The Poetry of G. K. Chettur

During his comparatively short life (1898-1936), G. K. Chettur has published several volumes of poetry, which include Sounds and Images (1921), Gumataraya(1932), The Temple Tank (1932), The Triumph of Love (1932) and The Shadow of God (1934). “Always”, says Prof. K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar, “Chettur’s mastery of his medium, the graces of his rhythm, the structural finish of his sonnets, the general richness of his articulation have contributed to his success as a poet in English.” (“Indian Writing in English”, P. 625)

I

What strikes us as the outstanding quality that distinguishes G. K. Chettur from his predecessors, is his almost thorough mastery of English verse forms, particularly the sonnet. His Gumatarayais a collection of sonnets, and The Shadow of God a sonnet sequence. His sonnets, mostly of the Italian model, consist of two parts–an octave and a sestet. The octave bears the burden; a doubt, a problem, a reflection, a query, an historical statement, a cry of indignation or desire, a vision of the ideal. The sestet eases the load, resolves the problem or the doubt, answers the query, solaces the yearning, realizes the vision. It gilds thought with the tracery of instance, crowns it with the sufficient and inevitable actuality that lies within the wisdom of art.

His sonnet Gumataraya, for instance, begins with an octave, describing a vision of the ideal:

I saw the dawn break on thy marvellous brow,
And light the depth of thy unseeing eyes:
And thou didst seem so calm, so stern, so wise,
Almost I trembled at the thought of how
A mortal hand had shaped that might of thine,
Till from insensate rock there did uprise
The visioned godhead in unmortal guise,
Unmoved, immovable, serene, divine.

At the end of the octave, the rhythm of which suggests the arduous climbing of the rock of Lord Gomateswara, there is a pause. And then the sestet follows, realizing the strength and peace:

O stone! O Might! O Heart of Man, made God!
Thou art the emblem of our hope, our prayer,
Aye, all our strength! and lo, on bended knees,
With joined hands, and where rapt feet have trod.
We yield the burden of our soul’s despair
And lifting eyes to thee, our hearts are peace.”

Chettur’s poems exhibit his mastery over other less-known verse-forms as the triolet. The triolet, like the rondel, repeats not merely a snatch of a verse, but a whole line or two in its refrain. It consists of eight lines rhyming ABaAabAB, and it is desirable that the refrains be varied in sentence-structure or meaning. With what consummate artistry Chettur handles the following triolets!

If absence makes the heart grow fonder,
Sweet, my love, I wish you gone;
For I shall love you better, yonder,
If absence makes the heart grow fonder.
Cheer up, sweet, what makes you ponder?
This is a truth I’ve hit upon:
If absence makes the heart grow fonder,
Sweet, my love, I wish you gone.

He’s a fool who yearns to barter
The present for increase of bliss.
Love too often proves a Tartar,
He’s a fool who yearns to barter,
And I’ve no mind to make a martyr,
While there’s time, come, let us kiss.
He’s a fool who yearns to barter
The present for increase of bliss.
(“He and She–Temple Tank”)

This technical excellence is achieved not at the cost of lyrical spontaneity. As Basil Mathews has observed, “Mr. Chettur has a strong lyrical voice, and uses words as an expression of–and not as a substitute for–thought.” There is not a single poem of his which does not reflect his highly emotional temperament and keenly sensitive mind.

II

What is the substance of his poetry? He deals with the three immortal themes of Love, Nature and Philosophy.

In many of his poems he sings of the old, old, plaint of love, which is forever new. He envisages this eternal theme, now joyously, now passionately. He lavishes upon it a copious flood of colour and sound. Addressing his beloved, he breaks out into lyrical passion:

You are the Rose of me,
In you have I lost myself utterly,
Your fragrance, as a breath from Paradise,
About me ever lies;
I crush you to my heart with subtlest ecstasy
And on your lips I live, and in your passionate eyes.
(Sounds and Images)

Absence from his beloved elicits a cry of pang, more musical and more sad than the plaintive notes of a male nightingale:

The little bird that makes its nest
In yonder cashew’s topmost crest
Has surely lost its heart to you,
For it can find naught else to do
But all the day most plaintively
To say, ‘Chochee-chochee-chochee’

And sometimes when you hear that call
Most sweet, most sad, most musical,
You turn your pretty head and say,
“The little bird wants me today,
Hear how it cries repeatedly–   
‘Chochee, chochee, chochee, chochee!’

