Death-Perception : Life-Perception

These poems of Dr. Mahendra Bhatnagar represent a wide range in terms of theme, mood and tone. They give us a glimpse of Mahendra Bhatnagar’s high stature as a Hindi poet, who can induce in the reader serious thinking as well as aesthetic delight. Dr. Mahendra Bhatnagar is most successful in vivifying directly-experienced scene of nature and prismatic states of weather, he often makes the objects of nature to carry symbolic meaning and convey dedicate the transitory states of the mind. Love is received by the poet in the form of a blessing and it lifts him to new level of being with sense of miraculous release. In the course of his life. Mahendra Bhatnagar has witnessed the national shame of subjugation and an intense desire to attain freedom. He has felt the joy of being independent, he has also shared the triumphs and sorrows of free India. All these experiences are preserved by him in memorable verse steeped throughout this collection-and indeed, on a larger scale, in the vast corpus of his writing. And when he writes of the have-nots, the exploited and the labouring workers, he shows genuine empathy, and the verse assumes revolutionary overtones. Dr. Mahendra Bhatnagar knows what it is to feel failure and disappointment, but his abiding strength is in courage and will to survive and overcome. The poet is aware of his broken dreams when the sweetness of a loving heart changed into poison. With the personal sense of failure he joins the general sense of suffering and disillusionment of our age. When dealing with this mood, Dr. Mahendra Bhatnagar is a modernist like W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot. On the other hand, the note of buoyancy and hoe is even stronger. The poet is fully conscious of the dignity and power of labour. For him, experience has proved that the dark hours are bound to pass and day will surely dawn. It is true that man is powerless before destiny and yet nothing can stop the progress of human knowledge and science. His deepest insight is that which all great thinkers and poets have realized: ‘in this life / there is nothing, / nothing indeed / more beautiful than love / anywhere!’ But he also knows that there is nothing more difficult than love – it is an ideal not easily to be achieved. Yet try we must because as W.H. Auden describes in a poem, ‘we must love one another, or die.’