jasc: journal of applied science and computations issn no ... · century and kamala das, who...

Both Emily Dickinson and Kamala Das as women poets achieving

universality through the use of images and symbols in their

poetical works: A Note

DR. C.Ramya, M.B.A,M.A,M.Phil,Ph.D

Asst.Professor,

Department of English

E.M.G.Yadava College for Women,

MADURAI – 625 014.

Tamil Nadu, India.

______________________________________________________________

An Abstract

This paper throws light on the poetical works of Emily Dickinson and

Kamala Das’ use of images and symbols, and their poetry stands for

universality among many other poets who made a significant contribution to

the poetical world added to it. Their poems are romantic and confessional

depicting their individuality in their works, as poets, they use the realistic and

harsh images to bring out admirable effects in all respects.

Key Words : Nature, Image, Symbolism, Unique, Universality,

Romantic poet.

_______________________________________________________________

Poetry is one of the earliest types of literary genres. There is no

denying the fact that of all the literary genres, poetry proves to be the most

interesting for the people all over the world. As it is known to all, reading

poetry not only gives pleasure but also makes the readers think and explore the

roots for deep rooted meanings. Many poets have done remarkable and even

tremendous contributions for the popularity of this genre. Just like its

popularity in England, in India too, it has gained immense popularity and

interest. All Indian verse in English produce since the beginning of this

century testify to the popularity it won among the English speaking people.

The contribution made by women poets to this field is something remarkable,

for they have proved themselves to be the equal counterparts like one Shelley,

JASC: Journal of Applied Science and Computations

Volume VI, Issue VI, JUNE/2019

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Wordsworth, and Coleridge as romantics and like one Robert Lowell, John

Berryman, Theodore Roethke as confessional poets.

In this line, Emily Dickinson and Kamala Das may be cited as good

examples for both romantic and confessional outpourings. Emily Dickinson

was a well-known poet in the nineteenth century. She did not blindly adhere to

the conventions of her day and she earned fame and name in the field of

poetry by writing in her own way. The unique qualities in her poetry reveal

her individuality. Kamala Das; who was the most prominent among the Indian

women poets, rose to fame in the 1960’s. Her poems are nothing but frank

confessions of her life. No other Indian woman has attempted on confessional

poetry as Kamala Das has done. So, both Emily Dickinson and Kamala Das

are great in their own way of writing, especially confessional poetry.

As a literary genre, poetry has gone through evolutionary changes. In

the past, writers were influenced by classic models like Virgil, Goethe and

others. Later, there appeared a generation of poets called romantic poets. Great

poets like William Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Coleridge and Keats

dominated the scene. All romantic literature is subjective. Emily Dickinson

lived through the romantic age and her poems are also subjective. Actually she

cannot be called a romantic in the true sense of the word, but romantic

features are found to be a considerable extent in her poetic creations. In the

letter half of the 19th

century and in the 20th

century, confessional poetry came

in vogue. This poetry is rather free from political and social consciousness.

The poets give vent to their own personal and realistic experiences. With

surprising frankness and sincerity, these poets express their personal vexations

and feelings. Many modern women poets like Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath,

Judith Wright, Kamala Das, Gauri Deshpande are known for their frank

expression of their inner-self.

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was a famous poet in the nineteenth

century and Kamala Das, who belongs to the 20th

century, is a popular poet

recognised in both India and abroad. So both the poets are separated by time,

place and culture. Both Emily Dickinson and Kamala Das have no direct

influence on each other, but human nature is found to be the same all over the



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world. Emily’s poems, like all romantic literature, are an expression of the

inner urges of the soul of the poet. But she never lays bare in her mind in her

poems. She conceals herself and it is the task of the readers to trace the impact

of herself on her poems. This is where a sharp contrast between Emily

Dickinson and Kamala Das can be noted. Kamala Das outpours her realistic

experiences as a confessional poet. Emily Dickinson too outpoured her own

feelings and emotions in the form of poetry, but not in a confessional tone.

The feelings, emotions and miseries she experienced are generalized.

Beauty and tragedy crisscrossed in the lives of both the poets. Melancholy,

romantic fervour and feeling for freedom are communicated in the poetical

works of Kamala Das. Romantic sensibility and sentiment are predominant in

Dickinson’s poetry. Emily Dickinson has her own way of expressing her

thoughts, and Kamala Das is confessional in all respects. Belonging to no

school of poetry and associated with no master, Dickinson wrote her poems as

lived her life in extreme individuality. Her diction is peculiarly her own and

her language was her own nature of the standard speech of her time, the

theological words of religious preachers and the words of the Bible and of

Shakespeare. Despite all such influences, she was found to be extremely

original in her style and diction. Kamala Das, who is not associated with any

writer, writes what she knows. There are not many to whom English is as

natural and medium of expression as it is to Kamala Das. Her choice of

English for her poem is testimony to her greater mastery of that language than

that of her mother tongue, Malayalam. Writing her poetry in the free verse

form, her style is characterised by the unconventional and extremely modern

point of view.

