A master of verse
by Mukul Bansal

Dom Moraes. Collected Poems, 1954-2004.
Penguin Books.
Pages 355. Rs 395.

Golden hair flowed to my waist

—Barrows from Serendip (1990)

IN the preface to this book, Dom Moraes tells us: "I worked at poetry like an apprentice at his trade." He adds: "We (poets) serve a ferocious master." Dom’s work as a poet has already earned liberal praise from legends like T.S. Eliot, Stephen Spender, Karl Shapiro, W. H. Auden and Allan Tate. It may be more fruitful, therefore, to talk about Dom’s poetry published in his career spanning 50 years than to assess it.

Dom’s first book A Beginning, was published when he was 19. It won him the Hawthornden Prize for the Best Work of Imagination in 1958. The story behind how Dom came to write Landscape Painter in this collection gives the reader an insight into his artistic growth.

A society painter in Chelsea had asked Francis Bacon to come and look at some of his works. Bacon suggested that Dom and someone else accompany him. They went to the painter’s house. "He drew a curtain to reveal a neat row of canvases hung on the wall. They were mostly landscapes. Bacon went and looked at each one carefully and at length. When he had finished, he turned, met the painter’s expectant eyes, and burst into a cataclysm of high, wild, clear laughter. It was one of the purest acts of criticism, I have ever seen... This incident conveyed to me a strong sense of the difference between the practitioner of an art and the artist."

Dom writes: All his perspectives were right, he was almost sure/ The subject tasteful, colours laid on well,/ The bright ones luminous, the light ones pure:/ What had gone wrong he was damned if he could tell. He employs striking imagery in Being Married: Beloved conquering bride,/My kisses lanced your veins with veins of light.

In his second collection, Poems, which became the Autumn Choice of the Poetry Book Society, Dom employs irony and the art of undiluted expression to great effect in Card Game: Unfold the table: cut and deal the cards./ It would be perfect, if you lacked/ That strange hypocrisy: but deal the cards. His delicate sensibility and a culture of pain, inherent to him, which remained the hallmark of his verse throughout his career, are reflected in For Dorothy: Years later, when you smiled,/ All was explained, but nothing was forgiven.

Talking about his poem, French Lesson, Dom gives an insight into his evolution as a poet in the early stages of his career. Dom took private lessons in French from the wife of the director of Alliance Francaise in Bombay. "Eventually I wrote a poem called French Lesson, which was about her. It explained to me what I did not know: that we didn’t understand each other. Most of my poems hitherto were written on a sort of insistent impulse, a rhythm that sang itself in my head and wanted to be flushed out with words. I threw the words down on paper quickly, trying to fix the rhythm before it left me.

"But with this poem it was not merely that. I fixed my words down like butterflies with delicacy and care, and felt the object that was being made by my hands. The shaping and polishing of the object outlasted the first impulse, so that I worked a while on it. Moreover, whereas normally before my poems rose from other poems I had recently read, in this one I tried to express my emotions with precision."

Dom became established as a serious poet with his third volume, John Nobody and followed this with Bedlam Etcetera. He then passed into a phase of poetic silence. In the preface to the book under review, Dom says: "Between 1965 and 1982 I ran into a writer’s block, but only about poetry... I realised that what poets have always whined about was true." His prolonged dormancy ended with the publication of Collected Poems followed by Serendip and In Cinnamon Shade. Dom’s more recent poems have appeared as Typed with One Finger and the ones he wrote before he passed away as New Poems.

In John Nobody that appeared in 1965 to much critical acclaim, Dom tells us: It was the winter of my seventeenth/ Year when I lost what some call innocence./ Lightly that night the snow fell on Belgrade... In Letter to My Mother from Bedlam Etcetera, one can catch a glimpse of Dom’s troubled relationship with his mother that affected his outlook on life and influenced his relationships with women: I am ashamed of myself/ Since I was ashamed of you.

Around 1990 Dom fell in love with an architect, Sarayu Ahuja, who later came to be known as Sarayu Srivatsa. This book is dedicated to "Sarayu, my closest friend, my harshest critic." Most of Dom’s later poems are written for Sarayu.

In Twelve Days in April, Dom writes: The birthmark on the left side of your lip/ I touched with reverence, as though to bless. Again: I cannot pay you back except in words. Dom celebrates his togetherness with his beloved in The Third Truth: Now you have taken time off to reflect/ upon my structural defects, restore/ or redesign me, dearest architect./ Since we are halves of the same entity,/ your line will never falter when you draw./ I find myself in you, and you in me.

One hopes that the reader is able to see what a strong hold his "ferocious master" exerted over Dom’s whole life. He may be left looking for more and begin his own exploration of the entire corpus of Dom’s poetry, his "haunting phrases and compelling images".

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