An African sunset

He was there, I swear, the last minute
Abrupt gone he was. Ate him who?
Thought some demon took him to pollute
And vanish\’d into thin air. Phew!
I search\’d in vain all night so darkest
Ha! He the crook who took to forest
Or the sea yonder- shall look out
Left on own accord- I did doubt
But why?- arose a question million
To give life and light to his love
So she shone bright on sky above
Behind his lady, he rode pillion
Sans thee, my dreams fail to take sail
Come back, dearest, to lift my veil.

Or was there motive any other?
Our plunder of his daughter- did
He change his nature in a pother?
Wild anger- he can\’t quite get rid
Himself hid in that icy water
Lest slaughter all by being hotter
O thy mercy! We bow to thee!
Man vs Man- sundry on a spree
Was he asham\’d?- Take time to ponder
Red in face, ran away so fast
Where shall I search in world so vast?
My weary mind- it fails to wander
Come out, burn zealotry and its trail
The ember of love- shan\’t let it fail.

P.S: This Sonnet follows the structure created by Aleksandr Pushkin, considered by many as the Father of Russian literature. Like all sonnets, it has 14 lines in each stanza. It follows iambic tetrameter with the rhyme scheme aBaBccDDeFFeGG, where the lowercase letters represent feminine rhymes (stressed on the penultimate syllable or having 9 syllables) and the uppercase representing masculine rhymes (stressed on the ultimate syllable or 8 syllables). It has a total of seven rhymes, rather than the four or five rhymes of the Petrarchan sonnet but same as that of Shakespearean sonnet yet with a different rhyming scheme.
In this sonnet, the author dramatically shifts the context in the second stanza. In fact, both stanzas can stand alone since both imagine the same natural phenomena, the sunset, from vastly different perspectives. But to maintain a modicum of continuity, the author maintains a same rhyme (sail, veil, trail, fail) in the last 2 lines of both the stanzas.

P.S 2: Meaning and explanation

Yonder- at some distance, pother- mental turmoil, lest- to avoid the risk of, thy- your, thee- you, sundry- of various kinds, spree- sustained period of unrestrained activity of a particular kind, zealotry- the fanatical and uncompromising pursuit of religious, political, or other ideals.
The author talks about the abrupt sunset in the African sky (well, it\’s abrupt in all equatorial and tropical areas) and goes on to wonder the reasons for its suddenness. He wonders whether any demon ate him alive. The author searches for the Sun the whole night and begins to think whether it was the night who swallowed him in the dark forests or beyond the seas. But the more he thinks, he starts to have doubt about the involvement of any outsider. He surmises that Sun might have left on his own accord so that his lady love, the Moon can shine bright. The sun may be glad to watch the Balmer rays of the Moon from behind. But the author misses the warmer chimes which help his dreams to come true and therefore implores the Sun to come back and lift the veil of ignorance, which prevents us all from seeing the truth that is so obvious.

The second stanza is very different from the first one in the sense that it takes a more serious note of the disappearance of Sun. He might have gone coz he can\’t digest the plunder of his daughter (Nature) by humans. If he stayed a bit longer, he would have torched the humans to vent his anger. So the author thanks the Sun for the mercy he bestowed on us. But he continues his guessing game about the real reason for Sun\’s vanishing act and concludes that he might be ashamed of seeing humans fighting over trivial matters like religion which was invented by them. The author bemoans that it won\’t be possible for his weary mind (it became weary without seeing its love, the Sun) to search the Sun in the vast Universe. So the only thing left for him is to request the Sun to come back on his own and burn all the fanaticism so as to keep humanity alive (\’burn something to keep the embers alive\’ – deliberate use of contradictions).

Author:- Ravi R. Chokkalingam