The Romance of the Ashy Woodswallows
What if Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Eliot, Rushdie and Arundhati Roy had come along with me in the boat to watch and to admire the Ashy Woodswallows? 😊
#intothewildwithrufus #birding
I’ve always admired birds in love. Yes! Ever since my childhood days, we’ve had pets galore at home – that included jumbo – our lovely labrador, our cute cockatiels known for their lovely mimicry skills, a lovely rolly-polly parakeet (aptly named Polly) that sang along with me, 😊African love birds, and what not. Back then as kids, after school hours, we would rush back home as quick as possible, and after our evening cuppa, first thing we did was to huddle up towards our blessed feathered friends, and what’s more… we used to take our turns playing with them and feeding them with their favourite fruits and nuts in the process.
And in all these avian encounters with our feathered friends, one thing I’ve quite admired in the bird kingdom is their capacity for genuine, constant and spotless love for each other.
We literary beings call it the language of love amongst our avian beings!
So it was, that, I chanced upon this lovely pair of Ashy Woodswallows whilst on our boat ride on the Bhadra river.
First, I spotted a lone Ashy Woodswallow, sitting all alone. Then, its mate came and sat quietly near it. No noise. No clinking. No jingling. No clatter. No chatter.
How beautifully has Tagore penned it in his Gitanjali (Song No. 7)
“Their jingling would drown thy whispers”
Tagore here so beautifully makes use of the “jingling of the ornament” as a metaphor for one’s ego, material wealth, and worldly distractions, and hence, he says that, if a person (in love) wears these worldly “jewellery” pieces, (ego) the noise and jingling they make will overpower and drown out the quiet, gentle whispers of pure unalloyed love between them.
As eminent critic Scupin Richard says –
When Love is in, Ego is out!
When Ego is in, Love is out!
Says Tagore -
My song has put off her adornments.
She has no pride of dress and decoration.
Ornaments would mar our union; they would come between thee and me;
their jingling would drown thy whispers.
My poet's vanity dies in shame before thy sight.
Indeed, I could sense a similar unspoken poetry in the way these birds expressed their emotion, nay devotion towards each other unmindful of anyone around them.
These shared rhythms of love gently remind us that, it’s not about falling in love, but rising in love that really matters! 😊
This blissful scene prompted me to make a wild hypothetical guesswork on ‘what if’ great sages of literature down the ages – they are some of my favourites too - had travelled along with me in the boat to River Tern Island, and witnessed this celestial sight and written some spontaneous evocative impressions on the lovely scene?
First, let’s take Shakespeare - 😊
Well, probably Shakespeare would have seen their silent courtship as a towering lighthouse built on a marriage of true minds!
Milton? 😊
Probably Milton would have seen in their union a ‘paradise unrefined’, a blissful, raw Eden on the Euphrates oops Bhadra river.
John Keats?
John Keats would have sensed a ‘Grecian Urn’ish sensibility to his perspective and called it a quiet sonnet… oops a silent sanctuary built entirely of love and love only! 😊
Eliot?
Probably Eliot woulda probably observed them through the lens of time and the chaotic everyday life of the modern world and felt their love as the still point of the turning world. 😊
Salman Rushdie?
Well, Rushdie woulda looked upon them through the lens of migration, as two migrating souls who chose to have that blessed stillness over chaos!
Chinua Achebe?
Well, as we all know, Chinua Achebe was well-known for invoking his tribe’s ancestors quite a lot in his proverbs to explain profound human truths. So I guess he woulda gone on philosophical mode and said,
They simply sat together in the solemn dignity of the ancestors in the obi of a shared silence! 😊
Finally, to Arundhati Roy?
Arundhati woulda probably viewed the Ashy Woodswallows through a lens of profound, heartbreaking fragility, and said,
They both were the ultimate Gods of Small Things, belonging only, and entirely, to each other!
I guess the legendary Tagore was right to a tee in his observations on stripping away the noisy jingling of the modern world! (which Pico Iyer would call, “the clangor of the world”).
And the moment one strip out the noise, what remains is the pure unalloyed eloquent and ecstatic silence of love!
PS: You may want to read more on Pico Iyer’s essay on ‘The Eloquent Sounds of Silence’ on our past post from 12 years ago, HERE, on our blog.
No comments:
Post a Comment