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DR. Chhote Lal Khatri
C.L.Khatri, Ph.D., an award-winning and widely published
and translated poet, is the editor of Cyber Literature and
is an important voice in Indian English poetry. He writes in
English and Hindi. His three collections in English, titled
Kargil, Ripples in the Lake and Two- Minute Silence
were favourably received. He edited an anthology of
poems on world peace Millennium. He is full professor
with Dept. of English of T.P.S. College, Patna, India.
STEPHEN GILL’S THE
Experimental Sonnets
SINGER
OF
LIFE:
Stephen Gill is a well known poet of peace and love and a
fiction writer. This is his maiden venture in writing sonnet
sequence evoking his deep felt and matured wisdom. The
poet identifies love with peace as the two “walk side by
side and where there is no love there is sickness in every
shape and where there is sickness there is no peace.”
(Preface) So the poet continues to tread in the same line
seeking universal peace and love. What draws one’s
attention at first sight is the physical form of his sonnet or
the singer of life- 100
his deliberate attempt to experiment with the sonnet form.
He writes a long Preface to justify his maneuver:
My sonnets of twelve lines each are based, as are
traditional sonnets, on love without the division into eight
and six lines, called octave and sestet. However I make
use of internal rhyme, including alliteration, assonance and
the end rhyme only when I need it the most. Some words
from the beginning of the first line form the heading. In
The Singer of Life, I modify the format of the sonnet to suit
my purpose. In other words, I change bottles, but the wine
remains the same. My sonnets are aligned to the left and
right sides in the same way as in prose. Such a format
demands its own strict discipline… (Preface)
Experiment with sonnet form is not new or
unprecedented; it has been going on since its beginning in
England. Spenser and Shakespeare were among the early
poets to experiment successfully with its form. G M
Hopkins wrote some of his sonnets in sprung rhythm, such
as "The Windhover", and also several sonnet variants such
as the 10½-line curtal sonnet "Pied Beauty" and the 24line caudate sonnet "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire". By
the end of the 19th century, the sonnet had been adapted
into a general-purpose form of great flexibility. In recent
time there have been many unconventional turns and
twists in its structure. Reference can be made to Mr. Acorn
with his cut it at 12 if it wants. West coast poet Alfred
Noyes, also known as Stephen Collis author of The
Commons, has also published poems called Compression
Sonnets, Wee sonnets that consist of fourteen words.
One can’t think of the sonnet without considering
Shakespeare, and all of the textual interventions his
sonnets have evoked. Jen Bervin’s in his book Nets, takes
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several dozens of Shakespeare’s sonnets and rubs away
at them revealing her own poems. This is called eraser
technique of sonnet writing. The contemporary Greek
poet Yannis Livadas invented the "fusion sonnet"
consisting of 21 lines, essentially a variable half of a "jazz"
sonnet, accompanied by a half sonnet as a coda. Both
parts of the poem appear as a whole in a dismantled form
of a series of 3, 2, 4, 3, 4, and 5-lined stanzas.
(Source:www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2010/03/to-sonnet-toso-net-tuscon-net)
This brief perusal of experiment in sonne t
legitimizes Stephen Gill’s experiment but the real test of its
success lies in the womb of time. As a matter of fact none
of the radical experimenters like Hopkins, Noyes or Bervin
have earned a lasting recognition for this feat. If the 12
liners in prose form gets acceptance in course of time Gill
will have the credit as it is a maiden model of sonnet.
The basic definition for a love poem of any sort is
a question to which the answer is inevitably “you.” The
sonnet diagrams this relationship very effectively. In this
respect, Stephen Gill stands to the test of love poem or
sonnet as he adroitly frames the relationship between “I”
and “you” albeit in the tradition of Platonic love.
Dr. Gill does not follow any of the conventional
parameters of sonnet at least in structure: 12 lines instead
of 14 lines, no rhyme scheme, no stanza division, no
iambic pentameter but he claims to retain the conventional
theme that is love. It is true that its pioneers wrote on love.
Among the early and best-known sonneteers are Dante
and Petrarch. Dante wrote The Divine Comedy to express
his love for Beatrice, and Petrarch wrote for his beloved
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Laura. Shakespeare also wrote for his beloved. Here one
is reminded of the fact that ‘Love’ has been a predominant
subject and not the only of sonnet. John Donne wrote
sonnets on religious themes in Holy Sonnets. Milton
expanded his range to include other subjects of serious
contemplation. Again Dylan Thomas’ Alterwise by Owllight is a sonnet sequence on his own life. As far sonnet
sequence is concerned, some of Elizabethan sonneteers
notably Sydney, Spenser and Shakespeare practiced it.
