by Jayant Mahapatra
(Summary)
Jayant Mahapatra was the poet of ‘the Modern Age’.
This age is also known as ‘The age of interrogation and anxiety’. The general
characteristics of this age are:
·
Anxiety and interrogation,
·
Art for life’s
sake,
·
Growing interest in
the poor and the working classes,
·
Impact of
socio-economic conditions on literature,
·
Stream of
consciousness,
·
Impact of the two
world wars &
·
The two world wars.
The general characteristics of poetry of this age
are:
·
Tradition and
experiment,
·
Imagism,
·
Symbolism &
·
Pound and Eliot
tradition.
The modern poet includes: transitional poets, war poets, Georgian poets, poets of imagism, poet of symbolism, oxford poets and the poets of Neo-Romanticism.
Jayant Mahapatra, a modern poet of Indo-Anglican
poetry was born in 1928 at Cuttack. He studied science and was a reader in
physique. He was a poet who wrote both in Oriya and English. His poetry is
lyrical in nature and portrays both ugliness and beauty of life. According to
him he writes what pleases him. His poems carry fragrance of soil and he has
raised petty things or subjects to the level of national and universal.
In the short poem ‘Indian Summer’ Jayant Mahapatra
describes the activities of an Indian family in a hot summer season.
The
Poetry of Jayanta Mahapatra (Fourth Revised and Enlarged Edition) by Bijay
Kumar Das (Author)According to the poet, India is a hot country and
the summer season here remains very dry. In this poem he gives a tragic view of
life. The poet is pessimistic when he talks about the sufferings of the common
people of India. In this poem, he has acquired a gloomy attitude towards life.
According to the poet, he hears the sighing of the gloomy winds. He says, that
the priests chant their hymns in loud voices. ‘The open mouth of India’ suggest
the wide spread hunger and starvation in India. The poet means to say that the
poor people of India suffer not only from the extreme heat but from hunger too.
While describing the hardships of an Indian in
summer season, he also talks about an amphibian, crocodile, which moves into
greater depths of water to get rid of the extreme heat. According to him the
sun is very hot and heaps of refuse emit smoke during the day.
In the last lines of the poem, the poet portrays the
Indian women but with sympathy. According to him in this hot season when it is
impossible to get out of the house in afternoon, the women shut themselves in
their room and they spent their whole afternoon by relaxing and lying-in bed.
They dream away their afternoon in such condition. They do not suffer the
burning air of the summer season which makes sound like the sound produced by
funeral pyre.
The poet presents a gloomy picture of India in
summer. The Indian suffer the extreme heat and somber wind in this season. ‘The
mouth of India’ suggests a tragic view and the pessimistic view of the poet’s
philosophy. The poem is written in a free verse form having no rhyme scheme.
The language of the poem is simple and style is jerky, i.e., the sentences
suggested by the lines of the poem are small and incomplete.
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