The elegy and its many faces

Part 8

During the last few weeks I have been discussing the concept of the elegy in relation to the English, American,. Arabic and Persian, Indian and East Asian poetic traditions. In today's column, which will be the final in the series on the elegy, I wish to focus on the Sinhala poetic tradition. There are numerous passages of poetry both in classical poetic texts as well as in the body of folk-poetry that bear the distinct imprint of the elegiac temper. I would like to select two examples, one from the classical elite tradition and one from the folk tradition, to demonstrate certain interesting features associated with the elegiac impulse as it finds expression in Sinhala poetry. In the second half of the column I would like to select a few examples from modern Sinhala poetry to illustrate the way the concept of the elegy has been given figurality by modern writers.

The first example is from classical literature – it is the famous lament of King Kusa in the ‘Kavsilumina’ after Prabhavathi has left him. The ‘Kavsilumina’ belongs to the category of a ‘maha kavya’ as ancient Sanskrit literary theorists defined it. It was written in the 13th century and is generally regarded as the greatest poem in the language. Not everyone, to be sure, agrees with this assessment, and critics like Martin Wickremasinghe are less impressed by it.

The ‘Kavsilumina’ is based on the kusa jatakaya, although the narrative has been re-structured by the poet to meet his specific and pre-determined needs. The combination of Buddhist narratives, often a Jataka story, and classical Sanskrit poetics is a feature that is manifest in many classical Sinhala poetical works; it is certainly the case with the ‘Kavsilumina’. The theme of the beauty and the best is found in many cultures and the kusa jatakaya constitutes a variation on that theme. After Prabhavathi leaves him, King Kusa laments her departure in moving terms. This is contained in 35 stanzas in chapter 12 of the ‘Kavsilumina’. This lament bears the marks of an overpowering elegiac impulse.

The powerful King Kusa, after her queen decides to go back, in utter misery and helplessness laments her departure. What is interesting about this lament is that it is centered on the physical attributes of Prabhavathi. Her face, , eyes, limbs, breasts are constantly evoked. The pull of physical desire makes his memories become more tense and sensual, while registering corresponding transition from visual pleasure to tactile delights. The poet makes use of images drawn from nature to depict his intense sorrow. Critics like Martin Wickremasinghe have pointed out that this exclusive focus on the physicality of Prabhavathi tends to diminish the stature of King Kusa who is after all a Bodhisatva. He goes on to compare this lament with the famous lament of King Aja in Kalidasa’s magnum opus the ‘Raghuvamsa’.

In The Ragnuvamsa, King Aja, after the death of his beloved wife Queen Indumathi laments her departure unconsolably. The difference here is that the king dwells on her spiritual qualities rather than physical attributes. On the basis of this comparison Wickremasinghe says that the elegiac passages in the Raguvamsa have a greater depth than those in the Kavsilumina. Martin Wickremasinghe’s observation is valid. However, in my judgment, there is a complexity to King Kusa’s characters that literary critics often tend to ignore. In fact the lament of Kusa can best be understood in terms of that complexity of character.

King Kusa was an ugly man; he realized full well that he was not attractive to the fair sex. He refused to marry and extolled the virtues of a non-domestic life. He was also a talented artist - a musician, a sculptor.

His interest in art was a form of sublimation of his sexual impulses. He created an idea image of womanhood aided by his repressed sexuality. Queen Prabhavthi conformed beautifully to that idealized iconic image of his. Hence, it was only natural that he would fall in live with the gorgeous Prabhavathi. However, when she decides to leave him and return to her parental in the city of Sagala, it is psychologically cogent that his repressed sexuality finds expression in the descriptions of her corporeal beauty. When one adopts such an optic to the elegiac passages contained in Kusa’s lament, one begins to see that the poet’s move to focus on the somatic attractions is totally justified. The elegiac passages contained in the ‘Kavsilumina’ are more complex and nuanced than one is led to believe at first glance.