They link a series of sonnets by exploring various aspects
of a relationship between the lovers or its successive
development.
In Stephen Gill’s sonnet sequence the poet
addresses to his beloved ‘you’ but ‘you’ is not necessarily
a female body but neutral God or Nature and Creatrix; “….I
shall wear your ring as the just tribute of my eulogy.” Like
Robert Frost he declines ‘to sleep yet’ as “Beastly winds
still blow the fragile petals and the wounded birds of my
aspiration still flutters in the cell of horrors of the callous
dreamers.”(3) It is not Romantic love of an Elizabethan
Sonneteer that brings him to his beloved but an evocation
of Platonic love. He is more driven by Shelley’s spirit for
reformation and change and invests Nature with Aeolian
power ‘The warmth of my psalms to honour its salient
silence negates the venom of the serpent of any fret that
lurks around “. (2) Here love and beauty are in sync with
nature to bring about Arnoldian regeneration of culture and
restoration of the time honored value system of love,
tolerance, kindness, honesty and universal brotherhood.
Dr. Gill has been playing the role of a crusader for world
peace, happiness and love through poetry even at the risk
of being accused of mannerism.
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The mysterious, anonymous recurrent ‘you’ that
structurally and emotionally binds all sonnets into a
seamless garland is variously alluded to in these sonnets:
“You are the calm of my lake” (5), “You’re the solid cottage
that shields the flickering flame…” (6), “You are the sprout
of a leaf” (6), “You are the Agni, the cleansing force” (9),
“you are the thoughtful shoot of life” (8) and this is how he
goes on alluding with the help of metaphors. The poet
describes himself as “the prophet of a few words of the
gifted tongue” or as an apostle of ‘you’ who carries the
message of ‘You’ far and wide with creative power. In
sonnet 12 he invokes ‘You’: “I prostrate lie before the
muse of lyrics to exalt love who is the Singer of life.” The
poet here personifies love but the next moment he defines
his love for ‘you’ “My love for you is deathless. It is the love
that has no barriers, no colours, no age, no lies” (Sonnet
12). He invests love with divinity: “It is the expression of
OM and OM is peace and peace is my plea as it is of
prophets,”. It seems he is moving towards the gospel of
universal religion in his plea for peace and love, the vital
force of human civilization and the crying need of all ages.
So the poet moves through the binary opposition: the
reality of ‘panicked dreads’, ‘maddening dusk’ and its
antidote love and peace which he tries to achieve through
“the chalice of your luminous presence”(18).
Stephen Gill compares love mostly using
metaphors and similes. Love is for him Donne’s ‘compass’,
lndra’s ‘Soma’ Rasa; it’s a prayer; like a bird and so on.
Comparisons and allusions are drawn from religions, art
and Nature; and they try to qualify and define ‘I’, ‘you’ and
‘love’. So from macrocosmic allusions and comparisons he
comes to the realization of the microcosmic essence of life
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that is ‘the lotus of cosmos’ (Sonnet 21).This is achieved
only in the union of ‘I’ and ‘you’. The darkness of demons
plaguing the world, be it the blood ravaged Arab world,
international terrorism, rising fundamentalism and threat of
third world war, can only be defeated by the light of love
that is the manna of Christ. He arrives at holistic fusion of
humans and non-humans, Nature and art in the
‘Sovereign space’ with an acute awareness of bipolar
reality. Example is sonnet 23 where he says:
You are the flamingo that nestles in the lagoon of my
painful melody, where my favorite apostles of art dwell.
When my body malfunctions due to the hysteria of chaos,
your cute tiny dimple dances as the herb of energy from
the inner psyche. You are the breath from the sovereign
space that links humans with non-humans. Life
disintegrates where the heat of your unblemished virtue
does not go. I wait to be baptized with the healing warmth
from the burning bush of your glow. (23)
The poet feels indebted to ‘you’-- the cosmic
energy or the ‘élan vital’, the Muse, the creative, artistic
and life-giving force, the genesis of all virtues and divinity
and pays his gratitude to her or ‘you’. He talks of Biblical
resurrection of Christ when he says, “I hear a heartwrenching Sonata from the dove that is lost and is still
alive.” (Sonnet 28) Towards the end he gives a pastoral
touch to the sonnet sequence in vivid pictorial description
of exotic pastoral landscape that is refreshing, energizing
and creatively stimulating. The poet deserves kudos for his
concept of the Platonic love to be realized in the physical
world as a panacea for all ills.