Priyadarshni and Micnhimer’s Lines Across Oceans: Lyrics on Multifariousness of Love in an Era of Lovelessness.

- Chaitali Giri

Guest Lecturer at MUC Women’s College

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Abstract:

Veterans have always reckoned that love has no language, no age. Being in love one can connect through unsaid words, through unpainted eyes, through unmediated smiles, and through untamed emotion. The world has experienced love and its purity so far by excavating its all sides, untying every knot. The present world of technology and easy availability of desired objects has caused a deficiency in the sincerity of love. Nalini Priyadarshini, the poet of the beautiful anthology of love lyrics Doppelganger in My House, has penned another collection of love poems entitled Lines across Oceans in collaboration with D. Russel Micnhimer and this anthology has what lovers will proclaim a recurring venture of that pure bond. The book is more like an antidote to the new illness of lovelessness and like an opportunity to relive that era of all conquering love through the poets’ written emotions. This article will focus on that multifariousness of love which is vibrantly present in the anthology and which has so far been conferred with all soothing and all healing powers:

If life is tangled, soul is wounded, or the landmarks of one’s own development and future are lost, love can be used as a magical mirror through which the circumstances appear in a better way.’(Maatta and Uusiautti 8)

Keywords: Love, Truthfulness, Timelessness, Lovelessness, Purity

‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds/ Admit impediments. Love is not love/ Which alters when it alteration finds,’ (Shakespeare 90, 116). Those who love are also in love with this commandment of Shakespeare. True love, which to Shakespeare was an unbreakable bond, inseparable union of two true minds; which to Donne was the only means to reach God, has multifarious upshots. Lines Across Oceans is a celebrated demonstration of that love which knows no obstacle. The most important facet of such love is that it is not confined within places and countries and thereby not limited to reasons:

“…there are no reason for loving – love is a “basic” or “unmotivated” desire. …feelings and attractions are not the sort of phenomena that admit of justification… are the sort of things that can make sense or fail to make sense. (Martin 698)

 It is never necessary to fall for someone who belongs only to one’s own country, comes only of one’s own culture, proficient only in one’s own language. The reason or the bases should be love and nothing but love itself:

If thou must love me, let it be for nought

Except for love’s sake only. (Browning 321, XIV)

 A long distance relationship between someone from India and someone from the other side of the oceans can also happen and can be cherished too. In her poem Just Before Dawn: Katuata, Priyadarshini evinced:

Distance just measures

How far and swift love travels(7-8, Lines Across Oceans 15)

It is always the person we fall in love with and never with their values and culture:

We do not really fall in love with values. Otherwise we would love all those who share those values and privilege certain aspirations, but these do not always coincide.( Enns 51)

Distance is only a measure and it works sometimes as a catalyst to kindle the desire to be together again. Though the separation is only physical and never emotional, an insecurity borne out of the absence:

When falling in love, also fears and insecurity start gnawing. Therefore not only many previously experienced feelings of happiness from childhood revive but also confusion and fears…( Maatta and Uusiautti 10)

 To those who love and suffer a situational separation, nature appoints itself as a bearer – sometimes of the vacantness, sometimes of the remembrances caused by love tokens, sometimes of the good wishes that keep the fortune of the lover working. In her poem Mango Sun the lover dreams of an Indian summer visualizing a little girl savouring the sweetness of a ripe mango. The vision made him remember the sweetness of the beloved. His words, in turn, sweeten and soothe her ears, leaving their resounding and echoing effects there:

Dreaming today

Of Indian summer

I saw you,…

I taste the sweetness of Alphonso today

On my lips

Parched longing

For ears that hear

Unspoken uncertainty

In all my conversations

Smooth over warring factions

Of my being

With your presence. (1-3, 21-29 LAO 31 )

The token can be an affectionate gesture like a passionate kiss which had once enlivened the parched lips or it can be some gifts, too, like a rudraksh mala. Wearing the beaded garland and sensing the poking touch of the beads which had once touched her body, the lover can reimagine the sensation of being in her arms:

