Note on Poetry and Oral Narratives

Rasel Raju 

12.17.2023

Modern poetry has a prestigious role in how it surprises the normal perception by extending metaphorical extension to such abstract notions to create a specific sort of perception, shuddering a genuine reader to delight. This notion is essential, and it is also purely ingenious that a poet plays with word to make a dignified reader travel word by word, rhythm by rhythm, image by image, and conceit by conceit to perceive the metaphoric extension and feel delighted by that revelation through the metaphoric extension. The understanding of poetry itself thus has prestige as it is said to be a distinguished form of artistic craftsmanship that requires a particular reader to perceive the artistry word by word and travel along the poem to the metaphoric extension, thus allowing that construct that rhetoric to animate him with that particular notion. As a poet myself, I always subconsciously longed for and constructed metaphors that transcended sensual perception. As I write this, I have come up with a metaphor: "My life is inside me in meditation," or the other one that I wrote some time ago,

For ages have I been longing in the shore of this material life,

who shall take me to the other side?

I kept on cherishing, but, alas! I cannot dip in the river of love!

These metaphors are composed of metaphorically extending the material reality to the immaterial. The abstract feeling beyond language that one feels resonates at the moment of joy, of sorrow, of delight, of sadness, of nostalgia. This extends beyond how one perceives of things using one's senses and instead goes on to demonstrate how one feels inside. Poetry itself thus stands out in its most surprising form. Equally so, this form garners a feeling of pity but without any material reason behind it.

However, modern poetry, except mystic, Sufi, and baul poetry, is relatively secular in its form. This does not, however, mean that poetry is perceived in its modern form by everyone. And the very perception of a true reader, a genuine reader, is somehow a literate construct. Poetry is, as Borges mentioned in his lecture on The Riddle of Poetry, like a book; its taste does not lie in the fact that it is perceived as such but in the moment of a reader reading it otherwise, the poem is dead, and thus a reader enlivens the poetry of the written words.

But is that just genius that creates such metaphors? It would take much work to answer this question. But the relation of conquest, imagination, and wonders surrounding everyday life itself is the core which muses the poetic, the genius of humans to construct a relation, a connection that transcends the material and takes the human to the realm of joy, curiosity, sorrow, sadness, nostalgia, to the other world that is beyond language and beyond expression. This is where the transformation takes place and a modern reader while Li Po feels amazed as he reads,

Chuang Tzu in dream became a butterfly,

And the butterfly became Chuang Tzu at waking.

Which was the real—the butterfly or the man?

This notion of real by a poet hundreds of years ago surprises a modern reader because it pauses in him a notion of reality, a transitory moment where he lingers between the real and the other realm that language can't express. 

But when it comes from everyday life and says,

The moon's visible mark has a treelike shape and is home to Ajrail, the angel of death. The treelike shape is a banyan tree underneath which dwells the angel of death, and in its leaves are inscribed the names of each man and woman on earth. As soon as a leaf falls off, the person's name engraved on it dies. Because Ajrail picks up the leaf, reads the name on it, takes away the soul, and hands it before Allah. A new child is born when a new leaf buds in the banyan tree.

The metaphoric extension above connects the moon with the idea of a banyan tree and the notion of death as part of the other world. This triangular construct involves an explanation of what the moon is and what death and life are, besides locating the world of language that creates the bond. It does not seem so surprising and rather constitutes a form of reason that modernity frowns as ignorance and lack of reasoning. However, thinking about the moon and its gray marks from the world and coming up with the idea of a banyan tree, Ajrail, and life and death constitutes a communication surrounding both the world of language and senses and the world beyond language that feels, fears, and wonders about what lies in death and why are people born. If Li Po's poem asking about reality is ingenious, why isn't the construction of the narrative regarding the moon and its marks ingenious?

This is where the modern poetry and its readership come into question. Modern poetry and those of the ancient poets' readers celebrate come into notice because the contact a reader makes is made consciously that he is reading a poem, a collection of poems in book-length form, or a single poem shared in notes and/or scribbles in its commonly acknowledged form. In that sense, naming poetry as poetry itself does the trick and creates its appreciation and its patron. On the other hand, the rhetoric, the conceit, the metaphor that lie within the concept of the moon as the dwelling place of the angel of death does not mark its imprint as such because this is an everyday thing. It does not require one to sit down and read it in a textual form or recitational form recorded as audio by a professional reciter.

In this sense, poetry itself as a form or a structure somehow prevented modern readers from perceiving the poetry of everyday life, especially in religious and belief narratives. This has surmounted to an end of circulation of these constructs and, as such, among the literate tradition bearers who boast about progress and evolution and label the dying tradition as ignorance, unreason, and superstition created by the darkness of time, of a medieval barbaric era. But who could tell how precious those rhetoric, metaphor, conceit, imagination, and their extension to the world beyond language were?