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ISSN 2278-9529
Galaxy: International Multidisciplinary Research Journal
www.galaxyimrj.com
The Criterion: An International Journal in English Vol. 8, Issue-V, October 2017 ISSN: 0976-8165

Reading You I Could Hold: A Versified Narrative of Love

Dr. B.C. Nayak

Asst. Prof. of Eng.
P.G. Deptt. of English,
M.P.C. Autonomous College,
Baripada, Odisha

Article History: Submitted-06/10/2017, Revised-15/11/2017, Accepted-18/11/2017, Published-20/11/2017.

Abstract:

The write-up titled “Reading You I Could Hold: A Versified Narrative of Love” is a
critical analysis of the collection of English poetry You I Could Hold by the bilingual poet
Dilip Naik who writes in Odia as well. While looking critically at the poems showcased in
the volume, this undertaking has discerned love as the central motif of a vast majority of the
poems. On the one hand, the number of poems centred on love is so big and the number of
poems alien to love motif is so negligible on the other that it won’t at all appear unwarranted
to label the entire narrative as a versified narrative of love. The thrust of this critical reading
is Naik’s perception of love which is attributive of apotheosis. Chance being construed to be
at the helm of whole affair, mortal human lovers have been conceived as mere abiding
functionaries dancing to the tune of the divine dispenser. Composed in the permanence of
melancholy, the tone of the love songs has been predominately mournful and their moods
have oscillated between hymn and elegy.

Keywords: motif, love, apotheosis, idolatry, memory, grace, ethics, paradise and hymn.

I seek refuge in your orphic grace

sing on
for what remains
is only a song
for what’s gone. --------------- Dilip Naik

you are the nocturne of a lifetime’s mood

in the permanence of melancholy. ……………….Dilip Naik

You I Could Hold is a collection of eighty seven poems in English by Dilip Naik, a bilingual
poet from Odisha, the east coastal state of Indian subcontinent. English apart, Naik writes
poetry in his mother tongue Odia as well. Insofar as his poetic output in English is concerned,
he has so far two volumes to his credit and You I Could Hold happens to be his debut
collection published by the Authorspress, New Delhi in 2013. A vast majority of the poems
of this collection tend to be love poems composed almost in a single memory. There lies at
the epicentre of this singular memory the lady-love of the speaker. The lady-love has

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Reading You I Could Hold: A Versified Narrative of Love

remained the gravitational force as well as his central other. The poems of this collection
seem to have been composed in the permanence of melancholy and the mode albeit ranges
from hymns to elegy. In his famous autobiographical epic The Prelude, Wordsworth has
written

Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up

Foster’d alike by beauty and by fear;
Much favor’d in my birthplace, and no less
In that beloved Vale to which, erelong,
I was transplanted. . . .

Much in the manner of fostering of Wordsworth’s poetic being, Naik’s poetic sensibility
seems to have been nurtured in a ‘fair seed-time’ in the past. But Naik’s fair seed time of past
tells the story of different action, of different length and avenue. The poetic persona is
‘grateful’ to ‘god’ for occurrence of such a memorable event with lifetime’s efficacy. In the
poem titled “To Be Left Behind” which figures in the volume under review, Naik has written
I’m grateful to the god who may not be there
for giving my memory so beautiful an idolatry
an alternative imagination of the improbable
for bringing for some time someone so luminous
that the thought smoulders throughout the leftover me (Naik,2013, 94).

The making of Naik’s creative sensibility is vitally linked to that ‘someone so luminous’ who
has ever remained the object of his haunting memory, and has turned the cause of ‘so
beautiful an idolatry,’ and it is her thought and image which have smouldered thought the
persona’s leftover life. How important that ‘luminous’ beloved has been to the poet, or rather
to the persona, is clearly stated in the following lines of the poem titled “Are You Really
Impossible.”
That’s how I live –
myth-making picturing narrating you
for you are the bread of my imagination
you are all I do (2013, 22).

The luminous being thus has been the bread of the speaker’s imagination. Rather the speaker
has found the gravitational centre of his mind, body and being in the lady-love. In the poem
titled “Only In Your Voice” he has reiterated
Only in your voice your eyes your face
my heart finds its geometry
outside the world in another place
in a time unknown to history (48).

