Childhood Memory and Ecological Identity: An Ecocritical Study of the Poetry of Seamus Heaney and Jibanananda Das
Abstract
Though the formation of ecological identity is a life-long process, it starts to evolve in the very early phase of life when the process of knowing the world begins through observation, exploration and communication with other human beings and the non-human world. This process has immense impact on the development of a person’s ecological identity or the attitude towards the world. The space a child grows up in and the people they come in contact with in childhood would mould the personality of the person. Therefore a close study of childhood is crucial to infer the psychological significance of nature in identity formation. Childhood spent happily in close contact with nature is desired to result in an adult attitude reluctant to severe the bond between the self and nature as the childhood memory of a place and life would retain the importance of being the root that a person always cherishes to return to. This contention may be validated by ecocriticism if we study the childhood memory of the eco-conscious poets like Seamus Heaney and Jibanananda Das as presented in their poetry to find out if their childhood life has some influence on their ecological identity.
Keywords: Childhood, memory, eco-consciousness, identity, interconnectedness.
The commitment of ecocriticism is succinctly summed up in the general introduction to The Green Studies Reader: “If green studies does not have an effect on this way of thinking, does not change behaviour, does not encourage resistance to planetary pollution and degradation, it can not be called fully ‘ecocritical’” (Coupe 4). So, ecocriticism proper proposes to reconstruct personal and collective identity so that human beings start reconsidering their place and role in the ecosystem and learn to acknowledge the significance of all the living and non-living elements in it. In other words, human race is to develop ecological identity which, as Thomashow defines, “refers to how people perceive themselves in reference to nature, as living and breathing beings connected to the rhythms of the earth, the biogeochemical cycles, the grand and complex diversity of ecological systems” (xiii). Though the formation of ecological identity is a life-long process, it begins in the very early childhood. Therefore a close study of childhood is crucial to infer the “psychological significance of nature” in identity formation (Clayton and Opotow). Childhood is a phase of life when the process of knowing the world begins through observation, exploration and communication with other human beings and the non-human world. This process has immense impact on the development of a person’s attitude towards the world. The space a child grows up in and the people they come in contact with in childhood would mould the personality of the person. Childhood spent happily in close contact with nature is desired to result in an adult self that would be reluctant to severe the bond between the self and nature. The rationale behind such a belief is that the childhood memory of a place and life would retain the importance of being the root that a person always cherishes to return to. As a result, a person would like to choose a life that resembles his/her early life because the memory of the childhood would goad the person to have a renewed experience of the dream which is worth running after though not achievable. In Edith Cobb’s words, “The experience at the dawn of conscious life remained the "guardian angel," returning in memory to remind him that "It was my goal, It was my real happiness," (547). The strong influence of childhood memory on a person’s identity may be summed up as a man is what he remembers. This contention may be validated by ecocriticism if we study the childhood memory of the eco-conscious poets as presented in their poetry to find out if their childhood life has some influence on what they have become. This paper aims to assess this through an ecocritical study of the poetry the Irish poet Seamus Heaney and the poetry of the Bengali poet Jibanananda Das translated into English.
Childhood memory can be a very useful subject for the understanding of someone’s identity if memory is treated as narrative. Autobiographical narrative theorists contend that self-understanding depends on narratives. As the title of D. P. McAdams’ book The stories we live by: Personal myths and the making of the self implies, the concept of self is made up of stories. One develops the sense of self in the way of divulging it to others in the form of life stories. Following the narrative theories of identity, ecological identity may be defined as a collage of earth-centric life events that coalesce into what may be called an organic life-story. To understand a person’s ecological identity, a person’s organic life-story, especially of childhood related to the child’s exposure to nature and its reflection in the person’s behaviour may be studied. The works of the eco-conscious writers, especially the ones that deal with childhood reminiscences can demonstrate that ecological identity depends on how he/she retrospectively views the experiences of exploring, knowing and connecting to the environment they have grown up in.
