Poetry

I wrote these poems in childhood and youth, but I do not place them in a glass case and call them evidence of a vanished self. The person writing them is recognisably the same person writing this note: the same hunger for peace, the same wholehearted love of the natural world, the same instinct to look the horror in the face and name it without flinching, and the same refusal to make cynicism sound like wisdom. These poems were written before I had much armour, which is part of why they say things so directly. They want beauty, escape, stillness, and transcendence. They want a way of living rightly in a wounded world.

Junior college in India did not help. It was pressure to perform, learning without the joy I found in it, rage at a life being spent in pursuit of a fraction of a fraction of a percent while the world was already beginning to fray at the seams. That pressure is in the poems written from classroom windows and from the edges of institutions that felt smaller than the world outside them. When The Butterfly watches a butterfly head into the sunset, or A Wish longs to leave a life of strife behind, or The Doom of Man names judgement without euphemism, the natural world is not serving as decorative contrast. It is the real world against which so much human busyness, ambition, vanity, and institutional nonsense shows itself to be trivial.

I was not, even then, "just" a nature poet. Systems are everywhere in these poems, because systems are everywhere in life. The weather is a system. A forest is a system. A classroom is a system. A city is a system. An economy is a system. The carbon age is a system. So is denial. So is the smooth little social machinery by which people repaint catastrophe in polite colours and congratulate themselves for having done so. If the poems keep turning from private feeling to atmosphere, from individual sorrow to wider damage, from one life to the habits of a species, that is not me wandering off topic. That is me following the pattern where it actually leads. A poem about rain, sea, leaves, or hills is also a poem about scale, dependence, consequence, and what sort of creature a human being has decided to be.

Nature is everywhere in these poems, but it is never scenery. It is refuge, witness, teacher, measure, and beloved. The Lord of the Eagles, for all its obvious Tolkien paraphrasing, is probably the earliest poem in this archive that is fully me: the eagle already standing for witness, nobility, and moral compass; the non-human world already treated as presence rather than backdrop; the scale already larger than the little human dramas around it. A Rainy Day, Wandering Streams, A Mountain’s Advice, The Song of the Sea, Dawn’s Breeze, and Of Enchanted Woods and Singing Streams all do something similar in different registers. They kneel before weather, water, birds, mountains, and starlight, not because I confuse reverence for life with religion, but because the living world is worthy of reverence. If one listens properly to wind and water long enough, the world will tell you what is wrong with it and what is right with it. These poems are full of that listening.

That is also why solitude matters so much here. Solitude is not loneliness. People are too quick to flatten the two into one another. Bliss, Hidden Paths, Lingering Dreams, My Own Little Corner, Here Lies a Good Man, Musings on Life, The Whisper of the Night, and Of Enchanted Woods and Singing Streams are not asking to be rescued from aloneness. They are making room for contemplation, for joy, for self-possession, for standing still in the company of the world without needing noise or audience. Even To a Little Wave, which some readers might try to sentimentalise into a plea for comfort, is really an offering of awe in return for knowledge: joy at being out in nature, joy at meeting something larger than the self without wanting to dissolve into it or flee from one's own mind.

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