Songs of life

William Blake, the 19th century poet from England collected his poetry under two titles - Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. Both these had poems on similar subjects but with different take and thoughts. I am not sure if these were separated by time. Innocence when he was young and Experience at a later stage. The reason for my uncertainty is Blake's enormous amount of intuition even in his youth. He was gifted with a strong sense of imagery that he even had visions before he wrote.

Talking about imagery, Wordsworth left on me a lasting impression. In "Daffodils", his timeless piece there is an eternal reserve of nectar for me. There may be many great appreciations written for this poem but the fact that it stood the test of time is a measure of its travel. Generally, when I write something out of the box, i.e., my brain, I tend to go back to it with almost a phobic diligence and see where, I mean exactly where that magic happened. Then I ponder how it happened and the question why it happened is for my Freudian friends. But what did wordsworth do after he wrote this? Did he take that casual walk in the park after a great accomplishment? I don't know. But he must have felt so much joy that he could kill himself. A sense of fulfillment that, "Yes, exactly, this is it. I was here for this and now it's done". However, he stayed on till today.

Another poet who has a two-line intrusion into my life is Keats. When I was in high school there was not a single piece of his. Agreeably,I found out later, he was too romantic for that age. Love for us was only talking to girls and that too plain-speak. Poetry was beyond the curriculum. Anyway, moving on. The two lines are

"A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness;"

This is the start of a long, long poem called Endymion which today people would not be interested to read unless there are good grades at the end of the tunnel. And the length was often the reason why I never ventured into anything beyond three hundred lines. I don't remember any of it now except the two lines. My father, who has this occasional jog into the English poetry boulevard, introduced me to some of the beautiful English poetry during my high school when I pretended that I could read poetry. Nevertheless he explained to me what it was, at least what his idea about the piece was. He would often with joy share an anecdote about how as Economics students they had boring classes and they used to stand near the window of the literature class to hear the Professor go on and on about Endymion. And arguably, he spent two weeks appreciating "A thing of beauty..". Not the whole thing, just the two lines.

Once upon a time, summers in Hyderabad were enjoyable. Especially the nights which used to be a lot cooler were perfect pretense for a digression into English Poetry. I would bring some of the old books which weren't sold and weren't eaten away by worms and start reading.My mother would bring me some snacks to eat and sit next to me to admire my parrot-like reading of those big English words. She always likes to see me speak in English and which I don't do often at home, even now. Reclining in his easy chair (which he still uses) my father would correct my pronunciation and explain the meaning of a phrase and occasionally recount an anecdote from his college days. How he used go onto the hills around his village herding the cows with a Shakespeare's book in hand and then read, whatever he read in that solitude. And now I get, why the intensities of experience are different between our two readings.Back to the summer night in Hyderabad now: We always read the same set of poems. At some point I had all those poems by heart and could quote from them. We didn't need books after that. We would just sit on the shores of a still pond of Poetry and admire the reflection of timeless imagery.