An Echo of Romanticism in Malaysian Poetry
As a matter of fact, there is not a single Malaysian poet can be certainly qualified as an avid disciple of Romanticism. However, some of them do write and celebrate nature in their works, namely, Ee Tiang Hong and Muhammad Haji Salleh. Living in a country blessed with green land and beautiful landscape like Malaysia without doubt inspires the poets to write about nature. This is because their poems are the result of their experience and inimitable feelings towards nature. Besides, it is clear, that sometimes, it is better to describe something indirectly through nature, than through the apparent. The layers of communication usually increases with its subtleness.Hence, it can be said that there is an echo of the idea of Romanticism in their poems, in particular, about nature.
Ø Ee Tiang Hong was born in Malacca (Malaysia) in 1933 of Chinese descent and died in1990 in Guildford, Western Australia He graduated from the University of Malaya in 1956 and published his first book of poetry in 1960.
Ø In “To a Shrub”, the poem can seen as having an echo of Romanticism because similar to Romanticism poets such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ee Tiang Hong celebrates the bougainvillaea because of its beauty and endurance to survive in a hot weather country. He also shows his admiration of the generous splendour of nature (the bougainvillaea) in the poems.
To A Shrub
Bougainvillaea,
I admire the wild poise and the grace
With which you droop your slender arms
Like a spray of cool fireworks in mid-air;
Glorious perennial
With what delicacy your leaves,
Cluster, and conceal fierce thorns
Disconcerting hungry goats.
What happy combination
Of the hardy and beautiful
Impresses eye and mind
Through drought and monsoon.
Gay shrub,
I never tire of your tireless beauty,
Your beautiful endurance,
Your crepelike blossoms softer than silk,
Your odourless indifference.
As in a wild dream
You flaunt in the heat of sun and sand
Myriads of crimson lips,
While I gaze at your glory
With a desire unrequited
In this sweltering shade.
Ø Muhammad Haji Salleh’s poem “Rain” and “Seeds” present the dependence of man on nature for survival.
Ø Malaysia’s best-known bilingual poet, Muhammad Haji Salleh was born on 26 March 1942, in a village called Temerlok, Trong, in British Malaya. Soon after his birth he moved to Sungai Acheh, Penang, where he began schooling in Sungai Acheh School in 1949.
Ø Muhammad Haji Salleh began writing when he was a student in the Malayan Teachers College in Wolverhampton. His fluency in both English and Malay enables him to write simultaneously in both languages. He has published several collections of poems. His only collection of poems written originally in English is ‘Time and its People’, which is published in 1978.
Ø Muhammad Haji Salleh’s poem “Rain” and “Seeds” present the dependence of man on nature for survival. Apart from that, these poems highlight the importance of nature to human beings, thus, it indicate the power of nature as source of living. There for these poems can be an echo of Romanticism.
Rain
suddenly they came, the mid-year padi rains,
falling slanted among the dried lalang
and into the branch-drains of the brown canals;
the big regular drops falling at their own rhythm
became the overwhelming sound of an insistent tempo.
it woke up the child in the sarong cradle
and the old resting father.
water has come. he looked out into the sheet of rain
descending along the atap eaves.
the rivulets carried the flattened straw
and the dust of the drought,
in their dark grey flowing threads
slithering to the depressions in the ground.
thin dry ducks quacked
splashed by the strange rain
and chickens ran from under the trees.
it was the beginning of an answer,
pak usin’s dark skinned muscles quivered.
rain slapped the leaves and bent the young coconuts,
shook the drought of its death-dust
and swept the remains of harvest rubbish.
for this season they collected hopes again,
carried them under cover from the heat to this day,
the rain fell and wetted their praying throats.
Seeds
these seeds in the hope-bowl of my palms
i wet with the new water of the new season.
in my grip i feel their skins burst and slap my hands,
their yellow shoots creeping into my blood stream.
now as I let them drop singly into the warm earth
they are already plants in me,
growing and feeding on my blood and my sweat-salt.
and as i patiently wait for them to emerge
from the night of the earth-womb,
i feel the youth of my blood return to my limbs
and i re-live this seasonal love affair:
the evenings and the mornings quench me,
and i grow with them,
inevitably aging, bearing fruit
and jumping back into life,
the repeat the life-cycle of my blood.
2 comments:
were these poem written in english originally?
yes... :-)