Many of us enjoy poetry when we encounter it in school, simple poetry, laid out in evenly measured lines and with easy rhymes, and we even learn to quote a few stanzas, pausing carefully at the punctuation marks — but as the years go by and we realise that only maths and the sciences are going to get us jobs, these poems recede further and further in the mind. And one day, all grown up, we find that we’ve forgotten how to read poetry, which we now see as sideward skyscrapers, staggered lines of words piercing a lot of white space.
And if it weren’t for our film music, poetry would be out of our lives for good — especially, in my case, Tamil and Hindi poetry. Most of my reading and web browsing consists of English-language content, and save for the short poems in Tamil periodicals I don’t get to read much poetry in other languages at all — but thanks to film songs, I do get to listen to a lot of poetry, and when I heard that Vairamuthu, the great lyricist and writer, was one of the recipients of the Padma Bhushan this year, I had a flashback of sorts, to the time I began listening to “poetry” on the radio, through the lyrics of the film songs that played on the Vividh Bharati programmes.
With songs, it’s always the music that gets you first. We’re drawn to the flight of the tune, the drive of the percussion — and if the music is good, we don’t really
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But are lyrics really poetry? The great Broadway songwriter Stephen Sondheim, in his near-autobiographical collection of lyrics,
All of which is certainly true, but the best lyrics, when written down, can produce similar effects. Besides, how do definitions matter when you can feel that something is poetry — if not in the textbook definition of the word, then in the sense of freeing us, for brief moments, from this prosaic world? Emily Dickinson said, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” That’s as good a definition as any for poetry, and the best lyrics can make us feel that way, through mood and image and a voice from beyond that’s like an X-ray of your soul, surprising you by revealing everything about something you thought only you knew about.
And I return to my flashback, to the Vairamuthu lyrics that took the top of my head off, many many years ago — from the song ‘Vizhiyil Vizhundhu’, in the film
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Everywhere you turn in these lyrics, in this — yes — poem, there’s a startling physicality. There is, first, a description of the physical process through which one falls in love. The usual way to do this is to say that “one’s eyes fell on a certain someone,” but here Vairamuthu says that “a certain someone fell on one’s eyes,” then entered the heart and then merged with the soul. Love has struck. And thereon, the cosmos and its contents are slave to this love — the mere sound of your silver anklets will open every window in the street; your laughter will cause moons to rise in every direction; if you place jasmine flowers on your hair then the spurned rose will catch a fever; if you wear silks, silkworms will attain salvation. Even the skies are touched by this physicality, with the twilight hour resulting from the “rubbing together” of day and night. It’s some sort of celestial frottage.
In these lines, we find — to borrow Sondheim’s words — density and packed images, and if these lines were to be written down, the reader can read it like he does a poem, inflecting it with his own rhythms, stresses and tone. But even if you reject these “academic” criteria, something inside those of us felled by these words tells us that these are, without doubt, not just “lyrics,” in the sense of simple, rhyming constructions fitted into a tune so that the singer will have something to sing. Lines that produce this kind of raw feeling — what else can they be but poetry? And someone who captures this level of intensity with mere words — what else can he be but a poet?