Childhood (Poem Analysis)

 Childhood -  Markus Natten

When did my childhood go?

Was it the day I ceased to be eleven.
Was it the time I realised that Hell and Heaven,
Could not be found in Geography,
And therefore could not be,
Was that the day!
When did my childhood go?
Was it the time I realised that adults were not
All they seemed to be,
They talked of love and preached of love,
But did not act so lovingly,
Was that the day!
When did my childhood go?
Was it when I found my mind was really mine,
To use whichever way I choose,
Producing thoughts that were not those of other people
But my own and mine alone
Was that the day!
Where did my childhood go?
It went to some forgotten place,
That is hidden in an infant’s face,
That’s all I know.

This poem encapsulates the reality- that is the unveiling of the shade the childhood inundates oneself into.

This reality is felt at the onset of mental maturity, as early as the age of 11, when innocence starts to erode.

Childhood days are, for most of us; nothing less than utopia (at least when we compare them with the current situation!). You may be aware of your rights as a citizen of this country but do you know that during childhood, children have the fundamental right to enjoy? 

Yes. This role in the "second stage" played by any human in the drama of life is a period for trying new things, failing and rising up with a smile without knowing that you have failed; and experiencing bliss under the protective fear of parents or guardian.

Adults who have made a mess out of their lives will tell you that childhood is a golden age in one's life. 

What they need to know is that, there's a "second childhood" waiting for them near the end of their lives. 

Here, in his poem, Marcus Natten explores when he lost his childhood. 

This poem however does not tell us the good experiences in childhood nor it is about childhood. 

So the name appears to be a misnomer.

In short, it is a poem packed with remorse and refrain.

The Walking Anti-virus

With the enemy so small, yet strong; 

the Men and Women in khaki and white, 

I see them working all night, 

in a 24-hour fight,

 to ensure no virus is at the site.

We hope you’ll be safe and nothing will go wrong, 

in this deadly war along. 

You keep this virus at bay,

What other praises can I say?

 I salute you people - the Anti-Corona Squad, 

You are nothing less than a living God!

With the spreading of the virus, insane 

I know you will break the chain, 

So that we end this hide-and-seek game.

Time for Nature (Poem)

Garbage garbage everywhere,

Not a spot clean.

Is this habit of pollution

Within our gene?

 

“Cleanliness is Godliness”,

Where has that jargon gone?

I’ve heard it since provenance;

Since pollution was born.

 

We should blame ourselves,

It is our shame

As we treat our environment insane.

 

You now know cleanliness wins,

When we throw our trash in the bins.

 

Our homes 🏠are beautiful when it’s clean,

So why don’t we work as a team👪?

To make the surroundings gleam✨.

 

It’s up to you, it’s your choice,

So come on, change your poise

And “keep your surroundings clean”

Teach this virtue to our teens.👦👧

Critical Analysis of the Poem - Father to Son

Father to Son

- A Poem by Elizabeth Jennings

I do not understand this child
Though we have lived together now
In the same house for years. I know
Nothing of him, so try to build
Up a relationship from how
He was when small. Yet have I killed
The seed I spent or sown it where
The land is his and none of mine?
We speak like strangers, there's no sign
Of understanding in the air.
This child is built to my design
Yet what he loves I cannot share.
Silence surrounds us. I would have
Him prodigal, returning to
His father's house, the home he knew,
Rather than see him make and move
His world. I would forgive him too,
Shaping from sorrow a new love.
Father and son, we both must live
On the same globe and the same land.
He speaks: I cannot understand
Myself, why anger grows from grief.
We each put out an empty hand,
Longing for something to forgive.

A father can only grow his son, growing up is in the child's hand.

Jist:

Surfacing a troubled relationship with a concerned father's lament over his son's behaviour, the poem's crux is tactile to every father.

This poem evokes similar emotions in every man in the father's shoes.

Fixed with universality in thought, the poem enjoys solitude in the literature concerning the relationship between two grown-up men.

It is highly capable of malleability and the following account serves to do the same

Introduction:

The lines are written after extensive emotional turmoil inside the father's mind.

This is apparent by the first line in which he says, he does not 'understand this'.

By calling his son, a 'child', his desire to keep him within his arms and reach is evident.

