An analysis of kamala Das’s poetry The Looking Glass

The Looking Glass

-Kamala Das 

A review by

JS N.

(31/01/2019) 

The Looking Glass is a poem from Kamala Das’s collections of poem entitled “The Descendants”. It is her second volume of poetry which deals with the Nihilism or Pessimism: “We are not going to be ever redeemed or made new ”. The Looking Glass is also included under the term nihilism. For she produced the poem in a sarcastic tone, mocking the cruelty of man towards his counterpart . The Looking Glass is a short lyrical poem of twenty four lines. It is spontaneously produced, that it contains no break in lines and there is no specified rhyme scheme or rhythm in these linked lines. However she introduced some simile and metaphor to draw the attention of her readers especially females .
                         On getting into the title of the poem, “The Looking Glass” literally means “mirror”. But an analytical view of the title would recognize the word “glass” in itself means “mirror”, coming from its root meaning “to shine”. It can also serve as “the opposite of what is normal or expected”, after Lewis Carrol’s book “Through the looking glass”. In reality, of course Kamala Das’s The Looking Glass poem is a confusing looking glass philosophy.
                           The poetess opens her poem by saying: “Getting a man to love you is easy”. Then she turns her mind and answers her readers that: “getting A man to love is easy”. The poem is produced like a conversation in the beginning but the listener is not mentioned or present in the poem. The ‘you’ in the given line is universal for all her female readers. In the first line ‘you’ is stressed and in the 17th line the stress falls on ‘love’. The stress denotes the importance of ‘you’, which is a woman who universally presents every woman. For she says that, making a man to love her is easy, which could be done by giving the bodily pleasure and by admitting him to be the strongest and woman be ‘Softer, younger and lovelier’.
                      “So that he sees himself the stronger one
                        And believes it so”
Kamala Das had sarcastically toned these lines. The words ‘sees’ and ‘believes’ reveals the sarcasm in her tone. It fits under a proverb “All that glitters is not gold”. The male sex sees themselves to be superior and believes it so, which is in real a mere reflection of their physic.
                             From the 17th line, the tone of the speaker shifts from sarcasm to frustration. In this point she simply embraces the role of a very honest woman and transcends the role of a poetess. She says “I’m not influenced by any poet”. In the words of Bruce King, Kamala Das’s “previously forbidden or ignored emotions could be expressed in ways which reflect the true voice of feelings”. That we through her poem could hear her mind turmoil.
                              Kamala Das bewares her readers about “A living without life”. The imagery which depicts the aftermath of a life without our counterpart, where we will be in a state of nostalgia with our body .
                              The poetess intends to leave us a lasting impression through her last two lines, with a simile. For she says: “Body which once under his touch had gleamed                                                               Like a burnished brass, now drab and destitute”. Her comparison is farfetched that the word ‘burnished brass’  literally means –“a European moth that has green to gold wing patches with a metallic lustre”, it also means “to make a shiny or lustrous thing especially by rubbing”. The context gives paradoxical meaning to the words. And the following metaphor of ‘drab’ and ‘destitute’ states that she who had been thought as ‘burnished brass’ is now “lacking brightness into a dull light brown colour” –drab, and was “deprived of subsistences” and is now destitute.
                              Even though Kamala Das had started her under a positive tone of “Getting a man to love you is easy”, the reality in life and her life’s experience had compelled her to navigate into negative tone as: “Like burnished brass, now drab and destitute”. That Anisur Rahman, aptly comments that her poetry “mirrors her life in all its nakedness, a free form, shaking all the established norms of life and art”.