Thomas Ansell's Sonnets: No Dhaka evensong
To somebody interested in the history of English writing in Bangladesh, as I am, it was gratifying to get Thomas Ansell's two volumes of poems, The Many-Coloured Mantle: Sonnets, and A String of Pearls. They were published from Writers Workshop in Calcutta in 1975 and 1977 respectively. The books came courtesy of Rubana, who's been digging through the WW inventory backlogs in Kolkata. Though Professor P. Lal's publishing concern has consistently published all sorts of South Asian English-language works over the past decades, only three writers from Bangladesh -- all of them poets, incidentally - have published from there. They are Feroz Ahmed-ud-din and Thomas Ansell during the '70s, and Khawaja Moinul Hasan far more recently. It seems that Thomas Ansell, an Englishman, came to then-Dacca sometime in the late '50s-early '60s and worked for The Pakistan Observer. After independence he continued to work at The Bangladesh Observer. He also seems to have published other poetry volumes from Dhaka. The 1977 volume, A String of Pearls, is divided into 15 sections, each section consisting of three or four ghazal-like quatrains. An author's disclaimer somewhat disingenuously avers that while "a poem of this kind is bound to invite comparison with the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam...any similarity is purely coincidental." It intrigued me that somebody would live and work in Dhaka (both before and after 1971) and yet attempt to write in a traditional English poetic form. What was Thomas Ansell doing writing sonnets in Dhaka? Evidently he had a fondness for fixed English verse forms. Even in A String of Pearls he chose not to write couplets, which would have been the logical choice for somebody wanting to reproduce a ghazal effect in English. Instead he wrote quatrains (4-line stanza), the most popular of English strophic forms: Come, Saqi, brim the bowl again
There's no time left for further thought;
The world surrounding us is nought,
And we shall question it in vain. That he was an Englishman no doubt helps explain it, but still, I thought, he was a transplanted Englishman, one who worked and wrote in the tropics, and I wondered whether his sonnets would reflect Dhaka's shimmer and haze, evoke bare, ruined minarets? If they did, he would be more than a fascinating footnote in the tale of English writing from a part of the subcontinent once considered a backwater of the Raj. The sonnet is a 14-line poem written in iambic pentameter, and traditionally centering on the theme of love. At first glance Ansell seemed to be holding up well. Here is the first sonnet in the book, out of a total of 58: Lovers have never had a need of sums,
Poor is their knowledge of arithmetic,
For one plus one by their additions comes
To one, and who shall count it as a trick?
Their algebra of love amounts of this:
Two hearts beating as one until they die,
With four lips joined together in one kiss –
I equal you so you must equal I.
The world is wise and by comparison
A lover must be coupled with a fool,
For one plus one is two as any one
Surely must know, whoever went to school:
But by another method lovers reach
Their answers than by what pure numbers teach. Not too bad. Critics so inclined may scoff at it as Dead White Male stuff, but it does talk wittily -- playing off the different meanings of "sums" and "coupled" and combinations of "four" and "two" and "one" - about love's logic pitted against classroom rationality, and argues about which should be considered the superior math. The lines too scan reasonably well in terms of the desired meter. But then, as I went farther into the volume, the quality of the sonnets deteriorated markedly, awash as they were with archaic words and schoolboy cliches of the "mists of time" variety: Your beauty is a battlement of spears,
An army with bright banners is your face;
Your glances lure me to an endless chase
Leaping across the mountains and the meres... There are also problems of structure. Though notable variations exist, the sonnet form comes in two flavours: the Italian-Petrarchan sonnet, and English-Shakespearean sonnet. Their structures differ radically. The Petrarchan sonnet's fourteen lines are organized into two units known as an octave (meaning the first eight lines, or more accurately two quatrains), and a sestet (the remaining six lines). In the English sonnet the first twelve lines (three quatrains) form the first part, and the last two lines - a couplet - the second part. Sonnets are arguments, and therefore there is a 'turn' in them, a crucial point where the poem undergoes an emotional or logical shift. In the Petrarchan it is usually at the beginning of the sestet. To put it crudely, you say 'this' in the octave, and in the sestet you then argue for 'that' based on the above 'this.' In the English sonnet the 'turn' usually occurs at the beginning of the couplet, at the thirteenth line. But, even though it can plainly be seen that Ansell attempted Petrarchan sonnets with its octave/sestet structure, quite a few of his sonnets lack this quality, deaf to the convention of first setting forth a complication, and then the resolution. They read like 14-line poems divided in a top-heavy manner. The sonnet, in either form, is difficult to write because the attempt to develop the argument begun in the first quatrain in the succeeding lines/quatrains very often lapse into tepid repetition. Instead of genuine thematic extension, a gaining of true density, we often get the same thing tricked out in different words. This difficulty is compounded in the Petrarchan sonnet due to its structure, where the poem's logical and rhetorical movement is intimately bound up with its rhyme scheme. In the Petrarchan sonnet the octave's rhyme scheme is abba abba, where the end-rhymes of the first and fourth, then fifth and eighth lines are 'enveloping' rhymes (they envelope the bb rhyming sentences inside). This means that sound correspondences of the lines must have logical, rhetorical and sense correspondences, even though such lines are separated from each other by intervening lines. As I said before, it is hell to write, especially when dealing with a language like English, which is poor in rhymes. What Ansell did was opt for the easier Shakespearean sonnet rhyme scheme: abab, cdcd, efef, gg. But when you impose the very different rhyme scheme of the English sonnet on the Petrarchan one, the octave instead of gathering force as it moves forward dissipates towards looseness and 'patter' that extends itself into the sestet. This structural disturbance leads to disturbances of logic and rhetoric - with, for example, the 'turn' coming not at the beginning of the sestet, but murkily somewhere lower down. It can also mean stiff blocks of end-stopped lines, which is antithetical to the sonnet's flowing aim of representing a closely circumscribed emotional moment. All of these are egregiously on display as one proceeds with Ansell's sonnets. Why he simply didn't attempt to write English sonnets is a mystery that he took to the grave with him. But the above 'structural' -- the larger question of form - failure could have been discounted for Bengali readers had there been Dhaka, or Bengali, daily life present in the poems. It is what John Crowe Ransom termed as 'local'- the question of texture, of what is unique to a given poem. In Ansell's sonnets we find Judas and Brutus, but no Krishna and Radha. We do get the East, but embarrassingly Orientalized: "the serpent of the Nile," and "golden Samarkand." Thomas Ansell could have been writing in Armenia, or in Newfoundland, for all the local colour his sonnets exhibit. No tropical parrot, or Dhaka evensong, accents his syllables here. On both counts -- in terms of technique or texture -- Thomas Ansell's sonnets fail. At least on the basis of this volume one has to conclude that he was some remnant of the Raj who happened to come by Dacca/Dhaka. His choices of form and meter point to somebody who remained very much an Englishman at heart. His place in the history of Bangladesh English writing may not amount to anything more than an ornamental footnote. Khademul Islam is literary editor, The Daily Star.
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