Whispering Shadows

Express Tribune

16-02-2025

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Petrarch (1304-1374), one of the founding fathers of humanism in Italian language and renaissance, could perhaps be described as the originator of the poetic genre 'sonnet' signified as a composition made up of fourteen lines, an iambic pentameter format, an octave and a sestet and a definite rhythmic scheme. The constrtictiveness and compactness of the structure imposes a fetter and shackle upon the work, yet in the eyes of William Wordsworth this is 'no prison but rather those who have felt the weight of too much liberty, have found brief solace therein.'
A book of verse, professedly written in the sonnet genre, may appear as restrictive and constraining as to its scope and expanse but like the Urdu ghazal may contain a kaleidoscope of subjects, contents, intonations with references to Rumi, Sufism, Wahdatul Wujud and Wahdul Shahud.
Primarily a love poem, Tahir Athar's venture into compiling a compendium of seven scores of English sonnets in Telling Twilights (University of Punjab 2024) is never confined as to format and content but enlarges into domains of love, longing and loss and spreading into expansive areas of romance, ageing and death.
In the words of Prof Nasheen Khan, Chairperson, Department of English Language and Literature, Government College University, Lahore: "The sonnet stirs his (author's) arresting interest - whatever the subject matter, love, longing or loss, he maintains a gracefulness and delicacy of expression which do not compromise but enhance the intensity of feeling. It is this fine balance between content and format, between emotions and structure, between inspiration and art that defines his sonnet."
The author, within the rigid confines of the sonnet, demonstrates a wide variety and diversity of themes, adding new vistas to its compactness of expression and intriguing regular rhyming scheme.
As regards the range of subjects, the poet is preeminently concerned with love: everything else emanates from and reverts back to this all powerful emotion.
Love, with the author, transmutes into not merely personal experience but is noticeable in the restlessness of the seas, the rustle of leaves, the opening and closing of flowers, the alteration of day and night - it transfuses into a universal force.
In its intensity of emotions in the poem, Perfume: XXXV, there is a fusion of senses and nature into perfumed smell: "The perfume I compose has relief squeezed from clouds/ the glow - fire leaves behind/"
Some of the sonnets express, almost in a metaphysical and mystical strain, the complete unity of the lover and the beloved.
On another plane there is replete the sense of religious devotion in the sense of formal remembering of God by raising hands in prayer and giving alms for charity versus the more "felt" ways of remembering:
"The Summer nights, before the Monsoon/ the slow smell of parched earth, too, are of, and for, you/
Throughout the compendium one may discern a patina of gloss on several points of juncture viz love, devotion ageing and nostalgia.
"One more year has passed, an year without you/ You chose to become like a little older/
And I old, resolved again to err."
In a melody to spring (Spring Sonnet XIV) a paen is paid to a season in which it is best to 'bare oneself' and not wait for monsoon to rhapsodise 'waning and love'.
And to divinity the poet reverts again and again.
"You are my first and my last and all that lives in between/ You are my apparent, beyond control/
An earnest prayer for a child is a heartfelt request to God for guidance, protection and blessings for the child.
In his prayer for Aanya, the first granddaughter, the poet effuses into bringing gifts like the Magi of gold from Africa and myrrh fragrance tapped in Holy Lands and a fervent wish that she grows up with a head which delved to ponder in logic and conceive possibilities, and 'a heart which grows fonder of those around and hurt no one's heart', no matter what compels such an impulse, 'for that is where God dwells'.
Again and again the loss of time, the decay of age, the fading light of creeping senility recurs in the book. In Sonnet LVII, the poet describes how imperceptibly new folds emerging on the face with unnoticed wrinkles appearing on the forehead like granite grains and the once sharp clarity in the eyes, has become dull.
One notices a sharp poignancy and nostalgic throwback in Sonnet LXIII 'Mother's Letters' (In memoriam Mrs Razia Tahir) where the poet talks of an arranged marriage between his mother and father growing in love and the mutual habit of letter writing and later when he departs for England leaving his threesome behind, this habit growing 'like a bundle swelling its contents'. And how for the last time, after he passed away, she read these 'private permanences' of a shared life brown, cream, crisp, weight-less and blown away.