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PROLEGOMENA TO MARGO SKINNER               Dr.Sanjiva Dev

of diverse contents and forms full of fine feelings. She was a subtle romantic poet like Shelley and Keats. Her poetic impressions are beyond our perception because the impressions are subjective and abstract while the expressions are objective and concrete.

She was an admirer and adorer of Nature’s charm and calm and her poetic expressions remind of Shelley’s subtle poetic sentence “There where feeling, music and moonlight are one”.

Skinner lived on the earth in her physical body but used to fly in the sky in her psychical body. She was, for a major part of her time, occupied by the transcendental atmosphere in the infinite azure sky above. In her poem “The silent Fountain” she sings: “Silent now the singing stone The Listener has gone The black bird, spotted bird, with blood Fly away; bathe your marked breast, wings in the distant river,
Wither pomegranate, Shrink Papaya, Titily, see your golden dress in another mirror Rose-Tree scatter soft white petals.There is no waiter to keep you green.Striped Squirrel, whom Rama stroked, Skittening Lizard, quick - winged sparrow.Travel, you have lost your garden
The Listener has gone. Silent now the singing stone The gravestone of the garden”. In the above poem, the theme is new, the technique is charming and the aesthetic appeal is sensitive.

English Poetry is divided into three: regular verse, blank verse and free verse (vers libre). Regular verse is that in which both rhyme and metre are used: blank verse is that in

which mere metre, devoid of rhyme, is used: free verse does not contain both, meter and rhyme.

But now modern poetry in all languages of the globe is addicted to free verse whose father was the American poet Walt Whitman in the last century; whose publication of free verse “Leaves of Grass” has been very famous. Skinner was familiar with all these poetic forms. Her poetic content used to appear in amplification in the simplification of the construction of form. It seemed she was born in poetry. Lived in poetry and died in poetry!

Her poems are paintings in words, or visual poems: these poems are not written in the medium of poems. In the following short poem only feelings appear in the; place of words: “Come out, come out of your narrow house Come into the starlit streets and dance. While rockets spangle the sky with gold. And music pours forth from every star to the double pulsing of our hearts”. The creators of such pure aesthetic poems are not poets but poems themselves. Margo Skinner was not a poet but a poem itself - a living poem! It was already stated that she did produce also Haiku poems. Haiku originally was born in Japan. A Haiku poem in the Japanese language contains seventeen syllables in three lines - the first line contains five syllables, the second line seven and the third line five. These mini-poems are pure word-pictures delineating fleeting incidents especially ephemeral natural phenomena.
In the English versions of these Haiku poems the poet transcends the Japanese principles of prosody. In the following Haiku in English, Skinner did the same.

Haikus:
“Rain falls on the sea,
Nourishing coral gardens,
In subterranean grottoes”
“A Brilliant paper fan flouts westward
who has left it to the tide!”
“I looked for the star
The sky was black
No headlights on the dark highway”.
Such a luminous human star (Skinner) did vanish forever from our territorial globe into the more luminous stellar sphere. She lived not for the sake of her own living but for the sake of the living of others too. Living is a loftily delightful act, no doubt. But living in sorrow and suffering is worse and more miserable than dying.

Skinner used to be keenly diligent in keeping herself as well as other fellow - beings ever delightful. She was well aware, man could not happily live without food and at the same time she was not unaware that man could not do so with food alone. In order to lead a happy life man should have both food and culture - food for the survival of the body and culture for the radiance of the mind. That was why hunger and ignorance ought to simultaneously be eradicated mercilessly for mercy’s sake!

Marge Skinner lived for the sake of realization of that lofty effulgent ideal.

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