The Poet & The Thinker

Maybe this shadow of mine
was born before I was.
Now I am never alone
because it’s always there.
People come often, stopping by
for my shadow.
− Shadow
(Random Descent, Third Eye Communications, Bhubaneswar, 2005, p.28)

I have no choice today
The house I have lived in all these years
has forgotten the stone it was made of
− Stones
(Ibid, p.47)

A dusk of memories
makes me feel weak and light;
I am unable to move.
Old stories reach
For those memories’ hands.
− A Sound of Flutes
(A Whiteness of Bone, Viking Penguin, ibid, p.62)

What does my world say?
I follow the substance of my shadow
in the procession of light on the leaves;
and I watch myself, standing in shadow,
afraid to step out of it.
But then the sun comes down on me.
− Harvest
(Burden of Waves And Fruit, Three Continents Press, ibid, p.28)

Jayanta Mahapatra as a poet is not only a writer of verse to be taken simply at one go, but a dreamer and a visionary, a physicist and a philosopher dwelling apart, delving too far into the unknown and unchartered domains and trajectories, which lie they stretched beyond, lengthening off to shadow space and encompassing in life signs to tell of life lived, felt and experienced through a strange vacuum seen and perceived. Apart from one of strong faith and belief, myth and mysticism shown against the backdrop of the rock-built temples, he has little to derive from and take out, as suspense and doubt seem to be taking the space to engage him otherwise and he bends to nihilism, existentialism and iconoclasm through which he builds and outdoes, constructs and deconstructs. A search is almost there in him, as for the images of life and for values, letting them as they are and as they will be in future. Art to him is not for art’s sake merely, but for morality too and he writes attaching with that. But to gather the momentum philosophically, from nowhere to somewhere and somewhere to nowhere, where one to go, how the images and reflections of life shadowed, this very silhouetting continues in his poetry.

If to ask him, he will perhaps say it, poetry is the photo negatives of life, images fleeting and in a flux and the reel moving on is the thing to be felt and understood at some level of inner consciousness. To read Jayanta is to come to the conclusion, nothing is what it seems to be and what it seems to be is nothing, as because the scenes and sites go shifting with the change in situation, idea, thought and reflection and the unconscious mind can always be seen at work. To paint the image against the backdrop of bright and shadowed lights is the flair of the writer.

A poet of silence and rural landscapes, his mind settles in the India of villages living in mud-houses with thatched roofs and the people holding faith in great belief which but betrays too, as faith remains not faith, but turns into blind faith thudded by doubt lurking within and suspense taking over. A poet who has studied physics as his subject with specialization and has taught it into the classrooms, he startles us with his poetic flight and imagination, brooding and insight, imagery and myth-making, peep and penetration, random reflection and introspection.

After his early education which he received in Orissa, he went to Patna University, Bihar to do his M.Sc. in physics, lived on the banks of the Ganges, saw the river in its rage and majesty, but could not understand his feelings then. He returned back to his native place after the attainment of the postgraduate degree and taught in the various colleges of Orissa before switching finally over to Ravenshaw College, Cuttack wherefrom superannuated too in 1986. This is all about his professional career that we know superficially. There is still much to learn from his memoirs, sketches and reflections; essays, papers and acceptance speeches; tours, travels, visits, sojourns and literary friendships. There are some editors who have really promoted him and his poetry. An Oriya Christian, and this too has a history of own, he starts his career as an amateur writer when in his forties.

“Over the sloughing of the somber wind
priests chant louder than ever:
the mouth of India opens.”
− Indian Summer Poem
(A Rain of Rites, ibid, p.35)

Let us see how Prof K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar takes to while editing the book for the third edition in 1982 for to be brought out in 1983 and adding a new chapter called Postscript where there figures in the page about the new poet Jayanta Mahapatra and his inclusion:

“Jayanta Mahapatra’s A Rain of Rites (1976), Waiting (1979), The False Start and Relationship (1980) reveal a first-rate poetic sensibility, and the last volume fittingly won the Sahitya Akademi award. Jayanta is a close observer of men and things, and he finds.