But sometimes when you are not here
His cry falls shrilly on my ear:
It makes me sad for then his voice
That bids me vainly to rejoice
Reminds me all too poignantly
That you are gone, chochee, chochee.
(Temple Tank)

III

In his enjoyment of Nature, Chettur is sometimes simple, childlike and spontaneous. A host of fireflies can kindle his imagination, and he sees them.

“All lighted up like ships at sea.
A bright and merry company,” (Fireflies)

or as a myriad stars fallen on earth. The enchanting beauty of a moon-lit night bewitches his soul and haunted by its loveliness his fancy mingles the lores of East and West:

Ah, here she comes in silver lace,
And treading with divinest grace
Her old accustomed pathway through
The smiles of all her courtier crew.
See, there, Orion bends to her.
Devout as any worshipper;

And there, the Twins, with sheepish eye,
Seek each other to outvie
In homage to the Queen of heaven:
While, overhead, the rishisseven.
Seem with gaze benign and hoar
On her their blessings to outpour.
            What fancies the mind invest
            With mingled lore of East and West
            When Love to Beauty yields her will.              (Temple Tank)

But more often Chettur’s enjoyment of Nature reveals his reflective and introspective mind. He is especially impressed by Nature’s solitude. He loves mountains, nocturnal scenes of silence, and the deep and holy seclusion of temple tanks. In such moments, Nature seems to be invested with godhead. His love for the mountains springs from their grandeur, simplicity and solitude;

“How shall I worship you, O mountains, mountains
I, in whose presence, seem a thing reborn,
Whose deep tree-shadowed vales and springing fountain.
Preserve the freshness of perpetual morn?
–he asks; “How of your quiet graciousness partake,
Your strength, your patience, your serenity?”
–he enquires. And gives his answer:
“Say nothing, nothing: caught up to the heart
Of this great silence, lay aside the rods
Of the world’s chastisement, and kneel apart,
Remembering how wise those Rishiswere,
Who for all beauty had a use most rare,
And now seem one with their commemorate gods.”                   (Mountains)

While being keenly sensitive to the appeal of earthly beauty, Chettur is equally conscious of its transcience. But his highly reflective and philosophic mind sees the face of Permanence, of the Infinite, sparkle behind the evanescent veil of Nature’s images.

How lovely the land lies beneath the moon!
Fairer a hundred times than Love or Life;
Fairer than Death, the end of mortal strife!
Now, langorous as lilies in the noon,
The very palms appear to sway and swoon
With this excess of loveliness; and the sea
Awaits, in patience, hushed, expectantly,
For what?–Ah, who may tell?–Or yet, how soon;
mortal beauty irreconcilable.

Changeless, yet ever changing mystery,
Holding at rare times all hearts in fee,
Subduing, sweet, and tantalising still,
What in thy glory may we here divine?
A hope–a longing–nay, a certain sign!

A sign, that of the living whole, we make
A part incorporate, however small;
A fragment of the passion that doth fall
In sudden splendour upon hill or lake:
A symbol, a remembrancer to awake
The sleeping godhead to a memory
Of what has been, and what again shall be,
And still the heart’s intolerable ache.
Nay more; a pledge, renewed from hour to hour
In song, in love, in dream, in children’s eyes;
Writ on the laughing heavens, the sorrowing sea;
Sealed on the morning face of every flower;
And, even as the rainbow in the skies,
A covenant of God’s integrity.               (Beauty)

IV

The unaffected joy and the undoubted song quality of Chettur’s poetry take however a distinctive shade from the introspective nature of the age and the peculiar docility to nature which characterizes the Indian mind. He has been consistently travelling towards his philosophic goal of comprehending one godhead in the countless manifestations of human joys and sorrows. But there had been moments of great mental distress when he found it hard to reconcile certain outward manifestations of ugliness with his vision of an Infinite Beauty. His poem, The Cow, expresses this concern for the presence of pain and suffering in the universe. On a gay morning, while the birds were singing joyously in the bright sun, a cow is run over across the railway line. It lay there, half-crushed and bleeding, all the day. None seemed to have cared for its fate. Jackals came that night “to the live feast that cow supplied.”