The soul of ecological identity is eco-consciousness, a perception of one’s relationship with the external world. Following Kuhlmann’s dictum “Perception implies the memory image and hence there can be no consciousness at all without the presence of the memory image,” it can be said that without any memory image of nature, there would be no eco-consciousness (343). A child unconsciously learns about earth while exploring the neighbourhood without any adult interference and the learning registered in the memory in the form of sensations and images is the sine qua non of his/her eco-consciousness. Seamus Heaney and Jibanananda Das had almost an Arcadian childhood and the picture of their boyhood self as would be conjured up in the mind of their readers is that of a happily lonely figure, free and curious, lost in the landscape. No wonder, they share an almost identical attitude towards nature as would be reflected in their poetry. Both Seamus Heaney and Jibanananda Das have created a poetic world that is inextricably imbued with a love for the natural world. Nature occupies such a pivotal place in their poetry that their poetry has its own ecological identity and the term eco-poets can safely be applied to them. The term eco-poet is more appropriate than Romantic poet for their awareness of the interconnectedness and interdependence of all the objects in nature and a desire for assimilation. They differ from the Romantic poets in their sense of place and consequently, in their view of the connection between the self and the environment. If Romantic poetry can be compared to landscape painting, the poetry of Heaney and Das can be called “landscape portrait,” to use Neil Evernden’s phrase (Glotfelty 99). In their poetry self is not dissociated from the environment it belongs to. As they are conscious of the history of the place and of the processes that go on inside, they do not see nature as merely a collection of objects. They try to capture something broader than a landscape or merely a portion of a territory that a viewer surveys, so that the person does not remain outside of the environment. The self is placed within a greater structure of environment along with all the other elements in nature. So, the landscape painting turns out to be a picture of the self. The connection between self and environment replicates the ecological balance and interdependence.
Many of the poems by Heaney and Jibanananda are memoirs as they are clearly dazzling gems collected from the sea of memory. The childhood life portrayed in Heaney’s poetry is different from the one described in his essays or interviews only in form. Similarly, after reading Ashokananda Das’s essay on his childhood days spent with his elder brother, Jibanananda Das, the sonnets of Bengal the Beautiful seem to be a diary, poetic and personal. A little knowledge in their biography makes it very clear that their poetry is autobiographical in tone and content. Therefore, studying their poetry, a reader can have a glimpse of the ecological identity of the poets. The subjective tone of their poems impresses the readers as if the poets are laying their identity bare. All the poems have the lively glow as of the snippets from the poets’ life-story. As the poets are eco-conscious and great lovers of the environment they live in, in almost all the poems, we have glimpses into their encounter with nature perceiving the elements of environment through physical sensation. The vital moments that mark their sudden realization of their place in the ecology and their relation with other elements of nature bear the significance of an epiphany. Such moments define the way they would construe their identity in relation to nature as they bring about substantial change in their ecological attitude. The instant reactions may be as different as joy, surprise, awe, or fear but in the long run, these experiences become instrumental in effecting an ecological awareness leading to a sense of reverence for every bit of this earth.
Seamus Heaney spent his childhood at Mossbawn, Derry, Northern Ireland and Jibanananda in Barishal, now in Bangladesh. Childhood memory serves as the omphalos to both the poets. In fact, “memory,” says Heaney, “was the faculty that supplied me with the first quickening of my own poetry” (Pre 54). Heaney elaborates the relationship between his creativity and childhood memory:
The early-in-life experience has been central to me all right. But I’d say you aren’t so much trying to describe it as trying to locate it. The amount of sensory material stored up or stored down in the brain’s and body’s systems is inestimable. It’s like a culture at the bottom of a jar, although it doesn’t grow. I think, or help anything else to grow unless you find a way to reach it and touch it. But once you do, it’s like putting your hand into a nest and finding something beginning to hatch out in your head. (O’Discroll 58)
Undoubtedly, Jibanananda and Heaney possessed this recondite power to touch the “nest” of memory and the life-forms that hatched there are captured in poems that transcend from being mere photographic expressions to an eloquent world with varying nuances. While in Jibanananda, this world of memory looks like a fog-enveloped river, arcane, dimly visible but ever communicating with intent souls, Heaney tries to render the function of memory in concrete images. In the poem, “The Summer of Lost Rachel,” Heaney presents memory as a river and different images from the past as submerged waterweeds teasing an observer (Haw 37). The elusiveness of memory is further explored in a similar fashion in the poem, “The Otter”; memory like this “palpable and lithe” aquatic animal surfaces in frisky flashes (Field 39). The image of a shallow river as fluid and dynamic memory recurs in the poem no. xli in “Squarings,” a group of forty eight poems of twelve lines each in Seeing Things (95). In these poems, Heaney devises a new perspective of seeing things, i.e. the vision of the dead or the other that would enable him to look back at his past with defamiliarizing eyes wondering at the other-worldly beauty and luminosity of this mundane world. Such fantasy for the after-death experience of the world can be found in Jibanananda as well. This visionary recreation of the past would show how imagination helped them to re-enter the world of memory only to be spurred by some earthly images stored therein to create something transcendental. In short, both the poets explore the world of memory which is slippery, glinting and fragmentary. So, to decipher the gradually transforming treatment of childhood memory, one has to gather all the poems together and such a comprehensive reading would unfold the development of ecological identity beginning from the very childhood to maturity.
