The most recurrent theme in Kamala Das’s poetry, as pointed out in the foregoing pages is love, rather the failure of love or the absence of love in a woman who strives for it in a loveless male world, for she can realize her being only through love. Like most of her poems on love and sex, this poem is characterised by an emotional intensity arising from a deep sense of betrayal, from the feeling that she has been damned to a life of imprisonment in a male-dominated world. Kamala Das has been accused of indifference to structure and syntactical order but in this poem one finds a conciseness and tightness of structure achieved by a network of concrete images which account for the success of the poem and also make the experience recorded in the poem transcend the personal level and become one with which every reader can empathies.
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11.1-5: The speaker’s husband, far from meeting her need for self- fulfilment through love, has crippled the “swallow” which has been accustomed to a life of freedom.
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11.5- 7: What the speaker needed was not sexual gratification through man but self-realization through love. But alas! She has met only with disappointment.
11.7- 11: Her experience with her husband has been only one of lust.
11.12- 15: The speaker feels that her married life was reduced to a mere surrender to the male ego. The wife is known only by her functions, well-defined and stipulated. The male ego domineering is presented here in a compact image and succeeds in giving the feeling that the very air reeks of it. Kamala Das has often been compared to well-known confessional poets of the West, like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton and this poem reminding us as it does of Plath’s ‘The Applicant”, almost out-Sextons Sexton in conveying the strong feeling that the egocentric and egotistical husband has made the marriage union one of serfdom and meek submission to exercises of lust.
11.19-22: Note the description of the suffocating atmosphere of the room in which she has been imprisoned. The husband’s monstrous ego kills all her reason and deprives her of her will and reason.
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11.23-25: The stifling, crippling atmosphere of her husband’s house with its male-dominated setting has made her lose her zest for life. Her life has now become an old playhouse where, with all its lights put out, the zest for life has gone.
11.27-30: For, love is Narcissus… to erase the water. Love is perhaps no more than a way of learning about one’s self and its reward an insight not into another’s being but really into one’s own. Narcissus was the legendary youth who fell in love with his own image reflected in a fountain thinking it to be the nymph of the place. His fruitless attempts to approach this beautiful object drove him to despair and death.
