Hunger an Assessment of Jayant Mahapatras Use of Symbolism free essay sample

A Critical Appreciation of the Symbols â€Å"Hunger’, according to Jayanta Mahapatra was an expression of his solitude. He writes in this regard: Hunger was written twenty-five years ago. I grew up in Cuttack, close to a temple. There were two rivers close by. The ways of life there were different. I was into religion. My poems today dont have those old images. Ive taken the temple out of my system. I had an unhappy childhood. I had an abnormal relationship with my mother. I owe a lot to my father, though. He put me in a missionary school. The school had a British headmaster I was trampled upon in my childhood. That still remains with me. Im not deliberately holding on to tensions. I ran away from home thrice. Im shaped by factors beyond my control. Now Im at peace with myself, but this wasnt the case ten years ago. We will write a custom essay sample on Hunger : an Assessment of Jayant Mahapatras Use of Symbolism or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Perhaps as a result of that childhood I always feel alone, alone when Im with my family or part of a crowd. Theres a chasm inside which can never be bridged. In Hunger I was writing from experience. †The title of the poem ‘Hunger’ may therefore reflect the poet’s need for company, and spiritual intimacy. He asserts that he had an abnormal relationship with his mother. Therefore, he primarily desires the maternal love that he was deprived of; he searches for a substitute owing to attention-deficit. The Fisherman :The speaker at the outset of the poem asserts that â€Å"the flesh was heavy on my back†. He experienced an incredible urge for sexual gratification. He finds himself before a fisherman, who is willing to ‘compromise’ on his daughter. The fishermen puts forward the question ‘carelessly’. The word ‘carelessly’ might point to ‘callously’, and to the fact that he did not put the question across with a sense of propriety. Will you have her? † was the question as though the girl in question was an item or commodity. Her individuality was relegated, and what she wanted was not of significance. Even a prostitute has a command over her own sexuality, and who her customers ought to be. The fisherman was â€Å"trailing h is nets†. The symbolism was apparent; he was laying out a net for customers. His insensitivity in his words were set out to erase the guilt from his purpose, that to sacrifice his daughter. He affected ‘ignorance’, as if the quality of ignorance seemed to sanctify the purpose itself. The white bone seemed to thrash his eyes, as though his very inner being wanted to thrash out against his vision. The Body vs. the Mind :The poet followed him across the extensive stretches of sand. He heart was throbbing rapidly. His skin is said to perform the function of a sling. That is, as a sling supports a fractured arm; likewise the instinctive feelings of the skin helped fight back the apprehensions of the mind. Redemption from his sins perhaps lay in burning the house that he lived. Silence seems to consume his self, as though they tugged at his sleeves. The fisherman’s net had froth from the sea. Perhaps it may be symbolic of the fact that wrongdoings may leave apparent traces behind. His lean body in the flickering dark appeared like a wound. The inevitable wound that poverty had gifted him with. At the current moment, the poet felt he was at will, as free as the wind. The palm leaves scratched his skin, leaving marks of guilt. Hours in the shack are portrayed as stacks bunched up to those walls splayed by the burning oil lamp. It signifies that all the hours were similar confined to the small shack. The space in his blank mind was filled with soot from the lamp. : â€Å"I heard him say: My daughter, shes just turned fifteen Feel her. Ill be back soon, your bus leaves at nine. † He could comprehend the tricks that the father employed to allure customers. He viewed this stock of tricks as exhausted because perhaps most of them were already used numerously to suit his needs. ’Fifteen’ was supposed to be an age where the girl was fully grown and fresh in her beauty. Nevertheless the years felt like cold rubber owing to impoverished malnutrition. He uses the term ‘wormy’ for her legs as she opened then wide. The word reflects the speaker’s perception of the girl as abject as a worm, thin and slimy perhaps, something that was revolting to him at the moment. â€Å"I felt the hunger there, the other one, the fish slithering, turning inside. † For the first time, the poet understood the real meaning of the word ‘hunger’. Not owing to sexual displeasure but that driven by dismal poverty. The feeling of the empty stomach, as though the fish turned inside. Images in the poem This poem impressed Bernard Young, the American poet, so much that he ‘quoted’ the whole poem in  The Hudson Review. The poem presents two kinds of hunger – one (physical) leading to the fulfillment of other (sexual). The theme is quite obvious, so let me focus on what I like about this poem. The poem primarily has two structures of images: flesh related and poverty related; hunger emanating from the flesh and that from poverty. What makes the poem impressive is the way these images entangle one another, some abstract, all building the irony of the two urges. The vividity of the images build a word portrait of the place, graphically relating the manners of the three characters. The fisherman, the father who pimps his daughter, is careless in his offer of the girl: â€Å"as though his words sanctified the purpose with which he faced himself†. I think the poet craftily pushes the reader to question the very ideas of sanctity here. The utter hopelessness in the life of the fisherman and his daughter is such that it words like sanctity would be meaningless there. The values have no ‘purchase’ in so utterly degraded a human plight. The image of wound is prepared to by such images as ‘the bone thrashing in his eyes’, ‘mind thumping in the flesh’s sling’, ‘burning the house’ ‘body clawing’. The actions indicated in these image portray the human effort that is rather desperate, fruitless and hurting. The wound image gathers them all together in a place where the combined force of all these previous images together hits the reader hard and jump him/her out of complacency. It must be borne in mind that the tourist searching for sexual gratification implicitly holds the place of the audience as the reader is a voyeur like the tourist. The soot image, a customary suggestion of sin, alerts us to how the blackness of the predicament of the father pimping his daughter is a condemnation not of the father but of the society where such a tragedy comes to pass. The soot covers the shack of the fisherman, but it is the tourist’s mind on which the poem sees the soot. Thus, like Blake who said the presence of a whore in society is a curse of the marriage system, this poem questions the justness in society from which sanctity has disappeared. It is the reader who has to bear the force of irony of this poem. It may be noticed how the reader in this poem is not allowed to be outside of it. Like the tourist in the poem, the reader is an outsider and a sort of voyeur. So the shame of the plight of the pimping father falls on the reader – not on the individual reader.