Settling in a mode of existence counter to the given scheme of time and space, the lady-love
has posed to be out and out a transcendent being to the protagonist. She has turned at once
‘an alternative imagination of the improbable’ and has transposed herself to the mode of an
existence akin to that of an immortal idol of divinity and from that position has induced in the

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speaker the feeling of a beautiful idolatry. As a matter of fact, most of the poems of You I
Could Hold have turned out to be splendid artifices of idolatry. The poet has accordingly and
aptly labelled these pieces as ‘hymns’ which means ‘a song in praise of a god or hero’ in
Greek (Cuddon, 1991, 434). The term ‘hymn,’ according to M.H. Abrams, ‘denotes a song
that celebrates God or expresses religious feelings and is primarily intended to be sung as part
of a religious service’ (Abrams, 1993, 84). The lady-love has turned, beyond any doubt, a
goddess or deity to the speaker of these songs. The divine face of the lady-love looms large
and hovers ever and anon in the lines of these songs. In a poem entitled “A Hymn” figured
albeit in Naik’s second volume of English poems By Inference (2014), the poet has written
Deified in my secret senses
you remain
as time passes
but remains itself as time (34).

With her deified status and mode of existence, the lady-love has not been a human being for
the speaker to share his ordinary banal life with security, comfort and health. Describing her
trans-human or better, supra-human position the poet has stated in the third stanza of the
poem
You can’t co-exist
with security, comfort, health.
You aren’t a negotiable point
in the honourable compromise
of living a normal life (34).

Attributes of her divine dimension have been further underlined in the next stanzas in the
following manner.
You aren’t a body I can hold
in sweat and semen and tears.
The spectre of a beatific efflorescence.
A figure of fate.
You are more like the disclosure
of a different meaning of mystery (35).

The divine aura is more explicit and pointed in the last stanza which reads
Like a marble statue
you have no blood.
Like an idol
you can’t answer.
But you alone deserve my worship.
You who aren’t a means, a use
you who are nothing in the language of things,
pure as impossibility,
you are the beloved I can’t live with
or live without (35).

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Reading You I Could Hold: A Versified Narrative of Love

The lady-love thus embodies a deity, a divine being and a sacred idol of worship. The lover is
her worshipping devotee and love a religious feeling, or a religious fervour. But such
perception of love though transcends the bounds of time and space, does have a history too. It
is linked to and founded upon one chance encounter with the beloved in the past in the early
part of persona’s life when he had hardly any idea about this feeling. Referring to that past
moment, the poet has written in the poem “It Happened A Bit Too Early”
It happened a bit too early
when we hardly knew what it was
before the curse of knowledge substituted
an idea for a feeling (53).

Though it happened too early and happened only for a short while, its impact was immensely
important to the speaker. That short heavenly interaction has had a lifetime’s effect on the
persona. Giving hints about this happening, the poet writes in the same poem
Though just a little
it was too much too soon
for since then
nothing like it has come to me
or nothing like it I could go to (53).

About the nature of this rare happening and its impact, the speaker says in the intermediate
stanza
a chance touch revealed a sky of song
a turn of tone dramatized
the possibilities of a promised time
in a little gesture or just a smile (53).

As stated in the opening stanza, what the protagonist underwent in that past memorable
moment was ‘a feeling,’ – a feeling of heavenly bliss. The last few lines of the poem offer
more vivid accounts of this chance begotten occurrence with immortal efficacy. The speaker
says
you turned me a ghost too soon
emptied the world of your possible alikes
you stole away the will to renew
and gave me the memory of paradise (53).

As a matter of fact, the trajectory of love this versified love narrative reveals has had three
dimensions to it: (1) of pure feeling, (2) of an idea and (3) of its configuration or settlement at
the habitation of words. Its contour is expressive of correspondingly a sensuous base, a
psychic terrain and a verbal abode. Its flight starts with the runway of the body, meanders
through the abstract realm of mind and imagination and ultimately lands in the immortal
province of the lexicons. The progress is thus from its chance breakthrough in the instinct,
prolonged fermentation in the mind and consciousness and final incarnation in the language
game. Despite love’s traversing through variegated plains and appearance in and invasion of

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human body and mind, the human agency, according to Naik, has no sanction of and
authority over it. He merely serves as a stage, or rather a medium of its revelation.

