This blog is based on Thinking Task given by Dilip Sir.
Let us have brief introduction of the poem.
"Lockdown", first published in The Guardian on 21 March 2020, is a response to the coronavirus pandemic, and references the Derbyshire "plague village" of Eyam, which self-isolated in 1665 to limit the spread of the Great Plague of London, and the Sanskrit poem "Meghadūta" by Kālidāsa, in which a cloud carries a message from an exile to his distant wife. The poem is written by Simon Armitage.
Poem :
"And I couldn’t escape the waking dream
of infected fleas
in the warp and weft of soggy cloth
by the tailor’s hearth in ye olde Eyam.
Then couldn’t un-see the Boundary Stone,
that cock-eyed dice with its six dark holes,
thimbles brimming with vinegar wine
purging the plagued coins.
Which brought to mind the sorry story
of Emmott Syddall and Rowland Torre,
star-crossed lovers on either side
of the quarantine line whose wordless courtship spanned the river till she came no longer.
But slept again,
and dreamt this time of the exiled yaksha sending word to his lost wife on a passing cloud,
a cloud that followed an earthly map of camel trails and cattle tracks,
streams like necklaces,
fan-tailed peacocks, painted elephants,
embroidered bedspreads
of meadows and hedges,
bamboo forests and snow-hatted peaks,
waterfalls, creeks,
the hieroglyphs of wide-winged cranes
and the glistening lotus flower after rain,
the air hypnotically see-through, rare,
the journey a ponderous one at times, long and slow but necessarily so."
Simon Armitage has written a poem to address the coronavirus and a lockdown. The poem, Lockdown, moves back to the bubonic plague in Eyam in the 17th century, when fleas carrying the plague to the Derbyshire village. Then came at the epic poem Meghadūta by the Sanskrit poet Kālidāsa.He references Eyam’s boundary stone, which contained holes that the quarantined villagers would put their money in to pay for provisions from outside, and then fill with vinegar in the hope it would cleanse the coins. It also depicts romance between a girl who lived in Eyam and a boy outside the village who talked to her from a distance, until she stopped coming.
Moreover, the poem was also influenced by a scene in Meghadūta in which an exile sends reassuring words to his wife in the Himalayas via a passing cloud.He thought there was a message to be learned “about taking things easy and being patient and trusting the Earth and maybe having to come through this slightly slower, and wiser, at the other end – given that one thing that’s accelerated the problem is our hectic lives and our proximities and the frantic ways we go about things”.
Poetry is “by definition consoling” because “it often asks us just to focus and think and be contemplative”, said Armitage.“Poetry is often about detail, even to the point where there’s just something sacramental in the ordinary descriptions of everyday life,” he said. “It’s unlikely that there’s going to be a book of poems that are consolation against catastrophe, but just in poetry’s nature, in the way it asks us to be considerate of language, it also asks us to be considerate of each other and the world. In the relationship with thoughtful language, something more thoughtful occurs.”
1. What is your first reaction to this poem? Are you able to connect your Lockdown experience with this poem?
2.If you are Chinese or African, would you be happy with the concluding message which the speaker is deriving or interpreting from this poem?
When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth! "
In addition, Kipling said that there is no boundaries between the world. We can look it through two ways. First if we took last stanza in literary sense, then it is universal and I am happy with its ending. On the other hand if I belongs to other countries like above mentioned I felt that if any literature has rich test than and than it will be used as references.
For example, Indian Sanskrit literature and English literature have great value. But what about our own literature, as African or any other European we also have our own litretute and falktales. As in if I am Japanese even we had Kanto earthquake in 1923 and we have stories of star-cross lovers Vega and Altair.
However, most of the time commonwealth countries are being marginalized and ignored by such kind of poet laureate. Their literature is not taken as references of poem though universality is everywhere. There is Existence of North and South. Equally they are part of the world, they contribute in literature too.
But as the last line is, "the journey a ponderous one at times, long and slow,but necessarily so. This journey is slow of accepting other European countries as a part of the world apart from wealthy countries. Though concluding messege is effectively reflecting universality and humanity spirit.
Thank you.
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