learning. He studied English literature and graduated with a BA (Honours) degree in 1919. That same year, his first poem appeared in print in the Boishakh issue of Brahmobadi journal. Fittingly, the poem was called Borshoabahon (Arrival of the New Year). This poem was published anonymously, with only the honorific Sri in the by-line. However, the annual index in the year-end issue of the magazine revealed his full name: \"Sri Jibanananda Das Gupta, BA\". In 1921, he completed the MA degree in English from University of Calcutta, www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 2 obtaining a second class. He was also studying law. At this time, he lived in the Hardinge student quarters next to the university. Just before his exams, he fell ill with bacillary dysentery, which affected his preparation for the examination. The following year, he started his teaching career. He joined the English department of City College, Calcutta as a tutor. By this time, he had left Hardinge and was boarding at Harrison Road. He gave up his law studies. It is thought that he also lived in a house in Bechu Chatterjee Street for some time with his brother Ashokanananda, who had come there from Barisal for his MSc studies. 164 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Travels and Travails His literary career was starting to take off. When Deshbondhu Chittaranjan Das died in June 1925, Jibanananda wrote a poem called 'Deshbandhu'r Prayan'e' (\"On the Death of the Friend of the nation\") which was published in Bangabani magazine. This poem would later take its place in the collection called Jhara Palok (1927). On reading it, poet Kalidas Roy said that he had thought the poem was the work of a mature, accomplished poet hiding behind a pseudonym. Jibanananda's earliest printed prose work was also published in 1925. This was an obituary entitled \"Kalimohan Das'er Sraddha-bashorey,\" which appeared in serialized form in Brahmobadi magazine. His poetry began to be widely published in various literary journals and little magazines in Calcutta, Dhaka and elsewhere. These included Kallol, perhaps the most famous literary magazine of the era, Kalikalam (Pen and Ink), Progoti (Progress) (co-edited by Buddhadeb Bose) and others. At this time, he occasionally used the surname Dasgupta as opposed to Das. In 1927, Jhara Palok (Fallen Feathers), his first collection of poems, came out. A few months later, Jibanananda was fired from his job at the City College. The college had been struck by student unrest surrounding a religious festival, and enrolment seriously suffered as a consequence. Still in his late 20s, Jibanananda was the youngest member of the faculty and therefore regarded as the most dispensable. In the literary circle of Calcutta, he also came under serial attack. One of the most serious literary critics of that time, Sajanikanta Das, began to write aggressive critiques of his poetry in the review pages of Shanibarer Chithi (the Saturday Letter) magazine. With nothing to keep him in Calcutta, Jibanananda left for the small town of Bagerhat in the far south, there to resume his teaching career at Bagerhat P. C. College. But only after about three months he returned to the big city, now in dire financial straits. To make ends meet, he gave private tuition to students www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 3 while applying for full-time positions in academia. In December 1929, he moved to Delhi to take up a teaching post at Ramjosh College; again, this lasted no more than a few months. Back in Barisal, his family had been deciding for his marriage. Once Jibanananda got to Barisal, he failed to go back to Delhi – and, consequently, lost the job. In May 1930, he married Labanya, a girl whose ancestors came from Khulna. At the subsequent reception in Dhaka's Ram Mohan Library, leading literary lights of the day such as Ajit Kumar Dutta and Buddhadeb Bose were assembled. A daughter called Manjusree was born to the couple in February of the following year. Around this time, he wrote one of his most controversial poems. \"Camp'e\" (At the Camp) was printed in Sudhindranath Dutta's Parichay magazine and immediately caused a firestorm in the literary circle of Calcutta. The poem's ostensible subject is a deer hunt on a moonlit night. Many accused Jibanananda of promoting indecency and incest through this poem. More and more, he turned now, in secrecy, to fiction. He wrote a number of short novels and short stories during this period of unemployment, strife and frustration. In 1934 he wrote the series of poems that would form the basis of the collection called Rupasi Bangla. These poems were not discovered during his lifetime, and were only published in 1957, three years after his death. 165 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Back in Barisal In 1935, Jibanananda, by now familiar with professional disappointment and poverty, returned to his alma mater Brajamohan College, which was then affiliated with the University of Calcutta. He joined as a lecturer in the English department. In Calcutta, Buddhadeb Bose, Premendra Mitra and Samar Sen were starting a brand-new poetry magazine called Kobita. Jibanananda's work featured in the very first issue of the magazine, a poem called Mrittu'r Aagey (Before Death). Upon reading the magazine, Tagore wrote a lengthy letter to Bose and especially commended the Das poem: Jibanananda Das' vivid, colourful poem has given me great pleasure. It was in the second issue of Kobita (Poush 1342 issue, Dec 1934/Jan 1935) that Jibanananda published his now-legendary Banalata Sen. Today, this 18-line poem is among the most famous poems in the language. The following year, his second volume of poetry Dhusar Pandulipi was published. Jibanananda was by now well settled in Barisal. A son Samarananda was born in November 1936. His impact in the world of Bengali literature continued to www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 4 increase. In 1938, Tagore compiled a poetry anthology entitled Bangla Kabya Parichay (Introduction to Bengali Poetry) and included an abridged version of Mrityu'r Aagey, the same poem that had moved him three years ago. Another important anthology came out in 1939, edited by Abu Sayeed Ayub and Hirendranath Mukhopadhyay; Jibanananda was represented with four poems: Pakhira, Shakun, Banalata Sen, and Nagna Nirjan Haat. In 1942, the same year that his father died, his third volume of poetry Banalata Sen was published under the aegis of Kobita Bhavan and Buddhadeb Bose. A ground-breaking modernist poet in his own right, Bose was a steadfast champion of Jibanananda's poetry, providing him with numerous platforms for publication. 1944 saw the publication of Maha Prithibi. The Second World War had a profound impact on Jibanananda's poetic vision. The following year, Jibanananda provided his own translations of several of his poems for an English anthology to be published under the title Modern Bengali Poems. Oddly enough, the editor Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya considered these translations to be sub-standard, and instead commissioned Martin Kirkman to translate four of Jibanananda's poems for the book. Life in Calcutta: Final Phase The aftermath of the war saw heightened demands for Indian independence. Muslim politicians led by Jinnah wanted an independent homeland for the Muslims of the subcontinent. Bengal was uniquely vulnerable to partition: its western half was majority- Hindu, its eastern half majority-Muslim. Yet adherents of both religions spoke the same language, came from the same ethnic stock, and lived in close proximity to each other in town and village. Jibanananda had emphasized the need for communal harmony at an early stage. In his very first book Jhora Palok, he had included a poem called Hindu Musalman. In it he proclaimed: However, events in real life belied his beliefs. In the summer of 1946, he travelled to Calcutta from Barisal on three months' paid leave. He stayed at his brother Ashokananda's place through the bloody riots that swept the city. Just before partition in 166 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

August 1947, Jibanananda quit his job at Brajamohan College and said goodbye to his beloved Barisal. He and his family were among the X million refugees who took part in the largest cross-border exchange of peoples in history. For a while he worked for a magazine called Swaraj as its Sunday editor. But he left the job after a few months. In 1948, he completed two of his novels, Mallyaban and Shutirtho, neither of which were discovered during his life. Shaat'ti Tarar Timir was published in www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 5 December 1948. The same month, his mother Kusumkumari Das died in Calcutta. By now, he was well established in the Calcutta literary world. He was appointed to the editorial board of yet another new literary magazine Dondo (Conflict). However, in a reprise of his early career, he was sacked from his job at Kharagpur College in February 1951. In 1952, Signet Press published Banalata Sen. The book received widespread acclaim and won the Book of the Year award from the All-Bengal Tagore Literary Conference. Later that year, the poet found another job at Borisha College (today known as Borisha Bibekanondo College). This job too he lost within a few months. He applied afresh to Diamond Harbour Fakirchand College, but eventually declined it, owing to travel difficulties. Instead, he was obliged to take up a post at Howrah Girl's College (now known as Bijoy Krishna Girls’ College), a constituent affiliated undergraduate college of the University of Calcutta. As the head of the English department, he was entitled to a 50-taka monthly bonus on top of his salary. By the last year of his life, Jibanananda was acclaimed as one of the best poets of the post-Tagore era. He was constantly in demand at literary conferences, poetry readings, radio recitals etc. In May 1954, he was published a volume titled 'Best Poems' (Sreshttho Kobita). His Best Poems won the Indian Sahitya Akademi Award in 1955. Love and Marriage Young Jibanananda fell in love with Shovona, daughter of his uncle Atulchandra Das, who lived in the neighbourhood. He dedicated his first anthology of poems to Shovona without mentioning her name explicitly. He did not try to marry Shovona since marriage between cousins was not approvable by the society. But he never forgot Shovona who went by her nick Baby. She has been referred to as Y in his literary notes. Soon after wedding with Labanyaprabha Das (née Gupta) in 1930, personality clash erupted and Jibanananda Das gave up hope of a happy married life. The gap with his wife never narrowed. While Jibananda was struggling with death after a tram accident on 14 October 1954, Labanyaprabha did not find time for more than once for visiting her husband on death bed. At that time, she was busy in film-making in Tollyganj. Death “One poet dead, killed near his fiftieth year . . . did introduce what for India would be 'the modern spirit': bitterness, self-doubt, sex, street diction, personal confession...” www. The World's Poetry Archive 6 —Allen Ginsberg On October 14, 1954, he was carelessly crossing a road near Calcutta's Desha Priya Park when he was hit by a tram. Jibananda was returning home after his routine evening walk. At that time, he used to reside in a rented apartment on 167 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

