LANGUAGE IN INDIA

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Volume 23:1 January 2023
ISSN 1930-2940

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A Critical Study of John Ashbery's Poem Syringa

S. Haripriya Devi Bharadwaj, M.A., M.Phil. and
Dr. Suneetha Yedla, M.A. (Eng.), M.A.(ELT), M.Phil., Ph.D.



John Ashbery (1927-2017)
Courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ashbery

Abstract

John Ashbery is the most distinguished member of the New York School of Poets. His avant-garde and highly innovative poetry make him one of the most unique poetic voices of America. Houseboat Days is a significant volume of poems from the oeuvre of Ashbery. It was published in the year 1977. Syringa is a remarkable poem from this volume. This poem which is in the form of an elegy narrates a poet’s relation to the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and how he studies it in relation to his personal loss. This poem can be studied as a revaluation of an ancient myth in relation to present times. Essentially the poem is a blend of modernist and traditional elements of English poetry. Although art is emblematized as an abstraction by the poet in this poem, at the same time the ability of art to transcend mutability is affirmed by the poet towards the end of the poem. The strophic structure bestows on the poem a continuity of thought. This poem also expresses the Romantic yearning of a modern poet for transcendence amidst negation and fragmentation. The critical method of close reading has been employed for the explication of this poem and for arriving at contextual insights.

Keywords: Avant-garde, myth, elegy, revaluation, continuity, transcendence.

Introduction

Syringa is an important poem from the volume Houseboat Days. Syringa is an elegy on the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus, a musician who goes to the nether world to bring back his dead wife Eurydice. The story of Orpheus and Eurydice is told by Ovid in his celebrated work Metamorphoses. The title Syringa probably refers to a variety of flowering shrubs belonging to the genus saxifrage which grow besides hard rocks at times and whose roots penetrate through the hard rocks and breaks them open. The flowers arc usually yellow in colour.

Essentially the poem is a series of contemplations on the Orpheus legend. The elaborate structure of a conventional elegy is successfully employed by Ashbery in this poem, even as the poem remains impersonal to a large extent. The speaker of the elegy grieves over a loss that remains undisclosed till the conclusion, he revaluates the Orpheus myth and without alluding to his personal loss directly establishes a correspondence between his sorrow and that of Orpheus. In the first strophe the myth is recounted.


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S. Haripriya Devi Bharadwaj, M.A., M.Phil.
Research Scholar, Acharya Nagarjuna University
bhavanidevi385@gmail.com
Mobile No.: 7660892978

Dr. Suneetha Yedla, M.A. (Eng.), M.A.(ELT), M.Phil., Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Acharya Nagarjuna University College of Engineering & Technology
Mobile No.: 9959141038
suneethakodali.anu@gmail.com

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