Free Odysseus Abroad by Amit Chaudhuri Page A

one part of a line and another, to indicate a pause and a fresh beginning. Also, he’d dispensed with capital letters at the start of each line, and everywhere else for that matter. He believed he’d been able to pull this off without seeming childishly avant-garde; that he’d succeeded in turning this and the other poems he’d shown Nestor Davidson into frozen pieces of music. It was
viraha
—separation from the beloved, an idea important to Kalidas and later to the
bhakti
poets (for whom it resurfaced as Radha’s perennial but unrequited longing for Krishna)—that he must have been trying to invoke. It was a concept unbeknownst to Ananda till he was seventeen; but, once he’d discovered it,
viraha
defined with more and more exactness the yearning he’d been carrying with him for years. The object of his desire was mostly an emanation rather than a specific person with a face and name (despite the fact thathe’d fallen in love with his cousin two years ago)—ah, it could even be a succession of names and faces, among whom, why not, even God could be included.
    —
    “And I’m sure you’re not as
bloodthirsty
as this poem makes you seem,” smiled Mr. Davidson affably, clearly secure in the knowledge that Ananda wasn’t capable of murder; now he was quoting Ananda’s own lines back to him:
“ ‘and if she’d died by me, in such a way / my soul might have been satisfied.’ ”
    Affably? But wasn’t he making fun of two of Ananda’s most beautiful lines? Not cruelly, maybe; but not affably surely? This poem, along with “Across the River,” he’d produced in a stupor of emotion and attentiveness to the sound of words. Could Mr. Davidson, who’d been so receptive to the essays, really miss the poems’ special quality? Was it because he was a fiction-writer, a different sort of beast to a poet? A novelist was about normalcy, wasn’t he—and, despite his susceptibility to the reverberations of Wordsworth, Eliot, and Larkin, Mr. Davidson presented the face of normalcy, of sanity, did he not? He was one who’d outlasted the first terrible pangs of love. Ananda was not only always in their throes—he couldn’t seriously believe that, one day, he wouldn’t be. Only two weeks ago he’d reread Auden’s introduction to Shakespeare’s sonnets, smiling inwardly at Auden’s tentativeness, as he asserted something in a qualified manner because he
knew
it was the truth: “Perhaps poets are more likely to experience it”—meaning “true love”—“than others, or become poets because they have.”
That
was getting it from the horse’s mouth. Mr. Davidson was among those that Auden had discreetly categorised as the “others”; the non-poets. In the quote that Auden had then offered from Hannah Arendt (once more, the apologetic air: “Perhaps Hannah Arendt is right”), Ananda hadbeen startled to notice his own blurred but unmistakable likeness: “Poets are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.” Wryly, he saw the pattern he was following, in committing a similar error with his tutor: it was no surprise, actually, that Mr. Davidson hadn’t grasped what the poem was doing, since, of course, he was no devotee of that “indispensable experience.”
    The poem Nestor Davidson had been gently ridiculing was a meditation on dawn (which Ananda was never up to see: all the better for his imagination and his faint memory, from childhood, of dawn’s radiance); the poet is thinking of his imminent departure from his lover, while she sleeps. He’d like to hold on to that fleeting moment, as the light begins to enter the window, keep it as it is, impossibly unchanging; and this is what leads him to lyrically speculate on whether the death of his sleeping lover—because death and sleep are one—wouldn’t arrest time and the day’s progress; wouldn’t cheat the inevitability of waking and parting. Mr.