The recurring idioms of Naik’s love songs idioms such as hymn, idolatry, deified,
figure of fate, chance, god, paradise and worship, do subscribe to the idea that heavenly
intervention is at the entire helm of the affair. Love as an affair comes within the
jurisprudence of god, the divine dispenser. While humans have merely to undergo such a
dispensation, they have actually neither any choice over nor any control on it. The plot of
love narrative is, in other words, cryptically drafted in heaven by the heavenly authority.
Human lovers’ happiness or unhappiness, fortune or misfortune is only part of the divine
machination on the matter. The persona of the love songs of You I Could Hold was fortunate
to have a taste of this divine feast even though for an extremely short while. But this taste
was so strong and intoxicating that he has never come out of its massive maddening effect.
The chance honeymooning with the ladylove has remained paradisiac in nature and essence.
The hangover of this brief spell of ecstatic life in the paradise has continued throughout his
afterlife. The blissful spell has ended but it has left the lover with the ‘memory of paradise.’
The protagonist has adhesively held to that initial unforgettable ecstatic ‘memory of paradise’
throughout his remnant life. The beloved marks ‘the figure of fate,’ and ‘a destiny of
consciousness,’ and the helpless lover cannot but supinely surrender to, or irredeemably stick
to and languish over such an overpoweringly paradisiac moment and its invaluable,
overwhelming revelation. The title of the collection is telling about such an adherence of
lifetime duration on the part of the speaker to a fateful and fixated moment in the past. As a
matter of fact, the collection’s title constitutes an intermediary line of a short stanza of a
poem by the 20th century German poet, Paul Celan and Naik has used the stanza as an
epigraph to his collection. Celan’s lines do in fact significantly initiate the tone as well as the
motif of the songs of the collection. Celan’s epigraphic lines are
You were my death:
you I could hold
when all fell away from me.

Death is undoubtedly the absolute, invincible and all-embracing figure of fate. It embodies
destiny per se with absolute marks of inevitability and finality. Love to the persona, and in
love, the beloved as well, appears as absolute as death. Here it is worth noting that love and
death to Naik are ‘equal’ and they form a ‘symmetry’- of violent nature and ‘coherence’
though. And both love and death bear in themselves stamps of absoluteness. In the third of a
series of five sonnets on Nisus and Euryalus of Virgil’s epic characters of Aeneid Naik has
emphasised ‘only death is as absolute as love.’ In the last two stanzas of the same sonnet, he
has gone on to write
The equality of death and love –
the symmetry of a violent coherence –
they had the fatal courage of sheer impulse,
and death showed the power of their performance.

They are forever what they were for once,

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Reading You I Could Hold: A Versified Narrative of Love

erastes and eromenos – the eternity of a chance (Naik, 2014, 105).

The love songs of You I Could Hold in a sense celebrate this ‘eternity of a chance.’ True, the
speaker of these songs has been turned to a ‘ghost’ following the withdrawal of the beloved,
the chance begotten gift - withdrawn only after a brief enchanting spell. But the fond and
fascinating memory of that chance encounter and ‘chance touch,’ was too profound and
powerful to be obliterated from the mind’s eye. That chance touch of fleeting moments of
past has brought him captivity for a term of lifetime duration. The speaker wonders at the
strange, never ending power of that captivity, of that memory of paradise in the poem “How
Could One Thing.” The opening stanza expresses this wonder in the following terms
How could one thing
polish everything into a mirror
reflecting your appearance
as your absence? (2013, 88).

To Keats ‘Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard /Are sweeter.’ In the same manner, to
the persona of Naik’s poem, appearance of the beloved through her physical presence was
real and joyous but her appearance through her ‘absence’ was more real, appealing and more
rejoicing. The joy she induced in him once was energising as well as engaging enough to
make his journey go on for ever. The speaker asserts ‘You are the joy the onceness of
which/makes the world go round, . . .’ He is heard saying a little earlier in the previous stanza
This waiting by the shore of the world
this mooning over you that makes of all time an exiled evening
this life conceived in pure memory,
lays its claim, however vainly,
on the promise of your presence (88).

