8.SING WITH SHAKESPEARE -2

8.SING WITH SHAKESPEARE -2

Transience of life

Philosophers and mystics of all traditions have spoken of the transience of life- its ever changing nature. Like water in a river, time keeps running and a time comes when we stop, not time or the water. And though the water flowing is ever new, the river itself is old!  It is a mystery, with time as its guard, announcer and identifier!. Sunrise and sunset, day after day; step by step, on a journey we know not where to, we keep moving. We do not notice as the moments and days pass, as the seasons change and return, but the moment once past is gone for ever! The whole life is spent like that, and reflection comes not at all  or too late for many of us!

Hindu philosophy is so full of warnings about the transience of life, youth, riches. This spirit so pervades our cultural life that even celluloid poets reduce it to immortal songs, as Anand Bakshi did it here:

सुबह आती है, शाम जाती है   
                        subah aati hai, shaam jaati hai

सुबह आती है, शाम जाती है  यूँही                   
subah aati hai, shaam jaati hai, yunhi

वक़्त चलता ही रहता है रुकता नहीं               
waqt chaltahi rehtaa hai rukta nahin

एक पल में ये आगे निकल जाता है                 
Ek pal mein ye aage nikal jaata hai

आदमी ठीक से देख पाता नहीं                        
Aadmi teeq se dekh paata nahin

और पर्दे पे मंज़र बदल जाता है                        
Aur parde pe manzar badal jaata hai

एक बार चले जाते हैं जो दिन-रात सुबह-ओ-शाम  
Ek baar chale jaate hain jo din-raat                                                  subah- wo - shaam

वो फिर नहीं आते , वो फिर नहीं  आते             
Wo phir nahin aate, wo phir nahi aate

ज़िन्दगी के सफ़र में गुज़र जाते हैं जो मकाम  
Zindagi ke safar mein guzar jaathe                                                      hain jo makaam

वो फिर नहीं आते, वो फिर नहीं आते              
Wo phir nahin aate, wo phir nahi aate


The days and nights, they come and go
They come and go in an incessant cycle
Time - it pauses not!
It keeps moving from moment to moment
One is not able to see  and grasp a scene
Lo ! it is there and is not! It changes so fast!
These days and nights, dawns and dusks-
Once past, they never come back, they never come back!
Those places you pass in the journey of life -
They never come back, they never come back.

And Saraswati Kumar Deepak reduced it to even simpler terms:

रात गई फिर दिन आता है
इसी तरह आते-जाते ही,
ये सारा जीवन जाता है…

कदम-कदम रखता ही राही
कितनी दूर चला जाता है

Raat gayi phir din aataa hai
Isi tarah aate jaate hi
Ye Sara jeevan jaata hai.....

Kadam kadam rakhta hi raahi
Kitni dur chala jaataa hai!

Night goes, day comes
Thus going and coming,
The whole life passes!
Keeping step after step, 
How far indeed the traveller does pass!


Poets enlighten !


All this was not meant to frighten us about life, but to awaken us to its mysteries, and make us seek the substance behind the show. In a deeper sense, it also meant to awaken us to our own deeper reality behind our decaying body. This was known to all the old philosophers. 

Poets have their own take and their own style. Wordsworth wrote about transience in the Lyrical Ballads.

“The pleasure-house is dust:—behind, before,

This is no common waste, no common gloom;

But Nature, in due course of time, once more
Shall here put on her beauty and her bloom.

She leaves these objects to a slow decay,
That what we are, and have been, may be known;
But at the coming of the milder day,
These monuments shall all be overgrown.” 

And Robert Frost writes in

Nothing Gold Can Stay:

Nature's first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf's a flower:

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf,

So Eden sank to grief.

So dawn goes down a day.

Nothing gold can stay.

Shakespeare: Sonnet 73

In his Sonnet no.73, Shakespeare does refer to the passing of youth.

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. 

In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self seals up all in rest.

 
In me thou seest the glowing of such a fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the deathbed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.

      This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong
      To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.

