Author Archives: mithiladatta

The Looking Glass by Kamla Das

Posted on by under Narrative and Poetry

The poem ‘The Looking Glass’ by Kamla Das contains rhythm in its all one verse and regularity in the length of the lines. The poem has been written in a very simple realistic language, using almost no metaphor except in the last line which makes it very easy for the reader to understand. The poem is all about the love between the male and the female, specially the physical love of them which also affects them mentally as well. The tone of the poem is very much impassioned in the beginning while describing the love-making between them. But later the tone becomes gloomy while describing the threatening consequences if someday there comes separation. She (author) says, it is very easy to step in the world of love, to roam around there and enjoy the passion, warmth and physical satisfaction love gives, but it becomes horrendous to bear the extreme pain when that love goes away from the life.
The author has mainly focused on the woman’s emotion and acts in a love relationship and according to her, it is easy to make a man love a woman if she allows her womanhood completely be expressed in front of him. In a love relationship, the man loves it if “he sees himself the strongest one” and the woman “much softer, younger, lovelier.” They become so close to each other that nothing remains personal between these two people. The woman knows every single details about him, even she knows every single external parts of his body, all the personal movement of his physic and also she makes him known toall the personal details of her body in the same way. Thus they become each other’s. But it is difficult “living without life” means to live if the person, she has made her “life”, by giving all she had, leaves her. She will lose all the curiosity in everything in the world, she will lose the interest in her life. Everybody in the world will seem “strangers” and she will be struck to the past when he was with her. Her thirsty body which he used to quince by his love will become “drab and destitute” where no thirst and shine will be remained.