Every man, every beast
trapped, deaf in his own sleep…

The lyric notes are sharp, they sting − yet somehow satisfy. The cripples at Puri who are taken for granted, the white-clad widows: Truth seems twisted sometimes, yet pitiless. ‘Hunger’ is brutal in its precision of despair, neither pseudo-romanticism nor routine realism. In several of the 44 lyrics in Waiting, Jayanta seems half-unconsciously to recapitulate Vedic times and themes, for he too is Man watching Nature within and without. The ancient spiritual quest tugs at the physicist-poet’s heart-strings. Why death? Why pain? Why this “wistful dreaming about the axis of the past”? The False Start is another vibrant string of lyrical poems, the running theme being the need to beyond defeat and attempt to reach after the seeming unattainable. Relationship is a sustained long poem, an expansion of the private lyric voice into a chain of meditations embracing a region, a tradition, a whole way of life. The theme and its half-hypnotic articulation alike compel respectful admiration. − (K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar, Indian Writing In English, Sterling Publishers Private Limited, New Delhi , Reprint 1993, p.713)

The poetic journey of Jayanta Mahapatra starts from 1971 or a little before it and the two history books will certify his arrival. This is possible in Indian English poetry that one starts one’s poetic journey just with the publication of a handful of poems and a book on the anvil, but even in our modern Indian languages it is difficult to attain the heights so soon. They turned into poets and poetesses easily, sailed through smoothly, but the coming times are going to be difficult as the writers will have to struggle and suffer more for new breaks in poetry.

“Only twilight,
that begins nowhere and ends nowhere
touches me like nothing does.
Its femininity, quickened and childishness,
stands out apart;
it begins in loss, beauty, the nearness of soul.”
− Only Twlight
(Bare Face, D.C.Books, Kottayam, 2000, p.14)

There are different facets of the same Jayanta Mahapatra. He is a poet of the morning, the dawn, the midday, the dusk and the nightfall and of the midnight too when he talks of being alone in the house with a rat running just like that of W.B. Yeats’ An Acre of Grass. There are several poems named round the golden and breaking dawn, glistening beautifully, reddening and brightening, flashing and dazzling. Again, the same scene with a little difference can be marked in the glowing sun about to set to be contrasted with the moon going behind the cottage of Lucy in Strange Fits of Passion and the glowing, sunny pastoral scene with Christopher Marlowe’s The Passionate Shepherd To His Love.

“Endless crow noises.
A skull on the holy sands
tilts its empty country towards hunger.
White-clad widowed women
past the centres of their lives
are waiting to enter the Great Temple.”
− Dawn at Puri
(A Rain of Rites,The University of Georgia Press, Athens, 1976, p.28)

Let us mark how Prof. M.K. Naik takes to,

“Jayanta Mahapatra (1928-), another academic, began his career with Close the Sky, Ten by Ten (1971) and has since published Svayamvara and Other Poems (1971), A Rain of Rites (1976), Waiting (1979), Relationship (1980, Sahitya Akademi Award, 1981) and The False Start (1980). Mahapatra’s poetry is redolent of the Orissa scene and the Jagannatha temple at Puri figures quite often in it. His most characteristic note is one of quiet but often ironic reflection mostly concerning love, sex and sensuality in the earlier poetry and the social and political scene in some of the later poems. His style has an admirable colloquial ease, punctuated by thrusts of striking images as, for instance, ‘his lean-to opened like wound’ and ‘the one wide street/lolls out like a giant tongue.’ His muted brooding occasionally results in extremes of either excessively cryptic statement of verbal redundancy and in weaker moments he is seen echoing other poets, as in the Eliotesque ‘mornings/Like pale yellow hospital linen’; but his better work indicates a poetic voice which promises to gather strength in the years to come.”  − (M.K. Naik, A History of Indian English Literature, Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, 1982, p.207)

A catalogue or bibliography of his books itself will speak of what he has as the works cited in as for our ready reference:

• Close the sky, Ten by Ten, Dialogue Publication, Calcutta, 1971
• Svayamvara and Other Poems, Writers Workshop, Calcutta, 1971
• A Father’s Hours, United Writers , Calcutta, 1976
• A Rain of Rites, University of Georgia Press, Athens (USA), 1976
• Waiting, Samkaleen Prakashan, New Delhi, 1979
• The False Start, Clearing House, Bombay, 1980
• Relationship, Greenfield Review Press, Greenfield, New York 1980
• Life Signs, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1983
• Dispossessed Nests, Nirala Publications, Jaipur,1986
• Selected Poems, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1987
• Burden of Waves and Fruit, Three Continents Press, Washington, 1988
• Temple, Dangaroo Press, Sydney, 1989
• A Whiteness of Bone, Viking Penguin, New Delhi, 1992
• The Best of Jayanta Mahapatra, Bodhi Publications, Calicut, 1995
  Shadow Space, D.C. Books, Kottayam, 1997
• Bare Face, D.C. Books, Kottayam, 2000
• Random Descent, Third Eye Communications, Bhubaneswar, 2005
• The Lie of Dawns: Poems 1974-2008, Authorspress, New Delhi, 2009

