The River is in fact a complex poem replete with visual images that are fundamental to creating modernist poetic flourishes that include tensions, irony, darkness, fragmentation, montage-like structure, ambivalence, etc. Poet AK Ramanujan, with a modernist approach to his poetry, raises existential questions by speaking of duality in relation to the past.
In fact, it is a bit difficult to reach a definitive conclusion, since the poem is implicitly marked with indeterminacy, which gives rise to various interpretations from various quarters. The poem brings some quality binary structures like “new poets” and “old poets”; city of “temples and poets”; singing of “cities and temples”; the deluge in the poems and how people saw it; a “pair of cows”; pregnant woman with “identical twins”, etc. at stake to consolidate the duality present in the poem.
The poem opens with a vivid description of the city of Madurai, a city of temples and poets, which simply breeds religious undertones along with creative impulses, though the rest of the lines have something more to say. Ramanujan gives a stunning description of the sweltering summer when the Vaikai River dwindles to a narrow trickle. The base of the river was then visible with straws and women’s hair blocking the rusted gates. The wet stones glistened like sleepy crocodiles posing a slipping hazard, and the dry ones looked like shaved water buffalo lounging in the sun. The description of the scorching summer seems to create a wasteland devoid of activity and movement.
The poem has an objective mood, as it employs an observer as a poetic character whose realization of the suffering of the human poet is in stark contrast to what the old poets and new poets sang of the Vaikai river. The ancient poets refused to narrate the agony of the human being in a rash. Rather, they were comfortable romanticizing the flood that actually washed away three village houses, a pair of cows, named Gopi, and Brinda, a pregnant woman expecting identical twins with no distinction to tell. The poets of yore would simply ignore such a moving sight. On the other hand, today’s new poets still quote their predecessors, bringing nothing new to the present generation. Aside from the grim realization of the rover, the poet hints at the creative sterility of the new Tamil poets. The poet perhaps indicates a kind of laxity that comes over the new poets and hammers to a degree their lack of poetic sensibility or it could be that the old and new poets simply took an escape route by not having the mettle to write about. the deplorable situation of the common people.
The poem has irony in every way, as the poetic character notes how ordinary people are interested in talking about the flood and rising water levels. People hardly care about what happened to the pregnant woman who was carried away by the devastating flood. Even they don’t know who the lady was. However, they meet the cow couple named Gopi and Brinda. Ramanujan aptly nails such imagery to encapsulate humanity’s gradual disintegration. What he insists over and over again is how the modern world becomes self-centered by claiming indifference to humanity.
The poem concludes with the repetition of stanzas 2 and 3. The poet strives to address several issues, including a lack of poetic sensitivity, the dissolution of humanity, meaningless romanticism, and most importantly, insensitive commercialization. . The poem has a sarcastic tone and somewhat clumsy structure, generally having all the salient features of the modern poem.
