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  • Summary of A River by Ramanujan: Explanation of The Poem

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    The poem describes how poets have traditionally romanticized the Madurai River in India without acknowledging the hardships it causes. In the summer, the dry riverbed reveals objects underneath. During monsoons, the river floods and takes lives, including a pregnant woman and her unborn twins recently, but poets fail to mention this. The poet argues other poets see the river's beauty but not the suffering, and questions why they don't document the real impacts.

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    a river

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    The poem describes how poets have traditionally romanticized the Madurai River in India without acknowledging the hardships it causes. In the summer, the dry riverbed reveals objects underneath. During monsoons, the river floods and takes lives, including a pregnant woman and her unborn twins recently, but poets fail to mention this. The poet argues other poets see the river's beauty but not the suffering, and questions why they don't document the real impacts.

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    3K views2 pages

    Summary of A River by Ramanujan: Explanation of The Poem

    Uploaded by

    anu dev
    The poem describes how poets have traditionally romanticized the Madurai River in India without acknowledging the hardships it causes. In the summer, the dry riverbed reveals objects underneath. During monsoons, the river floods and takes lives, including a pregnant woman and her unborn twins recently, but poets fail to mention this. The poet argues other poets see the river's beauty but not the suffering, and questions why they don't document the real impacts.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Flag for inappropriate content
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    Summary of A River By Ramanujan

    Madurai is the city of temples and poets. According to the poet, the sole concern of the earlier poets was
    to sing of the beauty of the city, its temples and its river. In every summer the river dries up making the
    sand visible. As the water level of the river decreases the sand looks like ribs of human. In addition to the
    sand, there are straws and woman hair under the bridges with rusty bars and patches of repair all over
    them.

    There are also shining wet stones that look like sleeping crocodiles, and those that are dry tend to be
    water-buffaloes with no hair relaxing in the sun. No poet, however, sings of this. They just sing of the
    rainy season, without mentioning the sufferings of the common people caused by the monsoon river.

    The poet claims he observed the flood of the river during the monsoon. People everywhere spoke about
    the rising water level of the river and the number of cobbled steps in the bathing place that it had
    submerged. It also took three village homes, a pregnant woman and a couple of cows by the humorous
    name of Gopi and Brinda.

    However, the new poets who are Ramanujan’s contemporary still quote the old poets without paying
    attention to the present circumstances. They never talked about the pregnant woman drowned with the
    twins in her womb. The poet imagines that the twines were kicking to escape while their mother was
    drowning but they could not and ultimately drown to death with their mother. The poets never presented
    this heart rendering incident in their poems.

    The poet refers to himself using the third person ‘he’. According to the poet, the river becomes poetic
    only once a year to satisfy the romantic and aesthetic feeling of the poets. Then in a sudden turn, the poet
    tells that in just half an hour, the river takes away three houses, a couple of cows and a pregnant woman
    who was expecting twins and was also thinking of having diapers of different colours to distinguish
    between them. Here the poet compares and contrasts the poetry of the other poets of his age with that of
    his own. On one hand, all other poets are very much interested in praising the beauty of the river on the
    other hand; our poet makes a balance between the beauty and the sufferings inflicted on the people by it.

    Short Summary of A River


    A River by the A.K. Ramanujan explains how poets of the past and present have romanticised the
    Madurai River. The poem starts with the speaker saying that every year, every poet sings the same songs
    about the riverbed, sometimes flooding, and sometimes dry. When it is empty, it reveals all of its secret
    objects. The poets still sang about this time and the other period in which the flood took place. But,
    they’re not getting into the particulars of who’s being affected. In the next stanzas, the speaker relays the
    words of the people of this region as they explain what has happened this year. Houses were swept away,
    including two cows and a woman who believed she was pregnant with twins. The speaker mocks old and
    modern poets for not caring enough to dig deeper into their environment.

    Explanation of the poem


    A River by A.K. Ramanujan is a four-stanza poem that is divided into uneven sets of lines. The first
    stanza consists of sixteen lines, the second: eleven, the third: seven, and the fourth: fifteen. They may not
    follow a strict rhyme scheme, but there are moments of repetition that help to establish a rhythm.

    Most obviously, there is a refrain that is used in the second and fourth stanzas and is only slightly altered.
    The speaker explains what occurred during this specific flood and then repeats the same thing. This
    works in two respects, first of all, to highlight the loss. But at the same time, the reader is also
    desensitising. One comes to expect disaster, as those who live in the region do, and see it as another
    aspect of the flood/drought.

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