Throughout their poetic oeuvre, the early-in-experiences keep coming back with various connotations but some of their works abound in direct references to those days like Heaney’s first volume Death of a Naturalist, Door into the Dark, Seeing Things and his last Human Chain and Jibanananda’s Dhusar Pandulipi (Grey Manuscripts), Rupasi Bangla (Bengal the Beautiful) and many of his uncollected poems. In Death of a Naturalist, the little boy of his poems gradually comes to know about his house, family, neighborhood and the environment and tries to fix his place in that context. His attempt at fitting himself into his surrounding is the beginning of the process of his identity formation. By the time the boy attains adulthood, many of his innocent perceptions had changed. However, this shift is crucial in the development of his self as a deeper awareness comes at the cost of innocence. The memories of the experiences gained at the interface between childhood and adulthood remain a strong pillar of his self. During this time before the adulthood, he is creating a map of his place in his mind. His fondness for certain places and fear and apathy for others contribute to the building of his sense of place. In this boyhood, he places himself in a narrow place and this would remain vital to his ecological identity even when he had grown up. The pictures and images that he remembers, the special language he learns to name these things, the smell and odour of every little things, the colour and texture of the natural objects would always be a part of what he becomes. Similarly, Jibanananda’s Bengal the Beautiful is a fertile text for the study of childhood memories and their impact on identity formation. In this sonnet sequence, past and present are so intertwined that it becomes difficult to tell his childhood memories from his adult experiences and it seems that he has not changed over time. Alan B. Seely describes the book as: “Visceral, sensuous statements, they speak of a romantic’s childlike heart reexperiencing love” (91).The love for nature with its grass, fields, birds, trees, a keen eye for the details, a curiosity for the mystery of nature, contemplation on these objects leading to creating a world of fantasy are common in both the young and adult selves. The poetic sensibilities that the boy imbibed from the rhythm of nature find expression in the poems of the grown up poet.
A common fondness for minutia in both Heaney and Jibanananda makes their poems a way of documenting the process of learning in early childhood. As a little child concentrates on a tiny object while trying to know the things and to take them in, the poems are rich in vivid details as if to trace the child’s learning process. The boy-poet internalizes nature through all the senses and the world presented in those poems is abuzz with thousands of insects, melodious with bird songs, refreshing with its lush greenery and alive with rivers, ponds, lochs, and bogs. Heaney remembers “the cool hardness” of the harvested potatoes in his hands (Death 1), how Bluebottles “wove a gauze of sound around the smell” of the flax-dam (3), the sweetness of the fresh blackberries (8), and his reflection in the dark well smelling of “waterweed, fungus and dank moss” (44). While Heaney’s poem generally pivot on a particular experience, in Jibanananda, it is difficult to find a central image or experience in a poem. Unlike Heaney, he does not write a poem on a particular experience; rather a series of experiences and sensations fuse into a poem. If Heaney’s poems may be compared to photographs, Jibanananda’s poems could be called a collage. He remembers the green trees shrouded in fog of dawn, the barn owl screeching perched on a kadam tree at night, the sour taste of the summer windfalls- green mangoes, kamranga, kul, the smell of basak or rice and the buzzing of bumblebees on pineapple flowers. Safely preserved in memory, the sense perceptions of the boy-poet create a world of its own- very alive and palpable. All the vivid and sensuous details lend a sense of warmth and brightness to the glowing picture of nature and suggest that the poets as children have assimilated the elements of nature with all their senses so intensely that it has created an inner organic world in their memory. As Pabitra Sarkar writes in “Nisargabodh o Jibananander Kobita,” (Eco-consciousness and Jibanananda’s Poetry), Jibanananda does not merely describe nature from an aesthetic, nostalgic perspective, nor is it a mere expression of his love for a specific place; his nature is a world in itself, dynamic, dramatic, animated, very physical, rich, and he locates his self in that world (Gangopadhyay 163-80).
One of the turning points in the development of identity in early childhood is the event of going to school. Schools can play a very crucial role in inducing an awareness of the environment and thereby to kindle their love for nature, which would, in the long run, result in an eco-conscious and responsible generation. Interestingly, school is not the sole institution of learning. In fact, a child learns from everything and everybody around. In this sense, nature can itself teach a child about nature. The concept of nature as teacher was popular among the Romantics and like Rousseau and Wordsworth, Heaney and Jibanananda explored this theme in their poetry. Jibanananda was not admitted to any school at a young age as his father was against such practice. So, his mother was his teacher but the motherly classes were seldom long and he enjoyed ample time in roaming in the garden, running after the butterflies, playing in the field, fishing in the pond or flying kites (Rudra 65). In other words, nature was his teacher who taught him the slow but steady rhythm of life, which would later mould his poetic sensibility. For Heaney, schooling itself is intertwined with nature. Going to his first school “Anahorish” was a kind of “a nature trail” as he himself says in his interview with Dennis O’Discroll (19). This walk through boggy places, bog holes, hedges and meadows by river and lough was a complementary prelude to what he would learn in school. In the poem, “Alphabets,” the first days at school are beautifully captured. The boy had learnt about nature much before he learns his alphabet. In fact, it is his knowledge of the different objects and creatures of nature that helped him to learn his studies. He remembers the digit two as a “swan’s neck and swan’s back” (Haw 1). His relates many of the things he learned in his school with the things he has already seen around him in their farm. What he learns at school is only a different significance attached to those shapes. Tick mark is hoe, omega is the good-luck horse shoe, delta is face of each potato pit etc. He learns to read and write but he associates everything with nature: “The letters of this alphabet were trees. / The capitals were orchards in full bloom, / The lines of script like briars coiled in ditches” (2). It is interesting to note that what he learned from their formal schooling may stand in stark contrast to what nature has to teach. The education that a school imparts is often a longstanding cultural notion of things including nature but there are moments in life when nature reveals its own secrets far more profound and truer than what any school can teach. Such epiphany subverts the popular ideas or emotions related to natural objects and it effects a substantial change in the child who experiences it. One brilliant example of such a moment in young Heaney’s life is captured in the poem “Death of a Naturalist.” One of the occasions when the poet as a little boy acquired a new perspective in the school of nature marks the death of the naturalist in him and the birth of an eco-conscious self. Inspired by the science classes of his school, he used to keep a jam-pot full of tadpoles to observe the gradual development of the frog. One day, he felt threatened by the frogs. This fear was a result of his hypersensitivity and imagination, but the awareness that the frogs are living creatures with natural instincts like love for the offspring and a desperate will to protect them made him realize that they are not mere subject for scientific study. This moment is crucial in the formation of ecological identity as it would induce in him a sense of respect for all life-forms though the initial feeling is that of fear. “I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings / Were gathered there for vengeance, and I knew / That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it” (Death 3). Heaney acknowledges the significance of these moments as “An Advancement of Learning.” In the poem titled so, he relates the story of a child overcoming the irrational fear of creatures which are socially, culturally despised and feared. The rats on the river bank terrified the little boy so much that he could not dare to cross the bridge. He manages to overcome his fear only by staring at a rat. In his imagination, the rat was unwholesome but after observing the creature for a minute, his fear subsided. He noticed all the parts of the rat very closely and he writes, “One by one I took all in.” Once he is able to connect himself with the rat, his description becomes free from all those negative words he used before, rather, it glows with a tone of sympathy and understanding. Now he can feel that the rat’s alert ears are “insidiously listening” and the poet sounds almost affectionate in phrases like “raindrop eye” and “old snout.” It is definitely a step forward in learning nature and this would only enhance his desire to understand nature. In this poem, a cultural fear of the plague-spreading rats rooted in the European collective consciousness is defeated. The crossing of the bridge at the end symbolically marks the boy’s journey from the collective consciousness to eco-consciousness. The transformed personality forgets his earlier fear of the rats experienced in the hen-coop of their yard or on the ceiling boards above his bed (Death 6-7). A similar kind of panic, as portrayed in “The Barn,” struck him in the claustrophobic atmosphere of the dark, musty barn with rats scuttling around and bat’s flapping the wings and he felt: “I was chaff / To be pecked up when birds shot through the air-slits” (Death 5). Like Heaney, Jibanananda, too, has listened to the “flapping of birds’ wings/ from a straw roof” and inhaled “an old owl’s smell” as described in “Before Death” but while it was a scary experience for young Heaney, Jibanananda is thrilled or charmed by this (Naked 28). Heaney’s fear of rats and owls are missing in Jibanananda and what we find in him is a sense of awe and amazement. However, the voice in this poem is that of a person “who have come to know life’s lonely enchantment” (Naked 28). The complexity of the images comes from a grown up poet’s contemplation on the mystery of life and nature but the images owe their warmth to the honest expression of the personal experiences. Nature seems to be mystery to a growing child and the poet retains the curiosity of a young boy amazed at the mystery of nature. The symbolic significance that the grown up poet attaches with the objects of nature is the result of a continuous search for the underlying meaning of the natural processes, a search that began in his boyhood.
