Tuesday, July 24, 2012

My rainbow of colors...

Am posting one of my favorite poems - 'Colors' by Yevgeny Yevtushenko

When your face
appeared over my crumpled life
at first I understood
only the poverty of what I have.
Then its particular light
on woods, on rivers, on the sea,
became my beginning in the colored world
in which I had not yet had my beginning.
I am so frightened, I am so frightened,
of the unexpected sunrise finishing,
of revelations
and tears and the excitement finishing.
I don't fight it, my love is this fear,
I nourish it who can nourish nothing,
love's slipshod watchman.
Fear hems me in.
I am conscious that these minutes are short
and that the colors in my eyes will vanish
when your face sets.

This poem brings out a sense of sadness in me that I cannot describe, I love the play of words... The poet so beautifully expresses his inadequacy, his joy and writes his own epitaph. 'Love's slipshod watchman'... Wow!
As love poems go, this one has to be one of the most woebegone ballads. It's general tone is of pessimism, yet there is this celebration of awakening, an epiphany almost.

I guess we are all familiar with the figure of speech that we learned as part of english grammar -'personification' also known as 'Anthropomorphism'. This poem is a perfect example of the opposite, '
Chremamorphism' is giving characteristics of an object to a person. When the poet compares a human face to an object as he does in the first line, 'when your face appeared'... 'Then it's particular light'... 'When your face sets'... he reduces a person to a thing.

Love is very much like that isn't it... it reduces you, depletes you, destroys you and nullifies you... until you are nothing but an object... but hey! An object of divinity and immortality... one that shines through a prism of light, bursts into the brilliance of the colors of a rainbow...

Who's bothered about the permanence of that arc, that variegation, that band of color... The fact that it was... even if for a breviloquent while... that suffices!

May the colors in your eyes propogate a brilliant canvas!


No comments: