Yet as the deadline approached, I became determined. ‘Write or die’ became my motto. I decided to read some of Tennyson's lyrical poems. The title of this poem -- Nothing will Die -- roused my curiosity. So, here goes.

Difficulty in understanding the language is usually the first reason of my tension when I read a poem. Fortunately that was not a problem here.

When will the stream be aweary of flowing

Under my eye?

When will the clouds be aweary of fleeting?

When will the heart be aweary of beating?

Never, oh! never, nothing will die.

I found the words easily understandable. Beautiful lines, beautiful sentiments, no doubt.

Yet, as I went on reading the poem, I could not agree completely with the poet's views. He writes:

Nothing was born;

Nothing will die;

Throughout the poem, the words ‘Nothing will die’ run like a refrain.

But does nothing really die? Does not all change imply destruction of the old? Things must die, so that the new can be born. Creation occurs through destruction; mere change cannot bring in the new. Old seasons die away, giving way to new seasons. The past dies so that the present can live. A new world can only be created when the old dies. Change can improve the state of things, but cannot build something new in a fresh and new form. The cycle of birth and death is necessary -- perhaps as part of the Divine Will.

By denying that death exists, was Tennyson trying to console himself? Perhaps he was trying to forget the death of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam and keep his memory alive -- ‘through Eternity’.

Our Department was going to publish a literary bulletin. I was very excited and eager to write something for it and decided on a poem. A poem to me was just an emotion expressed in rhymed words. I thought that through a poem I would easily be able to express my thoughts, my emotions and desires. So I sat down and wrote what I thought was poetry.

But, alas, it merely looked like a poem. It was like a body with no life at all. After writing it — and after it was politely rejected by the editors — I realised that writing a poem is not an easy job. The basic rules of writing a poem were unknown to me. In my poem there were no images. The language was not figurative. Sense perceptions were only described. I could not use images, I did not how to do that. I simply jotted down some rhymed sentences which contained a mixture of colloquial and formal words and called it a poem.

I now realise that to become a poet one must feel things deeply enough and express those feelings through images, keeping in mind the many rules involved in writing poetry. It is relatively easy to express an emotion or desire in prose, but to do so in poetry is a different kettle of fish altogether. Would I ever be able to do that?

I found the poem touching because it carried a wonderful message for me. It renewed my faith in God and gave me the strength of spirit to fight life’s hurdles.

It made me remember how Christ said to his followers – ‘I must work the work of Him that sent me where it is day, the night cometh when no work can be done.’.

Of the characters, I find Philip most appealing. He was a sweet, innocent, docile boy handicapped by a clubfoot. This physical defect remained a permanent impediment in his life. Philip lost his mother in the very beginning. He was too young even to realize what a loss it was, to understand what death meant. Adopted by Mr. Carey, he was sent to King's School at Tercanbury. Because of his deformity, he was constantly persecuted. Till he was thirteen, he had to live with ‘Singer’, his chief tormentor. It was a long time before the torture stopped. As a result he became very self-conscious and sensitive. Yet, beneath his painful shyness, a strong personality was developing. I find myself sympathising because I think this is very true to life.

Life went on with much the same pain. He travelled to many places in spite of his physical defect. He fell in love. His deformity came between him and Mildred. After much humiliation, Philip deserted the idea of winning her, though at the back of his mind hope remained. His need for holding on to someone, brought him to Norah.

After nearly thirty years, he realised what a blow his mother’s death was. This precipitated a deep spiritual crisis. His dreams of having a happy life began to slip away. It was Sally who saved him from utter despair. It is Philip’s struggle to find himself that attracts me most.

It is perhaps possible to relate these two poems thematically. ‘The poetry of the earth is never dead...’, exclaims the poet in the first line of the sonnet. Keats’s poetry includes the poetry of human life, the poetry of humankind’s joys and sorrows. That is why he welcomes both joy and sorrow in the fragment.

During summer, the grasshopper sings delightfully. The cricket’s song follows in the winter. In ‘Ode to Autumn’ we listen to the song of the hedge-crickets, to the twittering of the gathering swallows. A beautiful music fills the earth in every season.

Human life is both gay and dismal, both hard and easy, both simple and complex. This produces a melodious rhythm that is manifested through the songs of the grasshopper and the cricket. Earth presents us with her never-ending collection of poems hidden among the trees and the grassy hills. In poetry of earth there are elements both fair and foul, there are ‘serpents in the red rose hissing’, there is ‘dancing music’ as well as ‘music sad’.

Reading Keats’s poetry, I am learning to ‘mark sad faces in fair weather’ and to hear ‘a merry laugh amid the thunder’. There is need for us to rid our ‘faces’ of the ‘veil’ and enjoy the poetry of both happiness and sorrow.

Though his surroundings were hardly congenial for a poetic genius to develop, his vocation was poetry.

Apprenticed to a surgeon, Keats never liked the smell of hospitals. In fact, he is known to have fainted a number of times when working with cadavers. Not that he was bad at his job; he simply despised it. He has talked of an incident during his hospital days, which was quite significant.