the Lansdowne Road. Seriously injured, he was taken to Shambhunath Pundit Hospital. Poet- writer Sajanikanta Das who had been one of his fiercest critics was tireless in his efforts to secure the best treatment for the poet. He even persuaded Dr. Bidhan Chandra Roy (then chief minister of West Bengal) to visit him in hospital. Nonetheless, the injury was too severe to redress. Jibananda died in hospital on October 22, 1954, eight days later, at about midnight. He was then 55 and left behind his wife, Labanyaprabha Das, a son and a daughter, and the ever-growing band of readers. His body was cremated the following day at Keoratola crematorium. Following popular belief, it has been alleged in some biographical accounts that his accident was an attempt at ugh none of the Jibananda biographers have indicated such, it appears from circumstantial evidence that it was an attempt to end his own life. The literary circle deeply mourned his death. Almost all the newspapers published obituaries which contained sincere appreciations of the poetry of Jibanananda. Poet Sanjay Bhattacharya wrote the death news and sent to different newspapers. On 1 November 1954, The Times of India wrote : The premature death after an accident of Mr. Jibanananda Das removes from the field of Bengali literature a poet, who, though never in the limelight of publicity and prosperity, made a significant contribution to modern Bengali poetry by his prose-poems and free-verse. ... A poet of nature with a serious awareness of the life around him Jibanananda Das was known not so much for the social content of his poetry as for his bold imagination and the concreteness of his image. To a literary world dazzled by Tagore’s glory, Das showed how to remain true to the poet’s vocation without basking in its reflection.” In his obituary in the Shanibarer Chithi, Sajanikanta Das quoted from the poet : When one day I’ll leave this body once for all - Shall I never return to this world anymore? Let me come back On a winter night To the bedside of any dying acquaintance With a cold pale lump of orange in hand. Everyday Jibanananda returns to thousands of his readers and touches them with his unforgettable lines. 9.2 ABOUT THE POET Jibanananda Das was a Bengali poet, writer, novelist, and essayist. Dimly recognized during his lifetime, today Das is acknowledged as the premier poet of post-Tegorian literature in India and Bangladesh. He is considered as Bengal’s “greatest” modern poet and “best loved” poet too, his poems being regarded as \"part of the Bengali consciousness on the both side of border\" between India and Bangladesh. 168 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Das wrote ceaselessly but as he was an introvert and the “most alone of [Bengali] poets”, he “compelled to suppress some of his most important writings or to locate them in a secret life”. During his lifetime, only seven volumes of his poems were published. After his death, it was discovered that apart from poems Das wrote several novels and many short stories. His unpublished works are still being published. Das died-on October 22, 1954; eight days after he was hit by a tramcar. The witnesses said that though the tramcar whistled, he did not stop and got struck. Some deem the accident as an attempt of suicide. “Poetry and life are two different outpouring of the same thing; life as we usually conceive it contains what we normally accept as reality, but the spectacle of this incoherent and disorderly life can satisfy neither the poet's talent nor the reader's imagination ... poetry does not contain a complete reconstruction of what we call reality; we have entered a new world. ” —Jibananda Das Jibananda Das was born in 1899 in a Vaidya-Brahmin family in the small district town of Barisal, located in the south of Bangladesh. His ancestors came from the Bikrampur region of Dhaka district, from a now-extinct village called Gaupara on the banks of the river Padma. Jibanananda's grandfather Sarbananda Dasgupta was the first to settle permanently in Barisal. He was an early www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 1 exponent of the reformist Brahmo Samaj movement in Barisal and was highly regarded in town for his philanthropy. He erased the -gupta suffix from the family name, regarding it as a symbol of Vedic Brahmin excess, thus rendering the surname to Das. Jibanananda's father Satyananda Das (1863–1942) was a schoolmaster, essayist, magazine publisher, and founder-editor of Brôhmobadi, a journal of the Brahmo Samaj dedicated to the exploration of social issues. Jibanananda's mother Kusum Kumari Das was a poet who wrote a famous poem called Adôrsho Chhele (\"The Ideal Boy\") whose refrain is well known to Bengalis to this day: Amader deshey hobey shei chhele kobey / Kothae na boro hoye kajey boro hobey. (The child who achieves not in words but in deeds, when will this land know such a one?) Jibananda was the eldest son of his parents and was called by the nickname Milu. A younger brother Ashokananda Das was born in 1908 and a sister called Shuchorita in 1915. Milu fell violently ill in his childhood, and his parents feared for his life. Fervently desiring to restore his health, Kusum Kumari took her ailing child on pilgrimage to Lucknow, Agra and Giridih. They were accompanied on these journeys by their uncle Chandranath. In January 1908, Milu, by now eight years old, was admitted to the fifth grade in Brojomohon School. The delay was due to his father's opposition to admitting children into school at too early an age. Milu's childhood education was therefore limited to his mother's tutelage. His school life passed by relatively uneventfully. In 1915 he successfully completed his matriculation examination from Brojomohon, obtaining a first division in the process. He repeated the feat two years later when he passed the intermediate exams from Brajamohan College. Evidently an accomplished student, he left his rural Barisal to join the University of Calcutta. 169 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Jibananda enrolled in Presidency College, Kolkata, then as now a prestigious seat of Indian learning. He studied English literature and graduated with a BA (Honours) degree in 1919. That same year, his first poem appeared in print in the Boishakh issue of Brahmobadi journal. Fittingly, the poem was called Borshoabahon (Arrival of the New Year). This poem was published anonymously, with only the honorific Sri in the byline. However, the annual index in the year-end issue of the magazine revealed his full name: \"Sri Jibananda Das Gupta, BA\". In 1921, he completed the MA degree in English from University of Calcutta, obtaining a second class. He was also studying law. At this time, he lived in the Hardinge student quarters next to the university. Just before his exams, he fell ill with bacillary dysentery, which affected his preparation for the examination. The following year, he started his teaching career. He joined the English department of City College, Calcutta as a tutor. By this time, he had left Hardinge and was boarding at Harrison Road. He gave up his law studies. It is thought that he also lived in a house in Bechu Chatterjee Street for some time with his brother Ashokanananda, who had come there from Barisal for his MSc studies. His literary career was starting to take off. When Deshbondhu Chittaranjan Das died in June 1925, Jibananda wrote a poem called 'Deshbandhu Prayan'e' (\"On the Death of the Friend of the nation\") which was published in Bangabani magazine. This poem would later take its place in the collection called Jhara Palok (1927). On reading it, poet Kalidas Roy said that he had thought the poem was the work of a mature, accomplished poet hiding behind a pseudonym. Jibanananda's earliest printed prose work was also published in 1925. This was an obituary entitled \"Kalimohan Das'er Sraddha-bashorey,\" which appeared in serialized form in Brahmobadi magazine. His poetry began to be widely published in various literary journals and little magazines in Calcutta, Dhaka and elsewhere. These included Kallol, perhaps the most famous literary magazine of the era, Kalikalam (Pen and Ink), Progoti (Progress) (co-edited by Buddhadeb Bose) and others. At this time, he occasionally used the surname Dasgupta as opposed to Das. In 1927, Jhara Palok (Fallen Feathers), his first collection of poems, came out. A few months later, Jibananda was fired from his job at the City College. The college had been struck by student unrest surrounding a religious festival, and enrolment seriously suffered as a consequence. Still in his late 20s, Jibananda was the youngest member of the faculty and therefore regarded as the most dispensable. In the literary circle of Calcutta, he also came under serial attack. One of the most serious literary critics of that time, Sajanikanta Das, began to write aggressive critiques of his poetry in the review pages of Shanibarer Chithi (the Saturday Letter) magazine. With nothing to keep him in Calcutta, Jibananda left for the small town of Bagerhat in the far south, there to resume his teaching career at Bagerhat P. C. College. But only after about three months he returned to the big city, now in dire financial straits. To make ends meet, he gave private tuition to students while applying for full-time positions in academia. In December 1929, he moved to Delhi to take up a teaching post at Ramjosh College; again, this lasted no more than a few months. Back in Barisal, his family 170 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

had been deciding for his marriage. Once Jibananda got to Barisal, he failed to go back to Delhi – and, consequently, lost the job. In May 1930, he married Labanya, a girl whose ancestors came from Khulna. At the subsequent reception in Dhaka's Ram Mohan Library, leading literary lights of the day such as Ajit Kumar Dutta and Buddhadeb Bose were assembled. A daughter called Manjusree was born to the couple in February of the following year. Around this time, he wrote one of his most controversial poems. \"Camp'e\" (At the Camp) was printed in Sudhindranath Dutta's Parichay magazine and immediately caused a firestorm in the literary circle of Calcutta. The poem's ostensible subject is a deer hunt on a moonlit night. Many accused Jibananda of promoting indecency and incest through this poem. More and more, he turned now, in secrecy, to fiction. He wrote a number of short novels and short stories during this period of unemployment, strife and frustration. In 1934 he wrote the series of poems that would form the basis of the collection called Rupasi Bangla. These poems were not discovered during his lifetime, and were only published in 1957, three years after his death. The reason why Jibananda Das appeared so remote and impenetrable to many contemporary Bengalis is simply this: no other poet was more unlike all that had come before them in their native literature. Not for nothing has he often been described as the ‘loneliest’ poet. He seemed verily to stand outside tradition – and, as a poet who wrote after Rabindranath Tagore, it was a quite formidable tradition that he came out of but seemed to have nothing to do with. Jibananda stood like an enchanted island – isolated but magnificent – even as the broad stream of Bengali poetry flowed sedately by that island, lapping, it is true, at its shores, but seldom breaching them. And the aloneness of his poetry happened to be reinforced by the fact that he was an intensely private and shy man who possessed few of the usual social graces that make a person popular in their community. Indeed, his personal angularities often precipitated crises in his professional calling – he was a professor of English – that saw him lose his job more than once, obliging him to start looking for a new opening now and then – an experience that could hardly have been comforting at a time when jobs were particularly scarce. Among the aspects of his craft that set Jibananda so firmly apart from every other Bengali poet before or contemporary to him, the most notable is his incredibly sensuous poetic diction. In a very real sense, he was the least ‘spiritual’ or ‘philosophical’ of poets, and so one of the most ‘physical’. His extremely capacious imagination expresses itself not so much through ideas or even thoughts as through sensations, through shapes, forms, smells and colour that wash over his senses all the time. He was a virtuoso word painter, and the pictures he drew with such consummate skill come alive with a startling sense of immediacy. Rabindranath Tagore, who died before Jibananda had reached his prime, once spoke of the younger poet’s work as ‘soaked through with vividness’. For immediate context, Tagore had 171 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