If my line of argumentation is plausible, then, the elegiac lament of Kusa displays a thoughtful poetic art practised by the poet. A psychoanalytic approach of the Freudian or the Lacanian kind would uncover a vast richness of meaning concealed in these elegiac verses. In other words, the author of the Kavsilumins succeeded in investing his elegiac verses with a weight of psychological meaning that emanates from the complex character of Kusa. When we place the whole episode within a psychoanalytic framework and focus on the relationship between human subjectivity and the symbolic realm as Lacan advised us to do, the true import of these elegiac verses begin to emerge. The relationship between subjectivity, desire and language is crucial to a proper understanding of these verses in the Kavsilumina.

Some among my readers might object to the move of using a postmodern thinker such as Jacques Lacan to decode the meaning of a 13th century Sinhala text. At one level, there is merit to this charge. However it is important to bear in mind that at a deeper level what Lacan is saying is the following. Human subjectivity is premised on linguistic structures and the subject of enunciation has to be understood as a construction of language; this is indeed valid for any time or place. The subject of enunciation refers to the speaking voice that is brought into being through language and the author of the Kavsilumina was a master in this domain.

Let us consider next an example from the Sinhala folk-poetry tradition. Sinhala folk-poetry is full of verses that carry indubitable elegiac implications. This is hardly surprising in view of the fact that the Buddhist moral imagination that informs much of Sinhala folk poetry focuses on suffering and loss – themes central to the elegy. An interesting point about elegies found in Sinhala folk poetry is that animals too have become the object of poetic celebration and lamentation.

When discussing Sinhala folk poems containing strong elegiac passages, four poems demand close attention. They are The Story of Yasodara (Yasodaravata), The Poem of Vessantara (Vessantara Kavyaya), The Lament of Pattini (Pattini Halla) and The Lament of Kuveni (Kuveni Halla). The Yasodaravata describes the sense of sadness and anxiety felt by queen Yasodara after her husband, prince Siddhartha decides to renounce worldly life. In the Vessanata Kavyaya, King Vessantara, who is a Bodhisatva, hands over all his belongings including his two young children in his quest for truth and wisdom.

Her lament over her two missing children constitutes the emotional center of the poem. In Pattini Halla, the goddess Pattini realizes that her husband has been slaughtered by the king of Madurai. And she mourns his death. In Kuveni Halla the legendary prince Vijaya decides to turn his back on Kuveni, and in order to gain legitimization for his rule marries a queen from India Kuveni laments what she perceives as an act of wanton cruelty and betrayal. All four poems, in their different ways, can be regarded as elegies. A point of interest about all four works is that the elegies focus on the loss, misery, betrayal experienced by women.

In this column I wish to focus on the Yasodaravatha. It is a folk-poem of unknown authorship and consists of 130 rhymed, metrical stanzas; they are quatrains. Many of them have been composed to the specifications of the ‘samudra ghosga’ meter. That the Yasodaravatha belongs to the folk tradition is abundantly clear from the folksy diction as well as the ways in which the poet has flagrantly transgressed some of the norms of classical Sinhala poetics regarding repetition and end-rhyming. Words such as ‘isnane’, ‘sami’, ‘suvamine’, ‘samba vuna’ point to folk origins. Though not all verses are equally moving and well-constructed, there are several that display a literary imagination of a high order. These are a few of them. (The translations are by Ranjini Obeyesekere).

When the queen was sleeping on her golden bed

The full moon from the sky, shone on her bed,

The gold-limbed queen to King Sudovun went

trough the third watch of the night, I saw the moon’ she said.

As on her flower-filled bed queen Maya slept,

She saw her seated on mount Meru’s peak

Saw a nearby village caressed by the full moon’s beams

‘O king what is the meaning of that dream?

Verses like these reflect the poet’s laudable command of language and poetic utterance. In the following verses we see how the power of elegy manifests itself in this poem.

My eyes are full, my garment wet, tears fall

As my husband, nectar-like, I do recall

He went leaving our one son, I now remember

Does the world hold another such as me

My moon-like lord who partook of fragrant foods

That I with special flavorings made for you

May fragrant herbs now sprout in the forest for you

And scented flowers bloom for my lord of gold

In some of the verses, one observes a self-effacement on the pat of Yasodara, and concern for the health and welfare of her husband living in unfamiliar surroundings; consequently she conforms to the ideal of traditional womanhood. However, not all stanzas follow this predilection.