She wore them for a while

Before she sent them to me

From across my western sea

Rudraksh beads to remind you

Of my arms around your neck

Though you are far away( Rudraksh Beads from India 1-7, LAO 38)

Recapitulating the kissed lips, s/he longs ‘To rejuicinate them nectar’ (9) again whom time and its drought have left dried, devoid of moisture, keeping away ‘the monsoon’ (revival) of their lips. The burning passion of kiss and longing is well expressed in Thirst which emanates a quenched sensation:

Sweat of your longing

I grow in beads

On your upper lips

Cradling a thirst

To trickle down

The sun you hold

Between your lips

And sizzle before I go. (10-17, LAO 11)

Leaving each other’s imprints on each other to cast an ever invigorating effect of their unconditional love is like the elixir, like the touchstone that only magically renews and strengthened the bond:

When falling in love, even the negative features are seen as a positive light or explained in and again. (Maatta and Uusiautti 10)

It is this love fantasy that helps to cut down and calm down the desire of touch. The poets have enriched their lyrics with unparalleled and vibrant imageries. Waiting long for the loved one cause so many emotional traits working together that even some of the everyday habits can also renovate the desire for a reunion. The splashing sound of a favourite drink can make you yearn for the sizzling sound of the loved one’s voice. As the sound of the drink drawing towards the edge of the cup and thereby slipping into the lips quench the thirst, lovers, too, pine for the sweetness of the spoken words of the beloveds to make their thirsty ears quenched:

I hope soon the empty

Pitcher will be full and I will

Drink deeply again; (Listening Cups 34-36, LAO 52)

Even if they cannot satiate their desire physically, a recapitulation saves them from desperateness and depression but no alteration ever eludes their love smitten hearts. Truly thus has Barrett Browning expressed:

Go from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand

Henceforward in thy shadow. Nevermore

Alone upon the threshold of my door

Of individual life, I shall command

The uses of my soul, nor lift my hand

Serenely in the sunshine as before

Without the sense of that which I forbore, ..

Thy touch upon the palm. (Browning 319, VI)

This extremely emotional sentiment has a psychological fortification, too:

There is survival in the sense of living-on at the end of love, for physical separation, even though death, may not mean the absence of the beloved. We may conjure up the details of the loved one’s body – from scars to hand gestures to the sound of a voice – and remain sensuously attuned to the absent body, the smell of skin, the taste of lips. In this way the lost love continues to inhabit us, not only in our memories of the world we made together, but in the sense that we will never return to who we were before we loved the person now lost to us. (Enns 54 )

A dolorous separation is destined to be followed by a jocund unification, togetherness. The long waiting, the dried vacantness all get vanished as soon as a passionate embrace brings the two alienated corns in the field of love again:

A forlorn drop

I turn into love

The moment

We emberace

Cease all seeking

Home at last. (Mud Crown 11-16, LAO 14)

This passionate desire to meet him/her keeps the lovers going. The meeting, the unification becomes ‘the elixir of existence’ for the days before they meet again. A part of the lover and the beloved, both, are always with each other for an imaginary ride together at any desirous moment:

I drop a piece of me

Every time our fingertips brush…

Follow you everywhere

Like a flock of yellow butterflies…

Erase all darkness

From musty corners

As reflections meet

To merge and become

Elixir of existence. (Elixir of Existence 1-2 5-6 12-16, LAO 54)

Along with the desire to stay together, the lovers nurture another urge through out their whole existence – the desire to make the existence of their love and loved ones immortal. All the rationality fails to allure them to realize the truth of conferred mortality on every earthly object. But the will, unbound and indomitable, every time finds a way. While it seems impossible to make your love and loved one exist forever, poetry comes in the rescue there:

Love never lacked for those who try to tame it for “higher” purposes or those who would ague that “ the worst evils have been committed in the name of love”. At the same time, love has always had its passionate defenders, though those have more often tended to be poets – the Ovids, Shakesoeares and Donnes – than critics of poetry. (Bryson and Movsesian 1).

