Arth se pare...

I have been lazy and negligent about this blog and return to it now after over a year, spurred by a random event. Today, doing a search on Horace's Ars Poetica, I came across a blog with the following poem by Archibald MacLeish:

  Ars Poetica

 A poem should be palpable and mute
 As a globed fruit

 Dumb
 As old medallions to the thumb

 Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
 Of casement ledges where the moss has grown -

 A poem should be wordless
 As the flight of birds

 A poem should be motionless in time
 As the moon climbs

 Leaving, as the moon releases
 Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

 Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
 Memory by memory the mind -

 A poem should be motionless in time
 As the moon climbs

 A poem should be equal to:
 Not true

 For all the history of grief
 An empty doorway and a maple leaf

 For love
 The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea -

 A poem should not mean
 But be

It is a strongly evocative poem...almost hauntingly so. In particular, my eye wandered to the last two lines before I had even read the rest fully, and  I had a sense of deja vu. I recalled a poem by Naresh Mehta that was once a favorite but which I seem to not have thought about in several years (how we drift away from things we once loved):

उल्लंघन 

कविता अर्थ नहीं अनुभव होती है

क्योंकि वह भी सत्ता है

अप्रतिहत अप्रमेय

अर्थ तो शब्द का होता है

और कविता में शब्द

सरोवर में डूबी सीढ़ी है

जहाँ हम समाप्त होते हैं

और सरोवर आरम्भ होता है

सीढियां  खड़े होने के लिए होती हैं

पर सरोवर सीढ़ी-हीन संपूर्ण समर्पण मांगता है

इसीलिए शब्द पर जाकर खड़े मत रहो

शब्द का उल्लंघन ही कविता है