‘Before Death’, which we have looked at above already, and he was referring to such sparkling word-pictures as these: We’ve seen the green leaf turn yellow in the autumnal dark, Sunlight and the sparrow play in the lattice of the Hisal’s branches, The mouse’s silk-like fur caked in husk on winter night, The musty smell of rice wafting all day long on rippling waves On to the eyes of the solitary fish in ever newer forms. Across the pond the duck, in the gathering darkness of the evening, Scents delicious sleep – borne on soft womanly hands. This is a veritable feast of the senses, and it is remarkable how tactile and olfactory stimulation meld so fluently with visual experiences in such verses. Sound is absent here altogether: nature is unspeaking here, or, at any rate, hushed, restful, tranquil – very nearly still. The reader stands transfixed before the unfolding panorama of a landscape steeped in twilight, or caught in a dream, and she can feel the green wind blowing in her face or kissing the limpid waters of a tiny river even as she picks up the fragrance of sleep and the heady smell of cricket whistling in the dark. The ancestry of this unmixed and uninhibited celebration of the senses cannot be traced to anything within the Bengali poetic tradition. Parallels can only be sought in the early Keats, or Swinburne, or the Pre-Raphaelites. It must be said, however, that Jibanananda’s poetry is seldom circumscribed by the somewhat self-conscious aestheticism of the Pre-Raphaelites’ or Swinburne’s work. His poetry is graceful and light-footed, never glib or facile. And though it rarely sets out to make a point or give a message, it yet engages profoundly with the human condition – with pain and heartbreak, joy and exhilaration. And in no Pre-Raphaelite’s work could you pick up vignettes such as these: Lepers open the hydrant to lap some water Or may be that hydrant was broken already. Now at midnight they descend upon the city in droves…. or, Three rickshaws trot off, fading into the last gaslight, I turn off, leave Phears Lane, defiantly Walk for miles, stop beside a wall On Bentinck Street, at Tiretti Bazar, There in the air dry as roasted peanuts. or, again, 172 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

For the land they go to now is called the soaring river where a wretched bone-picker and his bone come and discover their faces in water–till looking at faces is over. Jibananda could also be cuttingly ironic when he wanted to, as in this withering commentary on the professional poetry critic who is ….. no poet, only a toothless professor Seeking eternity, drawing fifteen thousand a month For picking to the bone fifteen hundred poets, Once living, but now altogether dead, Scattering the flesh and the wriggling worms To the four winds…. In Jibanananda’s work, intense sensory experiences convey themselves to the reader in such magnificently vivid images and often via such a personalised vocabulary that his poetry presents some of the toughest challenges the translator’s craft can come up against, which is primarily why he is so little read outside Bengal. The bar for the translator is also high because this poetry is firmly rooted in the earth of Bengal’s countryside – more particularly in the geography now identified as Bangladesh. A related difficulty is that his poetry makes the most extensive use of such rhetorical devices as alliteration, irony, metonymy and bathos, besides of similes, metaphors and conceits, which it is often quite impossible to transliterate. His poetry, therefore, suffers even more in translation than many of his contemporaries’. Most Jibananda translations necessarily miss the extraordinary lightness, fluency and limpidity of his verse. And yet, if some of the flavour of the original is still captured in the more competent translations of his work, this is a tribute as much to the translator’s skill-sets as to the almost elemental power of his poetry. Here is a transliteration of what is perhaps the most widely-read piece of poetry in the entire universe of post-Tagore Bengali verse – the poem ‘Banalata Sen’ from the eponymous 1942 anthology, the translator being Chidananda Dasgupta: For aeons have I roamed the roads of the earth From the seas of Ceylon to the straits of Malaya I have journeyed, alone, in the enduring night, And down the dark corridor of time I have walked Through the mists of Bimbisara, Asoka, and darker Vidarbha. Round my weary soul the angry waves still roar. 173 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

My only peace I knew with Banalata Sen of Natore. Her hair was dark as the night in Vidisha, Her face the sculpture of Sravasti. I saw her, as a sailor after the storm Rudderless in the sea, spies of a sudden The grass-green heart of the leafy island. “Where were you so long?”, she asked, and more With her bird’s-nest eyes, Banalata Sen of Natore. As the footfall of dew comes evening. The raven wipes the smell of the warm sun From its wings, the world’s noises die, And in the light of fireflies the manuscript Prepares to weave the fables of night. Every bird is home, every river reached the ocean. Darkness remains – and it’s time for Banalata Sen. A native speaker of Bengali with even a passable familiarity with Jibanananda’s work is likely to miss the wonderfully fluid and graceful movement of the original verse here. The metrical structure also sounds somewhat clipped, even a little halting. Yet it is remarkable how, in its English avatar, ‘Banalata Sen’ remains a strikingly beautiful poem. The images of the concluding stanza are among the most memorable evocations of the day’s end to be found in modern poetry in any language. This most alone of poets rarely found anything in his proximate environment worth commentating on. And yet, miraculously, he wrote this exquisite little poem, titled ‘A Strange Darkness’, which shines an unforgiving light upon the dark times that seem now to have laid siege to his, and our, own country. 9.3 ANALYSIS OF “GRANDFATHER, I SHALL RETURN TO THIS BENGAL” Jibananda Das’s poetry has the power to transport one to the obscure region of one’s being and sensibility beyond the everyday bounds of sense and reason.He achieves it characteristically by endowing mystical attributes to mundane everyday objects of nature, especially the ordinary objects that we see in and around Bengal as Bengal was known then in its undivided entity. This rootedness of his imagination and sensibility is what makes Jibananda Das a unique poet, different from almost all the modern poets of Bengal. Bengal 174 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

has produced a great number of nature poets, the finest specimen of which could be no other than Tagore himself, the pictorial as well as spiritual quality of whose images has touched thousands of people across the world. But never before, perhaps, was there a poet in Bengal who like Jibananda, time and again, made the so-called lowly and unattractive creatures and plants like idur (mouse), shalik (Indian maynah), pecha (owl), kaak (crow), churui (sparrow), hash (duck), ghash (grass), akanda (crown flower, calotropis gigantea), dhundul (a kind of local vegetable) and so on so 'ordinary' yet significant. I intend to discuss three poems by Jibananda Das and all three are my favourite ones, namely ‘Before Death’ from his collection Dhushar Pandulipi (Grey Manuscripts), ‘I Shall Return To This Bengal’ and ‘Banalata Sen’ from his collection Rupashi Bangla (Beautiful Bengal) to examine his poetic sensibility as a modern poet, to examine his relationship with nature, a relationship with a difference, and the transformation that Bengal had undergone in his poetry because of this special bond. The order of discussion in my paper will have first ‘Banalata Sen’ to be followed by ‘Before Death’ and then ‘I shall Return to this Bengal’. In this context, it would not be wrong to refer to Tagore, and indeed I have already mentioned him as one of the finest examples of Bengal’s nature poets. With his vast range of songs and poems in praise of Bengal he remains not only relevant but a necessity for the expression of nearly all our moods and occasions, his songs fitting in and therefore being played during every single festival today in Bengal. Yet his description of Bengal remains more general, symbolic and romantic. Nature perhaps was a means of transcendence for Tagore, to be one with a greater being. Jibanananda’s association with nature and specifically that of Bengal is more specific, every day, ordinary, and common but at the same time sensuous and mysterious. If transcendence is the uniqueness of Tagore’s verse, then that of Jibananda is surely immanence, and this quality perhaps establishes Jibananda as one who comes after Tagore with altogether a new sensibility and quest. Never before or since were the poems of his kind written. Buddhadeva Bose in his book An Acre of Green Grass rightly says of Jibananda. A nature-worshipper, but by no means a Platonist or pantheist; he is rather a pagan who loves the things of nature sensuously, not as tokens or symbols, nor as patterns of perfection, but simply because they are what they are (Bose, 58). Jibanananda’s singularity lies in his ability to perceive beauty in the unacknowledged and small objects of nature, and in that sense, he truly made ordinary Bengal beautiful in the eyes of his readers. At a time when Jibananda Das was writing, many readers and admirers of his poetry had called him the lonely or the loneliest poet. The reason for using such a label was perhaps because of the pervasive sense of melancholy and of death in his poems. That label has remained with him forever. He was aware of it and had referred to it in the Introduction to the collection of his poems published in 1954 called Jibananda Daser Shreshto Kobita (The Best Poems of Jibananda Das). In the Introduction he says that many labels have been tagged to his name from time to time. Some have called him a nature-poet, some a poet of historical 175 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

and social consciousness, while there are still others who would prefer to call him a poet of the subconscious or more specifically a surrealist poet. Many of these, as the poet observes, stand true for specific poems, but none describes his whole oeuvre. This problem of defining Jibananda, as I see it, lies in the unusualness of his poetry. Jibananda lived during difficult times. It was a time of severe political disturbances, the rise of the Left movement, unemployment, financial crisis, and so on. Premendra Mitra and Subhash Mukhopadhyay, Jibanananda’s contemporaries, had once even declared that they were poets of the ‘coolie and the lowly’ (Bose, 59) and ‘workers and peasants’ (Bose, 59) respectively. In terms of poetry writing European modernist poetry was a big influence on the poets of this generation, so much so that many of Jibanananda’s contemporaries were called Eliotesque poets. Jibananda too had been at the receiving end of all this turmoil, but his uniqueness lies in dealing with the same situation in a different way. The world may have been chaotic, but the fecundity and correlative quality of Jibanananda’s mind, helped him create a unique world for himself even in the midst of all this turmoil. Hence most of his poems are neither rebellious nor angry nor dark, characteristics common to the poetry of many of his contemporaries. They are rather characterized by silence, tranquility and a dreamlike ambience. This perhaps was the reason behind calling Jibananda a surrealist by many. The Surrealists believed that the vagaries of the outside world could be overcome by invoking the powers of the mind to emancipate and escape into the world of amazing possibilities. Angst which is the hallmark of modernist poetry was present in most of the poets of the time, including Jibananda Das. Its presence can be felt in the pervasive presence of the sense of fragmentation, meaninglessness and even death in their poetry. But Jibanananda’s poetry is not to be marked by any of these, neither in terms of celebration nor lamentation. Rather his antidote for all this is to celebrate life, to be bound in love with this pulsating life as such in nature that makes it possible to be one with one’s own subconsciousness.The mysteriously beautiful and distant places as well as the sensuous opulence of nature that his poetry draws on make this imaginative journey to be one with nature and hence with oneself possible and deeply enjoyable.In Banalata Sen we encounter such a ‘tired’ soul of a journeying poet looking for peace and oneness. He claims he gets it from ‘Banalata Sen’, and we have the unmistakable feel that Banalata Sen, the loved one, is emblematic of Bengal, Bengal’s nature, its deep solace and shelter, so to speak. As he says: For thousands of years, I roamed the paths of this earth, From waters round Sri Lanka, in dead of night, to seas up the Malabar coast. Much have I wandered. I was there in the gray world of Ashoka And of Bimbisara, pressed on through darkness to the city of Vidarbha. I am a weary heart surrounded by life's frothy ocean. To me she gave a moment's peace—Banalata Sen from Natore. 176 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

