Review of K.Sachidhanandhan’s poem ‘A man with a door’

 

Review of K.Sachidhanandhan’s poem ‘A man with a door’

I request readers to read the poem first from the link above and then only my review. Thanks. 

A door is a versatile metaphor. It can protect you, imprison you or inform others whether you are available or not. When someone caged looks for freedom it is a whole new door. Freedom is not an object and nor the door to freedom. The poem is about the elusive door to freedom for someone with a quest. The door doesn’t fit to any house. That means a quest is subjective. Something personal. Something that happens of its own and is with the subject but independent of him. The freedom from the conditioning of mind by culture, family and society is never a project. It’s a transformation and an endless struggle to pursue your lonely path in spite of being one among ‘the maddening crowd’. Is a quest in anyway exceptional to the other pursuits of an individual? He messes up some of his endeavors and achieves a few. There is every chance the quest might end up incomplete and meet a dead end too. The quest is like the breath within which is so much with one but its support and company is not eternal. Probably the quest is a similar companion. The following lines highlight this:

And the door, its dream
rising above the earth,
longs to be the golden door of heaven,
imagines clouds, rainbows,
demons, fairies and saints
passing through it.

But it is the owner of hell
who awaits the door.
Now it just yearns
to be a tree, full of foliage
swaying in the breeze,
just to provide some shade
to its homeless hauler.

A man walks with a door
along the city street;
a star walks with him.

 

Why should the poet find the quest is independent of the seeker? May be it is abstract. But doesn’t a quest go always with the seeker as a part of him? Whilst they travel together he is clueless about the ultimate destination, and is he not well aware he has no hold over the quest? The quest is not one more stone turned but it is the closest encounter with truth. The beginning of a genuine quest is the journey to understand the truth and every step closer to the destination brings the feel of the truth and some glimpses of its various dimensions and its magnitude. The poem’s strength is the metaphor and the magical realism. The poet has aptly used these to make the reader get something too abstract.