On a bed if flowers in the forest are you sleeping

Your tender lovely feet are they now hurting/

Are there sufficient gods around you guiding

Dear husband, my elephant king, where are you roaming/

Nay all the forest fruits for you turn sweeter,

May men surround you as the bees a flower

May the sun’s scorching rays for you get dimmer

And league by league may heavenly halls appear

Narrative authority

The narrative structure of this elegy is interesting and invites close attention. There is a rapid description of the main events of the Buddha’s life leading to his renunciation; against that background the poet allows the melancholy lament of Yadsodara to emerge. The way the poem gains its narrative authority merits closer consideration. Initially in narrating the main events of the future Buddha’s life we see in operation an omniscient viewpoint. After Siddharta leaves home, the lament of Yasodara is expressed through the first person view point of her. At the end of the poem, the narrative perspective once gain shifts to that of omniscience as it ties the threads together and draws out the appropriate moral lessons from the entire experience. This conjunction of narrative perspectives has a way of reinforcing the authority of the poem.

As an elegy there are a number of distinctive features in The Yasodaravatha that we need to pay attention to. First, understandably, the entire elegy is framed within a decidedly Buddhist imagination. The tropes and topoi come directly out of Buddhist thinking and experience. Second, the complex narrative structure, especially the amalgamation of the different narrative optics, gives the poem a denser meaning.

Third, unlike many of the Western elegies that we examined it is a woman who occupies the emotional center of the elegy. Fourth, the author of the Yasodaravatha succeeds in introducing a complex tension into the character of Yasodara. On the one hand she is devastated by the fact that Prince Siddhartha has chosen to renounce worldly life leaving behind her and their son. On the other hand, she is also aware of the fact that he is doing so in order to attain wisdom that would ultimately help mankind.

Let us now turn to modern Sinhala literature and see how the elegy makes its culture-bound appearance. The Colombo poets wrote many poems that can be describes as elegies, some even basing their efforts on the English Romantics, but they failed to produce poetry of a high order. Except for a few poems such as ‘Kana Unde’, most of the rest are easily forgettable as elegies. One of the finest elegies written in Sinhala in modern times is Munidasa Cumaratunga’s ‘Piya Samara’. It was published in 1935. This is indeed a poem that has yet to receive its full critical justice. I myself was slow to appreciate its true value, put off as I was by the general archaic language that the poet seemed to prefer. However, when one is able to come to terms with this fact, one would realize that Piya Samara is an elegy that displays an extraordinarily fertile creative imagination as well as control of emotion and dsciplined thoughtfulness.

Piya Samra, in many ways, announces the beginning of modern Sinhala poetry. It is an elegy, a confessional poem that introduced a distinctively modern sensibility to Sinhala poetry. This is an elegy that celebrates the life of his deceased father; however it is not so much a continuous biographical narrative of his life as the putting together of a number of strong memories about him. The poet was a mere child when his father died; he is now looking back on those childhood memories from the vantage point of a mature person who is nearing fifty years of age. It is this conjunction of childhood memories and mature reflection that gives the poem its distinct solidity and introspective energy.

Artistic apprehension

Although the poem deals with the life of the poet’s father, at a deeper level of artistic apprehension it is more about the poet than his father. It is a poem that stages the complexities of self-fashioning; in this sense, Piya Samara can be termed a pre-elegy as well.

In this poem, Cumaratunga constructs a narrative structure out of the scattered and dispersed memories and ruminations of his father. What is interesting about the self that emerges in Piya Samara is that it is not a sovereign and self-present individual that modern western poets mistakenly valorize but much more a product of social memory and communal relations. Here I am reminded of the social scientist Maurice Halbwachs who inaugurated new era of study of memory by focusing on the concept of social memory.

Piya Samara is an elegy and a confessional poem, and the impulses associated with one galvanize the other. The conjunction of memory and reflection that I alluded to earlier pervades the poem. It acts as a cohesive force that highlight’s the author’s poetic credo which springs to life in stanza after stanza. Let me give an example. The poem opens with a stanza written in conformity to the ‘druta vilambita’ meter, which depicts his father lying on the death bed, calling is thirteen year son (the poet) to offer him good counsel for wholesome living in the future. Obviously, the young boy has a mind of is own, and the father was fully aware of this; the poem makes this clear.

