Vikram Seth
Vikram Seth
Vikram Seth
Vikram Seth
- poems -
Publication Date:
2012
Publisher:
PoemHunter.Com - The World's Poetry Archive
Hindi, which he reads and writes in the Devanagari script. He plays the
Indian flute and the cello and sings German lieder, especially Schubert.
Business acumen
Seth's former literary agent Giles Gordon recalled being interviewed by Seth
for the position:
"Vikram sat at one end of a long table and he began to grill us. It was
absolutely incredible. He wanted to know our literary tastes, our views on
poetry, our views on plays, which novelists we liked."
Seth later explained to Gordon that he had passed the interview not because
of commercial considerations, but because unlike the others he was the only
agent who seemed as interested in his poetry as in his other writing. Seth
followed what he has described as "the ludicrous advance for that book"
(250,000 for A Suitable Boy) with 500,000 for An Equal Music and 1.4
million for Two Lives. He prepared an acrostic poem for his address at
Gordon's 2005 memorial service:
"Gone though you have, I heard your voice today.
I tried to make out what the words might mean,
Like something seen half-clearly on a screen:
Each savoured reference, each laughing bark,
Sage comment, bad pun, indiscreet remark.
Gone since you have, grief too in time will go,
Or share space with old joy; it must be so.
Rest then in peace, but spare us some elation.
Death cannot put down every conversation.
Over and out, as you once used to say?
Not on your life. You're on this line to stay."
Writing
Travel writing: From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet
His travel book From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet
(1983) was his first popular success and won the Thomas Cook Travel Book
Award. It offers insight to Seth as a person, who is candid about the reality
and effect of living abroad though not in particular of being in diaspora
a theme which arises in his poetry but nowhere in his fiction:
"Increasingly of late, and particularly when I drink, I find my thoughts drawn
into the past rather than impelled into the future. I recall drinking sherry in
California and dreaming of my earlier student days in England, where I ate
dalmoth and dreamed of Delhi. What is the purpose, I wonder, of all this
restlessness? I sometimes seem to myself to wander around the world
merely accumulating material for future nostalgias." (p.35)
Poetry
Seth has published five volumes of poetry. His first, Mappings (1980), was
originally privately published; it attracted little attention and indeed Philip
Larkin, to whom he sent it for comment, referred to it scornfully among his
intimates, though he offered Seth encouragement.
In 2009 Seth contributed four poems to Oxfam which are used as
A Style Of Loving
Light now restricts itself
To the top half of trees;
The angled sun
Slants honey-coloured rays
That lessen to the ground
As we bike through
The corridor of Palm Drive
We two
Have reached a safety the years
Can claim to have created:
Unconsumated, therefore
Unjaded, unsated.
Picnic, movie, ice-cream;
Talk; to clear my head
Hot buttered rum - coffee for you;
And so not to bed
And so we have set the question
Aside, gently.
Were we to become lovers
Where would our best friends be?
You do not wish, nor I
To risk again
This savoured light for noon's
High joy or pain.
Vikram Seth
Across
Across these miles I wish you well.
May nothing haunt your heart but sleep.
May you not sense what I don't tell.
May you not dream, or doubt, or weep.
May what my pen this peaceless day
Writes on this page not reach your view
Till its deferred print lets you say
It speaks to someone else than you.
Vikram Seth
At Evening
Let me now sleep, let me not think, let me
Not ache with inconsistent tenderness.
It was untenable delight; we are free-Separate, equal--and if loverless,
Love consumes time which is more dear than love,
More unreplicable. With everything
Thus posited, the choice was clear enough
And daylight ratified our reckoning.
Now only movement marks the birds from the pines;
Now it's dark; the blinded stars appear;
I am alone, you cannot read these lines
Who are with me when no one else is here,
Who are with me and cannot hear my voice
And take my hand and abrogate the choice.
Vikram Seth
Distressful Homonyms
Since for me now you have no warmth to spare
I sense I must adopt a sane and spare
Philosophy to ease a restless state
Fuelled by this uncaring. It will state
A very meagre truth: love like the rest
Of our emotions, sometimes needs a rest.
Happiness, too, no doubt; and so, why even
Hope that 'the course of true love' could run even?
Vikram Seth
From California
Sunday night in the house.
The blinds drawn, the phone dead.
The sound of the kettle, the rain.
Supper: cheese, celery, bread.
For company, old letters
In the same disjointed script.
Old love wells up again,
All that I thought had slipped
Through the sieve of long absence
Is here with me again:
The long stone walls, the green
Hillsides renewed with rain.