Pictures of playful days where a child is playing football or with marbles, boating, fishing, swimming in the river, enjoying the taste of wild fruits are abundant in both Heaney and Jibanananda. One of the childhood activities that pleased both of them equally is relishing the bounty of wild nature. They enjoyed the experience of having the fruits plucked by themselves directly from the trees or briars. The sonnets in Bengal the Beautiful are scattered with such images. Having reached maturity, the poet cherishes the fruity smell of his boyhood and he wants to savour the taste of nata- fruit, soft fruit of cane and dhundul seeds, half-ripe mango, kamranga and kul, nona, karamcha, palm-kernels, lychees and jamrul as he used to do in his boyhood with his friends. Heaney scratched his hands, as recorded in “Derry Derry Down,” gathering ripe gooseberry in Annie Devlin’s back garden (Human 26). However, he is more famous for “Blackberry-Picking.” This poem records how nature’s abundance turned him over-enthusiastic and hungry. Nature produced more than he and his friends could consume but a desire to grab everything available turned them into hoarders though it ended with a sad realization that they can not preserve nature’s gift. The sweet flesh of the colourful berries and the fun of the very act of picking made them so zealous that they would ignore the scratches from the thorny briars to fill their cans which would ultimately smell of rot. However, this waste induces in him the awareness that “once off the bush, the fruit fermented.” Repeated frustrating experiences of this sort would result in a maturity that would be able to overcome the vexation caused by the joy at the sight of nature’s abundance and a responsible person would be born, who would use natural resources judiciously. However, the lusty boy shows a good knowledge of his environment: he knows that blackberries ripen in late August, after heavy rain and sun for a full week (Death 8). Jibanananda exhibits particular knowledge of all the fruits and plants as well but the temperament of the boy is different from what is found in Heaney. Death of a Naturalist follows the gradual development of a boy’s eco-consciousness but in Bengal the Beautiful, the boy has already attained it. The boyish zeal of Heaney is replaced by a poised fascination and almost indifferent longing as if the act of eating a fruit is not so much important to him as his being in the midst of nature’s bounty. He is so happy being a part of it that he almost identifies himself as a fruit. To describe his own birth, Jibanananda, in sonnet no. 46, uses the word “faliachhi” meaning ‘to be born,’ a word generally used in relation to fruit or crops (2001: 172). The person the boy in Heaney is going to grow into is what the boy in Jibanananda has already become.
