The Poetry of Keshav Malik

Primarily a connoisseur of the arts, Keshav Malik was visited by the muse in the late nineteen ‘Forties and was thenceforth haunted. Since then he has published four volumes of verse. His poems deal with a bewildering variety of subjects and they represent a bewildering variety of points of view. In fact all things under the sun and moon are grist to his potent mill. He depicts his sorrows and desires, his passing thoughts and belief in some kind of beauty. He does all this with a sincerity which is heartfelt, humble and quiet. In one line, he expresses himself the things that surround him, with a pen dipped in his soul.

Well then! Let us ask Keshav Malik what poetry means to him. He replies: “For me, and I have learnt this from my peers, poetry is the foremost sense-maker of experience. To try to make poetry is, then, to hope to rejuvenate life with understanding. Poetry is not less than a necessity–it reinforces sanity and energy at once.” In a poem entitled “The Singular” he tells us how; why and what for he writes poetry:

“He captures the impulses, pins down the inner motions
By thought, by thought gives airy ghosts statesque forms,
Arrests the elusive hosts of arms that flit through
His twilight calm. By sheer presence of mind,
By rarer device, condenses the intangibles to clear crystal
Cut class. He will not talk as plural; he, a bare mouth-piece
To the singing of seas, shall indeed singular be.
He cannot claim more, his comments his own, are not
The general lie or moan.”                      (Rippled Shadow, P. 6)

To Keshav Malik, poetry is “not merely an aesthetic activity, but is the activity which caters to man’s self-becoming.” He remarks: “Poetry is certainly born of disturbance in the routine of things.” If that is the case, we shoot another question “Do thoughts alone make poetry?” “No”, cries the poet, and in his poem “The Astronomer” he writes:

“Not that the thought is all that distinct,
Were it so I would in plain prose pose
An insane prepossession.”                     (Rippled Shadow, P. 1)

And while explicating his theory of poetry he says, “It is not merely an ordering of words in the best order, of music or euphony and rhythm (all those aspects on which the poet employs the conscious powers of his craft) but is at base a spiritual struggle, a mental conflict of opposites...Poetry, thus, transmutes the ordinariness of familiar things and events into excitement.”

Certainly, even a casual reading of his four volumes of verse, will show that the poetry of Keshav Malik is chaste to every syllable of his definition of poetry. They are thought-provoking volumes on experience. And it is through them the poet throws open his heart and what, we find there is the tears and sorrows for we live in a world bereft of peace. The poet reveals to us his deep discontent and disquietude and the world he shows us is not alien to us. We assent to the poet’s assertion that the “lips mutter faithless” and

“You shall watch you cheat you.
See a stabbed, double-crossed, cold,
with troubled steel.”                              (Rippled Shadow, P. 121)

and again in his poem “Death”

“There are cynics amongst us and would
Be mockers, whose spirits are shaken
And broken the wings of their once
lovely emotions.”(Rippled Shadow, P. 102)

Fatigued of “the world that is multifarious-more-than we are in a position to acknowledge” he, like the escapist of the Romantic Era; John Keats, loves to escape to a world of calmness and beauty. In his poem “Rip Van Winkle,” the poet dreams of a place which is calm and serene, where there is

“No sound of hammers
no honking horns
no cop whistles
no hurrying footballs
no zoom of planes.”(Storm Warning, P. 20)

Well then! Let’s not dream. Let’s come to the world of reality. Is there no hope of peace in this world? How long have we to undergo this agony? We shoot these questions at the poet.

Keshav Malik in a sorrow-stricken tone says in his poem “The Hope” that there is no hope for hope itself,

“Like a stone sank beneath waves
Then rested deep at the depths
Unable more to rise or lift its head.”
(Rippled Shadow, P. 43)

The poet is highly pessimistic about the fate of the world, when he gives vent to his feelings in the poem “You Shall...” But underneath his pessimism there is a ray of optimism too. He opines that till death separates us from this deceiving, victimizing, swindling and duping world, we have no other way but to undergo the agony. He writes:

“You shall have to go through this agony–
To live in uncertainty, be neighbour to suspense–
Be tense, no way out but through purgatory
To the heaven of sense, to live through the trial
Of strength. No way out but one to where the day
Is light, and the night day; no way but one, hold on
To the pain till the sun of love appear on horizon.

