A Critical and Comparative Analysis of Laxmi Prasad Devkota’s “The Beggar” and William Wordsworth’s “The Old Cumberland Beggar"

Prof. Dr. K. V. Dominic

(Originally published in in Literary Studies, Vol. 31, March 2018, by Literary Association of Nepal)

Abstract: Laxmi Prasad Devkota (1909-1959) is regarded as the greatest Nepali poet. Devkota is a Mahakavi who has written five epics and several other short epics and poetry books. He is also a playwright, novelist, short story writer and essayist. He was a Romantic poet in every sense and the Western poets William Wordsworth, John Keats and P B Shelley exerted great influence on him. As a lover of Nature we find great similarity between Devkota’s and Wordsworth’s poems. Nature and human sensitivity, feelings and love are the major themes of his poetry. Laxmi Prasad Devkota’s poem भिखारी (“The Beggar”) is the title poem of the book भिखारी – कवितासंग्रह (Beggar - Poetry Collection), probably published in 1945 from Kathmandu. The beggar is portrayed in the poem living in dire poverty and desolation, deprived of human love and material comforts. At the same time the poet gives another dimension of the beggar as the source of compassion placed in the core of suffering and destitution. While Devkota’s “The Beggar” is a short poem of only 64 lines in nine stanzas, Wordsworth’s “The Old Cumberland Beggar” is a long poem of 197 lines published in Lyrical Ballads with Other Poems, 1800, Volume 2. Both Wordsworth and Devkota are highly sympathetic to the beggar and plead for the entire humanity’s mercy to them. When Wordsworth points out the social aspects of treatment to the beggars, Devkota brings out the spiritual elements in them.

Keywords: Laxmi Prasad Devkota, Wordsworth, Beggar, Cumberland, Lord Buddha, Romantic, Compassion

Laxmi Prasad Devkota (1909-1959) is regarded as the greatest Nepali poet even though his precursor Bhanubhakta Acharya (1814 – 1868) is the Adikavi (First Poet) who translated the Sanskrit epic Ramayana to Nepali language and started writing and popularizing poetry in the native language. Born at the night of Laxmi Pooja, the goddess of wealth, on 12 November 1909, the child was regarded by his parents as a gift of the goddess and thus named him Laxmi Prasad meaning one who pleases Laxmi. But greater than his parents longed for, he became a gift of Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge. In fact he had a very tragic life full of poverty and miseries in life. Death of his father, mother and two month old daughter in a short span broke him down in his youth and he even underwent treatment in mental asylum. Financial crisis crippled him to such an extent that he wanted to end his life. Besides, his health waned and after a long battle with cancer he succumbed to death on 24 September 1959 at the age of fifty.

Great poetry comes out of burning hearts. As Shelley says our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thoughts. No doubt, Devkota’s poetry attained sublimity because it had overflowed from a heart which had been bleedings and burning throughout his poetic carrier. His heart ached and itched seeing the sorrows and injustices around him. Devkota is a Mahakavi who has written five epics and several other short epics and poetry books. He is also a playwright, novelist, short story writer and essayist. His first epic poem Shakuntala, in twenty four cantos, based on Kalidasa’s Abhijnanashakuntalam is a masterpiece showing his depth in Sanskrit meter and diction and it happens to be the first epic poem in Nepali language.

Laxmi Prasad Devkota was a romantic poet in every sense and the Western poets William Wordsworth, John Keats and P B Shelley exerted great influence on him. As a lover of Nature we find great similarity between Devkota’s and Wordsworth’s poems. Nature and human sensitivity, feelings and love are the major themes of his poetry. Like Shelley, Devkota was an atheist in his prime age. He opposed the view of attributing everything to God’s willingness and plan. He believed that if at all God is there, it is within human beings and the best way to attain godliness is by serving the less privileged fellow humans. In the poem “Yatri” (Traveler or Pilgrim) he explicitly wrote that God dwells within a human and not in any temple.

Straightforwardness, lucidity and honesty are some of the characteristics of Devkota’s poetic works. His feelings, sensibility and expressions have been blended perfectly and brilliantly with words and meanings that have created an explosion of thoughts and ideas in his writings. We find spontaneous expression in Devkota’s poems and there is no artificial sense. . . . His poems are like flowers grown and blossomed in the forests. . . . Humanitarian feelings are well entrenched in many of his poems through which the poet has advocated egalitarian society free from poverty, hunger, class and creed. For him, there is no class other than human being and no creed other than serving to human being. (“Mahakavi Laxmi Prasad Devkota”)

Laxmi Prasad Devkota’s poem भिखारी (“The Beggar”) is the title poem of the book भिखारी – कवितासंग्रह (Beggar - Poetry Collection), probably published in 1945 from Kathmandu. The translation used in this paper is by Albert Harris, a Scottish scholar who conducted research as well as translation of the poetry of Devkota at Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu. Harris accounts of his translation thus:

While living in Bhaktapur, one of the three ancient capitals of Nepal, I had eventually come to the dharma via Judaism, Hinduism and atheism. The profundities expounded by the four noble truths impressed upon me a depth of understanding which belied the apparent simplicity of ideas expressed by the statements and, in a sense, allowed me to discard the accumulation of mere spiritual knowledge accrued through the years to arrive at an experiential verisimilitude of truth.