The way you would lick your finger
And touch your forehead, the way
You hummed a phrase from the flute
Sonatas, or turned to say,
"Larches--the only conifers
That honestly blend with Wales."
I walk with you again
Along these settled trails.
It seems I started this poem
So many years ago
I cannt follow its ending
And must begin anew.
Blame, some bitterness,
I recall there were these.
Yet what survives is Bach
And a few blackberries
Something of the "falling starlight",
In the phrase of Wang Wei,
Falls on my shadowed self.
I thank you that today
His words are open to me.
How much you have inspired
You cannot know. The end
Left much to be desired.
"There is a comfort in
The strength of love." I quote
Another favourite
You vouchsafed me. Please note
The lack of hope or faith:
Neither is justified.
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive
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Interpretation
Somewhere within your loving look I sense,
Without the least intention to deceive,
Without suspicion, without evidence,
Somewhere within your heart the heart to leave.
Vikram Seth
13
Last Night
Last night your faded memory came to me
As in the wilderness spring comes quietly,
As, slowly, in the desert moves thew breeze,
As to a sick man, without cause, comes peace
[Original: Urdu, Translated by: Faiz Ahmed Faiz]
Vikram Seth
14
Mistaken
I smiled at you because I thought that you
Were someone else; you smiled back; and there grew
Between two strangers in a library
Something that seemes like love; but you loved me
(If that's the word) because you thought that I
Was other than I was. And by and by
We found we'd been mistaken all the while
From that first glance, that first mistaken smile.
Vikram Seth
15
Night Watch
Awake for hours and staring at the ceiling
Through the unsettled stillness of the night
He grows possessed of the obsessive feeling
That dawn has come and gone and brought no light.
Vikram Seth
16
Octet
You don't love me at all? O God. O Shit.
You still 'respect me.' Thanks. I value it
About as much as one who's asked to use
A second hat when he's in need of shoes.
Since, I discover, my own self-respect
Is quite enough to keep my spine erect
Why is it true my ample self-affection
Will not suffice to buoy me in rejection?
Vikram Seth
17
Prandial Plaint
My love, I love your breasts, I love your nose.
I love your accent and I love your toes.
I am your slave. One word, and I obey.
But please don't slurp your morning brew that way.
Vikram Seth
18
Progress Report
My need has frayed with time; you said it would.
It has; I can walk again across the flood
Of gold sil popples on the straw-gold hills
Under a deep Californian sky that expels
All truant clouds; watch squads of cattle graze
By the radio-telescope; blue-battered jays
Flash raucous squaking by my swivelling head
While squirrels sine-wave past over the dead
Oak-leaves, and not miss you_although I may
Admit that near the telescope yesterday
By a small bushcovered gully I blundered on
Five golden fox-cubs playing in the sun
And wished you had been there to see them play;
But that I only mention by the way.
Vikram Seth
19
Promise
I will be easy company; the blur
Of what I longed for once will fade to space.
No thought that could discomfort you will stir.
My eyes will painlessly survey your face.
Vikram Seth
20
Protocols
What can I say to you? How can I retract
All that that fool my voice has spoken Now that the facts are plain, the placid surface cracked,
The protocols of friendship broken?
I cannot walk by day as now I walk at dawn
Past the still house where you lie sleeping.
May the sun burn these footprints on the lawn
And hold you in its warmth and keeping.
Vikram Seth
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Sit
Sit, drink your coffee here; your work can wait awhile.
You're twenty-six, and still have some life ahead.
No need for wit; just talk vacuities, and I'll
Reciprocate in kind, or laugh at you instead.
The world is too opaque, distressing and profound.
This twenty minutes' rendezvous will make my day:
To sit here in the sun, with grackles all around,
Staring with beady eyes, and you two feet away.
Vikram Seth
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32
The Wind
With no companion to my mood,
Against the wind as it should be,
I walk, but in my solitude
Bow to the wind that buffets me.
Vikram Seth
33
Time Zones
I willed my love to dream of me last night, that we might lie
at peace, if not beneath a single sheet, under one sky.
I dreamed of her but she could not alas humour my will;
it struck me suddenly that where she was was daylight still.
Vikram Seth
34
Unclaimed
To make love with a stranger is the best.
There is no riddle and there is no test. -To lie and love, not aching to make sense
Of this night in the mesh of reference.
To touch, unclaimed by fear of imminent day,
And understand, as only strangers may.
To feel the beat of foreign heart to heart
Preferring neither to prolong nor part.
To rest within the unknown arms and know
That this is all there is; that this is so.
Vikram Seth
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