As the Impressionist Festival starts in Normandy this summer, one cannot help but remember the glorious birthplace of romanticism in paintings from Delacroix to Monet. Its the nature that is depicted with love- the frills, the caprices, the fleeting moods and the light.  Here I have tried to do meditation on this painting done by Claude Monet in 1885 titled Still-Life with Anemones. The objective behind my work was to enter into the consciousness of this painting and to reveal as I have felt the evolution of its consciousness with respect to time. I call this Consciousness-Analogue and this is not poetry but a form, a rhythm that comes directly from this painting.

Still-Life with Anemones and The Chariot of a New Race

Still life glances at the bare thoughts

A naked sign floats in the stream of ignorance and death

Beauty resides imprisoned in a shell

The glory of the sunbeam hasn’t touched her hairs

A tragic world lives in its past, crumbles the present

The future is hidden from the mortal eyes

An emblem chariot is deserted in the fields

The rose is plucked by the dire hands of a monstrous time

Too long in the sands under the desert sky

There’s the riddle that perplexed man and his friends

His kingdom laid waste in a gleam of illusions

There Europe lay battered in the centre of its birth

A ravished Leda, “a broken Coriolanus”, a murder in the Capitol

All these have swept the tide of our times,

The aeon-rings of this delivered birth

From the empty-handed void to the colossal death

Nothing changed the course of this ancient proceed

Nothing altered this submission to an unchanged destiny

But a grace can act in our dreams, move and surcharge and grow

Like the beautiful anemones in the casket of light

This great supramental force taking its birth

To blow the winds away from a cold heartless time

The darkness shall end with the eternity of dawn

And the slumbering fields draw the new chariot of a race.

– Joy Roy Choudhury

Kindly note the reference,  “a broken Coriolanus” from T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland v. What the Thunder Said (“Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus”)

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