Wordsworth.
Hey, you Wordsworth
Then where are your friends,
I mean Shelley, Coleridge and Keats!
You, gentlewoman, what are you?
Said she, I am Emily Dickinson
And hearing it, exclaiimed I,
O my God, so full of poets,
So many poets and poetesses abound in
Here in India,
World-class poets and poetesses,
God-gifted organ voices,
Golden voices,
O my God, I see!
Indian English poetry full of such personalities,
One calling oneself Wordsworth while another Keats,
One Shelley while another Coleridge,
One Tennyson while another Arnold,
One Hopkins while another Hardy,
One One Browning another Rossetti,
One Sylvia Plath another Judith Wright,
One T.S.Eliot another Ezra Pound,
One W.B.Yeats while another Lawrence,
One John Masefield while another Walter de la Mare.
Again, stepping a furlong, I could trace them,
Loitering behind,
Yea, met I Robert Herrick,
English not, Indian Robert Herrick of Indian English poetry,
Thomas Wyatt, michael Drayton, Edmund Spenser,
Elizabethan not, Indian sonneteers and song-writers,
Labouring to produce unnaturally,
Full of Indianness and Indianism,
Reciting like the texts in vernaculars,
Maybe they the incarnated ones,
Dead in the British isles,
But born again in India.
I just had been passing through to be acquainted with
The poets and poetesses waiting outside
To rejoin the seminar session
And to my astonishment, found I,
Re-traced back my Milton,
Who told about his poetry,
But not the burning of the midnightly lantern.
But I am sorry to say I cold not William Blake
Sulking somewhere,
I could not Thomas Gray writing his Elegy somewhere
In a graveyard,
I could not Auden of The Unknown Citizen!
God, God, O God, save me, save me from
Indian English poets and poetesses,
The egoistic and hypocritical fellows,
Mentally ill people,
God, save me, save me, God!
If all become poets and poetesses, who will read the poems,
If all become they,
The great poets of India!