Meel Patthar

The Cuckoo is a bird that we rarely see. But we hear its voice, and it is this voice that provides us with our introduction to it. The Cuckoo has a characteristic trait. Its voice cannot be heard always. In the heat-laden atmosphere of summer, this voice soars higher and higher. Like the ascending notes in a musical scale. Something comparable happens in the poet's mind when his inner being heats up. His inner voice transforms itself into poetry as it comes out. Today, we hear such an inner voice springing out from Saratchandra Shenoi's throat. At this moment, as we are about to step into the twenty first century, and as we ponder over the new forms literature has taken, would it be a contradiction to equate the poet with the Cuckoo and his poetry with what is vocalized? Poetry today is very different from that of the nineteenth century. Its form, sentiment, character, direction, and its inner traits, have altered substantially. Over the last hundred or hundred and fifty years, the world, man, and his life, have all changed, and it is hardly surprising that this change is reflected in poetry. In the nineteenth century, French writers protested against the 'bourgeois' element in the poems of Victor Hugo. Several French poets such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Laforgue and Mallarme began advocating a new form of poetry. Their influence however, was minimal on the work produced in the neighboring country, England.