Stephen Gill’s The Flame: Symphony of Music, Imagery and Thought

Chhote Lal Khatri, Ph.D.

What is remarkable about Gill is that he writes verse or prose with a mission to bring peace, harmony and brotherhood. As he writes in the Preface “The cure to the malady of religious and racial fanaticism and violence lies in the acceptance of the values of tolerance, understanding and co-existence.” This mission has become a passion for him that keeps reverberating in his writing and speeches. In this respect his poetry may be called a vehicle in aid to his crusades for world peace. But he cannot be called a propagandist. For he is propagating nothing of his own but trying to spread and consolidate the most cherished values of humanity. (Cyber Literature 91-92).

The present poetic volume, titled, The Flame is an extension of Stephen Gill’s vision on world peace and reaffirms his faith in and commitment to the cause that is dear to human race in a more matured and profound way with greater precision and incision.

The Flame defies categorization. It is neither a Canadian voice nor an Indian nor a diasporic voice. I cannot call it a post modern poetry for two reasons. First I do not believe post-modernism as a literary/ critical theory and secondly I am inclined to study it in the tradition of modern war poetry which came up in course of the First World War; and it has been continuing effulgent or subdued in one mode or another in World Literature even today. And the present paper views it in continuity of War Poetry as anti-Romantic response (One may call it post-modern response) to war in any form, in any place -war, cold war, jihad, or even organised violence against a community or a country in the name of religion, language, race or caste.

The legacy of war poetry can be traced back to the lliad and The Odyssey of the Greek poet Homer or the Mahabharata and the Ramayana in India. They were the Romantic portrayal of war and the glorification of warriors and the kings who led the war. Homer initiated the Romantic approach and the English poets from Shakespeare to Tennyson more or less maintained it. It is really mind-boggling that people have fought ‘five thousand wars in history of three thousand years.’ The reversal was bound to come and it did come with the First world war through the soldier-poets who were fighting for their country in a pseudo patriotic zeal. The horror and massacre, all round destruction and distrust brought in repulsion for war and revulsion of feeling. R.N. Currey rightly sums up this development.

A number of humane, civilized and talented writers, caught up in the demands of a new type of war, played their parts in the revolution of thought that took place, but the pattern stands out of development from romantic idealism, through puzzlement, disillusion and angry satire, too a deep and serious hatred of war (Carrey 10).

Wilfred Owen, himself a soldier, came out openly against war in his poems and he was followed by several other war poets in the first quarter of the twentieth century. But the greatest poetic pronouncement against war and the preparation for war came from W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot. Yeats’ vision of the war-torn modern world in ‘The Second Coming’ has acquired proverbial status. Mark the oft-quoted Yeats’ lines:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and every where

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

(Yeats  99-100)

T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land echoes the predicament of the same world through equally powerful image of “a patient etherised upon the table.” In course of time they were proved prophetic with the Second World War, war in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Indo-park wars, Into-China war, cold war, jihad and war like situation looming large over the world. Since Gill is carrying that crusade forward in letter and spirit, his poetry may well be placed in that tradition and may be called ‘war poetry’ for it’s a war against war and it is both war and poetry by virtue of a luminous symphony of thought, imagery and music that he achieves in this long poem.

The Flame is, as the poet himself says, “about peace and peace is the main area of my exploration. There are several minor and major areas that also relate to peace, including human rights, treatment of the minority by the majority and antiwar activities. I have tried to attempt these areas in the light of my ideology of peace.” (Author’s Preface 19). The poet relates this persistent concern to “Lack of security in the country of my birth”. One can understand his psyche well when one knows that he is a product of India’s partition and has been subjected to the trauma of partition precipitated by the ‘maniac messiahs’. So his poems have deep-seated psychogenesis.

This poem seems to me a long soliloquy of a tormented and agitated soul anatomizing his subject to understand the genesis and nature of the problem of peace, to articulate his traumatic experience, may be to achieve catharsis; and in this poetic process he gives extension to his quest for peace by making it a plea for the humanity.

The poet seeks solution in the flame and through the flame. The title “Flame” is not only a biblical symbol but almost every religion except Islam makes an experiment with fire or flame. However, “Flame also symbolizes sharing, compassion, sacrifice, courage and witness” (Author’s Preface 22).