 For ages the poets have commemorated their love through the lines of their verses. Expressing love and feelings by sharing written verse for each other helps forming a bond richer and stronger than those sprang from sharing beds:

Our syllables reach out and interwine

Whorled ridges of our separate knowings

Riping through the edges of our touching…

Harmonic echoes that win the game

Of eternity on the table of extinction. (Stronger than Bonds of Flesh 1-3 7-8, LAO 59)

Unlike others they who ‘ […]stretch / Into forever/ Warm showers of earnest love’ (Colours of Rainbow: A Choka 2-4, LAO 49) and who wish to ‘ Dye bodies we inhabit/ In rainbow colors’ (Colours of Rainbow: A Choka 6-7, LAO 49) will never choose to turn into dust at the hands of Time and never remembered again. They are resolute not to:

Let no winds lay asunder

Nor rains wash us away

Twirling whirling

We dance in sunlight

Free from confines of

Bodies and minds (Just Us Dust 10-15, LAO 21)

They, the lovers, strive to write poetry on each other because they think:

When you write poems for me

And I string my words together

To write about you and us

We do more than make love

To each other with our words

We bestow each other with

A slice of eternity. (Slice of Eternity 1-7, LAO 58)

But they are unaware of the fact that their love is already immortal as those who share a divinely pure bond are beyond the calculation of ages:

my flesh knows your soul

from another life. (Blossoms of Wondrous Heart: A mondoka 60-61, LAO 17)

Hence, poetry is never the only means to make love and the lovers immortal to the world when their true love is already timeless. Their love has no age, no count of time just as what Barrett Browning says, ‘…if God choose,/ I shall but love thee better after death.’ (Browning 327, XLIII). Moreover, apart from making poerty a means to make their love live forever, it has a very genuine materialistic purpose too.  Going through the verses written by the lover is like unfolding the heart and thereby paving a path into it:

She shares precious morsels of her life

with him in her verse…

…for him marvels of life

Unfolding like lotus petals…(Arms of Her Heart 1-2 5-6, LAO 46t)

Such is the equation of love, lovers and lyrics.

Besides experiencing the purity of this ideal love, the world has experienced a struggle between what is popularly known as Platonic love and the sensual love of flesh. What is worth to be accepted that one cannot live by a platonic love only:

It is not merely sex – some critics have been eager to dismiss it in just this way. Neither, however, is it only spiritual, intellectual, emotional, or what is popularly referred to as Platonic. The love ... that so much of our poetry celebrates, is a combination of the physical and the emotional, the sexual and the intellectual, the embodied and the ethereal. Above all, it is a matter of mutual choise between lovers who are each at once Lover and beloved. (Bryson and Movsesian 2)

Sensuality is like the touchstone that completes the love. But there is difference between sensuality and sexuality. If the partner’s concern is all about counting the curves of the body of the beloved and not to explore the curves of the heart, then the emotional bond pains more than the physical union. The pain of being used and exploited under the veil of love is what has found expression in Beyond Redemption:

This far and then no more

You can’t come any closer

I cannot let you see my soul…

When its no more than a game

An engagement to keep you busy

Until your next job

Or a more compliant warm body

Finds way under your sheets (Beyond Redemption 1-10 LAO 1)

When love searches for alterations, it should be damned in forlorn or else the ashes of infidelity will ‘get in our eyes’ (Beyond Redemption 30, LAO 1). If it cannot teach you to forget the count of time together, then such love is nothing but wastage of time:

If it does not ruin us beyond redemption

It is just a waste of time. (Beyond Redemption 50-51, LAO  1)

On the contrary radiating the emotion that rouses sensual touches of the lover, even from simple love tokens, is what makes the bond stronger and desirable to both:

… the rough

Balls of the rudraksh beads

Around my neck

You sent me and I have

Never taken off.