One of the poems I translated was Bikhari, expressing the motif of suffering as a condition of being human. The poem also evokes an understanding of ‘compassion’ for all sentient beings. (“The Beggar”)

The beggar is portrayed in the poem living in dire poverty and desolation, deprived of human love and material comforts. At the same time the poet gives another dimension of the beggar as the source of compassion placed in the core of suffering and destitution. Thus Devkota connects the beggar with the divine as the ultimate source of kindness and empathy. To quote from the poem:

Fallen from the blackest clouds
To enter into darker shrouds,
Is he deity or beggar? (“The Beggar”)

While Devkota’s “The Beggar” is a short poem of only 64 lines in nine stanzas, Wordsworth’s “The Old Cumberland Beggar” is a long poem of 197 lines. Wordsworth’s poem was published in Lyrical Ballads with Other Poems, 1800, Volume 2. The poet’s own note on the poem is enlightening:

Observed, and with great benefit to my own heart, when I was a child: written at Racedown and Alfoxden in my twenty-third year. The political economists were about that time beginning their war upon mendicity in all its forms, and by implication, if not directly, on alms-giving also. This heartless process has been carried as far as it can go by the AMENDED poor-law bill, though the inhumanity that prevails in this measure is somewhat disguised by the profession that one of its objects is to throw the poor upon the voluntary donations of their neighbours; that is, if rightly interpreted, to force them into a condition between relief in the Union poorhouse, and alms robbed of their Christian grace and spirit, as being "forced" rather from the benevolent than given by them; while the avaricious and selfish, and all in fact but the humane and charitable, are at liberty to keep all they possess from their distressed brethren. The class of Beggars, to which the Old Man here described belongs, will probably soon be extinct. It consisted of poor, and, mostly, old and infirm persons, who confined themselves to a stated round in their neighbourhood, and had certain fixed days, on which, at different houses, they regularly received alms, sometimes in money, but mostly in provisions. (“THE OLD CUMBERLAND BEGGAR”)

From this note we understand the attitude of Wordsworth to beggars and we find similarity between the two poets who were highly sympathetic to beggars.

The first twenty one lines of Wordsworth’s poem give a picture of the old beggar found on a highway side “On a low structure of rude masonry / Built at the foot of a huge hill, that they / Who lead their horses down the steep rough road / May thence remount at ease.” And he started eating from his bag “the dole of village dames.” The mountain birds then approached to eat the shreds that fell from his palsied hands. Wordsworth has written the poem in blank verse. Peoples’ sympathetic attitude to the old beggar is narrated in the next forty six lines. Line 67 to 154 deals with the good qualities of the beggar and his contribution to the society. The concluding lines focus on the reward the beggar gets for the service he has rendered to the society. The poem is a narrative one and the narrator ‘I’ is unnamed and not described. It might be Wordsworth himself who had a personal encounter with a beggar at the time when he was in France during the Revolution. The narrator wants the reader to realise that every human being is worth living and should be respected. It shows them how they can learn from the beggar and how everybody can personally benefit from the act of charity. But it also criticizes people who do charity work only to save a place in heaven for themselves.

Now coming to Devkota’s poem “The Beggar”, since it is a short poem and the focus of this paper is mainly that, it would be apt if the whole poem is explicated stanza after stanza. As stated earlier there are only nine short stanzas with varying length of six to eight lines. The first stanza introduces the advent of the beggar:

Look! – here comes a beggar, limping with every step,
            His eyes raised, pathetic, adept.
A dense sadness in the silence, the light!
            The string of life he plucks is worn from ages kept.
In the yard with the sunshine bright!
            On one point a round tear wept,
            The history of a lifetime’s plight. (“The Beggar”)

Let us compare this English translation by Albert Harris with Devkota’s original in Nepali:

(१)

हेर भिखारी अडि अडि आयो

करुण दृष्टिले नजर उठायो ।

गाढा दुखको मौन प्रकाश ।

झिना आशा-तार बजायो

घाम उज्यालो आँगन पास ।

एक बिन्दुमा गोल खसायो

जीवनको इतिहास । (“भिखारी”)

One finds that Harris has done cent percent justice to the poem in his translation. It is a verbatim, line by line translation even keeping up the rhyme scheme. Usually the translators transcreate rather than translate.

