As it is in Art...

From elegant Ivory Tower of intellectual theory

A professor plods, a parched poem in hand

To rough plains of ordinary experience.

There he shares, surely, softly and slowly

His philosophy and wisdom to a plebeian.

Thus spake the articulate professor

With Oronte’s* eloquence to Alceste:

‘Rubrics* go heavy in metred blank verse

Finds its free footing in cathartic heptatet

Lineation fall loose like a chandelier

Subtly spun is my metaphoric motif

In a maladroitly detached caesurae

The eclectic content juxtapose form

Inspired as antiphon to a post-modernist piece

Writ, mind you, in the heat of a purgative muse

Fixated enjambment charms the rhyme scheme…’

The don delves deeper and deeper

But lost, the plebeian interrupts, unsure if

She’s following him or chasing after meaning

‘But sir! My mind is more mesmerized

And mislaid in jungles of my subconscious

For how do I appreciate what I can’t apply?

What one doesn’t have knowledge of?

What goes beyond the bounds of the ordinary?

That has nothing to do with everyday living?

Can a ‘clinically detached style’ put salt on my table?’

She is a stranger on this side of the world

And most words won’t obey her tongue

But her rough riff-ruff voice endures—

Devoid of emotive lingo, she analyses

Characterized by a pedestrian interpretation—

Like a dog placing a prized bone at his master’s

Disinterested feet—she annotates.  The prof becomes

Student. She a mentor. She revises, refines his philos.

Purifying the poem with lyres of shared wisdom

Of singing and dancing with the soil, sowing, raking,

Scything hay stalks—the concerns of common humanity!

One creates a work in solitude, independently

Meticulously and cautiously and with restraint.

One pens and polishes poems like Basho*, until

They shine like a fox’s tail in the winter moon.

One deems it perfect—but unless you breath

The insight of daily life into your thoughts

Your philosophy of crowned wisdom remains

Dry and withered—no more than scraps

Of writing, a man with a pen in his hand

Might make for idleness or for practice

Purgation pours forth the prof’s brow

He is most poet! But she is most philosopher!

He is hearing the theory of relativity from Einstein himself!

He needn’t approach her in unfamiliar academic tradition!

He needn’t win her with airy arguments or gentle coaxing!

He needn’t quote an ancient Elizabethan sage that:

‘A mark of great poetry is to communicate

Even before it is fully understood.’

His buoyant thoughts, a hamlet habitation is given

She replaces his arm-chair theories with plebeian flavour

Trying to give him wisdom—which nature had denied —

To spice up an understanding for his academia

Out of the indulgence of her own peasant life.

Abstract meets concrete, theory seeks out practice

Intellect finds senses. Man woos woman. For one

Without replenishing the other is incomplete!

Wit, subtlety and cleverness tampered and churned

Serves not to display craft of the artist

But rather to reveal the truth of the poem.

That of erasing boundaries, between one world

And another. His and hers. She is a world

He can enter only through her.

He learns, discovers, the power to enrich,

To bring universality in art, and craft,

And learning, and life, is through harmony

Of the ideal and the real. The spiritual and secular.

Intellect and sensual. The ying and the yang.

As it is in art; so it is in life.

©Roundsquare

*Oronte – in Moliere’s Misanthrope, Alceste dismisses Oronte’s puffed up poem, which the latter doesn’t take it lying down.

*‘Rubrics…rhyme scheme…’ – very deep literary devices!

*Basho – a legendary and ancient Japanese Haiku poet, though Basho and the Fox story is apt and serves best the context.