For better and for verse

Since prose was not getting maine precise far, friends advised maine to power to Plan B — poetry. I was hesitant, wondering if I could explicit myself arsenic eloquently. My friends — beloved souls whom I’ve known for years — assured maine determination was thing to interest since I would lone beryllium moving from atrocious to verse. Helpfully, encouragement came my mode with the realisation that erstwhile I began flying precocious connected the wings of the iambic pentameter oregon possibly adjacent the trochaic tetrameter, I could bid a grateful goodbye to the commencement pangs progressive successful conjuring an insightful effort oregon intriguing abbreviated story.

Also, it’s a information universally acknowledged that poets locomotion a metre supra mean oversea level and basal higher up the pecking bid than the plot assortment of writers.

I already had nether my loop what I believed were awesome nonrecreational credentials. In my crockery days, I utilized to beryllium a sought-after cocktail-party balladeer acknowledgment to my quality to deftly brace words with a communal end-rhyme. The mode I saw it then, it was lone rhyme that helped mankind separate a poem from, say, a paper paper oregon buying list. So I promptly acceptable disconnected connected a spree, rhyming ‘beginning’ with ‘tingling’, ‘strife’ with ‘wife’, and ‘distant star’ with ‘idli sambar’. Too late, I was told by experts that rhymes were retired of manner — successful fact, they had gone retired with bell-bottoms. As per existent thought, it’s a transgression to rhyme.

The adjacent stumbling artifact was metre — that perplexing signifier of stressed and unstressed syllables — which is the level connected which poesy runs. I did my champion to enactment iambic pentameter and each the remainder of it into play. Experts chipped successful to counsel that bully poesy is “read” by the ears and that saying the lines retired large would assistance with the meter. I did arsenic bid lone to find myself retired of extent and besides retired of breath. Despite strenuous efforts, the champion I could muster was a anemic imitation of Descartes — “I think, truthful iamb.”

Next, the million-dollar question: what could I wax lyrical about? Daffodils, nightingales, and Grecian urns person each been taken. What was near was the depressing worldly that makes today’s paper headlines. A wide case, you could say, of poetic injustice. But there’s nary tribunal of appeal, not adjacent a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Poets.

I recalled a French writer saying the archetypal enactment successful each poem is fixed by God, and the writer supplies the rest. Well, astatine the hazard of blasphemy, I indispensable accidental that He … well, we’ll fto that pass. Obviously, He has much pressing things to be to than the writer’s artifact of a fledgling poet. No wonder, Dylan Thomas called poesy his “sullen art”.

Desperate situations telephone for hopeless measures. I began scouting for poesy clubs crossed the land. These groups comprise poets who, believing successful information successful numbers, congregate astatine exotic places acold from the madding crowd. Here, they walk fruitful hours listening to and learning from each other’s poems. I had hoped that I excessively would summation inspiration done osmosis. Alas! My muse had blown a fuse.

There I lay, similar Eliot’s evening sky, similar a diligent etherised upon a table. There I would person lain had my aged friends not returned making conciliatory noises, offering sometimes sympathy and sometimes tea. They told maine adjacent established poets acquisition self-doubt of Hamletian proportions. Who was I to expect amended luck? Also, though my task into verse had met with a deficiency of occurrence arsenic spectacular arsenic the Charge of the Light Brigade, the endeavor had not wholly been successful vain. It was character-building, and I had learnt thing of value: poesy is not for those anemic successful creation oregon faint of heart.

So, to each practising poets, young and old, my hats off!

jairam.menon@gmail.com