Wordsworth said, “Child is father of the man”
But this child has now disappeared into ‘the man’
Robbed of innocence his childhood curtailed
The worldly shadows that round him prevail
Makes the heavenly- halo round him derail
Coleridge and his Ancient Mariner
Fear no more the wrath of God
Just as numerous ‘Christabels
Dread the day not the dark;
The ‘Kubla Khans ‘ of modern day
No longer, hesitate to build a ‘sunny dome’
Around the ‘Alph ’with human mortar
Shelley with his ‘exotic’ energy
Roams no more the boundless sky
With clouds of hope … or like the West Wind great
Promising rejuvenation of the spring:
Keats with his merry ‘Nightingale’
Has forever disappeared into the forest wild
And the mysterious moon with its fairies gay
Is lost with its stones and rocks;
No more does the ‘Grecian Urn’ urge
Permanency in any relationships,
‘The Skylarks’, of both Wordsworth and Shelley
Take turns to roam the sky
One longs to return to its nest
The other roams the sky
“Away, away, far, far away”
Away from the dying hopes of humanity
We too long to chariot away
“On the wings of poesy”
Not with Bacchus and his pards
To smell the fragrance of the flowers
And see the ‘heavy winged thieves
“Store their clammy cells,” with honey sweet
And repeat…
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty
That is all ye know on earth
And all ye need to know.”
~Shobha Diwakar
Jabalpur, India
(with due respects to Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley)
A beautiful poem pinpointing the loss of childhood in this maze of competition & a complicated life along with many more puzzling problems.
thanks ASB for appreciating this problematic phase of childhood
somewhere in the rush of this crazy world innocence is completely lost and children going astray and falling into traps
A nice poem!
Just as any adulteration spoils the food, its presence in human relationships too pollutes the atmosphere, and results in its premature death!
Childhood days are very much divine, and remain as pure as the streek of water that flows in a river undisturbed
It’s the time when pretension has no role to play, and when truth remains unaffected by other colours or shades!
Let us go back to those enviable days, and enjoy its worth, in a casual manner, temporarily forgetting the competitive world we are in!
that is a very apt interpretation of the poem OKRSji and very beautifully analyzed
its a pity our modern children have matured before their age and face all sorts of unwanted problems at an age when they should enjoy the beatitude of life