REVIEW OF POEM

MIDDLE AGE
_Kamala Das

Middle age which speaks of the dismal stage of a mother whose love is rejected by her son is written by Kamala Das, now known Kamala Surayya.

When children especially boys grow and ‘emerge in harsh glory’ they hardly need the company of their mother. They share thoughts with friends and the poet compares the adolescent stage to pupae, with it startlingly beautiful image, bursting. Through this the poet could clearly express the harsh realities of adolescence. But the sensitive woman couldn’t ear the neglect. To her, motherhood is a part of her feminine itself that yearns for love and its fulfillment. The mother worries that her role in his life has been restricted to ironing sons clothes making him food etc. What she could do is to only weep a little secretly, feeling the older days: by having gentle touch on his books & things& to refresh the sweet memories of pampering her child. The poet to the last asks the mother to wake up from the dreamy world & to face the realities. The poet doesn’t blame on child or mother. She says that its nature’s process, but the mother can’t understand the changes of child’s attitude and the boy fails to realize his mothers thirst to be loved back, her mind. All started from the point of misunderstandings.

As in Kamala’s other poems, musing of lonely heart is the theme of this work too. In this poem feelings of longing and loss are invited into public sphere and acknowledged. Das seems to insist they are normal and have been felt by woman across time. Here she frames the pain of lost love of a mother so simply but leaving a crack in reader’s heart.

Women’s heart, especially mothers, seek love with never ending passion. Lust greed and hunger never satiate and finally the mind becomes an old play home with all its lights put out. Then they live with the golden memories in a wonderland.

The language used is simple and poetical. Her imagination has spread its wings at place she does comparison to a butterfly our life. For Das poetry is “the April sun squeezed like an orange juice”, the heat permeates into the readers mind. When she is moving to a new city, “sadness becomes a silent stone in rivers unmoving core”. She bid farewell to “the shadows behind the windowpane, the rain, the yellow moon, the crowd and the sea”. This sensitivity is the strength of her poetry.