Emily Dickinson’s Kinship with The Telugu Poets

EMILY DICKINSON’S KINSHIP
WITH THE TELUGU POETS

India and America are bound by strong affinities with each other. The two largest democracies of the world, once ruled by the English, share common language even now. The spiritual urge or the religious strong-hold still continuing in the modern age is a characteristic which distinguishes these two nations from the rest of the world. Indian thought has influenced the American poetry from the time of the Transcendentalism. Emerson, Thoreau, Whittler and Alcott are all acquainted with the Indian philosophy and wrote poetry showing its influence. The influence of Indian thought on Whitman is rather indirect i.e. through inspiration from Emerson. He is not only read and appreciated in India but has influenced creative writers like Subharamanya Bharati. Belonging to the same generation, there is yet another poet Emily Dickinson, who resembles many of our poets without any apparent contact with them. Her poems show similarity of attitudes and poetic treatment with the Telugu poets, when the poets pour out their heart’s content in a mystic revelation. In almost all her themes of love, nature and death when the chords of emotion are vibrated in the rapture of love of self surrender, in the perceptive vision of grasping the whole universe, in a final realization of death as a gateway to immortality, the American poet’s writings bear a ring of familiarity to the Telugu reader.

Emily Dickinson’s theme of love is infused with mystic leanings and in many poems she approaches God as a lover. The nuances of feeling revealed in her poetry in the imagination of God as a lover recall many of our poets writing in the tradition of Madhurabhakti, imagining God as a lover and husband irrespective of their sex. The overwhelming emotion of love and blushing ineffability seen in the poem of Emily Dickinson bring out her realization of God as lover. The tinge of shyness is the veil which keeps her at the artist’s distance to express her feelings.

Shame is the shawl of Pink
In which we wrap the soul
To keep if from infesting Eyes
 The elemental Veil
Which helpless Nature drops
When pushed upon a scene
Repugnant to her probity…
Shame is the tint of divine.¹

Similarly Devulapalli Krishna Sastri denotes the same inexpressible feeling of love, when God becomes his comrade and he imagines himself of God’s beloved. Just at the shawl of pink, which Emily Dickinson wears is symbolic of her feelings, Krishna Sastry gives expression to a dumbness in his over-powering feeling, when God approaches him and demands a song from him. A “Little song” emerges out of his muteness:

If it be Thy will!
Shall I enthrone thee on my head?
Did I say that Thy pleasure was only this?
Lord, if it be Thy will!

            Thou hast taken my speech
And made me a mute
But now thou wantest music from a mute
Lord, if it be Thy will!

With my voice stilled
At the dark night’s end,
What gift can I bring
Into thy hand out stretched
Except this little song—
­If it be Thy wil.  ²

God coming in search of his devotee is an oft-repeated theme both with the Telugu poets and Emily Dickinson. In her poem Emily Dickinson describes God as coming in search of her, tapping the door, standing on tiptoe and having a peep into her mind whether she is inclined towards Him or not.⁴ Similarly Tyagaraja sings in a rapture of ecstasy visualising God as walking towards him in the song. “Nadachi vachchitiva Nannu Palimpa”. While Emily Dickinson captures the idea of an over-anxious God by describing his Tyagaraja envisions Him as “Vanaja Nayana, i.e. one whose eyes are big as the lotus flower and says that He has learnt the poet’s innermost feeling of yearning for (Manasu lo marma merigi) God and has come to save him.

In her theme of nature Emily Dickinson shows a transcendental approach like our poet Devulapalli Krishna Sastry, The aesthetic pleasure in the enjoyment of nature makes Emily Dickinson transcend the barriers of the physical earth and rise to the consciousness of being one with the winds.

I crave Him grace of Summer Boughs,
If such an outcast be –
Who never heard that fleshless Chant --­
Rise -- solem, -- on the Tree,
As if some caravan of sound
Off Deserts, in the sky,
Had parted Rank,
Then knit, and swept –­
In seamless company -- ⁴

Similarly Devulapalli Krishna Sastry in his ecstatic enjoyment of nature is elevated to a rapturous mystical identification with care-free nature:

A leaf among leaves, a flower among flowers,
A tender tendril on a branch am I.
Can I leave this grove?
Can‘t stay behind here and now?
To be a little supple wave
of the tender breeze in, its exuberant flight
To be a little ripple of the gushing stream
Forgetting hunger, thirst, trouble turmoil shall
I roam about this way alone a mad man. ⁵

Emily Dickinson’s poems on the theme of death also show affinity with some Telugu poets. For instance in the poem, “Because I could not stop for Death” she imagines death as a gentleman who has come to give her a ride and the poet herself is a bride in wedding dress. ⁶ Emily Dickinson makes her journey into the other world in a chariot accompanied by the twin companions, death and immortality. Similarly Duvvuri Rami Reddi refers to death and life as twins, life meaning as “eternal life”; “Oh Queen of Death, oh Queen of World, did you take birth as twins? You and life at the beginning of Creation?”⁷ Duvvuri Rami Reddi associates death with marriage also, and picturesquely describes death as a beautiful bride: “I shall pour out White light on your eye-brows, Oh my bride.” ⁸

Thus there is a kinship between Emily Dickinson and the Telugu poets in spite of the historical, religious and cultural barriers and the lack of intellectual communication or emotional influence. The mystic lineaments run as an undercurrent, in all good poetry and bring out similarities of themes and techniques, among the poets of diverse origins. The university of mysticism and the truth of the Indian saying that “One who is not a seer or saint cannot be a poet” ⁹ (Nanrsih Kavirit­yuktam) are once again confirmed.

References:

¹ Thomas H. Johnson, ed., The Poems of Emily Dickinson., II, 708, hereafter cited as PED.
² Devulapalli Krishna Sastry, Trans. D. Anjaneyulu, Triveni (April, 1969), 53.

³ PED 1,241.

⁴ Ibid, I, 246.

⁵ Prose translation or a poem by Devulapalli Krishna Sastry in “Krishna Paksham”. 

⁶ PED. II. 546.

⁷ Prose translation or a poem by Duvvuri Rami Reddi, from a collection of Telugu poems, Manimakutamu P. 95.

⁸ Ibid., P. 97.

⁹ V. Raghavan and Nagendra, eds. An Introduction to Indian Poetics (Bomaby McMillan, 1970) PP. 23-24.