TRK
Travelogues
Manohar Shetty
Dom Moraes -
The Urbane Minstrel
MANOHAR SHETTY Pays a Tribute to DOM MORAES On His First Death Anniversary
To use the title of a poem by Jon
Silkin, 2004 was a year
which left ‘a space in the air’ in the diminishing world of English
language
poetry in India. This bleak period saw the passing away of three
mentor-like
figures: Nissim Ezekiel, Arun Kolatkar and Dom Moraes. At 66, Moraes
was the
youngest. He was also the youngest to be crowned by fame when at the
age of 19
in 1958 he won the Hawthornden, Britain’s most hallowed poetry prize.
The early
success did not go Moraes’ head. (Except briefly, when he infamously
denounced
the liberation of Goa. ‘I am horrified, ashamed and appalled by the
action of
the Indian government’, he declared in the ‘Evening Standard.’ in the
UK). He
followed up ‘A Beginning ‘with equally accomplished work in ‘Poems’
(1960),
‘John Nobody’ (1965) and ‘Beldam & Others’ (1967). Then
followed a long,
fallow period of 17 years when the poems dried up. There may have been
some
unnerving moments (all poets know the fear of falling silent) but
Moraes
thought of the time as a ‘germination period for words, while
experience and
travel took over my life’.
It was 1983 by the time he eked out
‘Absences’, published
privately in a limited edition.
By this
time Moraes had left England and settled, warily, in Bombay. More new
poems
appeared in ‘Collected Poems’ (1957-1987). But it was only in1990,
after a gap
of 23 years, that another full-length collection, ‘Serendip’, emerged.
In
between these books, Moraes published extensively-- travelogues,
autobiographies, notably the candid and moving ‘My Son’s Father’ and
biographies of Indira Gandhi and Sunil Gavaskar.
‘Absences’ marks a hyphen between his
‘English and ‘Indian’
periods. Moraes may never have felt at home in India, but the language,
the
reference points, the sensuous lyricism never changed in the poetry
itself. Though
some of his later work was more elliptical, the allusions increasingly
elusive,
the poems were still stamped with his trademark sentient images and an
undercurrent of emotion. Only a certain levity found in earlier poems
like ‘At
Seven O’clock’ and ‘Bells for William Wordsworth’ was missing. The
institutionalizing of his mentally ill mother early in his life
continued to
haunt him in middle-age. But he was now able to confront the pain
directly. In
the apparently simple and compellingly sad ‘Letter to My Mother ‘he
writes: ‘I am
ashamed of myself/Since I
was ashamed of you.’ This is a departure from ‘A Letter’ in his second
book
where he remarks defensively, ‘My mother mad, and time we went away’.
The fine-tuning of emotion, as in the
magnificent ‘Future Plans’
in ‘Serendip’, is what lends grace and validity to Moraes’ opulent
lyricism. As
he puts it: ‘All the pain of the poem is the pain of the poet.’ Even at
his
lowest creative ebb, Moraes was never merely a technician producing
poems
‘written by a typewriter on a typewriter’. This ‘felt lyricism’ spanned
his
preoccupations with exile and mythical figures, loneliness, lost (and
found)
love, and forebodings of death.
It is an irony that Moraes himself
would have recognized
that though his early poems were received rapturously in the West, his
work now
is not currently fashionable there, though it is in India. In a sense
Dom
Moraes’ life had come full circle. The best of his poems will surely
survive
transient trends.
With his gangly good looks, his
adolescent smile, the
quizzical eye looking out and over his reading glasses, and the
world-weary
carelessness (pay packet spilling out of his back pocket, whiff of
mid-morning
whisky), Dom Moraes was an urbane but vulnerable minstrel. He was a
brilliant
conversationalist, full of amusing stories and anecdotes (some possibly
apocryphal). But one had to strain hard to catch his near-imperceptible
flow of
words. Not so for the poems which speak as eidetic entities.
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