The foothills are quiet, it’s another day.
A new mist chokes the trees.
A sky of silence,
meaningless as man’s hatred,
as grass upon graves,
comes out into the sun.
− Dawn
(A Whiteness of Bone, ibid, p.62)

Jayanta Mahapatra published his first poetic venture titled Close the Sky, Ten by Ten and the book appeared from some Dialogue Publication, Calcutta. The work, though inclusive of mainly shorter poems, bordering on lyrical effusion, verbal play and imagistic lining, just talked of the arrival of the new writer. Most of the poems which he included in the work were imagistic portals, opening the Pandora’s box, full of image, imagery and imagism, the imagist in the making, the footfall of his sounding nearer, but one could not guess it then, nor the materials were so tight and meaningful. When it dazzles the light, imagery takes wings just like the gossamer shining underneath in the morning sunlight; when it grows dark and opaque, imagery takes wings again with the shadows lurking in, darkness enveloping and the birds returning back to their nests. He has played with words linguistically and the jargon of words prevailing upon. Today it is difficult to get the copy of the book. Just the xerox materials are doing the rounds for research works. It has not been reprinted. The author’s copy itself is the source material of it published long ago. A few of these poems just figure in research works otherwise the anthologists represent them not in the maximum.

I am still here.
To talk to the phantoms of time.
As the season of a hundred thousand years
starts to speak with its strange voice again.
− Season
(Shadow Space, D C Kottayam Books, 1997, p.28)

A poet of the seventies, he is a recipient of several accolades and prizes, honors and certificates and has delivered his lectures and speeches world-wide, going to the overseas. Jayanta received SAARC Literary Award for 2009, Allen Tate Poet Prize for 2009 and an honorary doctorate from Ravenshaw University in the same year. A recipient of Padma Shri from the Govt. of India in 2009, he is acclaimed for his service to literature and society.

A poet of Orissa, Oriya history, art, culture and thematics, he writes with Cuttack, Bhubaneswar, Puri and Konark as the hub of his poetry which he keeps rounding about, referring in a multiple way. The Chilka Lake with its natural habitat and migratory birds, the Konark Sun-temple with the chariot, the Jagannath Puri-temple with the statues of Jagannath, Balabhdara and Subhadra and the Lingaraj-temple telling of rock-cut splendour, the Puri sea-beach with calm and commotion and the Mahanadi and the Chandrabhaga rivers flowing through hold the poetic pen of Jayanta to write about and he does too in demarcating a cartography of that. As an imagist, he is Ezra Poundian, exploiting imagery and imagism and poems come to him as images and reflections and you go on seeing them rather than deriving for meaning just like a passenger peeping out of the window of the moving train bogey.

A myth-maker, he weaves the myths personal and private, deriving in the way as Yeats did in Sailing to Byzantium and others, as did Wordsworth while tuning to the reaper’s song. A singer of Ireland not, but of Orissa, its history, art, sculpture, tradition and space, he goes in the way of his to be a Gregoryian ballad singer. Just like David Herbert Lawrence, he sees the erotic sculptures carved on the outer temple-walls telling of man-woman relationship, telling of the dharma, artha, kama and moksha motif and the yoga-yoginis and it is form there that he got the dark daughter of his Relationship.

Who is this dark daughter, a yoga-yogini or a nautch girl turned into stone or a temple-serving devadasi? How to identify her? Is she an attribute of the Mother Goddess or a working class girl standing speechless and benumbed? Maybe she womankind upon whom atrocities are heaped upon. How to identify her?

A historiographer, a curator, a conservator, a photographer, he photographs the rock-built temples, in their full splendor and long-standing, the poet tries to go deep into their history, as for who made them and when did they? But there is none to answer. Everything is but anonymous and the history silent about all that. The history of Orissa is his subject and the culture of it the space of his poetry. He is first and foremost an Oriya rather than an Indian. An Oriya poet in an English garb is the thing to be dealt and this is true in respect of the poet. His poetic spectrum and the horizon of thinking match with that of Samuel Beckett’s in Waiting for Godot. Just waiting continues, not sure of whether Godot will turn up or not. Why are the tramps waiting for? Or, are we the tramps in reality passing our days in doing absurd and useless things? Is our life meaningless as Shakespeare says in the extract from Macbeth that life is a series of tomorrows ending death? Life is nothing but a walking shadow. Is it not? We do not know if his existentialism from the book of physics or from Kierkegaard, Kafka and Sartre. Poetry as seems to us from a reading of his poetry is but a book of physics, more specially the light chapter of it. To understand him better, Jayanta is but an absurdist and his poetry a study in absurdism. As Khushwant Singh is of the Punjab and its legacy and heritage so is Jayanta Mahapatra in his delineation of Odisha and the Odias.