Despite a togetherness of several years, their bond seems to break as the father knows almost nothing of his son. Here we do not get whether the son knows anything about his father.

This one-way approach,, in sense, supplements the poem’s charm and is intriguing in another sense.

The father feels he has killed the relationship with his son. Anyways, he tries of building it again.

The father questions his rightful authority over his son's ''land' (=his place).

They speak like strangers and there is nothing sort of any a personal touch to their communication.

The generation cap is perhaps felt stronger over here, where the father cannot share what his son loves. This gap is built over the innocent claim by the father that his son is built to 'his design'.

Miscellaneous Thoughts:

It seems somewhat ironic that while growing up, everything matures, except relationships.

The father wants his son back. The erstwhile prodigal boy returning to his 'father's home that he knew'

The tone of poetic deliverance, suggests that the father's fear is that his son is kind of lost in his 'new home'(= the newly found liberty and privacy)

He needs his son back- badly.

He says his anger stems from grief yet he chooses not to say anything further to justify it.

Ambrosia - A Poem on Rain

Ambrosia 

- P.R. Vignesh 

  

You fall down sans fear, 

Pleasuring the Earth’s biosphere. 

 

You kiss your love – the petrichor, 

You also bring her out – the girl-next-door. 😉

 

You drop down as H2O, 💧

or somedays as snow. ❆

 

Into the river, I see you flow. 

Wah! What grace you show! 👣

 

Sometimes you curse and give us pain; 

Those times, I see you as acid rain. 😑

 

No, I don’t blame you; it’s our shame, 

For we were the ones insane. 😕

 

So Rain, please don’t go away, 

Little Lilly, 👧 if not Johnny,👦 wants to play! 

Some Suggestions for the Draft Vision (eCourts Project)

....submitted to MyGov portal few months back...(the link to the Citizen Participation in Nation Building (in MyGov website) is in the 'useful links' section..😊)

Few Suggestions for the Draft Vision Document (eCourts Project (Ph III))

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        P.R.Vignesh

Given below are my humble suggestions: 

1. Inclusion of Final year LL.B (Law students) into the eCourt services, without them necessarily having to be a litigant in any case. 

 Petitioners having enough money and a well-informed mind can fight their cases in courts without much friction. But those who would find it difficult will be the illiterate and people falling in the poor strata of the society.

 An idea to mitigate this issue is to include our students.

 Final year law students inspired by the concept of “Antyodaya” given by our Hon. PM Narendra Modi (i.e., to serve the last section of the society) can aid in helping the most vulnerable sections of the society like abandoned senior citizens in old age homes.

What they can do? 

- Set up laptops for one-to-one interaction of the petitioner/plaintiff with the judge

- Fill up the required information in initial stages of filing a case,

- Upload the necessary documents. - Keep track of the hearing, etc.

 Other added benefits: 

- Feedback given by students at every step in the process can help in allaying the flaws encountered, 

- Gives the students a hands-on-experience into the new digital era of Indian Judiciary.

 2. In civil/consumer cases, when a petitioner files a complaint in the ePortal, he/she may

- get a list of all similar legal precedents from the national repository (without disclosing the names and information of the parties involved), 

-recorded court proceedings (if possible),

- transcript of the judgement, number of days taken, etc. 

- Armed with this knowledge, an honest seeker of justice can decide on his/her future course in fighting the case.

Review - Poem - La Belle Dame Sans Merci

La Belle Dame sans Merci 

                                                    --- John Keats

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

  Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing!

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel’s granary is full,
And the harvest’s done.

I see a lily on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever-dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.

I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful, a fairy's child;
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.

I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan.

I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery's song.

She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna-dew,
And sure in language strange she said—
'I love thee true'.

She took me to her Elfin grot,
And there she wept and sighed full sore,
And there I shut her wild, wild eyes
With kisses four.

And there she lullèd me asleep,
And there I dreamed—Ah! woe betide!—
The latest dream I ever dreamt

    On the cold hill side.

I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried—'La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!'

I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gapèd wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill's side.

And this is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.

My Critical Analysis:

Introduction:

Captivating!

This is how I'd best describe this sacred piece of work. 

 It's aura being strange yet mesmerizing, its theme in partnership with Gothic literature revealing the strife between temptation and duty, love and love failure, ecstacy and its aftermath, are echoed in the poets' own feverish condition.

