Down to the grass roots

VIJAY NAMBISAN

IN his 1972 "novel for children", Watership Down, Richard Adams did for English rabbitry what Kipling had done for the Indian jungle - he magically recreated a world of sounds and smells and dangers which humanity has long forgotten, cocooned in its artificial environment. Our chief dangers, as human beings, come from other human beings. Hunger, poverty, disease are largely manmade enemies. But an animal, even a household pet like a cat or dog, is still very much alive to external terrors. It is our tragedy that to animals, too, the chief enemy is man.

If you have ever seen a rabbit or a deer stealing out of the underbrush to graze at dusk, you will observe that they are constantly on the lookout for enemies. Their senses are always alive: nostrils twitching, ears tracking this way and that, eyes darting all around. The smallest unfamiliar sound or smell makes them jump nervously towards the nearest place of safety. Have you tried to imagine what it is to inhabit such a world? Adams did, and that is why Watership Down works so well. This poem instantly brings that successful novel to mind.

It was the belief of Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) that modern human beings have lost a certain magic around which older civilisations once fashioned their reality. This magic centre was once occupied by myth and religion; and now that humanity finds it possible and convenient to live without their sanction, we need something to occupy that "still centre of the turning world" (T. S. Eliot's phrase). This was, according to him, the reason for that 'spiritual poverty' which modern philosophers and critics of culture deplore.

Stevens in his poetry attempted a fusion of reality and what we make of reality in the mind, that is to say imagination. He felt this could fill that central space, supply us with that magic we still crave. He succeeded in this better than most modern poets have done (but then each poet has a different driving passion); however, it was often at the cost of being understood. The vocabulary of his poetry is vast and his words incessantly shift, change colour and meaning in order to convey the intricacy of the world which surrounds us.

"A Rabbit is King of the Ghosts" is a simple poem - for Stevens - and yet it suffers in explication. The poet has, to all purposes, made himself a rabbit, and is describing his own reality. It is a self-sufficient universe, with no mysteries except the big one of why it is, perceptible even to rabbits. The rabbit at this evening hour, the dangerous cat not dangerous now, "in the peacefullest time", is content with being: "everything is meant for you/ And nothing need be explained"; "The grass is full/ And full of yourself'; "a self that fills the four corners of night". Why should anything be said?

That is the essence of Stevens' poetry, the trying to say without saying. Obliquity, hints, the narrowing of a circle to define a point - these are all powerful weapons for a modern poet, and in Stevens' hands they are sharper than most. Like the evening universe to the rabbit, his poetry too is best described as a world where "everything is meant for you and nothing need be explained". It is full of joys to be discovered by the reader, alone.

Stevens, unlike many poets, was a successful man of affairs. After Harvard he worked briefly for the New York Herald Tribune, then took a degree in law. In 1914, while he was practising law in New York, his first published poems appeared in Poetry, a pioneer of modern forms; and thereafter he was a constant contributor to the literary journals. In 1916 he joined an insurance firm, of which he became vice-president in 1934 and stayed so until his death. He saw nothing incongruous in this (as neither did Eliot) and it is said that he jotted down his poetry on slips of paper on his way to work. None of his finished poetry, though, bears signs of haste in execution.

Though Stevens' first collection appeared only in 1923, his output in his last 30 years was consistent and acclaimed. His Collected Poems (1954) won the Pulitzer, and he earned several other honours. It is remarkable that his theme throughout his career remained the relationship of imagination to reality, and by extension that of the poet to society.

A religion has not necessarily to do with a God. It is something that satisfies one's soul. Stevens set himself lofty aims as a poet, and to a great extent he succeeded - not perhaps in defining what does make that magic space of myth, but certainly in defining what could. There can be no nobler aim for a poet than to discover a man's soul - or a rabbit's.

* * *

A Rabbit is King of the Ghosts

The difficulty to think at the end of day,
When the shapeless shadow covers the sun
And nothing is left except light on your fur -

There was the cat slopping its milk all day,
Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk
And August the most peaceful month.

To be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time,
Without that monument of cat,
The cat forgotten in the moon;

And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light, 

In which everything is meant for you
And nothing need be explained;

Then there is nothing to think of. It comes of itself;
And east rushes west and west rushes down,
No matter. The grass is full

And full of yourself. The trees around are for you,
The whole of the wideness of night is for you,
A self that touches all edges,

You become a self that fills the four corners of night.
The red cat hides away in the fur-light
And there you are humped high, humped up,

You are humped higher and higher, black as stone
You sit with your head like a carving in space
And the little green cat is a bug in the grass.

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Features
Previous : Sky is not the limit
Next     : A saga of survival