Glorification of childhood with a religious overtone, as we find in Henry Vaughan, William Blake or William Wordsworth implies that children can have a glimpse of heaven as their bond with heaven whence they descended on earth is not completely severed. If interpreted psychoanalytically, heaven may be seen as an embodiment of what Lacan calls the imaginary, when there is no distinction between the self and the other and a child having just entered the symbolic order may still be able to imagine or dream or even experience what is lost (72). From this perspective, a child does not need to learn to identify with the “other” as that identification already existed; rather, the symbolic order teaches a child how to differentiate from others. So, for the growth of ecological identity, the connectedness is to be retained. As time would pass, the distance between the self and the world would increase and trying to bridge the gap later in life would definitely be a more difficult task. Young Heaney and Jibanananda displayed a prolonged period of retaining that connection. The motif of a child in a mother’s womb is central to many of Jibanananda’s poems as the idea of complete mother/child identification is very dear to him. So, even death is not scary but desired as he considers death to be the means of returning to the elements; death is a kind of home-coming. In his poem “Back Then This Earth’s” from his first published Fallen Feathers (Jhara Palak), which is a meditation on his death, he initially believes that life on earth is an existence in the womb of Mother earth and death would snap his connection with her: “Earth’s umbilical cord was instantly torn asunder. / I heard a mother’s feeble weeping, / Mother earth – yours – calling to me from behind!” (Seely 49-50) but at the end, he realizes that when he dies, dark earth covers him like a mother who has recently delivered a child. He imagines himself to be a child in the womb of earth in all the three stages: before birth, during his lifetime and even after death. Many of Heaney’s poems capture similar experiences of complete identification with nature too. In the poem, “Oracle,” he describes his experience of hiding in the hollow tree trunk of a willow and getting dissolved in it. He used to become the “lobe and larynx of the mossy places” (Wintering 18). This experience is a simulation of the primary stage as he would lose his self in that condition and he could feel the life force of the tree as he writes in the essay “Mossbawn”: “Above your head, the living tree flourished and breathed, you shouldered the slightly vibrant bole, and if you put your forehead to the rough pith you felt the whole lithe and whispering crown of willow moving in the sky above you” (Pre. 18). The world of identity or symbol would call him back as his family members seek him out but in that trance-like state the sound of his name would sound like a cuckoo calling. Once initiated in the world of language, the absolute communion between self and the world becomes almost impossible and in spite of the desire for union, the gap gradually widens. Heaney, in the same essay, recounts his experience of bathing in a moss hole with one of his friend. He responds to “the invitation of watery ground” by “treading the liver-muck mud, unsettling a smoky muck of the bottom and coming out smeared and weedy and darkened” (19). In the poem, “Sensation,” Jibanananda writes about a similar experience of dipping his body in the water bodies of Bengal like the fishermen and “All wrapped around / with pondweed and algae, and smell of fish-scale / my body was” (Naked 31). These experiences of being submerged in water which may be taken as a symbol of womb fluid are almost reminiscent of a desire for perfect identification but Heaney describes this experience as a betrothal. The sexual implication in Heaney’s description is missing from Jibanananda’s. Heaney unites himself with nature and Jibanananda gets merged with nature. The masculine-feminine binary between the boy and nature dissociates the self from nature but in Jibanananda, the self gets lost in nature. Nature naturalizes the body of Jibanananda. Though these episodes are great instances of their proximity with nature, they are only simulation of their existence in the metaphorical womb of nature. A step further in the process of dissociation is when they can only communicate with nature as they did while fishing. Literally, they are out of the water as well and need a tool, i.e. the fishing rod to connect with water. In the second poem “The Pulse,” in the sequence, “Three Drawings,” young Heaney used to get enchanted by the force and thrumming of the river. He could almost feel the rhythm of the river in him or he himself became a part of the river (Seeing 13). Sonnet no. 31 in Bengal the Beautiful depicts a boy’s fishing expedition. In terms of gain, it was a failure but the boy seems less interested in the fish. He imagines what is going on in the mind of the lovers in the world of the fish and the kingfisher as he himself will steal a glimpse of his shy girl who would come there to collect fruits at midday. He could identify himself with the non-human lovers. Boyhood was a time when the earth communicated with him and he understood the language of nature. In the poem, “Rivers,” like a bronze-winged jacana, he has listened to the songs of the river. Alan B. Seely comments: “A child’s imagination, that tenuous link we establish between ourselves and nature, fades as we grow up and away from the natural world. At some point, adults inform us that the sky is just the sky, not something personal for us only” (116). Later in life, such communication could only be imagined. In the poem “Canopy” in Human Chain, the river and the wood are imagined to be communicating with Heaney though ironically, the source of that voice was voice-boxes installed in the branches: “Earth was replaying its tapes” (44). Growing up causes dissociation from nature and at maturity, the possibility of union becomes dim but the desire for that harmonious co-existence persists in the eco-conscious poets who have lost their fantastic imagination of childhood but as poets, they are equipped with a different kind of imagination that enables them to think and feel almost like a child. “In Bengal the Beautiful,” writes Seely, “the grown-up child attempts to reestablish and relieve that innocent contact” (116). The only way to proffer the effect of fulfillment of this desire is to dig the store-house of memory. On the contrary, this memory may be painful as it implies an absence. The melancholy tune can be heard in all of Jibanananda’s works especially in Bengal the Beautiful that presents a long list of all the little things and incidents of his childhood that the poet has lost. He misses the scuffle of the common mynas and the calls of the oriole and the housewife who threshed rice and dried her hair in the sun after bathing in the pond. The lonely, unused threshing beam reminds him of those bygone days that seem to be some stories from a fairytale book (32). He also talks about his lost boyhood love. At first, he is sad to think that the girl can never be found in any corner of the world but at the end, he consoles himself by saying “that still she is with me” (35). He can not have her physical presence as she has become a part of the earth. He can not wring her from the earth but he can feel her presence in everything. This girl is symbolic of the nature of his boyhood days. Though they are gone, they have become an integral part of his self. He can not relive those experiences but he can not separate them from his identity too. They are what he is now.