He is an imagist and this is the reason for which the images cannot be resolved, analyzed and annotated. Apart from an imagist’s foray and delving, he is a nihilist too, drawing from vacant thinking, random reflections and the shadow space, and this all shows his journey from here to astronomy to where? To read him is not to be light and happy, but to be laden and down, tense and fretful. A serious poet, he takes life seriously. Many read him, but fail to derive from as he is obscure and meaningless. The meaning is not there in his verse-lines. He is so abstract and condensed that words fail to claw at. Shifting shadows and images can never be explained and this is the case in the context of the poet in pursuance to meaning not, but linguistic presentation. Light and darkness are two sides of the same coin and these go swapping places in the poetry of his. A poet of some Oriya heart and soul, he cannot dwell anywhere barring it, the mind cannot lift to barring the place where he was born, got his schooling from, just falling short of being a Rupert Brooke.

Jayanta Mahapatra went on publishing one book after to substantiate and consolidate his position. Svayamvara and Other Poems was just a little bit better than the former. A Rain of Rites is actually the book to be reckoned with and here his poetry takes the flight. The famous poem, Dawn At Puri is herein. The False Start too is a good attempt whereas Waiting is a book of historical background. Relationship brings him the laurel in the form of the Sahitya Akademi Award. But one should not take for the Temple of Jayanta Mahapatra as for George Herbert’s The Temple, as the title is contradictory and there is nothing like that which Herbert has detailed upon in his poetry. Apart from being a poet, he is a prose writer, a short story writer, an editor, a translator and a reviewer and his books have arrived from small and big presses. Before getting name and fame in India, he had been famous elsewhere as he used to send his poems to foreign journals. Some of these were rejected definitely, but instead of that, he got rewards for his poetry. Sometimes the editors misjudge the entries and the same make a way when published elsewhere.

We question Nissim Ezekiel with regards to his identity and he suffers from the quest for identity too, but Jayanta passes the test without any doubt, as he is an Indian poet writing with Oriya blood and soul. The defeat of Ashoka he has not forgotten, the blood which it spilled from the slaughtered Oriyas when lay they lifeless and motionless in blood, writhing in pain and death on the banks of the Daya river, as the fields of Dhauli littered with the dead bodies, innumerable in number. On seeing the men killed and butchered, the heart of King Ashoka changed and he begged for penance through his rock edicts and turned into a Buddhist.

Apart from an imagist and a photographer of scenes and sights, temples and picnic spots, lakes and beaches, villages and village-ways, he is a realist, a social thinker and a feminist. Rape, violence, murder, atrocity, corruption, terrorism, communal unrest, bombardment, poverty, exploitation and injustice rake him badly and he longs for an expression. The newspaper items dealing with hunger, poverty, rape and death take the canvas away from him and he seeks to dabble in ink with a very heavy heart of his rarely to be found. What can poetry if the ills are not diagnosed and cured? The dowry deaths sadden him and he feels morose and broken. In the earlier poems of his, he had been so much imagistic and lyrical, but in the latter he turned to feminism and social realities.

An orange flare
lights the pale panes of the hospital
in a final wish of daylight.
It’s not yet dark.
− Twilight
(Burden of Waves And Fruit, ibid, p.23)

We do not know as to how to re-designate and rechristen him by calling a modern or a post-modern, a colonialist or a post-colonialist. When he just started to write, he had not been sure of what the future critics would designate him as for his verse. Like an Indian poet, quite insecure of his rank and placement into the annals, he just chose to dabble in verse. It is also true side by side that there had not been too much of competition then. A few used to think of publishing in English and the poetry-collections of the then time used to. To be a modern Indian language poet was but a difficult task rather than being an Indian English poet.