In spite of the fact that the joy the lover got once in the company of the beloved was strong
enough to make his world go its round, there is an inordinate desire in him to avail her
physical presence over and over again afterwards in his life. The ladylove has been
apotheosised and the desire has been accordingly transformed to a prayer while the lover has
taken the position of a devout priest or the worshipper of love. The desire for the presence of
the absent goddess of love takes various forms like an earnest appeal, a sincere prayer and a
just or legitimate demand. The tone also changes accordingly from sanctity or sanctimony,
through pity to stubborn assertion and often even of sarcasm. The poem “Come Again When
I Want To See You,” for example, marks a solemn and sincere prayer or appeal made so to
say, at the altar of the deity of love expressive of a fervent, sanctimonious tone. Apart from
the opening line of the poem which marks its very title, the last two stanzas best exemplify
this sincere and fervent desire on the part of the speaker. His appeal to the deified ladylove is
Come again when I’m ailing old
and can hardly recognize you
through the grey mucus of worn-out eyes
I still would make out – it’s you.

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Come again when I go up in flames

outside the whorehouse called time,
the sky would still be blue, the grass green,
and you alone would be mine (2013, 84).

The poem “Want To Meet You” is also an explicit manifestation of an identical earnest desire
for meeting the sweet heart on the part of the persona. It begins
Want to meet you
at the edge of time where the light dreams
of playing with shades of blue.

Want to meet you

outside hope
in a memory without anything to remember
where just your name will do (2013, 70).

This desire to meet the absent beloved finds reiteration again in the last stanza which reads
Want to meet you
after all the possible farewells
where to look into your eyes
looms the beginning forgotten by history (70).

The tone of the poem “What A Pitiable Demand – Desire Me” is a mixed one exhibiting both
fervent wish and self-pity or even subtle sarcasm. The title of the poem which marks the
opening line of the poem and the concluding line as well are discernibly somewhat sarcastic
in tone. The lines are ‘What a pitiable demand – desire me’ and ‘What a beautiful prayer to
an absent-minded god – desire me.’ In the last three lines of the last but one stanza, the
persona is seen in the posture of making a sincere prayer to this absent-minded god. The lines
read
the arms outstretched in the gap
between wanting and being wanted
rust in the rain of the passing years (85).

When did the realization come upon the speaker and why and how it did that the ladylove is a
heavenly being offered to him but only for once? This important realisation broke upon him
right since the beginning on the occasion of her very first arrival at his doorstep. The poem
titled “When You Came In The Light Blue Light” is a vivid account of this fateful arrival and
its mesmerising effect of lifetime duration. This historic occurrence took place in one ‘early
summer’ in the ‘quiet little town’ of the protagonist at a stage when he was hardly ‘at the
edge of boyhood.’ Describing this all important arrival, the poet has written in the first stanza
When you came in the light blue light
of the evening humming the beginning
of what was to be a lifetime’s hymn
to the desert sky of a dazzled thirst

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Reading You I Could Hold: A Versified Narrative of Love

that turned my bone to string (2013, 83).

As it is clear from this stanza, the very debut arrival of the elfin like beloved laid the
foundation stone of a maddening relation the stuff of which turned the stuff of ‘a lifetime’s
hymn.’ As regards the seminal significance of this rare happening, the third stanza depicts
I didn’t know then how it was named
but sharp was the curve that turned
a straight line into a throbbing arc –
the discovery of desire:
your arrival (Italic added, 83).

The all-important discovery, ‘the discovery of desire’ was made by the speaker. And ever
since this discovery, the desire has turned to an inexhaustible stream of ‘combustion’ in the
narrator and has set him ablaze and kept him ‘burning’ infinitely. The impassioned narrator
has described this state of his lifetime burning in the following pulsating lines.
Since then you are burning me
in the combustion that began in a fragrant smoke
and through the years carboned my look
wandering to find that different world
which you,
you who were for me everything for the first time,
in a grace of silence affirmed (83).