You shall have to live through – and be rocked
In care upon a deck chair, and be without
Laughter, and to yoke body to the soul’s behests,
Words to deeds, and to pay heed to the beast’s needs”

“No way out, sit tight or walk on slow till
You sight the distant home, no way out but inspiration
And prayer and the lit icon, a way from the sirens
And cynicisms of the heart, away from the vain tears.”
(Rippled Shadow, P. 141)

In another poem “Assurance”, he instructs us to persevere, marshal the heart’s skill and steel the will if we want to reach for the sweet water lake beneath every That and Sahara.

As a poet, fully conscious of the surroundings and aware of the enigmas of life, Keshav Malik portrays the struggle of man in the present day society. He shows us how the thoughts of a rationalist are curbed beneath the grim warden’s “strict eye, and gun” and how the thoughts that are kept gnawing within him move on in the night, when he is alone with only the nocturnal bird-owl on the tree top to give him company.

But the poet did not leave the matter at that. In his short and crisp piece “No Calamity Worse” he encourages us to be bold and pooh-poohs the acts of the cowards. He inspires us saying:

“Less afraid, than you appear.
Yet dare not own your fearlessness.
No calamity worse than fear­–
No death, yet this worse death
You cling to, that life not worth the having­–
That despair not worth the nursing.”
(Rippled Shadow, P. 34)
And again in another poem “Failing” he cautions us:

“Let’s train our verbs like swords
And strike at the roots
Of the mind’s poison ivies­–
Now blowing a thousand curses,
The hisses, the free death kisses. Make
Haste, or the splitting silence
Shall releak from the sinking skies
To do us waste.”
(Rippled Shadow, P. 28)

Like the Tamil poet Subramanya Bharati who, through his revolutionary verses, infused new blood into the dying veins of our elders to awaken them from their long slavish sleep, Keshav Malik in a handful of poems, like “Plea,” “Arriving Here” and “The Flame of an Anger” warms up the cold blood in us. He is a revolutionary to the core. Since the poet is “all eyes, all ears”, he does not want to remain silent to the way of the world and hence he lets fly his “willed thoughts – the total – in protest.” And one can find no other way of setting right the incongruities in our dog-tailed society. The poet shows us a path and at the same time advises us to “be director to your own actor.”

Keshav Malik does not restrict himself in portraying the only one aspect of life where there is frustration and the remedy for it being a revolution. He is an all-rounder and he pleads for “freedom on paper” so that he can “drift where (he) pleases.” His poems show the varying moods of the poet. When all other things in this wide world are found changing, it is foolish to expect man alone to remain stable both in body and mind. His poems, as he admits, “are not poetry, not verse, but flesh torn off growing urges.” Here is no hotch-potch of other men’s ideas, but every­thing his own. His ideas are not that of an eccentric but that of a philosopher’s, of a Yogi’s and above all of a full-fledged poet capable of seeing the world as a whole. He tempts everyone to ask himself or herself:

“Who we–­
Who in this whirling waste
Who we!”                                            (Rippled Shadow, P. 26)

Perhaps we will never find a satisfactory answer to such a poser because “life itself is a riddle and all our actions enshrouded in enigmas.” But what everyone knows for certain is only one. That is “Death.” Like the Tamil Siddhas, Keshav Malik in his poem “This Frame” speaks of the ephemeral nature of the body. Here are a few lines in which he excels the poets of yore who sang of the transiency of the body:

“The vase must crack
To handful dust, and the rock
Against rock too be dust; the bubble must burst
And the lost
Air merge with the seamless first.”
(Rippled Shadow, P. 19)

Poets ever since the dawn of literature have written on Death. Some have praised the invisible visitor and a few have ridiculed him. Here is Keshav Malik who cares little for death. He says that we know of its existence without the shadow of a doubt but let us not give way to despair or to tears for

“Death shall be on the run
As the golden-tongued sun
Warms to spring, hard riding on
The wayward winter winds.”
(Rippled Shadow, P. 100)

The poet praises death by saying “sea-deep dark of a promising calm”; “Dark more alluring than all the blinding light” and then proceeds to call death (the eternal rest) the Saviour himself.