It was a normal day. Keats was listening to a lecture delivered by one of the surgeons. Suddenly he saw a ray of the sun that had entered the room. Motes of dust floating in the air defined the ray. ‘The other day, during a lecture,’ he told a friend, ‘there came a sunbeam into the room and with it a whole troop of creatures floating in the ray; and I was off with them to Oberon and fairyland.’

This incident, though ordinary enough, not only illustrates his ability to take off on flights of imagination, but the acuteness of his senses. Such incidents must have gone a long way towards the fashioning of his poetic genius.

I first read Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant at the age of seven. I was so impressed by its theme that it became almost a habit with me to read the story regularly. It may sound strange, but I still carry on with this habit. It still gives me immense pleasure. This is because of the idea that runs through the story that I read the story again and again. It pleads against cruelty and selfishness.

The Selfish Giant symbolizes the self-centred tendencies of the human mind. At the end the Giant learns that real happiness can come only through sacrifice. The Christ child leads him to heaven.

The other story by Wilde that I love is The Happy Prince. The Prince learnt through the swallow that his subjects are suffering. He gave away everything he had to help them. It is the swallow that taught him to feel for the people. And it is the swallow that felt sympathy for him when he had become a pauper. It chooses to stay with him even though he knew he might die. And it does die.

The people that ruled the Happy Prince’s town and so admired his beautiful finery symbolize the vanity and selfishness of modern life. They throw away what is really valuable because it does not satisfy their idea of beauty. They cannot appreciate true goodness of heart.

This fragment from the letter of Katherine Mansfield shows how complex a person she was. The same complexity is revealed in her short story The Fly, written in February, 1922. She carefully blended intimate matters from her life into the events of the story.

Her father, Sir Harold Beauchamp was wealthy and dominating like the Boss in the story and the Boss’s son, like her beloved brother Leslie, was killed in the War. Mansfield was extremely close with Leslie and was deeply affected by his death. After his death she wrote:

Mansfield never had happiness in her life. She was a victim of Tuberculosis and suffocated in blood like the ‘fly’ which too suffocates in ink in the story. The efforts of the fly shown in the story represents the philosophy of man’s struggle against all hostilities of life only to be toyed with by the Fates. The fly has much in common with all of us. The role it plays in the story – all human beings play it, whether it is the Boss, old Mr. Woodifield, Boss’s son or Katherine Mansfield herself. The story thus is the reader’s autobiography as well.

"Truth is stranger than fiction" -- therefore it should not be said that the lover in Browning's The Last Ride Together is too noble to be real. The Last Ride Together is a poem of unrequited love, but the rejected lover does not whine and whimper like the conventional lovers. The lover becomes grateful to his beloved mistress for granting his one more ride with her that would attain him to Godhead for one day more. He has the ideal in his heart; it shall be cherished as the occupant of his heart’s throne for ever. In this poem Browning, the poet and the philosopher, joins hand with Browning the psychologist. Browning's deep psychological insight into the lover's mind reveals the conception of love as a spiritualizing and elevating force which purifies one’s body, mind heart and soul. The argumentative and the analytical poem sometimes depicts the strange lover as an optimist who perhaps believes that no earthly failure should crush the soul of a lover. He reveals intense passion as well as a meditative bent. So, in this poem, the lover may be called extraordinary but not unreal by any means.

‘‘Macbeth shall sleep no more!’’declared the disturbed protagonist, lovingly called by Upamanyu Chatterjee the ‘‘greatest insomniac in English Literature’’ and in a dark auditorium occasionally lit by the busy torches of the ushers, Orson Welles’ Macbeth recreated the magic of William Shakespeare.

For three days starting from the 23rd February 2001, the English Department of St.Xaviers College, Calcutta, presented Cinematic Adaptations Of Shakespeare, which included Japanese maestro Akira Kurosawa’s Ran (Kurosawa’s meditation on Shakespeare’s King Lear), Celestino Coronado’s Freudian version of Hamlet, Orson Welles’ Macbeth, Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (a superb interpretation of Macbeth), Orson Welles’ Othello, and a more recent version of the same, directed by Oliver Parker.

It was a novel experience for some, and a lifetime experience for many. Be it the haunting tune of a flute, coupled with the constant buzz of crickets in Ran, or the old hag in the eerie Cobweb Forest in Throne Of Blood, Shakespeare had never been so innovatively presented before a crowd comprising mostly of English Honours students from Presidency, Lady Brabourne, Scottish Church, Heramba Chandra, Rani Birla, Dinabandhu Andrews, Jadavpur University, and Chitrabani, savouring their first taste of Shakespeare on screen. The talks presented by Prof. Somdatta Mondal, Rev. Gaston Roberge, Shamik Bandopadhay, Prof. Paromita Chakraborty and Prof. Sanjay Mukhopadhayay were enlightening, to say the least.

Complementing the visual feast, came the excellent cuisine from the college canteen. We sincerely look forward to more such seminars in the years to come, where we will have such an illuminating time again, where the rigidity of Austen, or the modern complexities of a post-war Joycian fiction will come alive once again in the heart of old Kolkata.