The beggar comes limping to the yard of the house. His appearance shows that he is an old weak man. Even the nature reflects the pitiable condition of the beggar. There is dense sadness in the silence as well as the light around him. He is wearing the string of life he has plucked through his voyage through ages. The history of his lifetime’s plight is visible on a round tear wept on his face. Devkota’s presentation of the appearance of the beggar is more touching and sublime than Wordsworth’s.

Look! – look at the shreds and rags.
            Ah! Time unforsaking,
Wretched and broken on life’s worn flags
            Shivering and shaking!
He spreads his bag, threadbare, flaking,
            The fellow, forlorn, sags! (“The Beggar”)

The poet then speaks of the clothes the beggar wears. It is in shreds and rags and Time has not forsaken them for him. Had it been for other people, Time would have forsaken those dresses and given them new clothes. The poet’s empathy to the beggar is visible in accusing indirectly Time for dragging him in such a miserable condition. What a superb imagery the poet has used in comparing the rags of the beggar to the life’s worn flags!

Look at the frost formed over the years
            Fallen upon his head!
Look at the runnels formed by the tears
            Meander down a face that peers;
And etched on that chest is spread
            The cracks and fissures fierce. (“The Beggar”)

The gray hair of the beggar is pictured beautifully by the poet as formed by years of frost fallen on the hair. Years of tears meandered down his face has turned into a runnel. Cracks and fissures of wretched life are etched on his spread chest.

Limping and shaking he comes to a stop,
            A silent lament in the air to drop
From out of his heart, distressed and broken,
            The lifeless staff his weight to prop,
He rends the heart in a voice soft spoken,
            “A handful of rice!”
The one cry of a whole life,
            “One handful of rice!” (“The Beggar”)

The fourth stanza is heart rending. The beggar limping and shaking stops at the front door of the house. Supporting his weight on the lifeless staff, comes a silent lament from his distressed and broken heart. The use of the phrase ‘lifeless staff’ is very apt because there is no living human soul on earth who is ready to support the beggar in his life. The soft spoken voice from the beggar--“a handful of rice” rends the heart. How many hearts are rent by such voice of beggars is a big question. The poet is well aware that very few hearts are rent by beggar’s voice. The poet no doubt is deeply felt by such voice and he tries to evoke or arouse such empathy and emotion among his fellow beings. How touching is the line ‘The one cry of a whole life,’! The forsaken, lonely beggar has only one cry throughout his life, “One handful of rice!’ He has none in the world to communicate or interact. Hence for his survival he goes on crying this door after door. He is never greedy and doesn’t ask for a square meal, but just a handful of rice.

Thus one man before others
            From his heart doth cry.
Begging from his brothers
            One handful of compassion deep
In the courtyard light
            This gloomy sight!
The grieving fern doth sigh
            Amid the laughter of the roses bright. (“The Beggar”)

One can’t read this stanza without out a twinge in the heart and prick of conscience. Here is a man “Begging from his brothers / One handful of compassion deep”. The poet reiterates that the beggar is not an alien but our own brother. The situation that a brother has to beg for the mercy of other brothers for a handful of rice is that he has been denied what is rightful or due to him. No doubt, as the poet states in the next line, it is a gloomy sight. The poet then compares the beggar to a grieving fern that sighs amid the laughter of the bright roses. The beggar is a fern which struggles for its survival among the roses or hilarious happy people around him. Very often the beggar has to face the thorns of the rosy people. This imagery of Devkota is amazing.

Who is this child? Who can this be?
            Whose father was poor?
Which mother held you on her knee? –
            Two burning lamps for eyes, speaking, sure.
Whose hope opened the eyes, turned them free
            To the eyes of the sun and the moon?
Why has it faded? Why has it withered?
            Why has this life’s light dimmed so soon? (“The Beggar”)

The grieving mind of the poet then thinks about the birth of the beggar. Who can be this beggar whose father was poor? When he was an infant and his mother held him on her knee his eyes were sparkling with hopes like the eye of the sun and the moon. How then were those sparkles in his eyes dimmed and hopes faded? The poet is wondering or asking (perhaps to the Creator) why the life’s light in the Beggar was dimmed so soon. Such a compassionate poem on an ordinary beggar is seldom found in any literature.