The poet, as we see in the poem, has travelled far and wide, but peace eluded him. It is only when he comes face to face with Banalata Sen, does he feel peace. Jibanananda’s gives free rein to his imagination illustrated by his travels to ancient and remote places of great beauty and attraction. Yet his quest ultimately brings him back to Bengal, to Banalata Sen. Hence it can be said that Banalata Sen is identified with Bengal, and to give a sense of more rootedness, with Natore of Bengal. As is the case, Jibanananda’s poems often give ethereal feelings and exotic sensation, yet the images which abound in them are enough to evoke one’s deep-buried memories of Bengal. Even when he describes a woman or a beloved, he draws comparison from nature and uses images which offer a larger-than-life or stranger- than-life impression of the person. Yet he makes sure that the person is situated and identified in the familiar sights and sounds of the soil she belongs to. Hence Banalata Sen belongs to Natore and her eyes are like the nest of a bird. When the poet encounters her, she says, ‘Where have you been so long? And raised her bird's-nest-like eyes—Banalata Sen from Natore’ (trans. by Seely in Parabaas). At the end of the poem when the poet describes darkness as it descends on the Earth, the end of the day symbolizing end of life as well, he returns to Banalata Sen, his refuge. Jibanananda’s images come out brilliant and evocative, but often puzzling and therefore lasting for their oxymoronic effects. Banalata Sen’s ‘bird’s-nest-eye’ image is a case in point. It has made us all willing captives. It is his innate ability to give a fantastic touch to the so-called commonplace things; it is the ability to perceive the extraordinary in the ordinary; it is the ability to perceive pulsating life in the apparently inanimate; and it is this ability that opens the gateway for him to reach out to the life in nature and thereby to his own substratum. It is this ability that makes Jibanananda’s a modern poet with a difference. A sense of melancholy pervades in the last few lines of ‘Banalata Sen’ as he describes the day coming to an end. The images are hallucinatory, but tangible. As the poet says: At day's end, like hush of dew Comesevening.A hawk wipes the scent of sunlight from its wings. When earth's colours fade and some pale design is sketched, Then glimmering fireflies paint in the story. All birds come home, all rivers, all of life's tasks finished. Only darkness remains, as I sit there face to face with Banalata Sen. Fantasy and reality blend as one when he comes back to his beloved Banalata Sen of Natore. This sense of life coming to an end recurs also in the other poem that I want to discuss, and the very name of the next poem has the word death in it. But by now he has almost overcome 177 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

the fear of death. Hence, in ‘Before Death’, the poet gives the readers reasons for having overcome the fear of death. As he says: We who've walked deserted fields of stubble on Paush evenings, Who've seen upon the fields' far edge soft river women spreading Fog flowers — they all, alas, like village girls of days long past. We who've seen in darkness the akanda shrub, the dhundul Filled with fireflies, seen the moon standing silent vigil at the head of Fields already harvested — not lusting for the crops grown there. …Before death what more do, we wish to understand? The trope of death as we see extends to this poem also. But it loses its power over the poet however otherwise pervasive it may be. How can death daunt one like him, one who has seen all that is worth seeing in nature? This poem is a classic one which has Jibanananda’s unique style of describing nature. All his senses seem to be open, and he appears to absorb nature in all its varied beauties, beauties that elude others because they are otherwise small, ordinary and every day. But at his poetic touch the ordinary and the small become part of the sustaining substratum of life. His is a vision of total immanence in the life of nature.He talks of the strange beauty of winter night, of local plants like akanda and creepers like dhundul bright in the light of glow worms at night, of the longing of a crow, of the mouse whose fur is covered in grains, of the smells of grass, sunlight, infant-mouth, crickets, the smell of the ancient owl, the eggs of a sparrow, and so on. In the poem he says that one whose mind is open to these pleasures of nature has already had the privilege of enjoying the supreme pleasures of life and perhaps there is nothing more than life has to offer after this. Buddhadeva Bose rightly says that Jibanananda is inclined towards the exotic, but there is nothing uncanny about his poetry. Nature presents life in totality to the poet, so that just like the yellowing of a leaf or a day coming to an end or the change of seasons, death too comes naturally. But what is important here is that death comes not without fulfilment. Beauty in all forms, erotic and sensual, life in all its forms, pleasures in all its facets have been given to him by nature and they have filled him with ineffable joy. The last two lines of the poem talks of Jibanananda’s ultimate fulfilment before death and hence the acceptance that comes with it. As he says: Before death what more do, we wish to understand? Do we not know Gray death's face awakes, arises, like a wall, at the head of all our prostrate Reddened cravings? Once within this world were dreams; there was gold That obtained tranquility, as if according to the dictates of some master of illusion. What more do we wish to understand? Have we not heard bird wings call 178 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

After sunlight faded. Have we not watched the crows fly off through fog-filled Fields? Hence, after death, as it were, the poet says, ‘I Shall Return To This Bengal’. To Bengal he wants to return, a place which has given him utmost fulfilment during his lifetime, and in death too he desires the same place. No one really knows what happens after death, yet the desire that the poet expresses is eternal. But to Bengal he will return, not as a man. He will return as a mayna or a fishing-kite or a dawn crow or maybe as a duck.As a human being he has perceived this life as an outsider. Now he wishes to be one with it, one with this life, which is pulsating, and which is strangely beautiful. This life is not completely knowable until and unless one is completely a part of it. Hence, he says: I shall return to this Bengal, to the Dhansiri’s bank: Perhaps not as a man, but mayna or fishing-kite. Or dawn crow, floating on the mist’s bosom to alight In the shade of this jackfruit tree, in this autumn harvest-land. Or may be a duck- a young girl’s bells on my red feet, Drifting on kalmi-scented waters all day: For love of Bengal’s rivers, fields, crops, I’ll come this way To this green shore of Bengal, drenched by Jalangi’s waves Buddhadeva Bose in talking of Jibanananda’s poetry rightly says, ‘He brings us no breath of heaven, nor blasts of hell, draws up no molten metal from the unfathomed mind; what he does is to intensify the everyday experience of our senses to a point where it seems transformed, transcendent, miraculous. He is important because he has brought a new note to our poetry, a new tone of feeling…’ (58-59). Bose is right and I feel the most important aspect about Jibanananda’s perception of life is that in making the ordinary extraordinary and in making the animals of the lower kinds like owl, mouse, crow, duck, shalik, and so on, desirable and capable of bringing out the poetic inspiration in him, he unites his self with the ‘other’, or rather cognizes the ‘other’ almost in the postmodernist way. The philosophy that exudes from his poems is that of a wholesome living wherein human beings are placed at a necessary oneness with this other side of life considered as ‘irrational’, ‘subhuman’. That perhaps is also the reason why he appears to be a surrealist, one who has moved away from the dominance of the mind and the rational that more often than not divides and reached out to the subconscious where all is one in terms of the irresistibility of the force of life and living itself. His poetic self finds itself fulfilled in discovering this irresistible pulsating life and beauty in nature, in the nature of Bengal, and in being part of it. As he says in ‘I Shall Return To This Bengal’, 179 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Perhaps you’ll see a glass-fly ride the evening breeze, Or hear a barn owl call from the silk-cotton tree. A little child toss rice-grains on the courtyard grass, Or a boy on the Rupsa’s turgid stream steer a dinghy With torn white sail - white egrets swimming through red clouds To their home in the dark. You will find me among their crowd 9.4 CENTRAL THEME The poet, as we see in the poem, has travelled far and wide, but peace eluded him. It is only when he comes face to face with Banalata Sen, does he feel peace. Jibanananda gives free rein to his imagination illustrated by his travels to ancient and remote places of great beauty and attraction. Yet his quest ultimately brings him back to Bengal, to Banalata Sen. Hence it can be said that Banalata Sen is identified with Bengal, and to give a sense of more rootedness, with Natore of Bengal. As is the case, Jibanananda’s poems often give ethereal feelings and exotic sensation, yet the images which abound in them are enough to evoke one’s deep-buried memories of Bengal. Even when he describes a woman or a beloved, he draws comparison from nature and uses images which offer a larger-than-life or stranger- than-life impression of the person. Yet he makes sure that the person is situated and identified in the familiar sights and sounds of the soil she belongs to. Hence Banalata Sen belongs to Natore and her eyes are like the nest of a bird. When the poet encounters her, she says, ‘Where have you been so long? And raised her bird's-nest-like eyes—Banalata Sen from Natore’ (trans. by Seely in Parabaas). At the end of the poem when the poet describes darkness as it descends on the Earth, the end of the day symbolizing end of life as well, he returns to Banalata Sen, his refuge. Jibanananda’s images come out brilliant and evocative, but often puzzling and therefore lasting for their oxymoronic effects. Banalata Sen’s ‘bird’s-nest-eye’ image is a case in point. It has made us all willing captives. It is his innate ability to give a fantastic touch to the so-called commonplace things; it is the ability to perceive the extraordinary in the ordinary; it is the ability to perceive pulsating life in the apparently inanimate; and it is this ability that opens the gateway for him to reach out to the life in nature and thereby to his own substratum. It is this ability that makes Jibanananda a modern poet with a difference. A sense of melancholy pervades in the last few lines of ‘Banalata Sen’ as he describes the day coming to an end. The images are hallucinatory, but tangible. Fantasy and reality blend as one when he comes back to his beloved Banalata Sen of Natore. This sense of life coming to an end recurs also in the other poem that I want to discuss, and 180 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

