Lockdown

Pictorial Journey of a Pandemic poem ' Lockdown' :-

Hello Readers! This blog is a response to the Sunday reading Activity on a poem lockdown by poet Laureate Simon Armitage assigned by Dilip Barad sir, Department of English, MKBU. In this blog I am going to present  my experiences of Lockdown.

Simon Armitage:-

Simon Armitage, in full Simon Robert Armitage, British Poet, Playwright and Novelist whose poetry is attuned to Modern life and vernacular language and has been regarded as both accessible and revelatory. His works were widely Anthologized and have been broadly popular. In 2019 Armitage became poet laureate of Great Britain.  His Notable works are as below.

• Kid
• Book of Matches
• The Dead sea poems
• Cloud Cuckooland
• Tyrannosaurus Rex verses the Corduroy kid

About poem:-

Lockdown:-

The poem 'Lockdown' is written by Simon Armitage. It was first published in the Gaurdian on 21 March, 2022. It is a response to the coronavirus pandemic, and references the Derbyshire "Plague Village" of Eyam, which self - isolated in 1650 to limit the spread of the Great plague of London, and the Sanskrit poem 'Meghaduta' by Kalidas, in which a cloud carries a message from an exile to his distant wife. 

The poem is about two dreams, and the poem can be divided into two parts. 

• The great Plague of London
• Travel to the time of Kalidas's Meghaduta - the cloud messenger.

In the beginning of the poem, the poet described a hallucinating dream sequence of 1665-66 plague stricken village Eyam. Here he depicts a street in London. The line - Then couldn't un-see the Boundary stone, In this part, there is a presentation of the  how people used to manage things. The boundary was set by a stone and people had to put coins in hole of stone. During Pandemic time we were at our home, not going outside. Each and every village or city had made boundries. We were sanitising our hands so we could prevent COVID to spreading.  The second portion is about an exotic dream wherein the dreamer travels back in time to Kalidas's Meghaduta - the cloud messenger. The reference is from an Indian Sanskrit literature. It describes how a yaksha who had been banished by his master to a remote region for a year, to a remote region for a year, asked a cloud to take a message of love to his wife.

Q. 1 What is your first reaction to this poem? Are you able to connect your lockdown experience with this poem?

Yes, I am able to connect my experience with Simon Armitage's poem 'Lockdown'. I feel very happy in lockdown because I spent time with my family. And I improve my creativity. But the condition of the outer world is very bad. In the pandemic period a number of people died. People lost their Job or suffered a reduction in their income due to the covid - 19 Pandemic and it's resulting economic recession have negatively affected many people's mental health and created new barriers for people already suffering from mental illness and substance use disorder.

Q. 2  If you are Chinese or African, would you be happy the concluding message which the speaker is deriving or interpreting from this poem?

If I am a Chinese or African, I would contribute to the message of the poem. This poem is not about particular religion or particular race but it deals with the whole world in general and that is the real charm of literature to think about the whole world.

Many of us have become aware of how much we need other people - many have managed to maintain their social connections, even if they had to use technology to keep it touch. Thus, we can say that the poem presents the dire condition of the world during the Corona crisis but by the examples of the Great plague and Meghaduta. The poet Simon Armitage is presenting here a true image of the world.

Thank you for reading this blog...