Masquerade of Euphoria: Angst and Anomie – Diminuendo and Crescendo

Masquerade of Euphoria: Angst and Anomie – Diminuendo and Crescendo

Our very own Thomas Chatterton, Bhanusingha, i.e., Rabindranath Tagore's adolescence-16 year’s avatar, also created such masterpieces at that tender age, emulating Vaishnavite poets like Vidyapati and Chandidasa, whose leit motif was the cult of worshipping the amour of Radha and Krishna. He has left a spell at that age, which seems well-nigh impossible...and, that too was written in apparently Maithili language.In his autobiographical tome, Jibansmriti (Memoirs of my life), Rabindranath has made an elaborate discourse on this magical poetic experience. . ., that, in one rain soaked afternoon, with clouds louring from the sky he was spellbound and having a slate and a chalk scribbled 'Gahano kusumo Kunjamaajhey'...this opened up the fountainhead of the heavenly poet in him and he wrote a voluminous series of poems on this genre. Here we find a weird similarity of Rabindranath with the young poet, who looked like an angel, Thomas Chatterton...who has to undergo a pitiless onslaught, most savage, by the contemporary critics and so called connoisseurs. Thomas Chatterton (20 November 1752 – 24 August 1770) was indicted of pseudo-medieval poetry, christened Rowley Poems, which was brainchild, the romance of Thomas Rowley, an make-believe cleric of the 15th century, and adopted for himself the pseudonym Thomas Rowley for poetry. According to psychoanalyst Louise J. Kaplan, his being fatherless played the pivotal role in his imposturous creation of Rowley, “to reconstitute the lost father in fantasy From his poetic prose , Chatterton’s remonstration against his unaccomplished thirst for eminence, for which he has taken an erroneous detour,  he has expressed with a rare tour de force "Last Will and Testament".  A line was gleaned from this pamphlet and was inscribed as his epitaph, "To the memory of Thomas Chatterton. “Reader! judge not. If thou art a Christian, believe that he shall be judged by a Superior Power. To that Power only is he now answerable."...after his most untimely death at a very tender age, them a successive Romantics -chiefly, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats and much later Dante G. Rosseti were enraged and they scribbled lines with his fond remembrance I 'ld be signing off with a couple of lines by Percy Shelley, that was written by a poet, whose ideals regarding Romanticism was unparalleled:

 "The inheritors of unfulfilled renown
Rose from their thrones, built beyond mortal thought,
Far in the unapparent. Chatterton
Rose pale, his solemn agony had not
Yet faded from him;"- Adonais/ Percy Shelley.

 However, it is much relieving that Tagore was not pilloried and crucified, for his unique venture that would be cherished generations after generations...and was spared off the spiteful castigation by the critics and the dilettantes of his time. After such a slapdash write up, let me sign off with a poem befitting of the topic without which my gibberish looks like a crumbling façade.

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me, 
Black as the Pit from pole to pole, 
I thank whatever gods may be 
For my unconquerable soul. 

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

                                              -William Ernest Henley