This is one of the sonnets subjected to merciless, and at times meaningless, analysis by the scholars. But to us, its meaning and significance are strikingly clear. It is not melancholic  nor does it embody self pity. The poet is not referring to literal death but the passing away of youth. And he draws a daring conclusion: because we will leave things in the end, we must love them all the more!

Tennyson's Ulysses

The great mystery about time is that its turns are not sudden, but a gradual unfolding, which we do not notice as it happens! Infancy and childhood pass and merge into youth, youth holds for a time its form, but  its strength gets sapped we know not how!  We only say it is ageing!  One day suddenly, we realise like Tennyson's Ulysses that

  

We are not now that strength which in old days 

Moved earth and heaven, 

Yet we may console ourselves that

that which we are, we are; 

One equal temper of heroic hearts, 

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will 

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

What we lack by physical strength, we have to make up by strength of will ! This perhaps is the lesson of life. That we not only grow old, but wise too!

Life is thus an opportunity to realise the transience of things and also cultivate the will and the wit to deal with it and transcend it.

American poet Longfellow too put it beautifully:

What then? Shall we sit idly down and say 

The night hath come, it is no longer day? 
Something remains for us to do, or dare; 
Even the oldest tree some fruit may bear; 
For age is opportunity no less 
Than youth itself, though in another dress, 
And as the evening twilight fades away 
The sky is filled with stars invisible by day.

The World as Stage ! 

Shakespeare takes us through seven stages of life , when to cultivate it!

 All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages.

 At first the infant,

Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms;

And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel

And shining morning face, creeping like snail

Unwillingly to school.

 And then the lover,

Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad

Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. 

Then a soldier,

Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,

Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,

Seeking the bubble reputation

Even in the cannon’s mouth.

 And then the justice,

In fair round belly with good capon lin’d,

With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,

Full of wise saws and modern instances;

And so he plays his part.

 The sixth age shifts

Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,

With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;

His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide

For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,

Turning again toward childish treble, pipes

And whistles in his sound.

 Last scene of all,

That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness and mere oblivion;

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

[As You Like It.]

Here, Shakespeare conveys the great philosophical idea that we are not the roles we play on this stage!

Among the poets I have read, Arunagirinatha

captures these stages even more strikingly in Tamil. Poets do exaggerate but their intention is to educate, not entertain, or frighten. No great poet ever wrote for tickling the senses.They always convey  a message for life. Modern age has mistaken mere  words for wisdom, like it has mistaken information for knowledge, and lost track of wisdom, as Eliot reminded us.

 How long do we live? How much ?

 Here is a nice poem by a modern English poet Brian Patten.

www.insidehampshire.co.uk. Photo:Theo Moye

So Many Different Lengths Of Time 

How long does a man live after all?
A thousand days or only one?
One week or a few centuries?
How long does a man spend living or dying
and what do we mean when we say gone forever?

Adrift in such preoccupations, we seek clarification.
We can go to the philosophers
but they will weary of our questions.
We can go to the priests and rabbis
but they might be busy with administrations.

So, how long does a man live after all?
And how much does he live while he lives?
We fret and ask so many questions -
then when it comes to us
the answer is so simple after all.
A man lives for as long as we carry him inside us,
for as long as we carry the harvest of his dreams,
for as long as we ourselves live,
holding memories in common, a man lives.

His lover will carry his man's scent, his touch:
his children will carry the weight of his love.
One friend will carry his arguments,
another will hum his favourite tunes,
another will still share his terrors.

And the days will pass with baffled faces,
then the weeks, then the months,
then there will be a day when no question is asked,
and the knots of grief will loosen in the stomach
and the puffed faces will calm.
And on that day he will not have ceased
but will have ceased to be separated by death.

How long does a man live after all?
A man lives so many different lengths of time. 

[ I do not know about the Copyright. Given here for purely educational purpose, no profit motive.It is so wonderful, cannot be excluded.]

We will conclude with another quotation from Joseph Campbell:

" How does the ordinary person come to the transcendent? For a start, I would say, study poetry. Learn how to read a poem. You need not have the experience to get the message, or at least some indication of the message. It may come gradually."

― Joseph Campbell, Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor