A. K. Ramanujan's poetic style

Introduction:

A. K. Ramanujan is a great and gifted artist. He has assiduously polished and refined his poetic style. He has assigned a conspicuous place to the choice of words in poetry and to linguistic excellence. In his words: "Poetry is language that has not been used before, intense, creative, imaginative. And yet it is ordinary language, not a thing apart. It is this paradox that interests me. I want my poems ultimately to sound as though I spoke them." Ramanujan's imagination is always focussed and never diffuse His language is rapier sharp. His poetry is both delicate and intricate as the spiral line of shell. He brings to his poetry an authenticity of experience. But the experience is sieved through a perspective of the past, a configuration of familial relationships and his ironic perception.

Ramanujan's showing an Extraordinary Talent for Phrase-Making: Ramanujan's poems abound in felicities of word and phrase. For instance, there are the erotic implications of certain words and phrases in the poem entitled Looking for a Cousin on a Swing. Some of the words and the phrases in this poem are noteworthy because of their suggestiveness and their double meanings. "With every lunge of the swing" is a highly suggestive phrase in the context in which it occurs. The word 'lunge’ of course refers to the push or the thrust which is given to the swing by some adult in order to keep the swing going from side to side at a brisk pace, but the word 'lunge' in this context also suggests a thrust or stroke of the male sexual organ. And the girl feels her male cousin's closeness in the lunging pits of her feeling". The phrase “lunging pits of her feeling" is again highly suggestive, and for the same reason. Similarly, the use of the word 'crotch' in the closing lines carries erotic suggestions. In the poem entitled Of Mother, Among Other Things, we have such original phrases as the diamond splashing a handful of needles, and the rains tacking and sewing with broken thread the rags of the tree-tasseled light. In the poem entitled Love Poem for a Wife-l we have the following phrase which impresses us greatly: the wife's father has 'gone irrevocable in age'; the wife and her brother start 'one of your old drag-out fights'; and 'Sister-in-law and I were blank cut-outs fitted to our respective slots in a room'. Ramanujan also applies striking similes too, In the poem entitled Breaded Fish, the recollection of a past memory is described through a striking 'simile: "...as a hood/of memory like a coil on a heath opened in my eyes." In the poem entitled A River, there are a couple of original, though not very convincing similes in the poem. The wet stones glisten like sleepy crocodiles, while the dry stones look like shaven water-buffaloes roaming about in the sun. In the poem entitled Looking for a Cousin on a Swing apart from the metaphorical phrase "every lunge of the swing" and "the lunging pits", we have another metaphorical phrase and also a simile in the poem. The tree, which is not very tall, is full of leaves like those of a fig tree. "A brood of scarlet figs" is a metaphorical phrase because the wood 'brood' literally means the young ones of a mother while here it means a large number of figs.

The Use of Monosyllabic Words:

Ramanujan uses mostly monosyllabic words. He thus achieves a concentration of vowel sounds which makes his diction musical. He also uses rhyme and assonance to create musical effect. For instance:

"Specially for me, she had some breaded

fish; even thrust a blunt-headed

smelt into my mouth;

and looked hurt when I could

neither sit nor eat, as a hood of memory like a coil on a heath

opened in my eyes."    — (Breaded Fish)

The Use of Simple and Everyday Words:

Ramanujan uses simple, everyday words. He observes utmost economy in the use of words. He uses apt and meaningful words which help him to achieve Dantesque terseness and condensation. His diction is conspicuous for epigrammatic terseness, felicity of expression and classical simplicity and austerity. For instance:

"Her sarees

do not cling; they hang, loose

feather of a one-time 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. How vividly he describes the decline and dissolution of a princely dynasty in a simple and precise manner in The Last of the Princes:

"They took their time to die, this dynasty
falling in slow motion from Aurangzeb's time
Some of bone T.B.
Others of a London bog that went to their heads,
Some of current trends, imported wine and women
One or two heroics in war or poverty
with ballads
to their name.”

Employment of Elliptical Style:

Ramanujan skilfully employs an oblique elliptical. style, full of private insights. It helps him to juxtapose disparate elements, for instance:

"No, not only prophets
walk on water. This bug sits
on a landslide of lights
and drowns eye—
deep
into its tiny strip
of sky.”

Any event, however unimportant, can open up vistas in a vast interior landscape. Yellow trees bending over "broken glass and the walls of the central jail" set him off on a luminous reverie which takes in a "sharp and gentle daughter" and a mellow old age where he will somehow share:

"a language, a fire, a clean first floor
 with a hill in the window, and eat
 an ancient sandalwood door.
 The Hindu consciousness is pervasive.
 I must seek and will find
 My particular hell only in my Hindu mind."
                                                   — (Conventions of Despair)

 

The Use of Symbols and Images:

Ramanujan's images are precise, accurate, real, highly suggestive. The luminous evocations of family life in Relations, especially in poems like Small Scale Reflections on A Great House, Love Poem for A Wife-l, Of Mothers, Among Other Things etc. are noticeable. His imagery creates vivid visual effects. In the poem entitled Snakes have been vividly visualized commenting on imagery in this poem. The description of the snake reveals great skill in the use of images that are highly concentrated in their effect. The images have a vividness even in their abstractness. The childhood fears of the poet and his mother's reverential attitude towards snakes are vividly visualized. But all this is contrasted with the reality of his treading on a snake:

 

"Now

 frogs can hop upon this sausage rope,

 flies in the sun will nab the look in his eyes,

 and I can walk through the woods.” 

In this poem the poet has deftly rendered the memory of a childhood experience through apt. precise, picturesque and suggestive images.

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. How vivid and telling are the images of hands becoming wrinkled like "a wet eagle's two black pink- crimpled feet", crippled in a garden trap set for a mouse and her lose Saris hanging round her like a broken feather from the wing of a wounded bird.

In Ramanujan's poetry the image is not only the spring-board of poetic composition, but the kernel as well. 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. Although some of Ramanujan's poems are perfect in image-craft, his thought content is limited. Image is more important than thought. So, he has to move in a limited range of thought. He has to seek only such thoughts and feelings as can subserve the image.

The Use of Irony:

Irony is perhaps the most conspicuous quality of Ramanujan's poetry. Ramanujan uses it to emphasize the melancholy, the gloom, and the pessimism of his poems. Almost every poem by Ramanujan is characterized by irony to a greater or lesser extent. In the poem Looking for a Cousin on a Swing, we have a touch of irony when the speaker says that the little girl recalling her experience on the swing with her cousin had remarked that they (she and the cousin) “were very innocent about it"; and there is more irony when the speaker says that now, as a grown-up girl, she looks for the and "tries to be innocent about it". In the poem entitled A River, there is a touch of irony when the speaker in the poem says that the river has water enough to be poetic about only once a year. Irony is all-pervasive in Love Poem for a Wife-l. There is irony behind the speaker's reference to his wife's seven crazy aunts because of his use of the word 'mythology', thereby suggesting that the seven crazy aunts were merely an invention of his wife. In the poem entitled Small Scale Reflections on a Great House, there is irony in the very opening lines: "Sometimes I think that nothing/that ever comes into this house/goes out." The poem Obituary is wholly ironic too. Here the speaker, Ramanujan himself, has a laugh at his father who, at his death, left behind "debts and daughters", and also "a bed-wetting grandson who was named by the toss of a coin after him (the speaker's father)". In the poem Ecology there is obvious irony about the mother in the poem not wanting to have the troublesome tree cut down. Looking and Finding is a wholly ironic poem. One looks something but finds quite another. Chicago Zen is a wholly ironic poem too. It refers to the dangers and pitfalls of life both in foreign countries and in India. The Last of the Princes is also written in an ironic tone though there is much pathos.