Contemporary Literary Review India | eISSN 2394-6075 | Vol 2 No 1: CLRI February 2015

Jayendrina Singha Ray

Mariners Lost in their Albatrosses

How a Ship having passed the Line was driven by storms to the cold Country towards the South Pole; and how from thence she made her course to the tropical Latitude of the Great Pacific Ocean.

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

It was an attempt at being Woolf,

At being her style,

At being Cixous —

Free flowing, water-like

When impulse unchecked flew ahead

With the Martian spirit

Unstopped, unchecked, Free.

He held her with those glittering eyes,

There was a ‘me’, said he

‘Lost ’.She could not choose

But sat mesmerized on her seat

And in her impulse

promised him her patience —

A land of rivers, sunshine and mirth.

And then the storm blast came.

Within, in anticipation of without

Eating one another and eaten —

Flying and falling and flying again.

They watched the birds in their free flight

There was water and there was ice

And Fire lay in between.

Islands joined by a creek,

Ships on a stagnant sea,

Their Albatross was their need —

Then they became it — The Albatross

Stuck between the sky and ocean

It was one that sought release

And in circles it flew.

‘Fly, bird, fly,

Until you reach the answer’

The islands broke

Floating past —

Sadder and wiser.

Ancient Mariners

Joined to their Albatrosses.

(Inspired by The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Lord Alfred Tennyson)

Jayendrina Singha Ray is a student of English Literature, pursuing a research degree. Her poems have been published in some journals, including Contemporary Literary Review India. She intends to be a writer/illustrator in future.

'Mariners Lost in Albatrosses' is inspired by Alfred Tennyson's poem 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'. A lot of the lines have direct parallels with his poem. It is about two people (from separate castes) in love, who like islands drift apart due to social constraints. This is a poem about crossing boundaries set by social norms (and hence the release that the theorist Helene Cixous talks about, and the free-flowing stream of consciousness method followed by Virginia Woolf). The act of crossing boundaries however, does not result in a fulfillment of their love. Being social beings, they have to drift apart with the guilt of transgression. Like Tennyson's mariner they are left to wallow in the guilt of transgression and the pangs of separation.

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