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www.the-criterion.com The Criterion: An International Journal in English ISSN 0976-8165 When her cries were in vain she decides to relinquish the role of a heroine in Hughes’ life and she realizes that her spring of love has dried up. Only alternative was to fall in love with death, which seemed to be attractive to her, since a long time. Love, the world Suddenly turns, turns color. The streetlight Splits through the rat’s-tail pods of the laburnum at nine in the morning. Love has been a major theme in poetry for generations together and a woman plays a major role in the game of love. She is more emotional and sentimental about love than her counterpart. She forgets her identity and completely merges with her lover. She gets a jolt of her life when her tender world, which existed in her imagination, gets shattered. Failure in love as a theme is more powerful in the poems of confessional poets, than its consummation. Kamala Das, on the other hand, lends a new dimension to her love poetry by revealing her kinship with an interior Indian tradition which has its roots in Indian epics. Search for love is the principal preoccupation of Kamala Das’s poetry. She concerns herself with various facets of love. In fact the whole volume of Kamala Das’s poetry revolves round this theme, either directly or indirectly. Her shocking confession about this theme has startled equally the critics and the laymen. It was more shocking because it comes from a traditional, Indian woman. She started seeking love and sexual experience, when she was an adolescent. Devendra Kohli comments in this context: “Almost, all the critics of Kamala Das have been quick to notice that part of the strength of poetry emanates from her powerful personality. But while the vigour of her personality seems to operate rather transparently, and on the surface as it were, it does not detract from the complexity of the women’s ambivalence which is the certitude and the precariousness of sexual love.” She makes the theme more complex when she echoes the mythological love. She records her yearnings in her autobiography My Story thus: I was looking for an ideal lover. I was looking for the one who went to Mathura and forgot to return to his Radha. Perhaps I was seeking the cruelty that lies in the depths of a man’s heart. Otherwise why did I not get my peace in the arms of my husband? But consciously I had hoped for the death of my ego. The ones who loved me did not understand why I was restive. Kamala Das searches for love in more than one person and this leads her to more complexities. Her advantage is of being a poet of the modern era, in which, the idea of love and sex are discussed without any inhabitations. She is able to present her themes, raw, naked without clothing it with imagery and metaphors. She lived and loved like a ‘Radha’, like a queen and could not take the disillusionment of living in one room apartment of Bombay. She writes in her autobiography My Story: “From every city I have lived I have remembered the noon in Malabar with an ache growing inside me, a home sickness,” The same sentiment is echoed in her poetry: …… you cannot believe darling, Can you, that I lived in such a house and Was proud and loved …. I who have lost My way and beg now at stranger’s doors to Receive love, at least in small change? Vol. II. Issue. III 72 September 2011
www.the-criterion.com The Criterion: An International Journal in English ISSN 0976-8165 This urge for love becomes intense and can be traced in her poetic growth. Many persons entered her life as lovers and she does not make efforts to hide this fact. Her problem was, as she states: ……. Oh yes, getting A man to love is easy, but living Without him afterwards may have to be faced. A living without life when you move Around, meeting strangers, with your eyes that Gave up their search, with ears that hear only. Kamala Das’s need to have many men in her life was justified by her at several places. She yearns for such a love, which does not impede her impulse to freedom. Her concept of ideal love is embedded in the poem ‘The Old Playhouse’. … Love is Narcissus at the waters’ edge, hunted By its own lovely face, and yet it must seek at last An end, a pure, total freedom, it must will the mirrors to shatter and the kind night to erase the water. Her experiments with love take many turns and in the course, give birth to more frustrations and more poetry. She wanted a love of her liking and become ‘The Prisoner’ in that gladly. As the convict studies His prison’s geography I study the trappings Of your body, dear love, For I must some day find, an escape from its snare. The search for ideal love is continued throughout her poetry. Her concept of love takes a new turn very often. In ‘Love’ she confesses: Until I found you, I wrote verse, draw pictures, And, went out with friends For walks ………. Now that I love you, Curled like an old mongrel My life lies, content, In you … … She was sick of love, which was just skin-deep. With her strong aversion to lust, she questions her readers: … … … What is The use, what is the bloody use? That was the only kind of love, This hacking at each other’s part, Like convicts hacking, breaking clouds at noon. Her ideal love, which she seeks, had her grandmother’s love, her parental love and also the soft lesbian love, which she had experienced at school. She failed miserably but quite gracefully and poetically. This helpless feminine anger on her husband, lovers and society made her passion cruel. She says: Vol. II. Issue. III 73 September 2011
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