Emily Dickinson’s themes are limited. She examines what life is - the

joy, extreme depression, anguish, crisis and despair blended as a whole. These

feelings expressed in her poetry are universal. It is learnt that Dickinson was

involved in some love affairs and they enabled her to learn about the beauty

and pain of human love. Truly speaking, the regular themes projects in her

poems are life and death, love and lust and time and eternity. Though all such

themes are elusive to man, Emily Dickinson tries to expose their true colours



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as common to the whole humanity. Her poems are based on her own life but

she conceals herself, thereby achieving universality by all means. Unlike

Emily Dickinson, who expresses her feelings and emotions, Kamala Das

pictures her own experiences – joys and sorrows, like and dislikes in poetic

word-form. Since she is a confessional poet, her themes centre around a small

circle. Love and lust and childhood memories are her main themes. When

compared with Emily, Kamala Das is more limited. In her poems, she echoes

for women’s liberalization but she never generalises or universalizes them.

Even though she never generalizes the themes, universal significance can be

acquired from her poems. The poems dealing with her personal aspirations

reveal her feminine sensibility in her roles as granddaughter, daughter, sister,

mother, wife and beloved. Both Emily Dickinson and Kamala Das may be said

to be the poets who have achieved universality by using imagery and symbols.

Image or symbol is the poetic technique through which poets achieve

universality, ornamentation and aesthetic pleasure. Life is to all men, a

mixture of love, happiness and grief. So, as Henry W.Wells puts it, “By

exercise of his imagination the poet discovers symbols which unite men by

giving them as far as possible a common experience within the imaginative

realm and thus proving to them their common share in actuality” (P 245). An

image enables a poet to convey his or her abstract thoughts in a concrete

form, evoking a picture or an idea or a shape about the writer’s feelings.

Metaphors, contrasts and personification all together constitute imagery. To

serve their purpose, poets see both nature and human life as images.

Symbolism is used to represent something which is both evocative and

emotive. Both images and symbols increase the expressive power and range of

a writer helping him to communicate to his or her readers highly abstract and

metaphysical truths which cannot be conveyed directly by the use of ordinary

language.

Emily Dickinson and Kamala Das make ample use of images and

symbols to achieve their own means. Emily got fascinated by the beauties of

nature. Beset in the human world with personal adverse situations, she was

said to be comforted by the impersonality of nature. With a keen interest, she



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observed nature. Sun, Moon, trees, clouds, birds, flowers, insects, season and

creatures became images in her nature poems. After nature, religion becomes

the chief source for symbolism. Her poems abound in references to election,

grace and predestination and they are closely related with the practices of the

puritan believers. She did consider religious imagery as a universal reservoir

of human experience, as nature was to her. In the lyrics dealing with brides

and marriage, religious imagery can be found. Her invisible soul becomes

visible through imagery. Dickinson has employed the most apt and appropriate

symbols in her lighter treatment of the theme of lust or sex. In “A Bee his

burnished carriage”, she describes a lover-bee symbolically assaulting a girl-

rose. She beautifully describes the situation:

“A Bee his burnished carriage

Drove boldly to a Rose –

Combinedly alighting –

Himself – his carriage was –

The Rose received his visit

With frank tranquility … -

Remained for him – to flee –

Remained for her – of rapture

But the humidity” (Complete Poems 579).

This imagery of a bee visiting a rose for honey is from nature and it is a very

common image. The image is a symbolic representation of the male’s power

and the passive acceptance on the part of the female. Emily Dickinson has

treated the theme so decently that no other graphic description of the power of

sexual attraction can be given so vividly. In another poem titled “In Winter in

my Room”, she symbolically analyses the fear and repulsion it arouses. As in

the earlier poem, she describes the power of sexual attraction. In the first part

of the poem, the male force is not so strong and so she ‘secured him by a

strong’ and then ‘went along’. The snake, in the second half, symbolizes the

aroused passions of the man and that he threatens to break out of the controls

she had established:

“A trifle afterward



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A thing occurred

I’d not believe it if I heard

But state with creeping blood –

A Snake with mottles rare

Surveyed my chamber floor

In feature as the worm before

But ringed with power” (CP 682).

“With creeping blood” suggests the intense situation and fear she had for

masculine power. The male force is symbolised by the snake and it threatens

to dominate her “ringed with powers”. But in the end, she retreats because of

her deep-fears of masculine aggression. She retreated in fears. In both the

poems, Emily Dickinson uses the right symbols and produces an image to

indirectly communicate what she really asserts on the surface level, they

appear as nature poems but the deep realm of meanings explored, prove to be

suggestive of the theme of sex. Emily’s nature poems abound in fantastic

imagery. Her pictures of nature are bright and colourful. In the lyric “The

largest fire ever known”, she beautifully describes the path of the sun from

afternoon till evening:

“Rebuilt another morning

To be burned down again” (CP 501).

