Water~ Poet's Muse

  Water~ Poet’s Muse

The morning sea of silence broke into ripples
of bird songs; and the flowers were all merry
by the roadside; and the wealth of God was scattered through
the rift of clouds while we busily went on our way
and paid no heed.
An exalted mystic once wrote, ‘Love is the water of Life.’ Water loves its freedom too and is always quick to escape a clenched fist. But in the cusp of the poet’s hand it dances gently in a song of ripples, stoking the muse in vibrant colours. ‘Austere to ostentatious’ in its myriad forms, water brims over, spilling into songs, poems and thoughts of deep contemplation.
Embark on a pilgrimage with water. Flow with enchanting verses and drench in the soft music of water that inspires fine poetry and everlasting songs. The journey begins with the splendour of a distant glacier, a priced trophy perched on the shoulders of an imposing mountain peak. Sublime, silent and resolute, it freezes time into a myth. The awe inspiring lofty peaks have challenged man to dare and conquer, and lent musings that gave birth to poems of melancholy and longing; triumph and courage; beauty and solitude. In self addressed envelopes of frost and mist, water carries messages of winter to the valley.
The frost looked, one still clear night,
And he said, “Now I shall be out of your sight;”
Then he went to the mountain and powdered its crest,
He climbed up the trees and their boughs he dressed.
~Miss Gould
A vignette of vivacity echoes through the mountains as the revered river traverses her winding course through the valley. Sonnet of a stream reverberates, an aptly summoned metaphor in Tagore’s vision of India in his immortal Gitanjali
‘Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit...Into that heaven of freedom, My Father, let my country awake.’
The river grows wiser, quieter and deeper, opening the palms of her banks wide to embrace the world with generous gifts of new life, salvation and fertility. Pablo Neruda’s penning pours purpose into the turbulent advance of the spirited river.
Water is another matter,
has no direction but its own bright grace,
runs through all imaginable colours,
takes limpid lessons from stone,
and in those functionings plays out
the unrealized ambitions of the foam.
The winds are bearers of all tidings, good and bad. They kiss the chimes to music and urge the trees to a sway. In whispers they speak of longings of a thirsty cloud to the river. A gypsy grey veil, pregnant with joys of moisture, it is often referred to by bards as ‘sullen’ because a cloud makes angry soliloquies of thunder. But the cloud is busy composing special songs of rain; it is a tambourine against the blue palm of the sky prompting the poet to write songs of anticipation. All poems of monsoon musings, the peacock’s premonition; the lover’s yearn and the kite’s last wanton swerves above the meadow’s liquid eye are a delight to read.
Rain is the ‘water song’ of unequal music in scores of beautiful poems. It is God’s composition of tangible and intangible rhythms; on the windscreen as a pearl string that the wiper’s heartbeat steals away; as the distant drumming on a tin roof; a furious insistence on the window pane; a wail of anguish running through the corridors; the romance of shrinking the universe within the periphery of an umbrella; and the innocent trail of a paper boat chased through the by lanes by splashing little feet. Jelaludin Rumi’s ‘Moving Water’ speaks of a truce with one’s soul when the child within us makes us dance in the rain.
When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.
Water follows the heart too, and scripts a love story of its own in the sky. Tiny droplets tango with sunbeams and break into the rhapsody of a rainbow. Nature’s best loved poet, William Wordsworth colours the rainbow like none other!
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky;
So was it when my life began,
So it is now I am a man,
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is the father of the Man:
And I wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
Dew arrives each morning as the harbinger of a wonderful day with messages of freshness, renewal and vigour. The dew drops pour their uncorrupted sweetness into rhymes that celebrate nature. For instance Andrew Tennyson writes in ‘A Drop of Dew’
See how the orient dew,
Shed from the bosom of the morn
Into the region of the roses,
Round in itself encloses...
Restless it rolls and unsecure,
Trembling lest it grow impure;
Till the warm sun pities its pain
And to skies exhales it back again.
Journey on to quiet lakes; they are an epitome of pensive moods and the favoured rendezvous for thinking and soul searching. Poets in reflective and contemplative moods have sought their arms of serenity. The placid surface is often rippled by webbed feet of a bird, oars of a rowing boat, fishing rods and crescent pebbles tossed in anguish.
When God threw me, a pebble into the wondrous lake I disturbed its surface with countless circles. But when I reached the depths I became very silent. ~ Kahlil Gibran.
The collage of emotions in the human heart flows in the deluge of salty teardrops. Lucid and abstract poems of tears shed in pain, mourning and even ecstatic joy fill anthologies cover to cover. ‘Shakespeare’ to ‘Shiv Batalavi’, with skill and élan, many a poet explored the delicate fabric of human relationships in the harp of tears.
The ocean at the bidding of the moon
Forever changes with his restless tide:
Flung shoreward now, to be re-gathered soon
With kingly pause of reluctant pride,
and semblance of return.
The keeper of myths and mysteries; birthplace of mythology and life; playfield of the curious Columbus and wanderlust smitten Vasco; the ocean has washed ashore a sea of poems Expansive, melancholic, restless, calm, the bearer of tempests and storms, the ocean is the canvas where a writers’ pen surfs unhindered. Odes to farewells, fishermen, pirates, sailors, sails, noontides, seashells, sea monsters and mermaids are the treasures of a global poetic heritage.
Science says we are nothing but water. Indeed we are beings of water. Our laughter is like the foam and froth of a bubbly stream ; our leaps of joy are like the therapeutic springs and chirpy fountains; our success and disappointment forever rising and crashing are like the resurgent waves; our love pouring out is like the harp strings of rain that kisses the thirsting earth; our minds meander like the drifting cloud; our hearts melt in empathy like the glaciers; our solitude is like the tranquil lake; our dilemmas are like the marshland waiting for a lotus to bloom; our conversations are like bridges across two banks that yearn to meet; and our poems and songs are but tender teardrops turned into pearls forever...within the oysters of our eyes.