Vikram Seth 4z5c4h

On “The Frog and the Nightingale” Vikram Seth‟s poem, „The Frog and the Nightingale‟ was published as a part of a collection of his poems, titled Beastly Tales from Here and There. The collection contains ten poems in all. As an introduction to the collection, Seth explains:

Because it was very hot in my house one day and I could not concentrate on my work, I decided to write a summer story involving mangoes and a river. By the time I had finished writing “The Crocodile and the Monkey” (in a cool room lent to me by a friend), another story and other animals had begun stirring in my mind. And so it went on until all ten of these beastly tales were born – or re-born. Of the ten tales told here, the first two come from India, the next two from China, the next two from Greece, and the next two from Ukraine. The final two come directly to me from the Land of Gup.

It is an extremely slippery task to try and label or categorize the poetry of an author of such a cosmopolitan background and personal nature. Seth writes in his introduction to his The Collected Poems that he has often been asked the question, “Do I see myself as an Indian or American or Commonwealth writer…?” He answers later “These imaginative categories are fascinating, but in the final analysis irrelevant. I see myself as Indian…and primarily as a poet…” The reason why I quoted this age has to do with how I think this poem can perhaps be seen.

My first reaction upon reading the poem was that it was similar in some ways to The Owl and the Nightingale, a twelfth or thirteenth century Middle English poem. However, upon closer inspection of Seth‟s poem, I realized that the similarity lies merely in the dramatis personae, as it were, rather than in the subjectmatter of the poem. The Owl and the Nightingale is written as a débat in the French fashion, whereas „The Frog and the Nightingale‟ comes nowhere near being a debate. In form, I believe, „The Frog and the Nightingale‟ perhaps resembles most closely the ballad, in both its form and folk elements. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary defines ballad as:

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a folk song or orally transmitted poem telling in a direct and dramatic manner some popular story usually derived from a tragic incident in local history or legend. The story is told simply, impersonally and often with vivid dialogue. Ballads are normally composed in quatrains with alternating four-stress and threestress lines, the second and fourth lines rhyming; but some ballads are in couplet form, and some others have six-line stanzas. Vikram Seth writes elsewhere in his introduction to his The Collected Poems, “As for how I see myself: this is a question I am often asked, especially by academics. While it is useful to categorize a writer in order to analyse him, it is not something that the writer necessarily subscribes to…” The content of Vikram Seth‟s poems often contradicts the form. He himself writes that The Golden Gate “is not included here [in The Collected Poems] because it is in essence a novel in verse.” It is important to note that The Golden Gate is not merely written “in verse”. It is in fact a series of sonnets which serve the purpose of narrating matters befitting a novel. For this reason I think an understanding of the content of the poem might shed some light on the form Seth is subscribing to.

The poem, it seems to me, talks of the nature of the relationship between the artist and the person who sells the art to the consumer. Be it poet and publisher, be it musician and recording studio. This surely is not the only interpretation, perhaps not even a correct one, but for me, the nightingale represents the artist while the frog represents the producer, the pseudo-critic. More than pointing out the evils of the producer or publisher of art, the poem concentrates rather on the self-consuming nature of the “art industries”. These industries are both fed by art, and at the same time consumers of the artists, often depriving them a life of free choice. The nightingale falls into this dreadful trap. In a bid to become a popular artist, it allows itself to be molded by the frog and eventually loses its artistic abilities and dies „not with a bang but a whimper‟: “Puffed up, burst a vein, and died”.

The point of discussing the content as I read the poem is to ascertain the poetic tradition to which it belongs. I believe it can be read as a loose allegory. The allusion to Mozart in the fourth stanza

3 (in my edition) adds to the idea of art being exploited by persons incapable of art themselves in order to make money. Mozart‟s father, Leopold Mozart (who himself was a composer of some repute), “wanted to display his son's abilities as a performer and a rapidly maturing composer”, and it served to feed the family. Vikram Seth is considerably well-versed in Western Classical music, and I think this is a learned allusion, not a mere accident. In the poem the Nightingale calls the Frog “Mozart”, and as I see it, Seth very cleverly does not mention that the parallel with the frog is not with Wolfgang Amadeus, but with Leopold.

The poem, as I have mentioned earlier, among all available European categories, belongs perhaps most closely in form or content to the ballad. However, as Vikram Seth claims himself, he is an Indian at least by birth. He spent his early years in Calcutta and must surely have read essential Bangla children‟s literature. He mentions the Land of Gup in his introduction to this collection of poems. The Land of Gup appears in Salman Rushdie‟s novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories. It is a fictional land of stories, from which all stories and tales are sent to Earthly storytellers. The reference to Haroun, which in turn makes several references to Bangla children‟s literature (Goopy and Bagha, etc), is significant. It seems to me that the closest parallel to Seth‟s poem (in of content) that can be found lies not so much in Western forms of poetry but in Bangla children‟s literature, especially in Upendrakishore Ray‟s Tuntuni-r Galpa. “The Walrus and the Carpenter”, a poem which appears in Chapter 4 of Lewis Carroll‟s Through the Looking Glass may be thought of as an antecedent (to “The Frog and the Nightingale) as it tells a story, albeit not allegorical, through dramatic narration. “The Walrus and the Carpenter” is broadly classified under “narrative poetry”, a genre which includes lays, ballads and epics. By method of elimination, if by no other means, we can assume that since “The Frog and the Nightingale” cannot surely be either a lay or an epic, the form it comes closest to is the ballad. One Middle English ballad, “The Three Ravnes” (“printed in the song book Melismata compiled by Thomas Ravenscroft and published in 1611”) and its variant, the “Twa Corbies”, presents three or two (as the case may be) birds in conversation about what they should eat. One of the birds mentions a recently slain knight and as they reach the spot they find the dead body guarded

4 and looked after, and the poem itself takes on an allegorical or fabular tone. Some of the broad themes discussed in “Twa Corbies” following this are “the fragility of life, the idea that life goes on after death, and a more pessimistic viewpoint on life”. These poems are classified as ballads. Even though most ballads are conventionally set to tune, they may also have been written initially without music. The similarity of content most specifically seems to be with Upendrakishore‟s children‟s stories, most of which are allegorical, dealing with animals and dialogues between themselves, possessing the same musical and lyrical quality that can be found in Seth‟s verse. However animal allegories are found in Western literature too, mostly in the form of folk tales. It can perhaps be categorized as a ballad narrating not the life and deeds of a person, but rather as a ballad narrating what is essentially a folk-tale, with dramatic elements.

Sujaan Mukherjee