“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thoughts and thought has found words,” that is what Robert Frost wrote about poetry.

Prose, poetry and drama, the three main genres of literature have through their creative expressions enthralled the readers since ages. Each has its creative value in entertaining, inspiring, carrying social messages and storytelling in general.

However, poetry has unique attributes. While prose includes novels, short stories or non-fiction that’s written in the day-to-day language used or heard by us and has a paragraphic structure, the distinct constituents of poetry are its lyricism with poetic imagery. As for theatrical dialogues in dramas, these need to be supplemented by physical elements like stages and props for conveying stories impactfully to the audience, though there is some poetic flavour.

Also, the great differentiator for poems is that they depict diverse kinds of emotions like hope, joy, grief, anguish, romance and compassion with outstanding characteristics of artistic expression, rhyme and rhythm that appeal to our senses in a different way, permeating the chords of hearts and touching our souls intensely. The flowery language of poetry is ornamental with a perceptible sonorous appeal and feel which is enriched by its important constituents like assonance, alliteration, consonance and onomatopoeia. As an extended analogy, we can consider the appeal of jingles in advertisements that has a profound emotional impact on the audience as compared to textual messages.

‘Emotion’ is the hallmark of poetry. Poetry can move our hearts, make us introspect and reflect, at times make us laugh and at the same time it can also infuse hope, inspire us, and motivate us towards greener pastures.

Take for example, ‘hope’. It is the positive emotion that is evoked when despite hard and struggling times, we keep on visualizing streaks of a brighter future that keep us enlivened through the challenging times. The below stanza from Emile Dickinson’s poem, “Hope is the Thing with Feathers” portrays this exquisitely.

“Hope’ is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all-”

Here, the poet very artfully visualizes and inspires the readers that hope is the element that ‘perches in the soul and sings the tunes without words’ and thus keeps them enlivened. It also portrays that aspirations are great companions of human beings and that they should always sustain them in the most precarious situations.

Talking of other emotions, I am also reminded of Rabindranath Tagore’s classic literary work “Where the Mind is Without Fear” (excerpt below), which carries a galvanizing message for the society to use its enormous power of transformation to achieve the ‘heaven of freedom’.

“Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection:
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is lead forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action–
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.”

In the end, I would take the liberty of the concluding stanza from a poem “Existence or Extinction” from my recently published poetry book, “The Morning Glory”. It conveys a strong emotional message that if we don’t take expeditious steps in resolving the global ecosystem degradation, we are surely heading towards extinction.

“Unless we join concertedly,
And clean up the mess of our misdeeds swiftly,
We are doomed to become extinct,
and like the old civilizations become defunct.

It is now or never.”

**Ratan Kaul is a published novelist and poet.
His poetry book, “The Morning Glory”,
has been launched recently. He can be contacted on:
[email protected]; www.ratankaulauthor.com