Along with growing up and physical detachment from nature, other external forces may worsen the condition. Sometimes, one loses his paradise in childhood itself if, for example, economic development in the area destroys the landscape. In his poem “Album (I),” Heaney recounts such a loss. As a child he had visited Grove Hill “Where I’d often stand with them on airy Sundays / Shin-deep in hilltop bluebells” but these happy trips with parents became a memory, something that cannot be physically experienced any longer, when “the oaks were cut” (Human 4). This traumatic loss lurks in his mind and even in his midlife, away from that place, the sound of a heating boiler in the house brings back in his mind the sound of “the timed collapse / Of a sawn down tree”. Heaney expresses a feeling of loss when his childhood world is transformed but the dolefully nostalgic tone of Jibanananda, however, is not found in Heaney. Both the poets are acutely sensitive to the fact that they have lost their idyll but while one grieves for the loss and presents the present in stark contrast to a heavenly past, the other moves on and loves his present too. In fact, Jibanananda was never happy living in Kolkata though initially, as his sister Sucharita Das writes, he chose to settle there but the assurance that he could visit Barishal whenever he wanted to helped him take such a step but the partition of Bengal severed his connection with his childhood Eden for good and whenever he used to be happy in Kolkata he felt as if he was in Barishal (Rudra 85). So, his past remained in him as a symbol of happiness that can be reclaimed only in memory. Similarly, Heaney had to move from Mossbawn in Northern Ireland to Wicklow in the Republic of Ireland. But for him, his new home was not in striking contrast to his notion of home preserved in his memory. Glanmore was rather a replica of Mossbawn, a satisfying substitute for the original emblem of home. No wonder, he fell in love with this place as well. He says on Glanmore:
Maybe it was because of certain physical aspects of the house – cold cement floor in the living room, latches slapping up and down on the doors, a fire in the grate – things that connected back to the Mossbawn house…And there were the compensations of watching leaves sprout and weeds flourish and birds build…So when the cuckoo and the corncrake ‘consorted at twilight’, almost two years after we had landed, I gave in…Glanmore was the first place where my immediate experience got into work. Almost all the poems before that had arisen from memories of older haunts; (O’Discroll 198)
In “Glanmore Sonnets (V),” the boor tree of his childhood becomes a symbol of the mental state of Heaney settled in Glanmore escaping the Troubles and he finds this identity only an extension of his childhood self playing in his tree-house and experiencing connection with fellow creatures. In the poem “Scene Shifts” in the sequence “Glanmore Revisited,” Heaney tries to protect a tree that has become an extension of his identity. If a tree can be seen as a “blood-brother,” no wonder, the poet, now a father, gets really angry at his kids when they “stripped off the bark” of the ash (Seeing 35). His desperation to safeguard the tree stems from his impulse to preserve his own identity as he esteems the tree to be a keepsake of his childhood; in his imagination, it is a transposed tree from Mossbawn.
Childhood memory, therefore, is a vital part of a person’s ecological identity. Memory has the power to take people away from their present self or what they are at present and simultaneously it can take them close to what they were and what they long to be. The union between self and nature may be irrevocably lost but an intense desire for that union enables a person to remain close to his/her environment. Memory preserves that sense of unity and acts as a catalyst to rekindle the desire for it. Though it is almost impossible for a grown up person to experience that lost communion, the desire helps understand the network of relation existing in nature and a consciousness of being a part of the processes always at work in earth is born. This consciousness brings about an earth-centric perspective to view one’s place and role in the ecosystem and thereby guiding his/her behaviour. So, ecological identity may be seen as being developed by “mixing / Memory and desire” (Eliot 43). Similarly, the poetry of Seamus Heaney and Jibanananda Das can also be interpreted as a product of the same; memory is the raw material for their poetry and a desire for the glorious past is their muse as it goads them to re-experience the sense of union and express the experience in words. In short, their poetry is a way of unfolding their ecological identity.
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