The Flame is divided into eight parts and sixty two cantos. Part I reads like a hymn in praise of ‘you’ that stands for the divine force. “You” is Jesus Christ ‘the chalice of your peace’, Lord Buddha ‘you are/nirvana...’, Krishna ‘notes of the flute’, the Mother Mary “you are the mother.... That cuddles infants” (The Flame 34). In the first four Cantos eighteen attributes of this divine force are enumerated with attributive images in sing-song rhythm. Images are drawn from several religions but mainly from Christianity. This celebration of the divine is very close to the Hindu’s hymns to God. Prayer and invocation to god has been a common device of epics. In a hymn that is the second rule of Aryan Samaj, an off-shoot of Hinduism, nineteen attributes of God are mentioned. However the proximity ends here. Throughout the poem, the prayer, the picture of destruction, the plea for peace and the different moods of the poet besides the logical argument are projected and articulated through images abstract and concrete both. And they powerfully evoke our different senses concerned with the images. The very first canto has the image of ‘Chalice’ of your peace. Chalice is a wine cup used for Eucharist— the prasad offered to the believers in a Church. This image has a limitation. One may quip-- what about the non-believers. They too need peace. This image is further reinforced by another powerful biblical image ‘Manna’. Both are the blessings or prasad of God. One is of general nature while‘Manna’ is food provided by God to Israelites during their forty years of starvation in the desert. The image evokes the similar situation today that warrants God’s intervention or spiritual refreshment. The poet reposes full faith in God:

You are

the distinctive fount

that feeds the ever growing pangs

of the sages

in every age.

You bind the earth and the sky

and rule to relieve

the rusting monotony. (The Flame 33)

This God is ‘imperishable harmony’, ‘radiant might’, ‘luxuriating richness, ‘The beat’ or Naad in Indian terms, ‘Nirvana’, ‘Manna’ for the hungry, ‘fount’, ‘Notes of the flute’, ‘sincerity of conviction’, ‘monarch of the ray’, ‘Mother’ and the ‘spectacular sight of the dawn’. He goes on to add some more images like those of ‘white lotus’, inner sanctum’ and so on. The references and images are loaded with suggestions and connotations pertaining to the infinite possibilities in the Divine: “your sovereign art / heals the corroded minds” (The Flame 40), “you are the lightning of thunder/that kindles/ the fire of trust./ A fervent hope’ (The Flame 42). He appears like a devotee whose optimism amidst chaos like situation is born out of his unflinching faith in God ‘to end the odyssey of my woes’ and to regain ‘the fruit of peace’. The prayer ends with his ardent hope for peace.

The prayer is followed by gory pictures of sordid reality of human savagery. The portrayal is so graphic, incisive, repetitively hard hitting that it evokes both ‘pity and fear’. But the effect is not cathartic rather soul stirring and motivating to take up the gauntlet. The poet deals in detail ‘the destruction caused by the maniac messiah’ in four successive parts. The second part evokes the sense of loss because of the present deplorable state of the abode of Flame. It reminds us of the sense of loss evoked by Derozio in his poem ‘My Native Land’ where the country has lost her past glory. Gill is pained to see “the battered body of the abode/of my flame/flaring in the dark.....” (The Flame 59) He rightly lays hand on the cause that generates disharmony, disorder and jihad:

Spiders of sinister news

crawl in and out of the cracks

of the tranquil trust

that mothers the rational of discipline

and the stress-causing stairs

of the menacing fear go up and down

with the sound

of a tombstone in the grass. (The Flame 48)

The present is contrasted with the past when he says:

The smooth surroundings

of the temple of my flame

have grown treacherous

in a thickening fog. (The Flame 49)

It is through direct sense-impressions and metaphoric images that the three fold nature of poetic experience-- sense perception, thought and emotion-- reveals itself as the poet’s accurate and intense perception of zealot, jingoism and jihad. Poetic imagery of Gill’s has a sensuous, an emotional and an intellectual source and it communicates on all three levels:

Distressed by the locusts from the hell

the abode

leaves a wrenching hole

in the fate of the future. (The Flame 60)

We witness a movement from abstract images (the soul of clouds, wordless sonata, notes of the flute, impulse of nature etc.) to concrete images of birds, river, brutes, young mother and child etc. In the apt use of imagery one finds him close to W. B. Yeats. He echoes Yeats’ ‘falcon cannot hear the falconer’ when he says:

At the race track

horses went crazy

some threw their riders.