the very name of the next poem has the word death in it. But by now he has almost overcome the fear of death. Hence, in ‘Before Death’, the poet gives the readers reasons for having overcome the fear of death. The trope of death as we see extends to this poem also. But it loses its power over the poet however otherwise pervasive it may be. How can death daunt one like him, one who has seen all that is worth seeing in nature? This poem is a classic one which has Jibanananda’s unique style of describing nature. All his senses seem to be open, and he appears to absorb nature in all its varied beauties, beauties that elude others because they are otherwise small, ordinary and every day. But at his poetic touch the ordinary and the small become part of the sustaining substratum of life. His is a vision of total immanence in the life of nature.He talks of the strange beauty of winter night, of local plants like akanda and creepers like dhundul bright in the light of glow worms at night, of the longing of a crow, of the mouse whose fur is covered in grains, of the smells of grass, sunlight, infant-mouth, crickets, the smell of the ancient owl, the eggs of a sparrow, and so on. In the poem he says that one whose mind is open to these pleasures of nature has already had the privilege of enjoying the supreme pleasures of life and perhaps there is nothing more than life has to offer after this. Buddhadeva Bose rightly says that Jibanananda is inclined towards the exotic, but there is nothing uncanny about his poetry. Nature presents life in totality to the poet, so that just like the yellowing of a leaf or a day coming to an end or the change of seasons, death too comes naturally. But what is important here is that death comes not without fulfilment. Beauty in all forms, erotic and sensual, life in all its forms, pleasures in all its facets have been given to him by nature and they have filled him with ineffable joy. The last two lines of the poem talks of Jibanananda’s ultimate fulfilment before death and hence the acceptance that comes with it. Hence, after death, as it were, the poet says, ‘I Shall Return To This Bengal’. To Bengal he wants to return, a place which has given him utmost fulfilment during his lifetime, and in death too he desires the same place. No one really knows what happens after death, yet the desire that the poet expresses is eternal. But to Bengal he will return, not as a man. He will return as a mayna or a fishing-kite or a dawn crow or maybe as a duck.As a human being he has perceived this life as an outsider. Now he wishes to be one with it, one with this life, which is pulsating, and which is strangely beautiful. This life is not completely knowable until and unless one is completely a part of it. Buddhadeva Bose in talking of Jibanananda’s poetry rightly says, ‘He brings us no breath of heaven, nor blasts of hell, draws up no molten metal from the unfathomed mind; what he does is to intensify the everyday experience of our senses to a point where it seems transformed, transcendent, miraculous. He is important because he has brought a new note to our poetry, a new tone of feeling…’ (58-59). Bose is right and I feel the most important aspect about Jibanananda’s perception of life is that in making the ordinary extraordinary and in making the animals of the lower kinds like owl, mouse, crow, duck, shalik, and so on, 181 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

desirable and capable of bringing out the poetic inspiration in him, he unites his self with the ‘other’, or rather cognizes the ‘other’ almost in the postmodernist way. The philosophy that exudes from his poems is that of a wholesome living wherein human beings are placed at a necessary oneness with this other side of life considered as ‘irrational’, ‘subhuman’. That perhaps is also the reason why he appears to be a surrealist, one who has moved away from the dominance of the mind and the rational that more often than not divides and reached out to the subconscious where all is one in terms of the irresistibility of the force of life and living itself. His poetic self finds itself fulfilled in discovering this irresistible pulsating life and beauty in nature, in the nature of Bengal, and in being part of it. As he says in ‘I Shall Return To This Bengal’. 9.5 SUMMARY  Jibanananda Das’s poetry has the power to transport one to the obscure region of one’s being and sensibility beyond the everyday bounds of sense and reason.  He achieves it characteristically by endowing mystical attributes to mundane everyday objects of nature, especially the ordinary objects that we see in and around Bengal as Bengal was known then in its undivided entity.  This rootedness of his imagination and sensibility is what makes Jibanananda Das a unique poet, different from almost all the modern poets of Bengal.  Bengal has produced a great number of nature poets, the finest specimen of which could be no other than Tagore himself, the pictorial as well as spiritual quality of whose images has touched thousands of people across the world.  But never before, perhaps, was there a poet in Bengal who like Jibanananda, time and again, made the so-called lowly and unattractive creatures and plants like idur (mouse), shalik (Indianmaynah), pecha (owl), kaak (crow), churui (sparrow), hash (duck), ghash (grass), akanda (crown flower, calotropis gigantea), dhundul (a kind of local vegetable) and so on so 'ordinary' yet significant.  In this context, it would not be wrong to refer to Tagore, and indeed I have already mentioned him as one of the finest examples of Bengal’s nature poets.  With his vast range of songs and poems in praise of Bengal he remains not only relevant but a necessity for the expression of nearly all our moods and occasions, his songs fitting in and therefore being played during every single festival today in Bengal.  Jibanananda’s singularity lies in his ability to perceive beauty in the unacknowledged and small objects of nature, and in that sense, he truly made ordinary Bengal beautiful in the eyes of his readers. 182 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

 At a time when Jibanananda Das was writing, many readers and admirers of his poetry had called him the lonely or the loneliest poet.  The reason for using such a label was perhaps because of the pervasive sense of melancholy and of death in his poems.  That label has remained with him forever. He was aware of it and had referred to it in the Introduction to the collection of his poems published in 1954 called Jibanananda Daser Shreshto Kobita (The Best Poems of Jibanananda Das).  The poet, as we see in the poem, has travelled far and wide, but peace eluded him. It is only when he comes face to face with Banalata Sen, does he feel peace. Jibanananda gives free rein to his imagination illustrated by his travels to ancient and remote places of great beauty and attraction.  Yet his quest ultimately brings him back to Bengal, to Banalata Sen.  Hence it can be said that Banalata Sen is identified with Bengal, and to give a sense of more rootedness, with Natore of Bengal.  As is the case, Jibanananda’s poems often give ethereal feelings and exotic sensation, yet the images which abound in them are enough to evoke one’s deep-buried memories of Bengal. 9.6 KEYWORDS  Perceived- Become aware or conscious of (something); come to realize or understand.  Tranquillity- The quality or state of being tranquil; calm.  Erotic- Relating to or tending to arouse sexual desire or excitement.  Immanence- The state of being present as a natural and permanent part of something  Infant- A very young child or baby.  Daunt- Make (someone) feel intimidated or apprehensive.  Hallucination- An experience involving the apparent perception of something not present.  Melancholy- A feeling of pensive sadness, typically with no obvious cause.  Evocative- Bringing strong images, memories, or feelings to mind.  Descend- to come or go down from a higher place or level to a lower one  Abound- Exist in large numbers or amounts. 183 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

9.7 LEARNING ACTIVITY 1. Analyze the structure used in the poem. ___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ 2. Describe the themes used in the poem. ___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ 9.8 UNIT END QUESTION A. Descriptive Questions Short Questions 1. Describe Jibanananda Das as a poet of nature. 2. Describe Jibanananda Das views in “Grandfather, I shall return to this Bengal”. 3. Describe the themes of “Grandfather, I shall return to this Bengal”. 4. Discuss about the mental state of Jibanananda Das. 5. Discuss Jibanananda Das as modern poet. Long Questions 1. Analyze the poem “Grandfather, I shall return to this Bengal”. 2. Describe the critical analysis of “Grandfather, I shall return to this Bengal”. 3. Discuss the work of Jibanananda Das. 4. Illustrate fantasy and reality blend in the Jibanananda Das’s poetry. 5. Describe the role of death in the poem “Grandfather, I shall return to this Bengal”. B. Multiple Choice Questions 1. What sort of a poet was Jibananda Das? a. Bengali b. Bihari c. Marathi d. Pahadi 2. When was Jibananda Das was born? 184 a. 1899 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

b. 1902 c. 1954 d. 1945 3. Which is the other country in which Jibananda Das is famous? a. Nepal b. China c. Bangladesh d. Bhutan 4. Which was the most productive period of Jibananda’s literary life. a. 1934-1947 b. 1947-1957 c. 1940-1950 d. 1930-1942 5. Which was the year in which Jibananda’s work was published? a. 2007 b. 1968 c. 2005 d. 1956 Answers 1-a, 2-a, 3-c, 4-a, 5-c 9.9REFERENCES Reference Books  Bose, Buddhadeva (1948), An Acre of Green Grass: A Review of Modern Bengali Literature Calcutta, Papyrus.  Das, Jibanananda, (1999) 'I Shall Return To This Bengal'.” trans. by Sukanta Chaudhuri in Modern Indian Literature, New Delhi, Oxford University Press.  Das, Jibanananda(2011) ‘Banalata Sen’ and ‘Before Death.’ trans. by Clinton B. Seely in The Scent of Sunlight, Parabaas. Textbooks 185 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

 Das, Jibanananda (2006), Bengal The Beautiful, London, Anvil Press Poetry.  Das, Jibanananda (2003), Naked Lonely Hand: Selected Poems, London, Anvil Press Poetry.  Das, Jibanananda (2018), Rupasi Bangla, Createspace Independent Pub. Websites  https://www.poemhunter.com/i/ebooks/pdf/jibanananda_das_2012_8.pdf  https://wbchse.nic.in/html/jibananda_das.html  https://thewire.in/the-arts/jibanananda-das-poet-tribute  Understanding Jibanananda’s Different Poetic Sensibility, by Arunima Ray (Jibanananda Section, Parabaas; জীবনানন্দদাশববভাগ--পরবাস)  \"I shall return to this Bengal\" poem summary by Jibanananda (imrksir.blogspot.com) 186 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