Keats, who has written this paean; borrows a question and response form to structure the poem's narrative.

This account of mine scrutinizes the ballad and tries to surface it's microscopic intricacies in the form of poetic spotlights, while intending to shove its literal meaning aside for the purpose of expounding the metaphorical rhetoric contained it.

The Crux:

Do you believe in love at first sight ? If not, perhaps death at first betrayal?! 

Whatever side your psyche flanks to, there is this universal abstraction called love that inundates us all.

If not in your life, then by listening to offers experiences. it does so.

In the poem, an unknown person, whose anonymity is guarded till the end of the poem, asks a series of questions to a "Knight -at arms".

The purpose of these queries falls behind the knight's disposition. The Knight does not behave as a man should - in triumph and glory, but is gloomy. This is further cemented by the use of suggested vocabulary. 

What is 'ail'{ing} him forms the crux of the stranger's question.

The Knight is loitering by himself at the edge of the lake and he is pale. 

Apparently the knight doesn’t answer immediately so he has to repeat the question.

This time we get two more adjectives to describe the night - 

he is 'haggard' and 'woe-begone'. 

The speaker continues to address this depressed being. 

He makes use of  floral imagery to carry on. He asks about the 'lily' on the Knights brow. 

The scene is set:

Even nature cooperates. '...No birds sing' suggest that this is autumn or even early winter.

The Knights response makes up the rest of the poem.

The knight says he met a beautiful 'fairy' lady in the field. 

He starts hanging around with her making flower garlands for her, letting her ride his horse and the like.

She invites him to her Grotto. There, she 'lulls' him asleep.

So far the landscape cooperated but that too suddenly changes from idyllic to horrific, has the fairy tale romp turns into imprisonment on a cold hill.

The knight has a nightmare about all the heroic men that the woman had previously seduced.

They were experiencing death-in-life. He then wakes up to find himself lonely on a cold hillside.

The lady's abandonment of the knight is emphasized as an important theme, through repetition of the word 'alone '

When you are in love, everything seems to go in your way-

  

the Birds sing for you guys,

the sun rises up for you, and 

the whole of nature seems to be there for you.

But when things go awful, you feel lonely. 

You only hear squeaks when the birds sing.

Critical Analysis:

Keats' poetry possess a vibrant senselessness, passionate thinking, sweet and mellifluous music, and an artistic finish.

The word charms are warm and the ballad has a sort of an auto-biographical tone.

The more we consider the night story, the more we uncover parallels with Keats life.

A mind trained to think out of the box might offer a whole new perspective to the ballad.

Consider this :

What is the fairy is not an evil but a misunderstood one? 

Maybe in the fairy world promiscuity is practiced and the feminine gender has to leave her male lover, or perhaps the lady of 'La Belle Dame sans Merci' could be simply read as a mortal woman who broke the heart of the knight.

His retelling of the story however casts her as a supernatural in order to excuse his own weakness

Could the knight himself be a figment of the speakers imagination? 

---- this would completely change the reading of the poem!!

The purpose of education is to train the mind to think. 

While reading the poem it is obvious that every person who does it has a different viewpoint. 

This is the beauty of English literature!

Interpretations and 'wild' perceptions have the ability to change the whole discourse of the poem and the curious leader finds warmth correspondingly.

Justification the Title:

The French language has been generous in lending words to the English.

Here, Keats borrows five French words :

- 'La' --> the French definite article means 'the'

-'Belle'--> the adjective means 'beautiful' (Fe)

 'Dame' --> {as we say(ma)dame -->  means (my)lady. 

- sans Merci' -->is literally 'without mercy'

The use of a French title for an English poem highlights the fact that French is the language of love(and love failure!). They are the themes that constitute the heart of the poem.

'I love thee(true) -- perhaps the tree most powerful words in any language; has universality attached to it. 

Told only at special moments, these words have great evocative powers. 

It can make anyone go crazy!

Given the intensity of raw intimacy, betrayal at such points can really be heart-breaking.

In the movies and literature, women are stereotyped like this.

Feminist critics, have; in this case, criticized the title.

The knight's ornamentation of the lady's 'fragrant zone' suggests that he is celebrating her feminity.

A combination of these two factors, thus; justifies the title.