That ‘different world’ to which the narrator was led by the angelic beloved by her affirmative
‘grace of silence’ was definitely the world of ‘paradise.’ However, now the paradise has been
lost with that providential one time union of the lovers abruptly coming to an end. What now
the love-lorn narrator is left with is only ‘the memory of paradise.’ The life of pure ‘feeling’
has been replaced with ‘the curse of knowledge.’ And since that moment of most sensational
dramatic entry one fine and fateful summer evening and the soon after exit of the God-given
gift, the narrator has been to made to undergo ‘the curse of knowledge.’ Lord Buddha was
right to pronounce that desire is the root cause of suffering. The narrator of Naik’s love
narrative has been cursed to suffer irredeemably an unending anguish and misery since the
very moment of departure of his heavenly beloved. The ladylove was indeed the very
emblem as well as incarnation of desire to the narrator. More than that she was also an
embodiment of hope, grace, promise and sacrament to the desire-thirsty lunatic lover. She
has been described variously in various of Naik’s poems as ‘the gift of madness given for
once,’ as ‘a lucid secret, a lyric chance,’ ‘a gift of loss,’ ‘a field of vision,’ ‘pulsating points
of light,’ ‘a counter-gift to the given,’ ‘the reflections of untrammelled hope,’ ‘the spectre of
a beatific efflorescence,’ ‘the disclosure/of a different meaning of mystery,’ and as ‘a soft
terror.’ The praising words that Naik has used in describing Harel Skaat in his dedicatory
poem of the collection may also be aptly applicable to the mesmerising ladylove. Here she
has been eulogised in varying terms and expressions as ‘the depth of an aural sea,’ ‘the
serenade of the ever evening,’ ‘the exalted octave of agony’ and ‘the balm soothing soft.’ In
her the speaker has found precious intimations of ‘the boundless life of pure feeling.’ As

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these admiring or rather, adoring words testify both Harel Skaat and the beloved of the
narrator of Naik’s versified narrative of love have a thing of beauty and therefore, a joy for
ever. In this circumstance, t is no wonder, the promising beautiful face of the beloved has got
eternally and unerasably imprinted in the inner eye and mind of the maddened lover. In
ordinary situations, the speaker may sound somewhat hyperbolic in the following of his
account about the facial gesture of his beloved. But she has remained an extremely
uncommon a figure to him and that’s why appears very much contrite in his expression. He
says
That face
the promise of happiness,
those eyes to see is to dream
what can’t be interpreted,
that smile an anamnesis
of a possible world
in unashamed tenderness,
that smell of sweat-crossed-cologne,
that nerve-stroking breath (2013, 82).

And with that powerfully eloquent face no more in sight in his real life situation, the mirror
that is the narrator himself
looks for the image
in the darkness left behind
by the departed vision of that grace
which redeems the promise of time (82).

From a world of unnegotiable distance to which she has immigrated once and for all, in her
august absence, her visage now appears to the mooning and mourning lover ‘a photographed
face,’ ‘a paralysed reflection,’ ‘a marble statue’ ‘a figure of fate’ and ‘an idol’ with ‘no
blood.’

However, she has remained immortal in the realm of his mind as well as heart as the agency
of his sacrament. She has been a ray of his hope in the dark and blind alley of his life. So
much so, a decree of death from her would prove a gracious act to him. In the last stanza of
the poem titled “How Could One Thing,” he is heard saying
You who appear as your possible space
in the framed blackness of the world
remain in my heart like a secret sickness
to die of which would be an act of grace (88).

As a matter of fact, You I Could Hold has turned to be, as stated at the outset of this write-up,
a maverick string of melancholic prayers and ‘consecrating hymns’ composed without any
doubt, commemorating a single memory – the memory of the idolised ladylove – the memory
which has been ‘sadly endearing’ and unfailingly rejuvenating. Most of the poems of the
collection happen to be either an act of invocation of the goddess of love or rhapsodic

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Reading You I Could Hold: A Versified Narrative of Love

reminiscences of that rare ecstatic moment in the Eden garden of love. The beloved has
remained so central and regulating a figure as well as a force to the narrator and she has
pervaded so powerfully and unsparingly the entirety of his being that even when he is
otherwise engaged in taking note of the given cyclic run of things and seasons, she has
irresistibly intruded into his focal point to configure there in spectral form on the canvas of
things. The following introductory and concluding stanzas of the poem “I Open My Eyes”
best exemplify the fact.
I open my eyes
and look at the space
that was you (2013, 73).
And again
I close my eyes
and feel the body
that was you (73).