UNIT 10: WRITING: REFERENCE TO THE CONTEXT FROM THE POEM, REPORT WRITING: OFFICIAL REPORTS STRUCTURE 10.0 Learning Objective 10.1 Introduction 10.2 Poetry 10.3 Elements of Poetry 10.3.1 Mood 10.3.2 Imagery 10.3.3 Symbolism 10.4 Analysis 10.5 Summary 10.6 Keywords 10.7 Learning Activity 10.8 Unit End Questions 10.9 References 10.0 LEARNING OBJECTIVE After completing this unit, you will be able to:  Analyze the text as literary form of English Literature.  Appreciate the text from reader’s perspective.  Describe India through association of ideas in the texts and the external contexts.  Comprehend poetry and its literary elements. 10.1 INTRODUCTION The last flickering of New Apocalypse poetry—the flamboyant, surreal, and rhetorical style favoured by Dylan Thomas, George Barker, David Gascoyne, and Vernon Watkins—died away soon after World War II. In its place emerged what came to be known with characteristic understatement as The Movement. Poets such as D.J. Enright, Donald Davie, 187 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

John Wain, Roy Fuller, Robert Conquest, and Elizabeth Jennings produced urbane, formally disciplined verse in an antiromantic vein characterized by irony, understatement, and a sardonic refusal to strike attitudes or make grand claims for the poet’s role. The preeminent practitioner of this style was Philip Larkin, who had earlier displayed some of its qualities in two novels: Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947). In Larkin’s poetry (The Less Deceived [1955], The Whitsun Weddings [1964], High Windows [1974]), a melancholy sense of life’s limitations throbs through lines of elegiac elegance. Suffused with acute awareness of mortality and transience, Larkin’s poetry is also finely responsive to natural beauty, vistas of which open up even in poems darkened by fear of death or sombre preoccupation with human solitude. John Betjeman, poet laureate from 1972 to 1984, shared both Larkin’s intense consciousness of mortality and his gracefully versified nostalgia for 19th- and early 20th- century life. In contrast to the rueful traditionalism of their work is the poetry of Ted Hughes, who succeeded Betjeman as poet laureate (1984–98). In extraordinarily vigorous verse, beginning with his first collection, The Hawk in the Rain (1957), Hughes captured the ferocity, vitality, and splendour of the natural world. In works such as Crow (1970), he added a mythic dimension to his fascination with savagery (a fascination also apparent in the poetry Thom Gunn produced through the late 1950s and ’60s). Much of Hughes’s poetry is rooted in his experiences as a farmer in Yorkshire and Devon (as in his collection Moortown [1979]). It also shows a deep receptivity to the way the contemporary world is underlain by strata of history. This realization, along with strong regional roots, is something Hughes had in common with a number of poets writing in the second half of the 20th century. The work of Geoffrey Hill (especially King Log [1968], Mercian Hymns [1971], Tenebrae [1978], and The Triumph of Love [1998]) treats Britain as a palimpsest whose superimposed layers of history are uncovered in poems, which are sometimes written in prose. Basil Bunting’s Brigg Flatts (1966) celebrates his native North Umbria. The dour poems of R.S. Thomas commemorate a harsh rural Wales of remote hill farms where gnarled, inbred celibates scratch a subsistence from the thin soil. Britain’s industrial regions received attention in poetry too. In collections such as Terry Street (1969), Douglas Dunn wrote of working-class life in north-eastern England. Tony Harrison, the most arresting English poet to find his voice in the later decades of the 20th century (The Loiners [1970], From the School of Eloquence and Other Poems [1978], Continuous [1981]), came, as he stresses, from a working-class community in industrial Yorkshire. Harrison’s social and cultural journey away from that world by means of a grammar school education and a degree in classics provoked responses in him that his poetry conveys with imaginative vehemence and caustic wit: anger at the deprivations and humiliations endured by the working class; guilt over the way his talent had lifted him away from these. Trenchantly combining colloquial ruggedness with classic form, Harrison’s poetry—sometimes innovatively written to accompany television films—kept up a fiercely original and socially 188 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

concerned commentary on such themes as inner-city dereliction (V [1985]), the horrors of warfare (The Gaze of the Gorgon [1992] and The Shadow of Hiroshima [1995]), and the evils of censorship (The Blasphemers’ Banquet [1989], a verse film partly written in reaction to the fatwa on Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses). Also from Yorkshire was Blake Morrison, whose finest work, “The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper” (1987), was composed in taut, macabre stanzas thickened with dialect. Morrison’s work also displayed a growing development in late 20th-century British poetry: the writing of narrative verse. Although there had been earlier instances of this verse after 1945 (Betjeman’s blank-verse autobiography Summoned by Bells [1960] proved the most popular), it was in the 1980s and ’90s that the form was given renewed prominence by poets such as the Kipling-influenced James Fenton. An especially ambitious exercise in the narrative genre was Craig Raine’s History: The Home Movie (1994), a huge semi fictionalized saga, written in three-line stanzas, chronicling several generations of his and his wife’s families. Before this, three books of dazzling virtuosity (The Onion, Memory [1978], A Martian Sends a Postcard Home [1979], and Rich [1984]) established Raine as the founder and most inventive exemplar of what came to be called the Martian school of poetry. The defining characteristic of this school was a poetry rife with startling images, unexpected but audaciously apt similes, and rapid, imaginative tricks of transformation that set the reader looking at the world afresh. 10.2 POETRY The history of English poetry stretches from the middle of the 7th century to the present day. Over this period, English poets have written some of the most enduring poems in European culture, and the language and its poetry have spread around the globe. Consequently, the term English poetry is unavoidably ambiguous. It can mean poetry written in England, or poetry written in the English language. The oldest poetry written in the area currently known as England was composed in Old English, a precursor to the English language that is not something a typical modern English- speaker could be expected to be able to read. In addition, there was a tradition of English poets writing also in Latin and classical Greek. Today's multicultural English society is likely to produce some interesting poetry written in a wide range of other languages, although such poetries are proving slow to emerge. With the growth of trade and the British Empire, the English language had been widely used outside England. In the twenty-first century, only a small percentage of the world's native English speakers live in England, and there is also a vast population of non-native speakers of English who are capable of writing poetry in the language. A number of major national poetries, including the American, Australian, New Zealand and Canadian poetry have emerged and developed. Since 1922, Irish poetry has also been increasingly viewed as a separate area of study. 189 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

The Earliest English Poetry The earliest known English poem is a hymn on the creation; Bede attributes this to Cadman (fl. 658–680), who was, according to legend, an illiterate herdsman who produced extemporaneous poetry at a monastery at Whitby. This is generally taken as marking the beginning of Anglo-Saxon poetry. Much of the poetry of the period is difficult to date, or even to arrange chronologically; for example, estimates for the date of the great epic Beowulf range from AD 608 right through to AD 1000, and there has never been anything even approaching a consensus. It is possible to identify certain key moments, however. The Dream of the Rood was written before circa AD 700, when excerpts were carved in runes on the Ruthwell Cross. The works signed by the poet Cynewulf, namely Christ II, Elene, The Fates of the Apostles, and Juliana, have been assigned with reasonable certainty to the eighth century. Some poems on historical events, such as The Battle of Brunanburh (937) and the Battle of Maldon (991), appear to have been composed shortly after the events in question, and can be dated reasonably precisely in consequence. By and large, however, Anglo-Saxon poetry is categorised by the manuscripts in which it survives, rather than its date of composition. The most important manuscripts are the four great poetical codices of the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, known as the Caedmon manuscript, the Vercelli Book, the Exeter Book, and the Beowulf manuscript. While the poetry that has survived is limited in volume, it is wide in breadth. Beowulf is the only heroic epic to have survived in its entirety, but fragments of others such as Waldere and the Finnsburg Fragment show that it was not unique in its time. Other genres include much religious verse, from devotional works to biblical paraphrase; elegies such as The Wanderer, The Seafarer, and The Ruin (often taken to be a description of the ruins of Bath); and numerous proverbs, riddles, and charms. With one notable exception (the aptly-named Rhyming Poem), Anglo-Saxon poetry is written in a form of alliterative verse. The Anglo-Norman period and the Later Middle Ages With the Norman conquest of England, beginning in 1066, the Anglo-Saxon language immediately lost its status; the new aristocracy spoke French, and this became the standard language of courts, parliament, and polite society. As the invaders integrated, their language and that of the natives mingled: the French dialect of the upper classes became Anglo- Norman, and Anglo-Saxon underwent a gradual transition into Middle English. While Anglo-Norman was thus preferred for high culture, English literature by no means died out, and a number of important works illustrate the development of the language. Around the turn of the thirteenth century, Layamon wrote his Brut, based on Wace's twelfth century Anglo-Norman epic of the same name; Layamon's language is recognisably Middle English, 190 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

