The development of a love poet, can be traced easily by subtle analysis of various strains that define different moods and shades of love. The great metaphysical poet, John Donne provides a great instance of this kind of analysis of the poem. The first phase of Donne's love poems are conspicuous for exasparation and eccentricity that owes its genesis to peculiar notion that woman is essentially unfaithful and the object of sexual pleasure only. The second phase begins with the realization of the sentimental worth of a woman and in the third phase the poet enjoys the bliss of Platonic love where body, despite lingering functionality, ceases to matter and love is manifest at spiritual level.
Kamala Das, in her long career as a love …show more content…
She started to write poetry at that time when personal experiences took the place of colonial and nationalist themes in English poetry by Indian women. After the soft and soothing strains of Toru Dutt and Sarojini Naidu, the offensive individualism of Kamala Das appears as a shock. She is considered as a subjective poet and her poems are “products of uncontrolled emotions”. She was always in search for the perfect masculine being and each encounterwith the male-the husband or the lover in discovering the meaning of true love and finallythe frustration and disappointment resulting from the repeated failures of suchexperiments. To get relief from the frustration, she turns to her past memories where she got ideal love as a child. She showed her nostalgic element in her poems My Grandmother’s House and A Hot Noon in Malabar which first appeared in Summer in Calcutta in 1965. Kamala Das’ past and the present are contrasted. The present time is in no way worth-living and the past is inspiring and the memory is worth-retaining. When she thinks of her past and her present life she thinks that how fast the time goes, today my grandmother is no more and I can’t see her again. Nostalgia means remembering our past or childhood. Indian poetess recalls her dead grandmother in the poem My Grandmother’s House. This poem takes the form of a …show more content…
Now she had a dull grey face in front of her who can leave her at any point of time.Love and sexin her poetry become a paradigm for fractured realities encountered by the poetess.Essentially she speaks for a woman who is in search of love. She challenges the veryidea of phallocentric tradition and asserts in poem after poem that the subaltern canspeak. Post colonialism consists primarily in the contestation of power structures andsocial hierarchies. For Kamala Das a woman’s predicament as a daughter , a wife, or alover reflects a victimization in relationships. Kamala Das revolts against a constructednotion of relationship. Women are not the self-sacrficial model of virtue or promiscuity.The hitherto premises of male hegemony are violently shaken by Kamala Das who candefy the conventional ideological discourse of sexism and love. She herself became avictim of a young man’s carnal hunger.The poetic work of Kamala Das has engaged considerable critical attention and sustained rigorous explication. The subject of Kamala's work comprises of “woman” and the revelation of female experiences, be it trauma of an unhappy marriage or humiliation of a desireless surrender in sex or disgust at the male domination. Quest for love is certainly the perennial theme of Kamala's poetry. The poet studies love from many angles, and her treatment of the theme