The image of the ladylove has evidentially pervaded the entire gamut of time and space
insofar as the mode of existence of the narrator of the You I Could Hold is concerned. In this
circumstance, the very meaning and purpose of his life have been linked to and centred on the
graceful presence of her being. With the exit of the beloved, the lover stands
excommunicated from the basic objective of his living. Deprived of love, he is left with
‘unassigned reason’ for his living. In the poem “What A Pitiable Demand – Desire Me,” the
bereaved lover bemoans
a shadow that’s just been disqualified to be a body
doesn’t know what to do
with the unassigned reason
for being itself (85).

In this deprived, disgraceful and decrepit state, the narrator becomes increasingly aware of
the other ‘absolute’ figure, death to which he counts love’s ‘equivalence.’ In the opening
stanza of the poem “Waiting Keenly Terrified Though I Am,” the speaker explains
Waiting keenly terrified though I am
of his eventual arrival,
its unpredictable inevitability
teases the future tense
in the grammar of my being (2013, 39).

Death consciousness has remained an important motif with the poems showcased in You I
Could Hold. In many of Naik’s poems, not only of this collection alone but of its sequel By
Inference (2014) as well, love and its equivalent death go hand in hand avowedly in violent
coherence. Describing further his fearful state of waiting for death’s ‘unpredictable
inevitability,’ the speaker says in the latter half of the afore cited poem
I live in dread of him
though I live to be gathered by him –
an acceptance? or merely a pathetic hope?

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the embrace that never gets tired

of its possessiveness –
a necessary deception?

In this state of living with ‘unassigned reason’ and living ‘in dread’ of death, the only and
apparently sensible thing he finds worth undertaking is playing, what he calls, ‘a language-
game.’ The speaker is heard concluding the poem under reference
a language-game the heart must play
while waiting for the last silence?

The poems Naik’s two volumes are stringed with are truly the turn outs of this language-
game. Like many other poets particularly the compatriot, Jayanta Mahapatra, Naik’s
engagement in the language-game has turned to be a cathartic exercise. The following lines
from his poem “It’s Almost Real” offer a glimpse to his poetic manoeuver.
I’m an inward painter
(the object isn’t given though)
I imitate the feverish void of the interior distance
between me and myself,
where contours awake into figures,
colours spill over as the light breaks
and sounds wing their vibrations –
a space is born (2013, 32).

A space is born in the process of mapping out the ‘the feverish void of the interior distance’
and there finds configuration a painting in words the contours and colours of which resonate
with pulsating heartstrings. This is exactly what Naik’s verbal paintings are and do. They
externalise stubborn and turbulent internal feelings, ‘feverish voids,’ ‘ultraviolet pain’ in
most impassioned manner in ‘the subliminal tones of low time’ and in the permanence of
melancholy. Moreover, there can be seen in the poetic space born distinct marks of ‘the
buried years surfacing.’ Living in the exiled evening in constant dread of the unpredictable
inevitability and living with unassigned reason, the protagonist has often held prayers to the
idolised beloved with a view to attain sacrament through her grace. In the poem “Sing On,”
for example, the persona prays to the absent beloved to sing on and pour soothing music on
him ‘for it’s unbearable just to survive.’ Later on in the same poem he says ‘I seek refuge in
your orphic grace.’ The voice of the beloved has served him as ‘the balm soothing soft.’ The
persona fervently prays to his beloved to sing because, as he has put it in the poem “Only In
Your Voice”
Listening to you is juvenescence
which I have left far behind
only in your voice my memory sings
of absolute loss of a different kind (48).

The ‘absolute loss of a different kind’ that the narrator has suffered is indeed the paradise lost
consequent upon the departure of the ladylove. In the absence of the elf-like beloved, the

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Reading You I Could Hold: A Versified Narrative of Love

deserted lover is wandering aimlessly in an evacuated paradise. Describing his miserable

condition that he has been reduced to in the aftermath of that absolute loss, he says in the
poem “Every Night”
I roam like the abandoned dog of a refugee
in the deserted streets of a fallen city
sniffing at the rubble to scratch a hint
that all isn’t lost after all (110).

In this pathetic condition another fragment of a prayer deserves citing. It is from the poem
“Ghostscape” and it reads
Give me your salts and smells
burn me in the fever of your mouth
my throat aches for your spit, your sweat,
and the honey of sea flowers your spasms spout.
Gather me onto you
as the palms lift the water to the lips –
keep drinking me
for I want to be
at the same time
both inside and outside you (2013, 68).

It is true that You I Could Hold has happened to be a pageant of beautiful hymns and prayers
spelt out in commemoration of a departed lover or beloved. And Dilip Naik as a poet has
emerged to be a powerful singer of love with this maverick collection of love songs. But it is
also true that love is never the singular motif of the poems of the collection. Several other
motifs of universal nature and significance, motifs like time, space, death and artistry have
been entwined with the nucleus one i.e. love. Besides, the collection has been a fine
manifestation of Naik’s mythopoetic nature and tinge of imagination. Poems like “Yasoda,”
“Chandrasena,” “Sabari,” and “Soumitri,” in addition to the series of five sonnets hold
testimony to this fact. What is so common about these poems is all their characters are
invariably oriental mythological characters and all of them are centred on the divine
dimension of love. The sonnets of the series on the other hand owe their origin both in respect
of character and motif to occidental classicist Virgil. The poetic idiom and ideas as well do
powerfully point to mythopoeic traits of Naik’s poetic sensibility.

Lastly, a splendid versified narrative of love apart, Naik’s You I Could Hold has remained an
immensely insightful and illuminating anthology shedding uncommon intellectual lights on
the go of the world. In the side lines of grappling with the enigmatic contours and colours of
love, the poet has side by side, endeavoured to hold mirror to the world around and at large as
well, to see through it the underlying ‘motif in the given design.’ He has done so with a
persistent eye on the central motif love and the central other the beloved who have been to
him an exceptional endowment in life. When love has been the semantic termini of the syntax
of his life, he finds his central axis at odd with the ‘motif in the given design.’ As he has put
it in the poem “To Be Left Behind”

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The Criterion: An International Journal in English Vol. 8, Issue-V, October 2017 ISSN: 0976-8165

Some are sent to a monochrome life

to figure out the consistency of the pattern,
however brilliant the exceptional may be
it isn’t a motif in the given design (2013, 94).

The poem brings out the contrast between the motif of individuals, no matter how well it is
intended and that of the consistent pattern of life in a closely knit given family set up. Again
on the ways of the world, Naik’s realization is
this is how things are
this is the rule of law
high above our most felt intensities
irreducible to our most valued terms (13).

The persuasive conviction that ripples through poetic lines of the collection is ‘we don’t
matter/for the meanings are quite different’ (13). On the matter of love, ‘our most felt
intensities,’ the poet is of the view that ‘the supreme emotion/lives eventually . . . /in the gift
of separation’ (58). As regards human longing, the volume’s thesis is ‘longing can only
wander/in an evacuated paradise,’ and again, ‘in longing one rediscovers love/as the infinity
of a divine desolation’ (58). Another important realization with the frustrated narrator has
been that
failure casts a different light
on things which success hides
and rejection opens the heart beyond the self
for acceptance is too banal a bribe (45).

If what Coleridge has observed on poetry as ‘best words in best order,’ is the defining
parameter of poetry, the poems encompassed in the pages of You I Could Hold are without
any doubt the best ones of their genre. Similarly if ‘Our sweetest songs are those,’ as Shelley
has pointed out, ‘that tell of saddest thought,’ again Naik’s songs appear undoubtedly the
sweetest ones for they lay open before us the most melancholic musings of an extremely
ruffled heart. Sprung up as the songs of the collection have from one most fecund and erudite
mind and extremely impassioned heart, there’s a plenty in the volume’s pages for its readers
to feast and relish.

Works Cited:

Naik, Dilip. You I Could Hold. New Delhi: The Authors Press, 2013. Print.
------------- . By Inference. Bhubaneswar: Events Publication, 2014. Print.
Keats, John. Keats: Selected Poems and Letters. Delhi: OUP, 1971. Print.
Wordsworth, William. The Prelude. London: OUP, 1970. Print.
Shelly, P.B. “To a Skylark” in The Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics. London:
Everyman’s Library, 1983. Print.

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Reading You I Could Hold: A Versified Narrative of Love

Coleridge, S. T. in Table Talk. Here quoted from Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and
Proverbs. New York: OUP, 2001. Print.
Cuddon, J.A. Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. Third Edition. London:
Penguin Books, 1991. Print.
Abrams. M.H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Sixth Edition. Bangalore: Prism Books Pvt.
Ltd., 1993. Print.

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