Between Two Cultures
The poems of Dom Moraes have maturity, the seal of a personal idiom that comes less from the conquest of form than from a world of experience accepted and understood in solitude:
Today the rare pale sun
Appears, and the mules snort.
Das writes his press report –
We have seen no Chinese.
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No fighting has begun.
The hawks sleep in the trees . . .
My book will tell the truth
But it will not be true,
Till I return to you,
My truth, my miracle.
While I keep my old faith
In you, I shall write well . . .
I quote from the second of two poems ‘From Tibet’; and I would claim that these simple words are in themselves the pure blood of poetry, quite inestimable. It is the place the words come from that gives them their peculiar weight and resonance: not Tibet, no, but a contemplative silence on the far side of human conflict, longed for by many, reached by a few men only in each generation. There are reasons why Dom Moraes should be such a man and writer. Indian by birth, he has survived the wintry invigoration of an English literary training. Hence he is the one Indian poet with complete colloquial mastery of the English tongue. Further, he has not chosen to deny his race, but accepted the deep exile of being an Indian to Englishmen and an Englishman to Indians.
Such solitude is very rare. It places him precisely at the confluence of two cultures. It is possible that the inward injunction – ‘Know yourself ’ – came to him in a harsher form – ‘Know yourself or die.’ Moraes knows himself, and writes of India and England with deep tenderness, knowledge, and a most individual savour of irony. These twenty-five poems are a true portent, like a meteor in a dark sky. Moraes is probably a great poet, and probably also the one person who does not care greatly about it. The finest poems in the book are love poems.
1961 (242)