Across the city

many were thrown

from chairs. (The Flame 57)

The poem also moves on a line of narrative in terms of sequence of events. It moves from the general perception on chaos to specific description of jihadi activities or war-- explosions - to rescue operation in Part three and further operation and rehabilitation in Part four and five. It is followed by poet’s anatomy of war and yearning for peace, the questioning spirit and soothing balm for the survivors or the desperate cry of the tormented self.

It abounds in visual and sound images to bring alive the feeling of catastrophe caused by war.

From the jungle

of deafening disorder

wounded streamed out

screaming hysterically... (The Flame 52)

Another visual evoking a sense of pathos:

There was an arm and a head

and a woman’s leg

from the knee down

the rest was buried under the rubble.

A body appeared

to have been through

a meat grinder.

There was an open chest cavity

beside a headless torso. (The Flame 53)

In vivid visual description of the horror of war, death and destruction, Gill is akin to modern war poet Issac Rosenberg with a difference that the latter being a trench poet or soldier poet, lends an effective personal touch to the description. Here is a specimen of visual descriptions:

The wheels lurched over sprawled dead

But pained them not, though their bones crunched

Their shut mouths made no moan

They lie their huddled friend and foeman.....

And shells go crying over them.

(“Dead Man’s Dump”, Rosenberg’s Collected works, 162)

Rosenberg’s visuals are more connotative while Gill aims at evoking the feeling of pathos through word-pictures. Another interesting point is that ‘flame’ is a recurrent image in both, of course with different connotations.

Part three to five at times seems to be a war-reporter’s diary in verse. But what is remarkable is the poet’s deft handling of different linguistic registers in poetry. It shows that the poet has done meticulous work in these registers. For example the linguistic register of rescue team– ‘jackhammers and chainsaws’, ‘plastered with insulation’, ‘cribs’, ‘makeshift morgue’, ‘Remote sensing specialists’, ‘squads of tail-wagging searchers’, ‘optic cameras’, ‘forklifts’ ‘steel-toed boots’, ‘field shower flashlights’ etc. or medical register ‘improvised surgeries’, ‘off duty medical teams’, ‘first-aid kits’, ‘body bags’, ‘radiological procedures’, ‘anesthalogists neuro and vascular surgeons’, ‘pulmonary specialists’, are used without marring the poetry in them. However, at times they have jarring auditory effect:

Hospitals postponed planned surgeries

and nonessential radiological procedures.

They had enough anesthalogists

neuro and vascular surgeons

and

pulmonary specialists. (The Flame 83)

Such elaborate details, though not out of context, read like prose piece in verse form. Part six takes on the intensity of a crusader and is charged with emotion but never lapses into sentimentality— a rare feat to achieve in the given context. He seems to take the ‘blood spillers’ by the scruff and lead them down the lane where they slaughtered humanity and then swerve sharply sideways by questioning the very existence of sense organs in them :

I ask blood spillers

..........................

if they hear

the silence of infants

in the cradles of terror;

share

the woes of mothers

in the winter of their lives;

see

the shreds of peace flying

feel

the virginity of spring losing warmth. (The Flame 89)

He employs all his poetic tools at command like, rhetorical questions, irony, metaphor and the whole range of imagery to put ‘the patrons of carnage’ in dock.

The branches of the trees

Shall be the limbs of the infant

whose light was put off

by the wildest winds.

Indignant waves

of sadness and fury

of every group and race

merge now to shame. (The Flame 96)

The repeated use of the rhetorical question ‘who can tell’ comes like a thunderbolt with directness of appeal and a sense of immediacy. Mark the excerpt:

Who can tell

if they wiped sweat

before unchaining the bulldozers

of their delusionl disorder

to create a tormenting lake

where every wave is massive slap

from the uncouth heat of the sand. (The Flame 90)

Canto 27 runs in the same vein.

