LET US all congratulate Shamsur Rahman on his having arrived at the age of seventy-two. He Is not merely the most prolific living poet In the Bangla language; he nas transformed himself into the symbol of the nationalistic and aesthetic pride of the Bangalees living on the Padma-Meghna-Jamuna delta. Growing old by Itself, however, does not denote any nobleness; Yeats said that an old man is but a paltry thing, unless the soul claps its wings in tattered pantaloons. But Shamsur Rahman has matured like a palpable fruit: we can take his poetry in our palms and taste it at our leisure, for our profit and pleasure. And "Rlpensess Is all," said Shakespeare

Shamsur Rahman's poetic Journey to eminence has run parallel to the Bangalee s journey to nationhood and emancipation. In 1952. the starting point of our national struggle for linguistic and political liberty. Shamsur Raliman was still in his poetic Infancy: but his poetry even at that stage was noticeably different from those of his predecessors. most of whom, with a few exceptions like Ahsan Habib and Abul Hossain, were engrossed in a kind of jingoistic zeal for the Pakistani ideology. Shamsur Rahman eschewed the common path and chose the one hitherto less travelled: the path of humane liberalism untainted by the dogmatic and the communal and Illumined by the progressive understanding of the human situation in the double axes of time and space. With the passage of time. Shamsur Rahman has become the adorable doyen of our literature, "an eye among the blind." a Teireslas who has known and foresufiered all.

Shamsur Raliman did not have an auspicious beginning as a poet. His first volume of poems. Pratham Gaan, Dittyo Mrittur Agey. did not send any appreciable tremor among the poetryreaders of the time; it was considered at best a pastiche of the Jibananadaesque style, a wallowing in romantic emotions by a sky-gazing poet-would-be. But the second volume Roudro Korotite, changed the sky Itself, as the poet woke up from his romantic reverie to the harsh realities of life around him. As the skull got awash with sunlight, the world of mundane concerns impinged itself upon the world of sensuousness. Shamsur Rahman knew that his path lay through darkness, that he had to chariot through a dilapidated skyscape to the horizon of light Blddhosto Nlllema and Niralokey Dlbbyorath would have us believe as much. Since then, Rahman has been on his onward march: he has never had to repent for the road not taken. And now he is here amongst us. a conqueror with Apollo's laurel bough decking his aging forehead.

Eliot, more than any other English poet, captured Rahman's Imagination quite early. Roudro Korotite depicts the ennui and desolation of modem urban life in a language reminiscent of that Angjo-American'master:

yet

the evening of the lonely verandah.

the midnight silence of the avenue.

the wounded clown of the circus and

the sleepless cat on the wall.

the chorus of the colony wrung out of life,

the starstudded bra of the prostitute.

the blind violinist of the lane.

Braque's quiet fish, Cezanne s apple-

All know me so easily: I'm known

to the tamales grasses on my grave

(Self-portrait. Roudro Korotite)

1969 marked a watershed in Shamsur Rahmans poetic career. He had assumed a Prufrock-like mask and had iieen a rather impassive and sardonic-observer of the social going-on. But the mass-movement and the political upheaval of 1969 tore his mask of nonchalance apart: Rahman found himself standing face to face with the time of distress and diaspora. His style changed overnight: from the tower of cynically self-centred egoism, he came down to the .plane of common men. his coun-

trymen. Nljo Bashbhumey and Band! Shlblr thekey ar chls magnum opuses of this period, which, of course, marks a kind of climax of his career also. Hie glorification of the Bangla alphabet, the description of hartal scenes and the elegiac remonstratlons for the martyrs of the movement everything shows Rahman's newest

preoccupations:

See those bunches of Krishnachura

that have bloomed again on the paths of the city

In such clusters. When I walk down alone

or along with the procession. It seems

as through they were not flowers at all;

as though they’ were the bubbles of blood

freshly spurted from the wounds of the martyrs.

perfumed as they are with memories.

(February 1969)

Like clusters of red roktokarabi flowers

or the burning clouds of the sunset.

Asad's shirt now flutters in the air.

high in the blue sky....

Leaving the gentle shade of the pomegranate tree.

or the mother's sunlit yard the shirt now’ flutters without

pause

on the main streets of the city, atop the factory chimneys.

along the corners of noisy avenues.

in the sunburst, resounding plains of our hearts.

in every alignment of our conscious being.

(Asad's shirt)

Ulen came the liberation war of 1971. the most glorious year in the annals of the Bengali nation, a year that saw genocide and exodus, victories and flights, tears set ablaze by noble rage against death and destruction. The pomegranate of anger burst into thousand flakes of Are. We fretted and fought: we decked ourselves with plumes of blood, dipped ourselves in Die dye of death. Shamsur Rahman did not go to the battlefield; but we know where his heart was from the poems he wrote during those beleaguered days In a besieged city. Especially famous are hls two poems Shadhlnata tuml' (Freedom you) and Tomake pawar jonce hey shadhlnata' (to get you. O Freedom!). The former is. of course, not directly concerned with the blood and fire of the on going war of liberation: It is rather an encomium paid to the timeless spirit of liberty Itself. The later Is more directly concerned with the devastation of war and the Irremediable hope with which the war-ravaged people awaited the arrival of freedom.