To see the things in the eyes of K.S. Ramamurti,

“Mahapatra is again a poet whose poetry shows the stamp of the modernist and post-modernist influences. The recurrent themes of his poetry are loneliness, the complex problems of human relationships, the difficulties of meaningful communication, the life of the mind in relation to the life of the external world and the complex nature of love and sex.” − (K.S.Ramamurti, Twenty-five Indian Poets in English, Macmillan, Delhi, Reprinted 1996, p.55)

“Mahapatra has a feel for some rare moments which, even if they appear to be ordinary and insignificant, can mean a great deal for a poet of such delicate sensibility when he looks back upon it and contemplates it in retrospect. As in most modernist poetry, there is in Mahapatra’s poetry greater emphasis on subjective memory and inner self than on the external world or actual events.” − (Ibid, p.65)

“There is a photograph still hanging
on the wall in my father’s house. It is quite old;
and against an elaborate backdrop the photographer used,
are my parents, my younger brother and I.
I want to shut it from my mind
because it reminds me of a useless moment.”
− The Dispossessed
(A Whiteness of Bone, Viking Penguin, New Delhi,1992, p.29)

People call him a very tough poet to be dealt with, as because he is imagistic, linguistic, lyrical, nonsensical, nihilistic, blank, abstract, mythical, psychological, philosophical, introspective, multi-dimensional, rural, landscapic, social, humanistic, liberal, factual, real, regional, personal, private, patriotic, national and international at the same time when we sit to assess a genius like that of him. His poetry is a poetry of pinda-dana continuing in on the beach and of the asthi-kalsha hanging to be disposed off into the holy waters, the rituals going on the sea shore adjacent to the Puri temple. The poet marking the skulls and thinking of the dawn at Puri, the pyres lit around, flames going up in the air, the trails of blazing smoke rising upwards and the sands shifting, these strike not the heart, but the image-taker’s lenses. He is there to present and picture life and the world as they are rather than to be remorseful. The same world, the same man and the same time, what does it make the difference! The same time is fragmented into ages, decades, years, months, hours, minutes, seconds and moments. Poetry is perception, poetry is impression, poetry is unconscious mind at work, whatever tell you is true in connection with Mahapatra and his poetry. Poetry is blank thinking and the poet a blank thinker, nothing in the mind, consistent and stable, everything in a flux, this may also be true and his poetry can be explained through the light chapter of physics.

The opening passage from Relationship itself states it clearly,

“Once again one must sit back and bury the face
in this earth of the forbidding myth,
the phallus of the enormous stone,
when the lengthened shadow of a restless vulture
caresses the strong and silent deodars in the valley,
and when the time of the butterfly
moves inside the fierce body of the forest bear,
and feel the tensed muscle of rock
yield to the virtuous water of the hidden springs of the Mahanadi,
the mystery of secret rights that make up destiny;”
( Relationship, The Chandrabhaga Society, Cuttack, Second Indian Edition, 1999, p.9 )

Mahapatra quotes a stanza from Walt Whitman to start Relationship and this is the ground for which we call it a Leaves of Grass in miniature. Relationship as a work is so visionary, so much dreamy and fanciful that the poet just floats on and flows by as Tennyson’s The Brook murmurs by, as John Keats goes with the nightingale into the woods smelling fragrant flowers. Similar is the case with the Mahapatra of this long poem. Just like Ruth or Philomela, Ulysses or the Ancient Mariner, he holds the hands and tells the stories of his own. Maybe it that the writer of Christabel Coleridge is before us or that of The Listeners and Martha poems, who is none but Walter de la Mare. Somewhere the music is like that of Look, Stranger of W.H.Auden, somewhere that of Poem in October of Dylan Thomas. Here the poet is a singer like the Wordsworth of Tintern Abbey, The Daffodils, To The Skylark, The Lost Love, Upon Westminster Bridge, By The Sea and John Masefield of Sea Fever.

Jayanta’s attachment with the land of his birth and nativity, there lies it depicted in a very flowery language and a dreamy glide, floating by. The poem deals with the lost mariners, Ashokan bloodshed and the fields smeared with bloodshed and the bodies with bloodstains and the river Daya unable to wash off the sin of the emperor and in the aftermath of all that he relented and repented for after having killed and that was why laid down the arms for peace. The Dhauligiri Shantih Stupa, the Peace Pagoda adds to the beauty of the site. The rock edicts at the foot of the Dhauli hills tell of many a thing in the form of his decrees. Ashoka felt guilty of conscience as for the unwashable sin of killing many and felt aggrieved from his within. There is the thunder shower of The Cloud of Shelley as well as shantih of The Waste Land of T.S. Eliot, but in a subdued way. Here in this fairy man work, the poet Mahapatra is serene, tranquil and quiet taking the flight as do the swans, herons and storks for the marshy plots, making us remember of W.B. Yeats’ The Wild Swans At Coole. Sometimes the poet draws the things from tantra-yoga and the yoga-yoginis; sometimes tells about the lingam-yoni motif in Relationship. The Frostian woods lovely, deep and dark, but miles to go before we sleep, stopping near fascinated by the mystery and beauty of the tract one evening and the Longfellowian footprints on the sands of time to follow after as per the psalm of life tempt us really.

A few stanzas from Song of Myself of Leaves of Grass will put it comparatively:

“I celebrate Myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease….observing a spear of summer grass.
Houses and rooms are full of perfumes….the shelves are crowed with perfumes,
I breathe the fragrance myself, and know it and like it,
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.
The atmosphere is not a perfume….it has no taste of the distillation….it is odorless,
It is for my mouth forever….I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.”
− (Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, Edited, with an Introduction, by Abraham Cowley, Penguin Books, USA, 1986, p.25)

M.K. Naik in one of his contents named Two Worlds: The Imagery of Jayanta Mahapatra of the latest book of criticism writes:

“An intensive scrutiny of Mahapatra’s imagery reveals that his images are dawn from two worlds viz., the exterior world of phenomenal reality and the surrealistic world and the way these two worlds are related is equally significant. The image is for Mahapatra not merely what Wyndham Lewis called, the primary pigment of poetry; it is almost his characteristic way of reacting to experience, ordering it and recording it.” − (M.K.Naik in Indian English Poetry from the beginnings upto 2000, Pencraft International, Delhi-110052, pp. 2009, p.104)

Random Descent, Bare Face and Shadow Space are alike in theme and expression and are the latest books of his poems, but the poet has not changed his track. He is the same Mahapatra who began with his earlier books as he cannot do away with imagery and word-play. Poetry, to him, appears to be a cobweb of words glistening as gossamer in the morning when the first rays of the sun flash upon. The Lie of Dawns is not at all a new collection, but a selection from his different works, together with a few unpublished poems to be counted on fingers. His Temple is one dealing with poverty, hunger, food problem, suicide, rape and killing, opening the wounds again to question, how secure are we, how the food problem lies it addressed to! The attainment of freedom, the celebration of the 50 years of India’s independence and the voters coming to cast their votes stun us differently in thinking what we have really done for all those people, what to do with the false dawn of democracy! Summers, hot and perspiring, take the canvas of the poet for a deliberation and he tells about the orchards, the woman passing the midday and the daughter combing her hair underneath the shades and the mangoes dropping to change from one theme to another.

“The girl’s line of life climbs those sheer
vertical walls she’ll never be able to climb herself.
In the darkness of the city, familiar bloody hands
are cleaning their livers and their intestines.
Neither daughter of wind nor cloud, the girl’s
mind is wrapped in a haze of thousands and children.”
− From the poem ‘Palmistry’
(Random Descent, ibid, p.16)

The final passage from the work, Relationship ends as thus, embroidering the mythical text of the dark daughters

Is anything beyond me that I cannot catch up?
Tell me your names, dark daughters
Hold me to your spaces
In your dance is my elusive birth, my sleep
that swallows the green hills of the land
and the crows that quicken the sunlight in the veins,
and the stone that watches my sadness fly in and out
of my deaths, a spiritless soul of memory.
(Relationship, The Chandrabhaga Society, Cuttack, Second Indian Edition, 1999, p.38 )

The word ‘door’ plays a pivotal role in the understanding of his poetry as his poems pertaining to the dawn, the morning and the nightfall are in their essence. There are also many poems taking the summer theme as for poetic expression, but in a very private and personal way of reflection. The unconscious mind at work and play is the thing of his deliberation, what it comes to the plane, stays not, but passes out as fleeting impressions in a flux. The brooding quality of his poetry seconded by the visionary glides, imaginative flights and dreamy drives take him to the pedestal of glory. A search for meaning pervades the whole poetic corpus in the form of questions and answers ever raised, ever tried for a solution, but the solution is not. Sitting by the door, he dreams and dreams, thinking about the unknown paths of life and the world, leading whereto,

So many doors before me,
and each single one open.
Yet one cannot enter,
walking silently by a door.
These dead things
loom larger with every hour that goes.
− Doors
(A Whiteness of Bone, ibid, p.53)