Appreciating poetry
What is the inherent purpose of poems? (Part-1)

By Dr Shradha Kaul
Baa baa black sheep, Jack and Jill, Humpty Dumpty… Welcome to the world of poetry. We still hear kids mouth these eternal nursery rhymes. Poetry comes inbuilt into our lives, beginning right from the cradle with the crooning of lullabies. Nursery rhymes are mostly anonymous and are covertly didactic. Some can even trace their links to historical events. As we grow older we read longer and more aesthetic pieces. The ones we come across as children are mostly from our school books, so the nature of these poems continues to be directed at instilling values in us. Nature poetry is a realm which we are exposed to as children. I can still recall my first brush with a master piece on nature and which has stayed with me all my life, it was a poem by William Wordsworth called Daffodils, the lines. “A host, of golden daffodils… Fluttering and dancing in the breeze” still linger on in my mind.

What could be the inherent purpose of poems? Is to soothe, to describe rhythmically or to musically weave words that tumble out from the soul? Poetry, we can say, is a medium that conveys something from the simplest thought to the deepest feeling. According to many it’s a ‘language of the heart’. From time immemorial, every art form that expresses the heart in a literary form can be seen as poetic. Before we are able to step forward to an in-depth and complicated reading and understanding of poetry, we first have to learn to appreciate it.

Let’s go step by step. Can the nursery rhyme be called a poem? A rhyme is a poem or piece of verse having a correspondence in sound. So, one can gladly state that one has a reasonably good exposure to poetry, however, it will be only rational to call nursery rhymes stepping stones to the greater things to come.

The poetry that we come across as we go higher, comes to us in palpable themes. The foremost themes concern nature, patriotism, altruism, filial love, religion, social causes, history, metaphysics, motivation and emotions. So, the first rung would be recognising the various types of poems that can occur in terms of subject matter. Say, a poem like Rabindranath Tagore’s patriotic Where the Mind is Held without Fear is a simple yet powerful and fervent appeal for India’s freedom and there can be no mistake in understanding this one.

Along with Wordsworth, Tennyson, Shelley, Keats and Coleridge, William Blake’s nature poetry is quite popular amongst the readers as well as the teachers. The Road Not Taken by Blake serves two purposes, one for its sheer beauty of narration and two for the purpose it serves which is making one understand about the choices one has to make in life. A most subtle and interesting way to make you aware of the challenges that life presents to us. Another very ‘bubbly’ poem on the vagaries of man’s life and the timelessness of nature is Lord Tennyson’s The Brook. The very choice of words makes one undulate along with the flow of the brook. Take for instance the poem Night of the Scorpion by Nissim Ezekiel, it deals with the theme of a mother’s love and sacrifice, very easy to understand and to identify with. Another, very interesting subject of Shakespeare’s The Seven Ages, is the description of man’s journey from the cradle to eternal rest through the metaphor of life being a stage and where all men are actors playing the roles assigned to them.

Poetry uses particular forms and conventions to expand the literal meaning of the words, or to evoke emotional responses. It also has many stylistic elements like symbolism, irony, ambiguity, poetic diction and other aspects. So if you have understood the bigger picture, I must say that you are on the path to understanding poetry.

—The author is an academic & writes on varied issues