Samuel Taylor Coleridge was right when he wrote that prose signified ‘words in their best order’, whereas poetry is born when someone is able to arrange ‘the best words in their best order’. Therefore, the burden of responsibility is far greater on a poet than on a novelist, and no one is more aware of this than writers who are able to switch between these roles with enviable ease.
Vikram Seth, of course, is a poet first and everything else — novelist, journalist, musician, economist, etc — later. He started out with a collection of poems, the wonderful Mapping s, which was published in 1982. Then, in 1985, came The Humble Administrator’s Garden ; a year later, his tour de force novel-in-verse The Golden Gate ; and then in 1990, another book of poems, All You Who Sleep Tonight . Although Seth did publish verse for children and poems in translation in the interim, it’s only now, after a gap of over two decades, that a new and bona fide collection of his as-yet-unpublished poems has come by.
In a way,
But this state of easy familiarity is obtained only once we’ve been thrown out of kilter by the opening and eponymous poem of this book. ‘Summer Requiem’ constitutes a dramatic departure for Seth as a poet — from the clear waters of accessibility towards the more tenebrous wastelands of abstraction.
The opening poem is Eliotesque in its disregard for meaning and its elevation of the image — plus the mood that the images convey — above everything else: ‘The crimson sun suspended on the dark spire/ Can see me wander near the bridge.’ Seth begins the collection’s next poem, ‘A Cryptic Reply’, with the words, ‘Abstractions have their place, the concrete too,’ as if the poet owed an explanation to the reader for all of this.
This, no doubt, is correct. Abstractions do have their place. But it is on the concrete that the poetic moment tends to hinge. Some poets tend to look inwards for that all-capturing detail, while others look outside, towards nature. Seth remains eminently sensitive towards natural imagery of all kinds: he writes of birds, rivers, trees and the sky with the responsiveness of an impressionist painter. I feel one of Seth’s great achievements in this book is his depiction of a sunset in the poem ‘Parrots at Sunset’: ‘Earth rises in the west/ Against the reddened sun.’ Seldom have so few words painted such an immense and memorable picture. The tone here, again, is reminiscent of Eliot, but the mood is indisputably akin to Philip Larkin, our poet laureate of despair.
Seth’s artistic debt to Larkin’s poetry was never a secret. Some of Seth’s early poems, presumably sent to Larkin for a sort of peer review, even elicited a response from the master verse-maker. In a much-publicised letter to the critic and writer Robert Conquest, Larkin harshly wrote of having received ‘another load of crap from this Vikram Seth character... Quite pleasant stuff, but fails to grip.’ Buried beneath this layer of contempt, and maybe even a tinge of envy — after all, what else can a young writer expect from an established literary figure he seeks to replace — is Larkin’s genuine admiration and generous regard for Seth’s talent. ‘Quite pleasant stuff’, coming from the greatest poet of his generation, counts as high praise, and particularly so in the present context, where the original intent was to belittle.
There are a number of motifs in Summer Requiem that were central to most of Larkin’s work: like the passing of time and the auguries of mortality in an indifferent, godless universe. In ‘Evening Across the Sky’, Seth writes: ‘The stars won’t last./ The moon will die,/ Earth, evening, you and I. There are no fixtures in the sky/ Free from the growing past.’ That ‘growing past’ is indeed as good as Larkin’s phrase in his poem ‘Observation’, when he wrote: ‘...the tideline of the incoming past/ is where we walk, and it is air we breathe...’
There is much pleasant stuff in Summer Requiem . But there are certain dry patches, where the book simply, to once again echo Larkin, ‘fails to grip’. The poet’s many emphases on the word ‘dark’ and ‘darkness’, for instance, ring hollow. ‘Bright darkness is my comfort,/ Dark daylight is my friend’ (from ‘Bright Darkness’). And again, in ‘Evening Scene from my Table’, he writes of ‘grand unnerving bats’ flying ‘dark across a darkened sky’. Words like ‘bright’ and ‘dark’ are just words on the page, having no serious poetic import whatsoever and are evocative of precisely nothing. But this much we can forgive our poet, so long as he promises to not keep us waiting another decade or two for his next collection of poems.
Vineet Gill is a journalist with The Sunday Guardian