By Janya Shah
With rose tinted screens on their eyes which scrutinize the most paltry details, poets often have a penchant for making a mountain out of a molehill. They keep scribbling on bits of paper, ambiguous and complex words, breaking the rules of grammar like a rebellious teenager, without paying any heed to the level of comprehensibility and clarity
of their text.
I often wonder, are all the poets drunk? Otherwise why in the world would Shakespeare compare his romantic interest with a sweltering and blazing hot summer’s day?
Girlfriends of today’s generation would be aghast at such juxtaposition. Or how John Keats said ‘ a thing of beauty is joy forever’ then why does a flower wilt? Why do butterflies die? This phrase basically marks the existence of quintessentially ugly things like deformities, crows, drainage as irrelevant by only focusing on rainbows and sprinkles.
There must be a rule that even to pass the gateway of the poetic realm, one has to leave
all common sense and logic at the door. And what does the real world say about things
lacking in these two traits? Useless. And Oscar Wilde himself quote ‘ all art is quite
useless’ If the poets assumed that writing incomplete sentences which are forcibly made
to rhyme in order to seem appealing, would somehow radically alter the thought process
of masses, they were delusional.
Pablo Neruda must’ve spent days if not weeks to conjure up a total of 20 lines of the
poem titled ‘keeping quiet’ who’s sole motive was to urge the audience to stop all war
and lionize the peace which prevails. Russia is still at war with Ukraine, terrorism is up
and running, animal slaughter is not yet past tense and peace is a utopian concept.
Words are only meaningful when followed up with action, poetry is just half the work
done, just like half cooked rice cannot be eaten, one can't rely on poetry to make any
difference in this world, unless it is backed up by efforts.
The objective of text is to disentangle the complexities of the human brain by translating
them into straightforward and unambiguous wording. On the contrary if a man who is
weighted down by his thoughts tries to seek refuge via the lines of poetry, he will most
likely find himself overwhelmed by the grandiloquent terms and obfuscation of the actual
intention.
“But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out
of it”. Poet Billy Collins wrote these lines in one of his poems which accurately depict the
condition of poems in today’s world, people dissect it and believe what they wish to,
abandoning the true rationale behind the text, rendering the poet’s slog worthless.
If poets wanted to have an impact on the world they could’ve learnt the chords and
become songwriters; perhaps they themselves got entangled amidst its cloudy subtleties
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