I feel smoothness of your skin

I know has touches these

Very orbs… (Dreams From Rudraksh Beads 2-9, LAO  7)

The integrity of the desires to caress each other, to love each other makes the coupling and its ecstasy more intense as if the lovers become one single entity like stars part of a single constellation. The way the passion burns body as though hot caramel has been smeared over the body:

Hot caramel of my skin

Spread slowly over

Golden vanilla of yours…

We melt into marble swirl…

Sweeping our hearts

Into a single constellation

In forever’s sky.(Marble Swirl 1-3 8-10, LAO  11)

Picturing an amour through flavor i.e. depicting a love relationship through food imageries is something one can always instantiate in Priyadarshni. If in Doppelganger in My House she has compared making love with that of kneading bread after having adjusted every relevant and necessary component proportionately: ‘Whorls of my fingers explore your grains/ As I mix oil of first pressing with eggs and milk/ Knead the sweet and salty moments together/ To bridge the gaps between knowing of our hearts (Bread of Oblation6-9 48), in Lines Across Oceans she has brought the imagery of an oddly combined food dish like ‘a jigger of whisky and a jigger of vodka /together in mango juice’ (Tastes Almost Like Love  1-2, LAO 33 ) liked by only a few who will find strong predilection in it. A relationship between two completely different personalities appears apparently ‘horrible’(Tastes Almost Like Love  1-2, LAO 33 ) to the world but is not fully irrelevant because ‘The difficulty in love is that it requires two people to become one still remain two individuals.’ (Maatta and Uusiautti 14). This oddly matched pair can reach their existence to a stage where no expectation of perfection finds existence:

a couple find themselves extremely different from each other;…If a couple gets through this phase, they will move on to the third one where the expectations to each other become more realistic…In Goldstine et al.’s theory, love turns from romantic, passionate love into realistic, “companionable” (Walster & Walster 1978), “mature”, or “right kind of” love (Hatfield, 1988), if the partners manage to overcome the period of unwelcomed emotions.’ (Maatta and Uusiautti 5)

‘One reason I talk about you/ is your name …’ (Your Name 1-2, LAO  41) (ellipsis in original) The most bemusing fascination and obsession of being in love is the charm of articulating the name that let lovers’ hearts race hundreds of marathons at in a moment. The verbal pleasure is, thus, another gratification of being in love. It has a romantic resonance which is different from those of physical and emotional pleasure. The tongue is a small part of our body abut can perform real miracles. When it comes to the point of getting pleasures, tongue plays a vital role. The taste buds carry the pleasure of tasting something which only the tongue can feel. But the pleasure it produces by rolling words of love and care through it, only a love-leaden heart can relate. Not precious gifts or promises but only a few words of kindness can bring solace to a distressed person. The lover, hence, wonders how s/he can make their words ‘taste as good as ice cream on a hot day’ (How Can I Make My Words 1, LAO 5 ) or ‘feel as good as silken’ or make them ‘sound like music’ to the ears of each other. All s/he wants to do is to make a love-leaden offering to the lover through sweet words so that s/he can show ‘the inside’ and can make the other feel his/her real worth ‘not only to the world’ but to his/her own self. Here she establishes an affinity with Elizabeth Barrett Browning who boldly proclaims:

And wilt thou have me fashion into speech

The love I bear thee, finding words enough,…

In words of love hid in me out of reach.

Nay, let the silence of my womanhood

Commend my woman-love to thy belief, -

Seeing that I stand unwon, however wooed,( Browning 320, XIII)

Verbal pleasure not only an emotional appetite. It satiates the physical hunger too, the hunger for warm touches of caress on days of argument:

Hot tip of your tongue

Like the tip of a dagger

Pierces my dreams

Bringing my sword from

Its scabbard

To sharpen it

On the edge

Of your breath ( Defining Destiny 8-15, LAO 4)

The pleasure in the articulated phrases of love and in the pronounced name of the loved person is such that no matter how many beautiful words life teaches you, how many names society offers you to enrich your dictionary of intellect, the name of him/her in the ‘vocabulary would stay new,/ Never would it grow stale or nebulous’ (Quatracrostically Speaking 6-7, LAO 57). In the poem Your Name the poet has beautifully compared the name of the loved person with that of an edible object that leaves immense and lingering pleasure inside the mouth. Like a chocolate ‘it tickles’ (Your Name 3, LAO  41 the lips, like ‘lipstick after a stolen kiss’(Your Name 5, LAO  41) its flavor gets smeared around the mouth; like a strong smell it leaves its reminiscence on his or her ‘auro, igniting/ The interplay of orange and indigo’(Your Name 13-14, LAO  41). Before it finally melts inside the mouth, s/he ‘savors the flavours it bursts into’(Your Name 9, LAO  41) and finally, just like the taste of our favourite chocolate, gets so replete into our tongues that others do not allude our buds, the ‘aftertaste’(Your Name 15, LAO  41) of pronouncing his or her name is so unique that this feeling is ‘the reason of my refusal/ to speak about anybody else’ (Your Name 16-17, LAO  41).

Lovers finding presence of love in everything they visualize or experience around is a very common trait. Poets and writers have thus presented love variedly through different images and imageries to exhibit its multifariousness to the world.  Priyadarshni is a poet to always use such rich imageries to convey her thoughts and the readers have already experienced that richness in her anthology Doppelganger in My House which contains some very common yet very striking images. The imagery of baking or cooking adjusting every necessary ingredient to produce a perfectly tasted dish is presented to convey her message to the readers that writing poetry, too, like baking a cake where all the ingredient are to be mixed in adequate quantity to get the pleasure of a perfectly swollen cake or perfectly tasted cookies though not perfectly shaped:

I, being more concerned with texture

Of ingredients I mix and slap into place

And the flavor they lend to my poems

Can’t be bothered with shapes just now. …

But I want you to relish my poems

As they dissolve in your mouth

Excite your palate, making you ask for more

For poetry is mostly about flavor not shape (Poetry Cookies 9-12, 19-22)

Again the image of a lotus, blooming in mud sometimes gets place at the feet of the god, represents the truth of the superiority of deeds and conducts and not of country, culture or class:

To lie all your life in

Suffocating darkness

Or to rise above it,

Is a choice…always …

It’s not the place you start

But where you reach

And what you become

Padma in the hands of Vishnu (Padma 9-12, 17-20)

In Lines Across Oceans the cooking imagery is again found very appropriately executed. The beloved wants to be kneaded like flour by the fingers of the lover. She has prepared the oven with the lover’s smile and her own genuine efforts to fill every gap to bake the rotis faultlessly:

Place me in that oven I built so

Warmth of burning branches fit

Tight …

Open oven doors to slide the roti out

To baste again rounded peaks with…

The head of your essential

Knighting fingertips

Caressing apart the whole… (Jaan Bread 16-27, LAO 27 )

Image of a rainbow filled with colours of desires and dreams, has found way to her poem Feathers For Me :A Rispetto where the lover gets a dream of the beloved collecting white feathers of peacock for him. The white feathers representing the pure, unmediated mind and heart of the beloved which is to be hued with strong colours of love:

I became a rainbow, a million crystals all colours of one a part.

