- Chaitali Giri
Guest Lecturer at MUC Women’s College
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
Maatta, Karina and Uusiautti, Satu. Many Faces of Love. The Netherlands: Sense Publishers, 2013.print
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
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