Before Lord Buddha’s eyes
            This very same beggar came.
The same form, the same sighs
            Expressing a heart-felt pain.
From him passion filled the seas,
            His very words sent waves abreeze:
Humbled Bali, proud and vain:
            In such guise brought him to his knees. (“The Beggar”)

The above stanza shows that the beggar meant by the poet is not a particular beggar like the one referred by Wordsworth. He is a representative of the class of beggars from the very beginning of the human race. And thus the same beggar came before Lord Buddha with the same sighs expressing heartfelt pain. Lord Buddha, the embodiment of compassion, was moved by the beggar’s cry and his very words passed abreeze through the waves to Bali and the proud and vainglorious people there were made humble. The reference here might be the impact of the Buddhist philosophy of love and compassion to all beings which was spread in Bali. Another interpretation is possible that Lord Buddha himself can be considered the beggar begging to all his bellow beings for mercy and compassion to all creatures and creations.

Fallen from the blackest clouds
            To enter into darker shrouds,
Is he deity or beggar?
            Buddha speaks – his words pierce the heart,
Wandering from house to house, yard to yard,
            Now speaking with a voice of pain:
His heart in sorrow cowed. (“The Beggar”)

The beggar who descended on the earth from the blackest clouds had to enter into darker shrouds. The interpretation of the imagery is that the beggar was born as an unlucky person and had to lead a hellish life or that of a living dead. Now the poet asks himself as well as to the world if the beggar is actually a deity or a beggar. As Lord Buddha says that the beggar’s words pierce the heart, the poet assumes that the man is indeed a deity and not a human being. The beggar who appears before you and cries for alms and mercy is a disguised God in religious terms. When you give food and help to the poor, it is to God that you give, all religions teach.

From age to age the ne’er–ending tears
Distilled, repeated through the years.
Through countless, opening lips He speaks!
            He comes upon the earth
            And from his brother begs for alms –
           The beggar in the yard. (“The Beggar”)

Through the concluding stanza the poet emphasizes that the beggary is a common phenomenon from the very beginning of the human race and it will continue till the end of the world. And through the beggar’s lips He, the Creator speaks. The ironic situation of a man begging to his own brothers for a handful of rice has been going on in this world from the very beginning and this injustice will continue till the end of the human race.

The beggar is a symbol of the vast majority of human beings--the poor, downtrodden, marginalised and under privileged people who had to beg for mercy to the rich and the privileged classes. They are begging for their legitimate property and rights which were looted and denied from them. The beggar can stand for both individuals and nations. The poor and underdeveloped nations have to beg for alms and mercy to the rich and mighty nations. The rich nations help the poor not because of any spirit of charity but because of selfish profit motive. They, in fact are strangling the poor nations by loans which the poor countries have to repay with high interests. Unable to repay in time they take more and more loans forfeiting their citizens’ liberty and rights to the rich countries. As Frantz Fanon says in The Wretched of the Earth what the rich countries give as charity to the poor countries is only a moral reparation. Fanon states that the wealth of the imperial countries, amassed through capitalist exploitation, is in reality the colonized people’s wealth too (59).

Laxmi Prasad Devkota’s poem “The Beggar” is thus a very powerful and marvellous poem having different layers of meaning. It is applicable to all times and space and thus has attained immortality. It has a divinity which is absent in Wordsworth’s poem. Both Wordsworth and Devkota are highly sympathetic to the beggars and plead for the entire humanity’s mercy to them. When Wordsworth points out the social aspects of treatment to the beggars, Devkota brings out the spiritual elements in them.

Works Cited

“The Beggar by Laxmi Prasad Devkota translated from the Nepali by Albert Harris.” Accessed 22 Jan. 2018.

https://bodhicharya.org/manyroads/the-beggar-by-laxmi-prasad-devkota-translated-from-the-nepali-by-albert-harris/.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wrteched of the Earth. Translated from the French by Richard Philox. Grove Press, 2004.

“Mahakavi Laxmi Prasad Devkota.” Accessed 22 Jan. 2018. http://www.weallnepali.com/sahitya-sumana/laxmi-prasad-devkota-laksmi-prasada-devakota.

“THE OLD CUMBERLAND BEGGAR.” Accessed 22 Jan. 2018.

http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww139.html

Wordsworth, William. “The Old Cumberland Beggar.” Accessed 22 Jan. 2018.

http://www.online-literature.com/wordsworth/lyrical-ballads-vol2/22/

“यात्री, भिखारी” Accessed 24 Jan. 2018.

http://www.weallnepali.com/sahitya-sumana/laxmi-prasad-devkota-laksmi-prasada-devakota/Poems/yatri

Prof. K. V. Dominic, Writer & Editor

Saturday 10 March 2018

A Critical and Comparative Analysis of Laxmi Prasad Devkota’s “The Beggar” and William Wordsworth’s “The Old Cumberland Beggar”