Because you were to come. Freedom

Sakina bibl's life is wrecked.

Haridasl's widowhood wiped the vermilion stain on her fore-

Bccause you were to come.

o 11ve - co 1 oured tanks marauded our streets.

bellowing like monster:

Because you would come. O Freedom.

hostels and slums w-ere deserted.

recoilless rifles and machineguns had their sway all over the place:

villages were burnt to ashes, because you were

supposed to come, a dog howled for its

dead master, standing on a devastated homestead:

because you would come. O Freedom.

the innocent baby crawled upon

the corpses of its parents.

( Because you were to come. O Freedom)

But to read Shamsur Rahman as Just a chronicler of political events is to seriously misread him. He has followed the political events of his country with the avid interest of a patriot and recorded his feelings of joy. dismay. hope and despair, which are actually the sentiments of the people themselves. In this, Rahman may be dubbed "a courtpoet of the contemporaryBut he is much more than that: hls poetry traverses a longer path than the one strewn with anger and tears. His poetry has sent a plethora of tentacles down the layers of human consciousness and has illumined many shadowy borders of experience. Basically. Shamsur Rahman is a sceptic, at times bordering on the pessimist. He often portrays himself as a threatened man. surrounded by vague fears of the work-a-day world. In a poem called: "Rhinoceros. Rhinoceros (Adigonto Nognopadaddhani). Rahman conjures up an loncsco-llke nightmare of charging and bellowing peclderms:

Thousands of angry rhinoceroses

are charging towards us from all sides.

their tusks shining in the

It's futile to hide, it's better to come out

from the tree-holes or dry nut shells.

Rhinoceroses and rhinoceroses all over!

Helpless you only hear the noise of destruction.

Rahman's poetry is marked by narrative eloquence, which often degenerates into verbose prolixity. Quite often he takes recourse to lengthy descriptions of phenomena which might have been done with more economy of words. Particularly in the middle period of hls poetry, he indulged in a style Imitated from the poppoets of the sixties In England like

Adrian Henry. Roger Mcgough and Brian Patten. The style of cataloguing tilings and events and supplying hundreds of different appellations for the same thing has made his poetry a mere mumbo-Jumbo of words. Luckily, of course. Shamsur Rahman discarded the cataloguing mode and went back to hls earlier mode of cynical social observer with a tinge of self-pity. The following lines of a poem titled "here was a door' will Illustrate Rahman's typical stance:

Here was a door, the madhabl

spreading Its beauty over It.

there Is nothing, nothing at all: only

a foolish wall, shell-struck, stands there

all alone. A few spoilt bricks He here and there. If you look left.

see only a doll, very little else.

I stand still in the wreckage, as though

I were a wreckage myself:

1 stir the ashes with my shoes, with

the hope, an undying phoenix would suddenly take to wings from there:

or perhaps I'd see someone's smile, or gel

someone's blossoming affection. or love.

Shamsur Rahman's poetry is remarkable for Its animal imagery. a fact which very few have made mention of. Of course, he cannot be called an animal poet' or a zoo-laureate' like Ted Hughes, but the animal world has been the main supplier of Imagery for Rahman's poetry. And just like in Ted Hughes, most of Rahman's animals are predators; they prowl about In his poetry as symbols of the evil forces of the society. Shamsur Rahman, of course, never writes about the animals in their natural habitat: they encroach upon and invade the urban centres. Or more precisely, it is the human beings who behave like animals: the feral nature of the Hon, the rapacity of the wolf and the wiles of the fox are betrayed through the behaviour of men who eat each other's flesh with cannibalistic zeal. We have already mentioned the rhinoceroses. Here are some other animals:

Then suddenly the moon appeared on the full sky-

Apriceless, unattainable pearl. And a boar

smelt its way Into the moonlight, where

the desired ballad blossoms in the bubbles of stars.

All the sceneries were obliterated at once, and

then 1 was alone: myself and the boundless loneliness.

(The ballad of the beautiful)

This town daily fights against a protean wolf.

Who does not know that before a true line of a poem

gets written a lot of similes drop down like buds;

between two sentences prolongs the quarrel of an eagle

and a hill lizard: by the side of a lake lie the lumps

of flesh of a deer, a tiger's happy kill...

('A poem after a long time )

I am so alone at midnight

When my eyes are without sleep and 1 He on bed

like an abandoned cross, then ahorse

with a human head comes and tells me In a queer voice:

"Listen. In your own city, we havejust confirmed

our unquestionable authority and power."

( More valuable than a poets'

It's a queer city where Aesop's animals roam about

In the streets...

('Staff correspondent')

The most interesting animal-symbol used by Shamsur Rahman is. of course. Lhe horse. Il Is more often than not the symbol of the phaeton-llke aspirations of a poet who is unwilling to give up hls fight: the poet Is a shongshoplak who clasps the neck of his striding horse and heads Into the thick of the battle. Shamsur Raliman deserves our salute because he has never left the battleground, neither In poetry nor In the beleaguered society where he lives under the threat of philistine fundamental-