For it was the pure white feathersthat you gathered as you slept

All colors blended in single treasure trove where all beauty’s kept;

I welcomed them all, they fanned my ardor to love of country wide (Feathers For Me :A Rispetto 4-7, LAO 32)

As mentioned earlier, the use of food and cooking image is what makes her anthology more reverberant. In the poem I Want to Make You Waffles for Breakfast the lover desires to make the belovedsome waffles in the morning, whose every row will be decorated with honey, jelly, juices representing sweet words, polite talking and truthfulness that his ‘heart oozes when your song squeezes’(15, LAO 36)  and reaches ‘the taste buds’(21, LAO 36) of her ears ‘mixed with sugars of fresh fruits/ jellied with essence of my truths’(19-20, LAO 36). There is no space for bitter lies between them. The beloved, on the other hand, likes to hold ‘a special place for everything’(5-6, LAO 36) even for her lover which allowed them both enough space in life and in their relationship as well. This genuine gesture on the part of the beloved has opened a way for the lover to spread butter every time he produces something for her – be it a verbal presentation or the presentation of a cooked dish – to smoothen up the ‘understanding of each other’s words’(12, LAO 36). By gridding the relationship every new day ‘with new flavors/ of jam and insights jelled in perfect pectins’(23-24, LAO 36), they will be able to ‘seal’(29, LAO 36) a hot embrace between them disallowing everything sour and rotten for their days to come.

Love in Priyadarshni has one prominence which cannot be demeaned by the material and mortal world around. It is the purity, the unflinching vitality, its magical presence and its all soothing power. A pure love has that charisma which can charm the world without any formal grandeur. When a lover expresses his true heart to the woman of his dream appealing her to come close so that he can ‘ breathe life into’ (Come Closer if You Wish 8, LAO 3) her cheeks and prompt her ‘…eyes/ to open wide and for the first/ time behold the smile/ of desire without greed’( Come Closer if You Wish 9-12, LAO 3), is when the union gets ‘power stronger than the sea’ (Come Closer if You Wish 18, LAO 3) and out of that pure porcelain of union ‘you and me’ (Come Closer if You Wish 20, LAO 3) get formed with all new personality. The poem Moon Pie beautifully has used a fairytale like ambience to bring out the exuberant desire on the part of a partner to offer an ever shining smile or laughter on the lips of the other so that s/he can ‘come back for it later and / watch you sleep’ (5-6, LAO 8) and thereafter can melt own self around him/her:

When we love a person, we (pragmatically) find both her proximity and her flourishing pleasurable, her absence and suffering painful. Because of these feelings, we become attracted to having her near and to contributing to her flourishing…’(Martin 692-693).

‘Along with falling in love, an individual’s image of himself or herself becomes stronger in many ways. One feels more skilled and capable than before… When the partners try to reveal and specify the features in themselves, falling in love may also improve self knowledge. When being endured, cared and appreciated, the young become ensured that they are good and worth loving’. (Maatta and Uusiautti 11) - the statement has its alibi, the poem If You Do Not Doubt Me, Do Not Doubt Your Beauty. The lovers always are endowed with a special vision, a special glance that excruciate those beauty spots in the beloved that others, even if they hire ‘microscopes and telescopes’(18, LAO 23) ‘to see deep into your eyes/ they would not discovers blinks your gaze flickers into mine.’(18-19, LAO 23) cannot identify whereas the lover will never fail to ‘discover/ some new nuance of your beauty’(12-13, LAO 23). It is the lover and the beloved who have probed in depth their gazes to reach the perfect beauty already present in each other that  does not required to be beautified artificially. The lover thinks the beloved’s structure, her curves, to be beyond the perfection of a veteran sculptor specially when she ‘press/ against me when our limbs seek a perfect common trunk’(25-26, LAO 23). Not only this but what the lover concludes her uniqueness finally is that though he discovers unseen nuances everyday in her face, still ‘there are parts of you words will never be able to describe’ (55, LAO 24) and because she has exhibited ‘ all true beauty comes from inside out’(58, LAO 24).