She rises to rarer heights when her images are perfectly embodies with the

lofty theme of the poem. In the poem “The mountain set upon the plain”, she

describes mountains as the “omni fold” ruling the universe. With great

emotional force, she ends the poem:

“Grandfather of the Days is the

Dawn – the Ancestor” (P 456)

Often she uses harsh and realistic figures to produce admirable effects. In the

lyric “It sounded as if the streets were running”, she employs a homely

imagery for describing nature:

“By and by – the boldest stole out of his covert

To see if time was there –

Nature was in an opal Apron,



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Mixing fresher Air” (CP 598-599).

The metaphor “opal Apron” is used to describe nature which pictures a

homely imagery. Emily Dickinson’s poems on death emphasize its physical

aspects to illustrate the emptiness after the soul’s departure. In “Too Cold is

this”, she portrays death’s complete dominion over life:

“Too Cold is this

Too warm with Sun –

Too stiff to bended be”.

Images of coldness and stone contrast the body’s former vitality with its

present immobility. Moreover she says:

“How event the Agile Kernel out

Contusion of the Husk

Nor Rip nor wrinkle indicate

But just as Asterisk” (Couple Poems of Emily 509).

As a slab of polished marble that merely glistens in the sun, the body is so

inflexible that even the finest craftsman could not join the pieces. There is no

‘Contusion’ or ‘rip’ only a blank asterisk, the typed symbol placed beside a

person’s name to indicate his death. The impersonality of the image manifests

the desolation of the body once the soul has fled. Some of her best lyrics on

death consider the sensation of the dying person, the physical experience as

the soul leaves the body. “I heard a fly buzz, when I died” contrasts the

expectations of death with its realistic occurrence. Like so much of life’s

experience, the fly comes at the wrong time distracting the approach of death:

With Blue – uncertain stumbling Buzz –

Between the light – and me –

And then the windows fails – and then

I could not see to see” (CP 224).

In the final stanza, it is the stumbling blue buzz, an apt image that conveys the

confusion of the dying mind.

Kamala Das, as a confessional poet, does mirror her life in all its

nakedness. She, too makes ample use of images and symbols; but they are not



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too many when compared with Emily Dickinson. Her images spring from the

human body as she is a poet of love and sex. Apart from the human body, she

finds a few images in nature and Hindu mythology. Kamala Das makes use of

the four elements of the nature, the fire, the earth, the water and the air. The

fire-image stands as a destroyer of the human body; the air-image refers to a

calm and peaceful atmosphere; the water-image, the sea, she identifies herself

with it; and the earth-image refers to the sexual passions and their earthliness.

In “The conflagration”, air and fire images can be found. She writes:

Let only silence move there humming

a slow and languid air

The ‘Languid air’ refers to peace and calmness that the poet asks for. But the

fire-image is of more importance. The title of the poem is itself based on this

fire imagery. The latter part of the poem offers the following lines:

“He said you are

A forest conflagration and I, Poor forest,

Must burn” (The Descendents 20)

The atmosphere of burning is created due to the meeting of the two lovers.

The fire symbolizes the violent and strong sexual passions. “Poor forest, must

burn” refers to the passions of the man. The image as a destroyer of the human

body is shown in her “Forest Fire”, Kamala Das writes:

“Of late I have begun to feel a hunger

To take in with greed, like a forest – fire that

Consumes ….” (The old Play house 39).

The Sun is a recurrent image in the poetry of Kamala Das. As Anisur Rahman

points out, it is “an agent of scorching heat, corruption and lust” (32). It is

associated with sex and the dullness of life. “In Love” she equates the

“burning” Sun with the “burning” mouth of the man:

“of what does the burning mouth

of Sun, burning in today’s

sky remind me …. Oh, yes, his mouth”

(The Old Playhouse 15).



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Another predominant image is Kamala Das’s poetry is the sea. The sea is an

extensive symbol and it serves as the thread that unifies all experiences and

images into one whole. The sea-image turns into a symbol in “The Suicide”.

Kamala Das approaches the sea for escape and relief. Thus, both Emily

Dickinson and Kamala Das achieved universality by the use of images and

symbols.

Works cited:

1.Chase, Richard. Emily Dickinson.

West Port : Greenwood Press, 1951.

2.Dwivedi, A.N. (ed.) Indian Poetry in English.

New Delhi : Arnold Heinemann, 1980.

3.Jassawala, Feroza. “Kamala Das: The Evolution

of the Self.” The Journal of Indian Writing in English.

10 Jan – July 1982.

4.Johnson, Thomas. H. The Complete Poems of Emily

Dickinson.

Delhi: Kalyani Publishers, 1957.

5.Prasad, Hari Mohan. Indian Poetry in English.

Aurangabad : Parimal Prakashan, 1983.

6.Rahman, Anisur. Expressive Form in the Poetry of

Kamala Das.

New Delhi : Abinav Publications, 1981.

7.Wells, Henry. W. Introduction to Emily Dickinson.

New York : Hendricks’s House, Inc., 1947.



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