One can notice that the mood, tone, spirit of the situation is communicated in the fast pace of rhythm with no pause and also in the music of the verse with explosive sound ‘b’, ‘d’ and ‘t’ echoing sense of death and disorder and is further reinforced by the images of ‘bulldozers of their delusional disorder’, ‘tormenting lake’, ‘wave’ and ‘heat of the sand’. The word ‘disorder’ carries the central idea of the state of affair in the poem and is echoed and re-echoed by different images here as elsewhere like ‘sightless assassins’ (It reminds me of another Canadian writer Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Blind Assassins’), ‘night...with the devil’, ‘dry lips of earth’, ‘flushed cheeks of horizon’, ‘tribes of chaos’, ‘cobwebs of despair’, ‘cracks in crumbling walls’, ‘ghost of despair’, ‘odyssey of my woes’ and ‘cradles of terror’ to name just a few.

Still the poet does not lose hope and asserts his faith in the flame:

Flame is still a pyramid of justice

Hope carves niches of safety

around towers of peace

to lay eggs.

Denizens of ignorance.

blow off the petals of the flowers

of today

not knowing the doors of the future

remain open.

When the bulldozers

uproot the shrine

the land does not go dry. (The Flame 98)

One can mark the changed tone, mood and rhythmic pattern in these stanzas. The tone is somber the mood serene and the movement slow, and the effect is of renewed hope and optimism.

M. L. Rosenthal and Smith pertinently comment: “In a good poem, there will be a definite relationship between the points of emphasized thought and emotion and the pattern of sound” (Rosenthal 36). Sample the excerpt for the poet’s giving soothing balm to traumatized mothers:

Dear mothers

do not unfold

the bed of the past

a broken image

in the foggy mirror.

There are cradles

in which

new babies of aspiration

are to be rocked. (The Flame101)

The poet uses a verse form dominated with diameter and even monometer with predominance of monosyllabic words. The rhythmic movement is slow and graceful with falling tone in which past and present stand side by side and the poet exhorts mothers not to ‘unfold....the past’ and nurse ‘new babies of aspiration’. The soothing effect is achieved through slow rhythm, falling tone, monosyllabic words and the emotional appeal of the tender image of ‘new babies’. Surely he perceives some sort of ‘second Coming’.

The Flame, on the whole, seems to be unified with the central image of Flame around which a host of images, not closely related to one another, are heaped up to reinforce the central image. It is in a way narrative of the Flame-- its innate virtues, glory, decadence and then resurgence. It is the only hope and he seeks solution in it for it is “the binding force / for families, planets / every atom / and every part of every individual” (The Flame 135) In it he makes room to express his individual bruised self and his diasporic sensibility “If the pangs of separation/ ever prick me/ I shall clasp the soul of the night/ or/ dissolve the dawn’s freshness in my veins” (The Flame 131) and is able to make his way to “the place of peace” through a maze of destruction and chaos. The poem ends with a positive note of reaffirmation of poet’s faith is his pursuit:

I shall pursue my odyssey

through the barren regions of the moor. (The Flame 152)

Certainly the poet, Stephen Gill, comes out triumphantly as a one man army fighting for peace, trust and brotherhood through the weapon of Muse. And in this way he stands as a distinct poetic voice. One may call him esoteric or even maniac but he is here to stand with a mirror before us and The Flame offers us a bouquet of poetry with brilliant poetic flashes that animate a reader with its thought, music and imagery in symphony.

Works Cited

Bottomby and D. Harding : Rosenberg’s Collected Works (ed) London. Penguin, 1931

Currey, R.N. Poets of the War, London, Longmans, 1960.

Eliot, T.S. The waste Land, Macmillan.

Gill, Stephen. The Flame, Canada. Vesta publications, 2008.

Khatri. C. L. Rev. Shrine in Cyber Literature, Dec. 1999 (Pages 91-92).

Rosenthal, M. L. & A. J. M. Smith; Exploring Poetry, New York, the macmillan 1957.

Yeats, W.B. Selected Poetry, Delhi, Book Land, 2004.