Love can induce the inhabitants with all altering, all accepting and all adjusting powers there where people fail to find consent. That we should not count what our partners are not sacrificing for the relation, rather we should value their sacrileges to what they pay their devotion to is what has found meaning in this averment:

Morning rituals of shared coffee

With a tea person should make you wary…

Mightn’t be the coffee they are after

But coffee flavored kisses. (Morning Rituals 1-2 9-10, LAO 35  )

The lovers in love share a good understanding with and for each other. The first and foremost aspect is to let each other be their own true being as this can alter each other to goodness, alter as  humans without altering the person:

Fill me with colors of your knowing…

Heal me with whisperings of your soul…

Teach me things…

Sing to me songs only a lover can sing…

Fill my cracks with gold…

Replenish me, renew me

You altered me in a thousand ways

By just being you.(Being you 6 8 10 11 12 13-15, LAO 47)

The poet has drawn her focus into a very important gesture of love which is to let one’s love find expression to reach the hearts to flex it to each other. There is no such day to be called the love’s day; rather each and every day of the lovers is the day of love and showing it to whom the feelings are for is not supposed to be stored for a particular day to come, hence:

Each night I will shower

Your heart with love drops

as numerous as stars in sky. ( To My Valentine 1-3, LAO  55)

Thus, the more you express, the more you ensures places for each other in each other’s hearts. This small gesture of making them undergo the infiniteness of your emotions for them and making them aware of their esteem in their partners’ life, though not showing it off, is what we can call loving.

Conclusion:

‘ Whether love is directed in a life companion, children, fellow humans or various forms of work and doing…it is crucial that people preserve sufficiently powerful passions and dreams, may be even illusions that inspire and make then feel alive. Love can act as an impetus for goals that give meaning to life. Love, at its best, is manifested by the endeavor to make things develop, grow, and come forward…’ (Maatta and Uusiautti xi) – such is the expansion of the effect of love, such is the widespread of the positivity of love. Not only can it heal or renew but also can create things, can turn impiety to piety:

Love does not always succeed. But for its most radical devotees – the Dido of Ovid’s Heroides, the troubadour poets of the eleventh and twelfth centuries in Occitania, the famous lovers of Shakespeare, and Milton’s Adam and Eve – love is revolutionary, an attempt to tear down the world and build it anew, not in the image of authority, but that of a love that is freely chosen, freely given, and freely received,’ (Bryson and Movsesian 9).

Love has no language, it speaks ‘everywhere the same language’ (Priyadarshni and Micnhimer i) and finds ‘resonance in almost every heart’ (Priyadarshni and Micnhimer i). The anthology is, thus, like a tapestry where every emotion of the pious act of love has been threaded like a garland to crown the readers and to induce in them the multifariousness of love.

Work Cites

Browning, Barrett. A Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, London: Oxford University Press, 1904. Print

Bryson, Michael and Movsesian, Arpi. “Love and Authority: Love Poetry and Its critics”. Love and Its Critics. California: Open Book Publishers, 2017. Web <https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1sq5vd6.5>

Enns, Diana. Love, Life, Death and survival”. Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical journal 48,3 (2015): 47-55. JSTOR. Web. 20 Jan. 2019. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44030453

Maatta, Karina and Uusiautti, Satu. Many Faces of Love. The Netherlands: Sense Publishers, 2013.print

Martin, Adrienne M. “Love, Incorporated”. Ethical Theory and Mortal Practice 18,4 (2015): 691-702. JSTOR. Web.20Jan. 2019. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24478754

Priyadarshini, Nalini. A Doppelganger in My House. Gurgaon: The Poetry Society of India, 2016. print

Priyadarshni, Nalini and Micnhimer, D. Russel. Lines Across Oceans. Gurgaon: The Poetry Society of India, 2017.print

Shakespeare, William. “Sonnet 116”. The Sonnets. Ed. Evans, G. Blakemore. New Delhi:Cambridge University Press, 2011. 90. print

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Bio: Chaitali Giri works as a Project Fellow in the department of English and Culture Studies at The University of Burdwan. She also teaches as a Guest Lecturer in English at MUC Women's College, Burdwan, WB, India. Her articles have been published in journals like Research Guru, New Academia etc. Five of her poems were published in the December, 2018 issue of SETU. Her email is chaitali.giri@gmail.com

Setu, April 2019