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Book Review
Menezes' poems
THE CRADLE OF MY DREAMS — Selected Writings of Armando Menezes: Compiled and edited by Louis Menezes; Ignatius Menezes & Sharmila Ribiero 2, Casa Goa, F122, Anna Nagar, Chennai-600102. Price not stated.
FOR ARMANDO MENEZES, poetry was a steady passion. His poems were that of a professor who loved to read, teach, talk and write about English literature. Writing about him in his Indian Writing in English, K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar discussed the "exile's sharpened sensibility" in the poems of Menezes and praised their structure and craftsmanship. It is good that the children of Menezes have come out with a fine selection from the poetry and prose of their distinguished father to mark his birth centenary.
A Shelleyan romantic and a carping Pope by turns, Menezes could also make us pause, stand by and retire into a grey mood, as when he expressed anguish on our first Republic Day in 1950:
"Why is your rising, Mother,
solemnly cold,
With the heavens clouded to
a murky mood?
With downcast eyes, and mouths
agape for food,
And angry gnashings in
the wintry fold?"
During the half century when this poem has been read often by me, I know the mother's dark eyes never bloomed to smile as far as Menezes was concerned. He was an intense patriot, and felt unhappy at the way caste and creed were proving to be disintegrating factors for this great nation. But Menezes was not disheartened. He continued to cultivate his "private garden" which happened to be the teaching profession. If you take care of the younger generation, you take care of all your tomorrows! The ideal teacher in Menezes is remembered to this day since his philosophy of teaching transformed the shabbiest college room into a meadow of lilies dancing in the breeze:
"Teaching has been to me, almost from the start, a joy; and it had been a joy because it was part and parcel of my mere sense of being alive and active. I have never felt a gap between my teaching and my life; and I have never recognised a gap between my teaching and my enjoyment. I have always believed that literature and life must flow into and complete each other; and I think the ideal teacher would be one who induces in the student the feeling that his studies and his joy in living are parts of a single whole."
This, among other gems of instruction from the beloved writer, makes the book a volume to be treasured in the libraries of all our academic institutions.
PREMA NANDAKUMAR
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