though his prosody shows a strong Anglo-Saxon influence remaining. Other transitional works were preserved as popular entertainment, including a variety of romances and lyrics. With time, the English language regained prestige, and in 1362 it replaced French and Latin in Parliament and courts of law. It was with the fourteenth century that major works of English literature began once again to appear; these include the so-called Pearl Poet's Pearl, Patience, Cleanness, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Langland's political and religious allegory Piers Plowman; Gower's Confessio Amantis; and, of course, the works of Chaucer, the most highly regarded English poet of the middle ages, who was seen by his contemporaries as a successor to the great tradition of Virgil and Dante. The reputation of Chaucer's successors in the 15th century has suffered in comparison with him, though Lydgate and Skelton are widely studied. However, the century really belongs to a group of remarkable Scottish writers. The rise of Scottish poetry began with the writing of The Kingis Quair by James I of Scotland. The main poets of this Scottish group were Robert Henryson, William Dunbar and Gavin Douglas. Henryson and Douglas introduced a note of almost savage satire, which may have owed something to the Gaelic bards, while Douglas' version of Virgil's Aeneid is one of the early monuments of Renaissance literary humanism in English. The Renaissance in England The Renaissance was slow in coming to England, with the generally accepted start date being around 1509. It is also generally accepted that the English Renaissance extended until the Restoration in 1660. However, a number of factors had prepared the way for the introduction of the new learning long before this start date. A number of medieval poets had, as already noted, shown an interest in the ideas of Aristotle and the writings of European Renaissance precursors such as Dante. The introduction of movable-block printing by Caxton in 1474 provided the means for the more rapid dissemination of new or recently rediscovered writers and thinkers. Caxton also printed the works of Chaucer and Gower and these books helped establish the idea of a native poetic tradition that was linked to its European counterparts. In addition, the writings of English humanists like Thomas More and Thomas Elyot helped bring the ideas and attitudes associated with the new learning to an English audience. Three other factors in the establishment of the English Renaissance were the Reformation, Counter Reformation, and the opening of the era of English naval power and overseas exploration and expansion. The establishment of the Church of England in 1535 accelerated the process of questioning the Catholic world-view that had previously dominated intellectual and artistic life. At the same time, long-distance sea voyages helped provide the stimulus and information that underpinned a new understanding of the nature of the universe which resulted in the theories of Nicolas Copernicus and Johannes Kepler. 191 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Early Renaissance Poetry With a small number of exceptions, the early years of the 16th century are not particularly notable. The Douglas Aeneid was completed in 1513 and John Skelton wrote poems that were transitional between the late Medieval and Renaissance styles. The new king, Henry VIII, was something of a poet himself. The most significant English poet of this period was Thomas Wyatt, who was among the first poets to write sonnets in English. The Elizabethans The Elizabethan period in poetry is characterised by a number of frequently overlapping developments. The introduction and adaptation of themes, models and verse forms from other European traditions and classical literature, the Elizabethan song tradition, the emergence of a courtly poetry often centred around the figure of the monarch and the growth of a verse-based drama are among the most important of these developments. Elizabethan Song A wide range of Elizabethan poets wrote songs, including Nicholas Grimald, Thomas Nashe and Robert Southwell. There are also a large number of extant anonymous songs from the period. Perhaps the greatest of all the songwriters was Thomas Campion. Campion is also notable because of his experiments with metres based on counting syllables rather than stresses. These quantitative metres were based on classical models and should be viewed as part of the wider Renaissance revival of Greek and Roman artistic methods. The songs were generally printed either in miscellanies or anthologies such as Richard Tottel's 1557 Songs and Sonnets or in songbooks that included printed music to enable performance. These performances formed an integral part of both public and private entertainment. By the end of the 16th century, a new generation of composers, including John Dowland, William Byrd, Orlando Gibbons, Thomas Weelkes and Thomas Morley were helping to bring the art of Elizabethan song to an extremely high musical level. Courtly Poetry With the consolidation of Elizabeth's power, a genuine court sympathetic to poetry and the arts in general emerged. This encouraged the emergence of a poetry aimed at, and often set in, an idealised version of the courtly world. Among the best-known examples of this are Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, which is effectively an extended hymn of praise to the queen, and Philip Sydney's Arcadia. This courtly trend can also be seen in Spenser's Shepheardes Calendar. This poem marks the introduction into an English context of the classical pastoral, a mode of poetry that assumes an aristocratic audience with a certain kind of attitude to the land and peasants. The explorations of love found in the sonnets of William Shakespeare and the poetry of Walter Raleigh and others also implies a courtly audience.` Elizabethan Verse Drama 192 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Elizabethan verse drama is widely considered to be one of the major achievements of literature in English, and its most famous exponent, William Shakespeare, is revered as the greatest poet in the language. This drama, which served both as courtly masque and popular entertainment, deals with all the major themes of contemporary literature and life. There are plays on European, classical, and religious themes reflecting the importance of humanism and the Reformation. There are also a number of plays dealing with English history that may be read as part of an effort to strengthen the British national myth and as artistic underpinnings for Elizabeth's resistance to the Spanish and other foreign threats. A number of the comic works for the stage also use bucolic themes connected with the pastoral genre. In addition to Shakespeare, other notable dramatists of the period include Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker and Ben Jonson. Classicism Gavin Douglas' Aeneid, Thomas Campion's metrical experiments, and Spenser's Shepheardes Calendar and plays like Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra are all examples of the influence of classicism on Elizabethan poetry. It remained common for poets of the period to write on themes from classical mythology; Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis and the Christopher Marlowe/ George Chapman Hero and Leander are examples of this kind of work. Translations of classical poetry also became more widespread, with the versions of Ovid's Metamorphoses by Arthur Golding (1565–7) and George Sandys (1626), and Chapman's translations of Homer's Iliad (1611) and Odyssey (c.1615), among the outstanding examples. Jacobean and Caroline Poetry English Renaissance poetry after the Elizabethan poetry can be seen as belonging to one of three strains: the Metaphysical poets, the Cavalier poets and the school of Spenser. However, the boundaries between these three groups are not always clear and an individual poet could write in more than one manner. The Metaphysical Poets The early 17th century saw the emergence of this group of poets who wrote in a witty, complicated style. The most famous of the Metaphysical is probably John Donne. Others include George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Andrew Marvell and Richard Crashaw. John Milton in his Comus falls into this group. The Metaphysical poets went out of favour in the 18th century but began to be read again in the Victorian era. Donne's reputation was finally fully restored by the approbation of T. S. Eliot in the early 20th century. The Cavalier Poets The Cavalier poets wrote in a lighter, more elegant and artificial style than the Metaphysical poets. Leading members of the group include Ben Jonson, Richard Lovelace, Robert Herrick, 193 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Edmund Waller, Thomas Carew and John Denham. The Cavalier poets can be seen as the forerunners of the major poets of the Augustan era, who admired them greatly. The School of Spenser The early 17th century also saw a group of poets who were interested in following Spenser's example in the area of long mythic poems. These include Michael Drayton, William Browne and the brothers Giles and Phineas Fletcher. Although these poets wrote against the literary fashion of their day and have since been much neglected, their tradition led directly to John Milton's great mythic long poem, Paradise Lost. The Restoration and 18th Century It is perhaps ironic that Paradise Lost, a story of fallen pride, was the first major poem to appear in England after the Restoration. The court of Charles II had, in its years in France, learned a worldliness and sophistication that marked it as distinctively different from the monarchies that preceded the Republic. Even if Charles had wanted to reassert the divine right of kingship, the Protestantism and taste for power of the intervening years would have rendered it impossible. Satire It is hardly surprising that the world of fashion and scepticism that emerged encouraged the art of satire. All the major poets of the period, Samuel Butler, John Dryden, Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson, and the Irish poet Jonathan Swift, wrote satirical verse. What is perhaps more surprising is that their satire was often written in defence of public order and the established church and government. However, writers such as Pope used their gift for satire to create scathing works responding to their detractors or to criticise what they saw as social atrocities perpetrated by the government. Pope's \"The Dunciad\" is a satirical slaying of two of his literary adversaries (Lewis Theobald, and Colley Cibber in a later version), expressing the view that British society was falling apart morally, culturally, and intellectually. 18th Century Classicism The 18th century is sometimes called the Augustan age, and contemporary admiration for the classical world extended to the poetry of the time. Not only did the poets aim for a polished high style in emulation of the Roman ideal, they also translated and imitated Greek and Latin verse. Dryden translated all the known works of Virgil, and Pope produced versions of the two Homeric epics. Horace and Juvenal were also widely translated and imitated, Horace most famously by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester and Juvenal by Samuel Johnson's Vanity of Human Wishes.479 Women Poets in the 18th Century During the period of the restoration, two women poets of note emerged. These were Katherine Phillips and Aphra Behn. In addition to these two, a number of other women had plays performed on the London stage. Nevertheless, women poets were still relatively scarce 194 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

and only two of them published collections during the first decade of the new century. By the 1790s, that number had grown to over thirty. It is evident that women poets had become more acceptable, and this change is generally dated to the 1730s. Among the most successful of these women were Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, Elizabeth Thomas, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, Mary Leapor, Susanna Blamire and Hannah More. The Late 18th Century Towards the end of the 18th century, poetry began to move away from the strict Augustan ideals and a new emphasis on sentiment and the feelings of the poet. This trend can perhaps be most clearly seen in the handling of nature, with a move away from poems about formal gardens and landscapes by urban poets and towards poems about nature as lived in. The leading exponents of this new trend include Thomas Gray, William Cowper, George Crabbe, Christopher Smart and Robert Burns as well as the Irish poet Oliver Goldsmith. These poets can be seen as paving the way for the Romantic movement. The Romantic Movement The last quarter of the 18th century was a time of social and political turbulence, with revolutions in the United States, France, Ireland and elsewhere. In Great Britain, movement for social change and a more inclusive sharing of power was also growing. This was the backdrop against which the Romantic movement in English poetry emerged. The main poets of this movement were William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Keats. The birth of English Romanticism is often dated to the publication in 1798 of Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads. However, Blake had been publishing since the early 1780s. However, much of the focus on Blake only came about during the last century when Northrap Frye discussed his work in his book \"The Anatomy of Criticism.\" In poetry, the Romantic movement emphasised the creative expression of the individual and the need to find and formulate new forms of expression. The Romantics, with the partial exception of Byron, rejected the poetic ideals of the eighteenth century, and each of them returned to Milton for inspiration, though each drew something different from Milton. They also put a good deal of stress on their own originality. To the Romantics, the moment of creation was the most important in poetic expression and could not be repeated once it passed. Because of this new emphasis, poems that were not complete were nonetheless included in a poet's body of work (such as Coleridge's \"Kubla Khan\" and \"Christabel\"). Additionally, the Romantic movement marked a shift the use of language. Attempting to express the \"language of the common man\", Wordsworth and his fellow Romantic poets focused on employing poetic language for a wider audience, countering the mimetic, tightly constrained Neo-Classic poems (although it's important to note that the poet wrote first and foremost for his own creative, expression). In Shelley's \"Defense of Poetry\", he contends that 195 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

