‘Prison Days and Other Poems’ by Agyeya

Void of ornate pretensions, a collection of poems that lays bare the bleak truths of an earnest soul. S.H. Vatsyayan, better known as Agyeya, could enthuse readers of English as much as the inhabitants of the Hindi land — as is evident from the foreword Jawaharlal Nehru had written for the collection. The aforesaid is a modest attempt at English language poetry by a Hindi writer who claimed of no mastery, but which by all means can be acclaimed as a bilingual oner. 

The clang of the shackles and the unrepressed wrath for the Empire are felt in the sundry lookouts of the section entitled ‘Prison Days’. Verses of the ‘Days When the Lotus Blooms’ are evanescent of the bereaved freedoms of the natives: These are the days when the lotus blooms/ In the foresaken garden near my home—/ Faraway./ Forsaken, yes,/ And faraway./ And behind me is the might of the whole empire,/ I am not forsaken./ Lotuses/ An expanse of limpidity/ Free spaces/ Five measured paces this way/ Five measured paces that way/ Prison. 

Yet another titled ‘The Dispossessed’ spews whiffs of the bemusing vexations of the countrymen : But we are not the dispossessed;/ We are possessed of a fiend who knows no chains,/ Whom bars do not bind: 

The one that blatantly arouses the virginal senses of the reader — or so this reader feels — is ‘The Breakers’  whose last three words scream of the aspirations that the hundreds of words imbued with raged emotions strewn on these pages struggle to effuse : Equality/ Fraternity/ Liberty? 

Prison ordeals aside, another theme for which the poet proves his flair, is that phenomenon, or rather the philosophical entity, that binds souls in staunch yet flaccid threads, called love. These unfazed utterances, as expressed in one such poem ‘Afterward’ : When I saw/ The two bright red curves of your lips/ I knew all else can be forgotten— could’ve been for the person to whom the poet dedicates these lines. 

Ruminative themes such as change, fate, beauty and so on, also find place in his poems. 

Though by no measure the erudite poet of our blinkered imaginations, Agyeya is a writer whose verses speak to us through the numerous latitudes we cross in our lives, without our ever having to sit on a couch and wrap ourselves in his words. A confluence of the vernacular — in its sensibility — and the foreign — in its outlay, these mellow poems characterise our infrequent returns to the past and travails of the present, and in these unsullied aspects, it truly proves its mettle.