“But no man cared, or stopped to see–
So great life’s little cares are grown,
A dumb beast’s mortal agony
Is soon forgot.

To cruel hearts of wood, of stone,
Alas, it mattered not!

In rose and gold it dawned next day,
The birds again sang tweet-a-tweet,
And all the world once more was gay,
And sweet and fair.

Lord how could the world be sweet
With that cow bleeding there? (The Cow)

Is death the inescapable end of life? Are decay and transcience an inevitability? The problem of death haunts his mind. Even in his earlier volumes of poetry there arc occasions when he tries to reconcile the irreconcilable. The sonnet, The Prison, visualises the world as a prison-house, and the beauty of the world as its ‘bars of hope’, and Death as the last gaoler, who

“comes, soon or late,
With pace unhurried, to the appointed door,
Slips in the key, draws the bolts and bars,
And strong or steadfast, weak or passionate,
Glad or reluctant, we go forth once more,
To join the grave procession of the stars.”         (Prison)

In another sonnet, entitled Death, he says:

“I looked on Death today, with tears unshed,
In bitter humiliation of such peace
As there, upon that brow, those lips, I read.” (Death)

But these pictures of Death as ‘freedom-giver’ and ‘peace-bringer’ are more the creation of poetic fancy than real and authentic presentations of Death drawn from experience.

In his last volume of poems, The Shadow of God, Chettur faces this problem squarely. The Shadow of God is his most mature and best poetic expression of life. He meets Death face to face, as it were. Chettur’s mother passed away on 10 February 1934. The poet could almost see the approach of Death, and now Death has arrived, and life is extinct. Prof. K. R Srinivasa Iyengar’s comments on this part of the sonnet sequence are very illuminating:

“A brooding melancholy settles for a time upon the poet; the antics of pitiless Death prey upon his brain, and he needs must conclude that life is but ‘a round of sorrow and despair’. But out of the dark negation and despair come new streaks of light at last. Death’s other kingdom might be a hospitable place after all! Yet the poet is not quite sure whether this is the mood of ‘philosophical ingratitude’ or whether he is rather chastened in his sorrow, his mind being ‘upborne to thy new sphere.’ But it becomes a settled mood presently, and he is reconciled to the conundrum of life and death–that if one would conquer Death, one must first conquer Life. He is thus brave enough to say:

If Death should take me by the throat today,
And hold me up, and look me in the eyes......
I should but point to yonder bannered skies,
where the great sun quick-flaming in his way,
Pranks all the East in hues of paradise,
And murmur’ Strike,!’ and patient wait the blow...”

The poet’s voice has now become more compelling because it is the voice not of fancy alone, but of personal tribulation. He has seen the valley of despair, coursed through the slough of despond, and has reached the Delectable Mountains. He is competent to give his own philosophy of life. And when he sings

Lord of unnumbered hopes, unnumbered prayers,
Immaculate dream, unknown, unknowable
To mortal sense save dimly through the spell
Of earth’s delights and quickening despairs,
Forgive what we have been, and what we are,
For that which in Time’s fullness we shall be!
Thouartthe Light, and in Thy shadow we
Movein our pathways like a growing star.
Make grow our comprehension till we see
Through life’s bewildering complexity
The touch by which inscrutably is wrought
Thy will; and shape each word, each act, each thought,
Until we learn to read Thy will aright
And pass from shadow to Eternal Light”                        (The Shadow of God)

that song of prayer convinces us as the expression of a genuine hope, the expression of a sensitive soul which has purified itself through intense personal loss and which has learned to look at Death and Decay not as ends in themselves, but as stages in the evolution of Man and Universe.

“Forgive what we have been, and what we are,
For that which in Time’s fullness we shall be!”

What a vision of hope for Man’s Immortality does this prayer present, for Time’s fullness–canit be measured in a single span and does it not hold up an ever widening vista of life after life striving towards perfection?

Far from being a minor poet, G. K. Chettur commands our admiration by his technical excellence, his mastery over his medium, his themes of perennial interest, and by the addition of a spiritual dimension to the general richness, grace and charm of his poetry.