poets are the \"creators of language”, and that the poet's job is to refresh language for their society. The Romantics were not the only poets of note at this time. In the work of John Clare, the late Augustan voice is blended with a peasant's first-hand knowledge to produce arguably some of the finest nature poetry in the English language. Another contemporary poet who does not fit into the Romantic group was Walter Savage Landor. Landor was a classicist whose poetry forms a link between the Augustans and Robert Browning, who much admired it. Victorian Poetry The Victorian era was a period of great political, social and economic change. The Empire recovered from the loss of the American colonies and entered a period of rapid expansion. This expansion, combined with increasing industrialisation and mechanisation, led to a prolonged period of economic growth. The Reform Act 1832 was the beginning of a process that would eventually lead to universal suffrage. High Victorian Poetry The major High Victorian poets were Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Matthew Arnold and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Tennyson was, to some degree, the Spenser of the new age and his Idylls of the Kings can be read as a Victorian version of The Faerie Queen, that is as a poem that sets out to provide a mythic foundation to the idea of empire. The Browning’s spent much of their time out of England and explored European models and matter in much of their poetry. Robert Browning's great innovation was the dramatic monologue, which he used to its full extent in his long novel in verse, The Ring and the Book. Elizabeth Barrett Browning is perhaps best remembered for Sonnets from the Portuguese, but her long poem Aurora Leigh is one of the classics of 19th century feminist literature. Matthew Arnold was much influenced by Wordsworth, though his poem Dover Beach is often considered a precursor of the modernist revolution. Hopkins wrote in relative obscurity and his work was not published until after his death. His unusual style (involving what he called \"sprung rhythm\" and heavy reliance on rhyme and alliteration) had a considerable influence on many of the poets of the 1940s. Pre-Raphaelites, Arts and Crafts, Aestheticism, and the \"Yellow\" 1890s The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a mid-19th century arts movement dedicated to the reform of what they considered the sloppy Mannerist painting of the day. Although primarily concerned with the visual arts, two members, the brother and sister Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti, were also poets of some ability. Their poetry shares many of the concerns of the painters; an interest in Medieval models, an almost obsessive attention to visual detail and an occasional tendency to lapse into whimsy. 196 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Dante Rossetti worked with, and had some influence on, the leading Arts and Crafts painter and poet William Morris. Morris shared the Pre-Raphaelite interest in the poetry of the European Middle Ages, to the point of producing some illuminated manuscript volumes of his work. Towards the end of the century, English poets began to take an interest in French symbolism and Victorian poetry entered a decadent fin-de-siecle phase. Two groups of poets emerged, the Yellow Book poets who adhered to the tenets of Aestheticism, including Algernon Charles Swinburne, Oscar Wilde and Arthur Symons and the Rhymer's Club group that included Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson and W. B. Yeats. The 20th century The First Three Decades The Victorian era continued into the early years of the 20th century and two figures emerged as the leading representative of the poetry of the old era to act as a bridge into the new. These were Yeats and Thomas Hardy. Yeats, although not a modernist, was to learn a lot from the new poetic movements that sprang up around him and adapted his writing to the new circumstances. Hardy was, in terms of technique at least, a more traditional figure and was to be a reference point for various anti-modernist reactions, especially from the 1950s onwards. The Georgian Poets The Georgian poets were the first major grouping of the post-Victorian era. Their work appeared in a series of five anthologies called Georgian Poetry which were published by Harold Monro and edited by Edward Marsh. The poets featured included Edmund Blunden, Rupert Brooke, Robert Graves, D. H. Lawrence, Walter de la Mare and Siegfried Sassoon. Their poetry represented something of a reaction to the decadence of the 1890s and tended towards the sentimental. Brooke and Sassoon were to go on to win reputations as war poets and Lawrence quickly distanced himself from the group and was associated with the modernist movement. World War I As already noted, the Georgian poets Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon are now mostly remembered for their war poetry. Other notable poets who wrote about the war include Isaac Rosenberg, Edward Thomas, Wilfred Owen, May Cannan and, from the home front, Hardy and Rudyard Kipling. Although many of these poets wrote socially-aware criticism of the war, most remained technically conservative and traditionalist. Modernism The early decades of the 20th century saw the United States begin to overtake the United Kingdom as the major economic power. In the world of poetry, this period also saw American writers at the forefront of avant-garde practices. Among the foremost of these poets 197 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

were T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, both of whom spent part, and in Eliot's case a considerable part, of their writing lives in England. Pound's involvement with the Imagists marked the beginning of a revolution in the way poetry was written. English poets involved with this group included D. H. Lawrence, Richard Aldington, T. E. Hulme, F. S. Flint, E. E. Cummings, Ford Madox Ford, Allen Upward and John Cournos. Eliot, particularly after the publication of The Waste Land, became a major figure and influence on other English poets. In addition to these poets, other English modernists began to emerge. These included the London-Welsh poet and painter David Jones, whose first book, In Parenthesis, was one of the very few experimental poems to come out of World War I, the Scot Hugh MacDiarmid, Mina Loy and Basil Bunting. The Thirties The poets who began to emerge in the 1930s had two things in common; they had all been born too late to have any real experience of the pre-World War I world and they grew up in a period of social, economic and political turmoil. Perhaps as a consequence of these facts, themes of community, social (in)justice and war seem to dominate the poetry of the decade. The New Country Poets The poetic landscape of the decade was dominated by four poets; W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day-Lewis and Louis MacNeice, although the last of these belongs at least as much to the history of Irish poetry. These poets were all, in their early days at least, politically active on the Left. Although they admired Eliot, they also represented a move away from the technical innovations of their modernist predecessors. A number of other, less enduring, poets also worked in the same vein. One of these was Michael Roberts, whose New Country anthology both introduced the group to a wider audience and gave them their name. Surrealism and Others The 1930s also saw the emergence of a home-grown English surrealist poetry whose main exponents were David Gascoyne, Hugh Sykes Davies, George Barker, and Philip O'Connor. These poets turned to French models rather than either the New Country poets or English- language modernism, and their work was to prove of importance to later English experimental poets as it broadened the scope of the English avant-garde tradition. John Betjeman and Stevie Smith, who were two of the most significant poets of this period, stood outside all schools and groups. Betjeman was a quietly ironic poet of Middle England with a fine command of a wide range of verse techniques. Smith was an entirely unclassifiable one-off voice. The Forties The War Poets 198 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

The 1940s opened with the United Kingdom at war and a new generation of war poets emerged in response. These included Keith Douglas, Alun Lewis, Henry Reed and F. T. Prince. As with the poets of the First World War, the work of these writers can be seen as something of an interlude in the history of 20th century poetry. Technically, many of these war poets owed something to the 1930s poets, but their work grew out of the particular circumstances in which they found themselves living and fighting. The New Romantics The main movement in post-war 1940s poetry was the New Romantic group that included Dylan Thomas, George Barker, W. S. Graham, Kathleen Raine, Henry Treece and J. F. Hendry. These writers saw themselves as in revolt against the classicism of the New Country poets. They turned to such models as Gerard Manley Hopkins, Arthur Rimbaud and Hart Crane and the word play of James Joyce. Thomas, in particular, helped Anglo-Welsh poetry to emerge as a recognisable force. Other 1940s Poets Other significant poets to emerge in the 1940s include Lawrence Durrell, Bernard Spencer, Roy Fuller, Norman Nicholson, Vernon Watkins, R. S. Thomas and Norman McCaig. These last four poets represent a trend towards regionalism and poets writing about their native areas: Watkins and Thomas in Wales, Nicholson in Cumberland and MacCaig in Scotland. The Fifties The 1950s were dominated by three groups of poets, The Movement, The Group and a number of poets that gathered around the label Extremist Art. The Movement The Movement poets as a group came to public notice in Robert Conquest's 1955 anthology New Lines. The core of the group consisted of Philip Larkin, Elizabeth Jennings, D. J. Enright, Kingsley Amis, Thom Gunn and Donald Davie. They were identified with a hostility to modernism and internationalism and looked to Hardy as a model. However, both Davie and Gunn later moved away from this position. The Group As befits their name, the Group were much more formally a group of poets, meeting for weekly discussions under the chairmanship of Philip Hobsbaum and Edward Lucie-Smith. Other Group poets included Martin Bell, Peter Porter, Peter Redgrove, George MacBeth and David Wevill. Hobsbaum spent some time teaching in Belfast, where he was a formative influence on the emerging Northern Ireland poets including Seamus Heaney. The Extremist Art Poets The term Extremist Art was first used by the poet A. Alvarez to describe the work of the American poet Sylvia Plath. Other poets associated with this group included Plath's one-time 199 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

husband Ted Hughes, Francis Berry and Jon Silkin. These poets are sometimes compared with the Expressionist German school. The Modernist Tradition A number of young poets working in what might be termed a modernist vein also started publishing during this decade. These included Charles Tomlinson, Gael Turnbull, Roy Fisher and Bob Cobbing. These poets can now be seen as forerunners of some of the major developments during the following two decades. 10.3 ELEMENTS OF POETRY 1. Anaphora Anaphora describes a poem that repeats the same phrase at the beginning of each line. Sometimes the anaphora is a central element of the poem’s construction; other times, poets only use anaphora in one or two stanzas, not the whole piece. Consider “The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee” by N. Scott Momaday. I am a feather on the bright sky I am the blue horse that runs in the plain I am the fish that rolls, shining, in the water I am the shadow that follows a child I am the evening light, the lustre of meadows I am an eagle playing with the wind I am a cluster of bright beads I am the farthest star I am the cold of dawn I am the roaring of the rain I am the glitter on the crust of the snow I am the long track of the moon in a lake I am a flame of four colours I am a deer standing away in the dusk I am a field of sumac and the pomme blanche I am an angle of geese in the winter sky I am the hunger of a young wolf I am the whole dream of these things 200 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)