A.K. Ramanujan as a poet or His Poetic Craftsmanship

An Eminent and Gifted Poet:

A. K. Ramanujan is a born poet who has given a new direction to Indian poetry in English. He stabilizes his position as one of the most talented of the new poets. His poetry is the product of a specific culture and his real greatness lies in his unsurpassable ability to translate this experience into terms of another culture. He is flawless artist who tries to achieve perfection. He uses language which is rich in subtlety, nuance, and colour, and yet retains its precision, adjusting both to revive and the pointed thrust of immediate experience.

References of the Family Members in His Poems:

The family figures most prominently in Ramanujan's poetry. Indeed, the family may be regarded as one of the leading themes of his poetry. Ramanujan seems to believe that living in the midst of relations binds or fetters the feet of a man. To live away from relatives means a sense of deprivation, but to live among them curbs one's freedom. His poetry is rooted in the family. He is constantly remembering with nostalgia the various members of his family as well as the various objects connected with his earlier life when he used to live in India. Ramanujan's interior landscape is peopled with a host of familial figures and objects. In poem after poem Ramanujan goes back to his childhood or boyhood experiences of his life in Southern India. Recollected in adult tranquility in Chicago (where he has lived for many years and still lives), these experiences, indelibly imprinted on the mind of a sensitive, growing boy, now pulsate into life and enter his poems. Of Mother, Among Other Things contains Ramanujan's recollections of his mother. Love Poem for A Wife-Ⅰ is about the speaker's conjugal life which has not been very happy. In Small-Scale Reflections on a Great House is staged the history of the great family house. The poem Obituary is about the poet's father. The poem entitled History contains the recollections of the poet about some of his relatives when he was yet a child. In Snakes, the poet recalls another experience of his childhood. Breaded Fish is about Ramanujan's experience as a child when, eager to eat breaded fish.

His Successful and Unobtrusive Fusion of Indian Sensibility with Temper of Modernity:

In Ramanujan's poetry, we find a most interesting as well as intriguing blend of modernity and orthodoxy. It has been well said that the family is one of the central metaphors with which Ramanujan thinks. His poetry is full of references to his father, mother, wife, sister, aunts, cousins, nephew etc. Equally important in his poetry is his emphasis on his Hindu heritage. He has his roots in Hinduism which is an ancient religion. The opening lines of the poem entitled show Ramanujan's strong awareness of the requirements of modernity. Ramanujan cannot accept the superstitions of his Hindu faith, and so he goes on to give us a brief description of the tortures to which sinners are subjected in hell and of course, he does so in a satirical manner so as to expose the absurdity of the belief in hell and its tortures. The poems like Conventions of Despair belong to the category of poems in which the conflict in Ramanujan's mind between his Hindu heritage and his notions of modernity is the theme. The family motif dominates in such poems as Of Mothers, Among Other Things, Love Poem for A Wife I and II, Small- Scale Reflections On a Great House, Obituary, Reflections, Snakes and History. In the other group of poems, it is the conflict of the tension between Ramanujan's strong sense of his Hindu Heritage and the intrusion of modern values into his sensibility which. constitutes the theme. Ramanujan's poetry draws its sustenance from the tension or the conflict in his mind between his intense awareness of his Hindu heritage and the partly modernistic outlook which he has developed as a result of his prolonged contact with American culture. Ramanujan's awareness of his Hindu heritage does not lead to a blind acceptance of it on Ramanujan's part. He is equally alive to both the strength and the deficiencies of his racial ethos. He admires the Hindu religion's vision of the unity of all life as expressed by him in the poem entitled Christmas, and as he does in the poem Small-Scale Reflections on a Great House in which he recognizes the great absorbing power of Hinduism by describing a typical joint family. Ramanujan also occasionally juxtaposes ironically the ancient Hindu ethos with the situation of the modern Hindu as in the poem entitled Some Indian Uses of History on a Rainy Day.

Sharp and Acute Historical Sensibility:

Ramanujan is interested in the history of his family of which he gives us glimpses in the poem Small-Scale Reflections on a Great House and in the equally elaborate poem entitled History. But he is also interested in the history of his country even though he has been living for the last many years in a foreign country. His interest in his country's history is powerfully projected in several poems. His awareness of the tragedy of his country, which he describes as the ancient chaos of a country, finds expression in such poems as Compensation and The Last of Princes. He links his familial experience with his historical consciousness in poems like Conventions of Despair and even more so in a much later poem Prayers to Lord Murugan.

The Poems Celebrating Love:

A. K. Ramanujan has also written a few love poems which deserves attention. Love Poem for a Wife-l is one such poem. This poem is a revealing comment by Ramanujan on how an unshared childhood separates a husband and a wife who could otherwise have led a happy conjugal life. A short poem, entitled Still Life, seems to be a celebration of love as an abiding experience. Here Ramanujan looks back wistfully and longingly to a lunch which a beloved woman shared with him a little while ago. Looking For a Cousin on a Swing may also be regarded as a love-poem. Here the little girl, who used to enjoy a ride on a swing with her male cousin sitting against her, says that they were both innocent about this sport. But the way in which the poet has depicted their childhood experience shows that the girl, though only five or six years old was instinctively conscious of the fact that her partner belonged to the opposite sex and this consciousness had somehow thrilled her. On growing up into a mature girl, she consciously looks for a cousin in order to have the same experience on a swing.

Symbolical and Imagistic Poetry:

A. K. Ramanujan's images are precise, accurate, real and highly suggestive. The luminous evocations of family life in Relations, especially in poems like Small Scale Reflections on A Great House, Love Poem to a Wife-l, Of Mothers, Among the things etc., are noticeable. His imagery creates vivid visual effects. He prefers the concrete, the picturesque and the precise as against the general, the vague and the abstract. For instance:

"And search

for certain thin—

stemmed, bubble-eyed water bugs.