The adult poet now looks back on this episode and is overcome with guilt. It is evident that this consciousness of ineradicable guilt drives the poetic discourse in interesting directions.

As an elegy, Cumaratunga’s poem focuses on the idea of community which was central to his thinking. In his view, community implied a moral relationship that underpinned human responsibility and agency.

The way he develops this idea invests the poem with a cultural density and purpose. It is also evident that as the poem unfolds the elegiac and confessional imperatives combine to promote a self-clarification leading to self-understanding and self-acceptance on the part of the poet. Hence, it can be said that the Piya samara moves simultaneously on a number of different axes.

Compactness

Piya Samara is a carefully constructed elegy. While Martin Wickremadinghe lauded his effort, he felt that the poem was more in the nature of a sketch that was to be expanded later. However, it seems to me, this compactness is part of the design and meaning of the poem.

Instead of offering a full-fledged biographical narrative, Cumaratunga has attempted to present a chain of powerful memories, and reflections on them, through the eyes of a poet. Another important aspect of this elegy is the self-control and discipline exercised by the poet.- scenes, that in the hands of a lesser poet, could have easily degenerated into bathos and melodrama, are handled with mature restraint. The Piya Samata, then, is one of the finest Sinhala elegies written in the twentieth century.

In more recent times, a number of modern Sinhala poets have written poems that can be usefully described as elegies. Some of the works of Gunadasa Amarasekera, Siri Gunasinghe, Mahagama Sekera, Dayasena Gunasinghe, Monica Ruwanpathirana, among others, spring to mind. I now wish to call attention to an elegy by Gunadasa Amarasekera gathered in his volume ‘Avarjana’. The poem is titled ‘Mehekariyage Miyagiya Piya’.

The poem deals with the death of the old and feeble father of the poet’s house-maid. The decrepit body, feeble and battered, is described by the poet in a series of graphic tropes.

Against that multi-faceted image of the old man, who comes to emblematize human suffering, the poet sees his death as a relief from the torments of physical living. Speaking of his death the poet asks the question

How can it be a pain and sorrow

It is not a pain, only a solace

What is interesting about this elegy is that the subject of commemoration is not a famous figure, a celebrity, one who belongs to the elite class; it is a poor peasant who is barely able to eke out a living. It is also interesting to note that while in most elegies we examined death was seen as a betrayer, a cruel force that robbed people of glory and achievement, in this elegy of Amarasekera death is seen as a welcome presence,

Conclusionww

I would like to conclude my discussion of the elegy in modern Sinhala poetry by referencing one of my own poems. This a poem much cited and the title is ‘The Death of an Old Woman (Miyagiya Uvasiya).I have translated this from my original Sinhala.

The holy book lies open on the table

The compound drifts with withered leaves

The lamp that shone there flickers no longer

Now and then, behind the hut, a stray dog barks.

This highly compact poem is based on a childhood experience of mine growing in a remote village in the North Western Province. A pious old woman that I used to see often had died, and through a series of images of absence I sought to create a living presence of her in this elegy.

In this series of columns on the elegy and its many faces I have sought to cast the net as wide as possible. I began with a discussion of the nature and shape of the elegy as a poetic genre and how it grew within the classical English poetic tradition.

I then proceeded to discuss some prominent elegies produced by modern American poets who expanded the discursive horizons of this form. After that I went on to explore the ways in which the elegy flowered in classical India, the Middle-East, and East Asia. Finally I focused on some memorable elegies found in classical and modern Sinhala literatures.

The selection of the elegies and the readings of them offered are entirely mine; to that extent my commentaries bear the traces of my own preferences and antipathies. Wherever possible, I sought to make use of deconstructive protocols with the intention of deepening the literary experience communicated by the chosen elegies as for example in my discussion of the Meghaduta; this strategy may or may not have worked depending on the predilections of the readers. Clearly, the elegy is an evolving form; as we saw clearly, it draws on the culture that it inhabits. Hence, it is hardly surprising that elegies produced in different cultures whether in East Asia or the Middle East or South Asia breathe in an atmosphere saturated with cultural codes, conventions and practices.