Rhythmic Words Unscanned Poem by Ananta Madhavan

Since boyhood I have felt melodic tunes
That lingered unbeknown within my pulse
In rhythmic beats I was not taught to scan;
Wavelets of words and phrases reached my feet,

With lilting beats and tales to calm the mind,
Forever skeptical of fantasy,
So counter to my sense of real life,
Duties like homework still left incomplete.

I was saddened for the sweeper's son,
Who could not go to school because
His parents could not pay the fine, nor buy
A snack for lunch, and he was proud like me.


I felt the drift of rhyming tales, the lull
Of common words that foreign kids could sing:
Incredible that Jack and Jill must climb
A hill to fetch a pail of well water.


Elders regaled us with heroic legends
And sang some haunting psalms, inviting us
To join the choral chant in syllables
That rolled from childish tongues with joyful zest.


When as a boy I went to the sandy beach
Of Madras on the Coromandel Coast, I loved
The tickling of my feet by rhythmic waves
And sought to tune them in my singsong words.


I found a rhythm which I later learnt
Was called ‘iambic', when two syllables,
The first unstressed, the next with stress;
A line of five such pairs a ‘pentameter'.

- -
My first poem thus began:
"And away they go
With a lance and a bow,
Faster than a crow,
High and low".

Juvenilia is best discarded, but
Memory obeys no one's vanity.
I read the verse of Lake Romantics and
By many other scribblers like ‘Anon'.


At college, poetry was minor to the prosaic;
But verse was in my blood. I read Palgrave;
‘The Golden Treasury' revealed the way
Gray's ‘Elegy' combines both sense and sound.

‘The paths of glory lead but to the grave'.
Fatalistic, morbid, but true and terse.
Perhaps poetasters could try another tack:
Something unsound, but not without some sense.


I must make Sense. It takes priority
To meter, euphony and assonance.

Trochee, Spondee, varied with Anapest,
Goodbye. Would Byron make sense today,
With his enticing line I once declaimed?
‘The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold'.

It can be fun
To make up a pun,
Bilingual, as in this:

"One man's poisson
May be another's poison".