See them perch

On dry capillary legs

weightless

on the ripple skin

of a stream.

No, not only prophets

walk on water. This bug sits

on a landslide of lights

and drowns eye—

fin deep into its tiny strip of sky."         — (The Striders)

In this image of striders, a kind of New England water bugs, the poet has precisely portrayed the figure of the object with a vivid sense of its distinctive quality. The picture of water bugs with 'bubble eyes' perching 'weightless on the ripple skin of a stream' is sculpturesque. The image also assumes a spiritual dimension. The water bug sitting on 'a landslide of lights’ and drowning 'eye-deep into its tiny strip of sky’ is compared with the superhuman powers of prophets walking on water. Of Mothers, Among Other Things is a succession of beautiful and suggestive images which evoke varied pictures of his mother at various stages of her life. The opening lines describe the blooming beauty and delicacy of the mother:

"I smell upon this twisted

black bone tree the silk and white

petals of my mother's youth."

In the poem, Snakes the most striking feature is its imagery. We have visual imagery and we have sound-imagery in the poem. There are the hissing sounds of the snakes in the poem and there are the pictures of the snakes raising their hoods and discarding their withered skins. Then we have the pictures of the curves of the snakes uncurling, and the snakes sucking the milk from saucers. Next, there is the picture of the snake-charmer putting a snake round his neck (like a garland), and the speaker's father smiling at the sight while the speaker screams. One of the most striking pictures is that of the speaker's sister tying her hair into braids with a knot of ornamental thread, and using clean new pins co hold the braids together. And, finally, we have the picture of the frogs hopping upon a dead snake which looks like a sausage rope, and of flies hovering over the dead snake's eyes.

Sometimes Ramanujan's imagery creates an obscure effect. In A Hindu to His Body, the body is visualized as the image of the soul.  At death when the body leaves the soul to rise in the sap of trees, the soul—now formless—yearns for the tree form:

"Let me go with you and feel the weight
of honey hives in my branching
and the burlap weave of weaver birds
in my hair."

Depiction of Child-Psychology and Adult Psychology:

Among the salient features of Ramanujan's poetry is its psychological realism. Looking for a Cousin on a Swing depicts child-psychology as well as adult psychology, with the sexual instinct being an active force in both a child and a grown-up person, though in childhood it is dormant and is never explicitly expressed. In the poem Of Mothers, Among Other Things, Ramanujan depicts his mother at various stages of her life, and his own reactions to her at those different stages, with an emphasis on his final reaction when he sees her four still sensible fingers picking up a grain of rice from the kitchen floor. Love Poem for a Wife I is an acute analysis of the mind of the speaker in the poem, and of the minds of his wife, her father, and various other relatives, hers and his own. Obituary reveals to us the mind of the persona's father, and the persona's reactions to him. The persona is Ramanujan himself.

Poet's Occupation with Physical Violence and Psychosis:

Ramanujan is obsessively preoccupied with inner and physical violence, with derangement, and with psychosis. Fear, anxiety, and despair have been his themes. In Ecology, the son feels indignant with the trees which give his mother the migraine. But darkness enters even the familial domain. In Routine Day Sonnet, the wife cries her heart out 'as if from a crater/in hell; she hates me, I hate her'. The obsessive images of violence and pain are particularly dominant in the poems entitled Fear, Pleasure, A Minor Sacrifice, Alien, Zoo Gardens Revisited, Son to Father to Son, At Forty, Middle Age and Looking Finding.  In his concern with physical violence Ramanujan shows himself to be almost a sadist.

Ramanujan, a Skilled Craftsman:

A. K. Ramanujan is one of the most competent and skilled craftsmen in Indo-Anglian poetry. The terseness of Ramanujan's diction, the consummate skill with which he introduces rhyme and assonance into his verse, his sharply etched, crystallized images and his disciplined handling of the English language make Ramanujan one of the most significant poets in India. The image or the picture undoubtedly plays a key role in his art, but he does not rely solely on the image or the picture for the effectiveness of communication. He has assigned a conspicuous place to the choice of words in poetry and to linguistic excellence. He says., "So poetry is language that has not been used before, intense, creative, imaginative. And yet it ordinary language, not a thing apart. It is this paradox that interest me. I want my poems ultimately to sound as though I spoke them."

Ramanujan's interest in linguistics and anthropology helped his outer forms— "linguistic, metrical, logical, and other such ways of shaping experience." He has copiously drawn upon folk-lore to give him his inner forms, images and symbols. He uses simple, every day words. He uses apt and meaningful words which help him to achieve Dantesque terseness, felicity of expression and classical simplicity and austerity, for instance:

"Her sarees

do not cling; they hang, loose

feather of a onetime wing."    — (Of Mothers, Among Other Things)

In these lines the poet describes vividly his mother's emaciated form in fewest possible words, which are remarkable for their simplicity and commonness.

He uses mostly monosyllabic words. He, thus, achieves a concentration of vowel sounds which makes his diction musical. He skilfully employs an oblique elliptical style, full of private insight. Verbal irony is an important aspect of his poetic diction. He also creates vivid poetic effects by repeating deftly a common phrase or word. His favourite stylistic device is to create tableau like effects by employing vivid picturesque diction. His vocabulary is sometimes suggestive. He skilfully employs the device of playing upon words not only to create a clever poetic effect but also to suggest the meaning that he intends to convey. In this way, it can easily be observed that Ramanujan is a skilled craftsman. His technical skill remains matchless in Indian English poetry.