Latest news with #Yeats'
The Hindu
10-05-2025
- General
- The Hindu
A grief that refuses to fade
The morning after the Pahalgam massacre, we remembered the laughter that vanished mid-air. Children looked for faces that will not return, mothers dreamt of voices that the wind had stolen. And still, the men who plot wars draw their maps in silence, remaining unshaken by the wailing. For me this is not just grief, but the death of meaning. Surely, they died for no reason. And we live with no reason. It is not just the dead who suffer. The living too ache with fractured memories and empty hands. Mothers fold clothes that will never be worn, and fathers set an extra plate that they must soon take away. They thought we would forget but we remember. We remember the small shoes left at the door, the songs half-sung, the meals half-eaten. We remember the laughter that vanished mid-air, the goodbyes that never thought they were the last. Our loss is not merely of life, but of time, of continuity, while our political leaders speak in cold numbers, distorting the truth with euphemisms. Killing the innocent with no logic is an interruption of the very pulse of existence, the death of meaning. In the midst of such a tragedy, Yeats' haunting words of growing disintegration of our world come to my mind: 'Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.' This collapse is not some abstract vision — it is reality. It is the blood-soaked streets, the empty stares of those left behind, the hearts shattered in an instant. Violence now churns beneath the surface of every life, spreading like a cancer. The silence of the dead becomes the haunting truth amid loss and pain. Rising toll From the marketplaces of Gaza to the green fields of Pahalgam, from once-vibrant towns now turned to rubble, to villages hollowed out by conflict, the toll of human life rises — silent and appalling, and so deeply expressed by Isaac Rosenberg in his poem Dead Man's Dump: 'And the dead were no more than/ Empty vessels, and their voices/ Were but a wild cry in the night.' The dust of violence chokes whole generations and erodes human dignity, just as the world is poisoned by the wreckage of conflict and political greed. Violence today is no longer an eruption; it is a grim undercurrent, steady and relentless. The violence we see today shatters both the living and the dead, tearing down not just bodies, but the very structure of meaning. The mythical sustenance that once tied us to hope, faith, and community is gone: a line from T.S. Eliot's Wasteland says it all — 'A heap of broken images, where the sun beats' — defining a landscape of aridity and devastation, of despair, drought and the belief that nothing can ever be whole again. 'These are the fragments that I shore against my ruins,' asserts Eliot at the end of his Wasteland harking back to the undying monuments of civilisation, the great masterpieces of literature and art that sustain human life. What is really heart-rending is the suffering of the children inheriting not only the trauma of loss but the trauma of abandonment being thrust into a world where safety is a lie and justice a ghost, where small hands reach for missing hands, and find only air. There is no myth left to guide them, no story to make sense of this brutality, no toys or books or favourite drawers in their writing tables they once found refuge in. They grow up in a world without meaning, in a world filled only with echoes of war. More than anything, it is Amrita Pritam's anguished cry that echoes in my emptiness, as she laments the violence that eats away at the fabric of human existence: 'Ajj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu' — Today I call out to Waris Shah,/ Rise from your grave,/ Speak from your pages,/ And witness the pain of Punjab once more.' Her words mourn not just a region, but the loss of the sacred, the death of a culture, and the disappearance of the stories that once held meaning. Without them, we are lost in a desert of memory and grief. Yet, amid all this, there flickers a defiant, aching hope — a refusal to let the dead be erased. While they made widows and orphans, we make songs and prayers. While they made graveyards, we make gardens out of tears. Our hope is not a naive surrender to fate, but a rebellion against the absence of meaning. Even in the face of overwhelming grief, those who remain choose to rebuild and remember. Hope is all that we have. In W.H. Auden's elegy In memory of W. B. Yeats, he captures this hope amid the disillusionment of the modern world after the loss of a great poet: 'He became his admirers./ Now he is dead./ Now the ghost of his words still haunts us.' The death of the poet in Auden's world is not just the death of a man; it is the death of a voice that helped make sense of the chaos, the voice that tried to weave myth back into the dust of history. But that voice is gone, and we are left to fend for ourselves in the darkness where art and poetry live on, asserting and reinforcing the ever-living sprit of man, his undying songs that stitch their words into every step he takes. We are the ones who remain and in our broken hearts, the dead still live. shelleywalia@
The Guardian
24-03-2025
- General
- The Guardian
A swan: ‘I have looked upon these brilliant creatures, and now my heart is sore'
This morning I learned the word 'limn'. It looked at first like a typo, and I almost ignored it. But I pressed on the letters on my phone, which caused its meaning to pop up in a little box, like a window appearing in a wall. To limn is to 'depict or describe in painting or words'. I was drinking cold coffee in my kitchen, and preparing to write this column – my last. Because I knew that I would do the swan, a large, long-necked water bird had started gliding around my mind, so it seemed clear that the word limn looks like a swan: the tall l with the tiny flick of a dipped head, and the letters after. It can also mean 'to suffuse with light', or outline: the full moon limned the dark river and the white feathers of a swan upon it. Limn: it comes from luminare, to make light, and illuminate, as in to illuminate, or decorate, a manuscript. It was only much later, when I read the words 'Farewell, all joys! O Death, come close mine eyes! / More Geese than Swans now live, more Fools than Wise.', that I suspected I had written about swans in this column before. I had, in November 2022. Recently my mother told me she was worried that in the last two years or so, I had 'lost some of my innocence'. This is the sort of thing mothers say as you are walking, perfectly innocently, to the movies, thinking of nothing but popcorn and wine. And it is the sort of thing they tend to be right about. Over the course of writing these columns, I have had a child, have lost someone important to me and have lost, then rebuilt, my sense of self. The swan song I wrote in 2022 was by a person who feels familiar, but separate, from the one that stood in my kitchen this morning. So it is exactly right that there should be two depictions of a swan: one before, and one after. After all, the most famous swan poem, Yeats' The Wild Swans at Coole, is about this feeling of having changed between one year and another, and realising it because you see swans: I have looked upon those brilliant creatures, And now my heart is sore. All's changed since I, hearing at twilight, The first time on this shore, The bell-beat of their wings above my head, Trod with a lighter tread. Swans, quite obliviously, sent Yeats into despair. And that is one of the very many magical things about people thinking about animals. Pick one – some will speak to you, others not, and you will know instantly – and it acts like a key or a guide. It will illuminate (limn) your own memories, otherwise doors wedged closed or opened at random, and poems, or books, or passages, or lyrics, or cartoons you once loved, or hated, or were confused by: all of these are living in your head, along with all of the animals. To think about a given animal, or insect, or the moon, or fish that sing or fish that portend doom is to remember old selves, to connect your heart to your tongue: Her tongue will not obey her heart, nor can Her heart inform her tongue, –the swan's down-feather, That stands upon the swell at full of tide, And neither way inclines. I have learned that people can feel so strongly about daddy long legs or Komodo dragons or a lemming that if you insult that animal in your headline, people will defend it in the comments in their hundreds. That people will write to you to tell you the story of one particular spider that inhabits one particular shower, or to admit that they, too, have always pronounced anemone incorrectly. Will send you emails about the frogs, robins, snails and slugs in their gardens or tell you the price of a beaver in Canada ($2,000). Now, I am off to a new job. Writing these on a Monday morning, staring an animal in the eye, devouring all I can about an oyster, being paid to contemplate, for hours, the significance of an egg, has been meaningful and delightful. I hope it has been something like that for you. Thank you for reading. This is Helen Sullivan's last Nature of column (for now). She is writing a novel for Scribner Australia. You can still write to her, here.