The subject matter he chooses for his poems is vast and varied. He tells us, tells us all he knows, for he is aware that “is the earth we are eager to hear of you, of him, of her.” He speaks of the stars, tells us the tale of the universe, counts those rings on the conifers, makes us enjoy the music he sucks at the ocean shores and to crown them all shows us the beauty spots. The whirling table fan too is capable of inspiring him to write a poem on it. And the way in which he executes it is superb, which is a possibility only with fertile poets. He writes:

“Behind a purdah of bars
its blunt speech is a vigorous purging breeze,
which knows no surcease
but once the thumped switch has conveyed it
its hissing electric itch.”(Storm Warning, P. 23)

Poems like the “Table Fan” can be read for the sheer joy they give. And there is another such poem intended for the budding poets titled “To the Novice.” It is a poem that every novice should write out and keep it on his writing desk as Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru did the famous lines of Robert Frost. It is an encouraging poem born of the experience of the poet himself. It deserves to be quoted in full:

“At first there will be hurdles,
Words won’t unroll, in fact
There will be continuous stoppages, delays
At the customs, there will be no clear goals;
Rubble will constantly hold up progress,
There be no signposts; tanks will leak
The spirit bubbles run out, evaporation
will be often, oftener exhaustion, mental fatigue
of body, and of course complaints
from passengers. But all this shall pass
past the zenith, and on that other side of hill
coasting be smoother, more of gas, more
of the caution posts, lots of cash, there
the wheels will roll in unison, and scenery be
various and no serious dearth draught
or desiccating sun.”(Rippled Shadow, P. 90)

The form Keshav Malik chooses to clothe his thoughts in is Vers Libre. Perhaps he believes with William Blake, who once remarked “Poetry fetter’d “fetters the human race.” Keshav Malik is a perfectionist in style. In his poems every word and every syllable is studied and put into its fit place. What matters much in poetry is beauty. The words – the media – must by all means be beautiful and this Keshav Malik does and hence attracts our attention. His verse is as direct and natural as spoken words. He never employs two words that mean the same thing.

The images he uses are his own inventions, which are very modern and apt. His images are spangled by sparks of sense and those sudden flowerings of surprise. His images sound clinical when he writes:

“His thoughts act like ulcers, the lovely
World swells as an ache.”
(The Lake Surface and Other Poems, P. 4)

He speaks of birth and death in terms of modern images in the following lines:
“head thrust out like a seasoned sea-bird’s
towards the finishing line
of the dawn horizon.”                            (Storm Warning, P. 10)

and

“One by one
He saw the lights switch off
Saw others switch on.” (Rippled Shadow, P. 19)

He calls the human body the “bone tower,” the moon “Stone­moon” and the conscience “a caged wild beast in unease.”

Keshav Malik’s use of rhythm is captivating and a few lines from the poem “In Disquiet” will suffice to substantiate the view:

“And sorely missing the swirling dance
of the rushing rivers
Down your scrub slopes
And dry valleys ­
Hearing no thundering Niagaras roar
In a tearless vicinity. “(Storm Warning, P. 55)

Keshav Malik’s poetry is superb, because he goes inside himself and discovers the motive that bids him write. His poems are the sweetest because they tell the saddest thoughts. His poetry is appealing because he expresses a lot in a few chosen words. Certainly there are a few poems of his which none could claim to have understood perfectly. But “Poetry gives most pleasure,” wrote S. T. Coleridge, “when only generally and not perfectly understood and perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.”