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ALFREDA DE SILVA'S CHILDLIKENESS:
'Forever... the smell of loneliness'
 I first became acquainted with Alfreda de Silva not through her
poetry but through her only prose work, 'Pagoda House - Recollections of
Childhood'. I was struck with the writer's ability not only to describe
events of her childhood as she had actually experienced them, but to
convey the effect that these experiences had on her child's mind at the
time - which she could only have come to understand long afterwards. Her
two-year stay with her grandmother from the age of four to five was
seemingly a uniquely enriching time, of which she might well have said
with Wordsworth, "Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up Fostered
alike by beauty and by fear." That the child was becoming mother of the
woman was evident from such an observation as this: "Perhaps this was
the beginning of that sixth sense that has been both the blessing and
the bane of my life."
In her poetry Alfreda often revisits the scenes of her childhood to
discover the formative influences of her adult personality. In such
poems we find the same ability to recreate the experience of the child
and to endow this with its significance as subsequently realised by the
adult. For example, in 'Detail from Childhood' she relates the
devastating experience of finding that her parents have left her with
her grandmother and returned home without saying goodbye. "I'm falling,
falling Into a bottomless well, I'm wheeling in darkness Leaving
childhood behind, Starting a new and frightening History." The poem
ends, "Outside, there's a dark sweet smell Of garden leaves - Forever to
be the smell Of loneliness."
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Alfreda de
Silva |
This sense of loneliness continues to haunt her adult life, as can be
seen in the last verse of 'The End of Something': "I drift like the
aimless leaves On the inscrutable side-walk. I don't want to go Anywhere
Except into myself."And that the bitterness which invariably underlies
the preference for solitude was already forming in childhood is apparent
from 'The Changeling': I t begins, "Aged four, I sit On idle afternoons
In the cool womb Of the meditating house..", continues, "No children To
play with. Only white frilly Mango-bloom And hard, fat wood apple To
talk to To stalk, through The grasses..." and ends, "Till one day I
stare In the darkening glass And see myself, Not a child But a haunted
gnome, With resentful cinders Glowing, where the eyes Should have been."
The bitter experience of childhood, however, matures into an
understanding of the ultimately unfulfilling nature of human experience.
This awareness pervades much of Alfreda's poetry, invading even the
realm of the most intimate of relationships, where time takes its cruel
toll as in 'Return to a Room by the Sea': "Night-long The man and woman
In the bridal room Hear a sea- song Of immortality... Too late they
return For renewal from the Corroding commonplace Of uneven years. The
room has grown Incongruous and cold, Its buoyant images Fled. Desire
flares up Like anger And is quenched." Skilful variations of this theme
are to be found in the reworking of ancient myths in poems such as
'Penelope', 'The Return of Ulysses' and 'Stone Girl in an Indian Garden.
This fascination with the meaning of myths is another of Alfreda's
childlike traits. But in 'Eve' she reaches beyond myth to the heart of
the human tragedy: "We have sloughed off Immortality And begun our death
With the snake That hisses derision In the reeds. We flee the avenging
Garden. In what sick place Of ashes and trampled flowers Will we raise
your seed, So new inside me? Everything is wounded With the sting of
salt - Tears, sweat, love, Our lives." This recalls Auden: "Underneath
the leaves of life, Green on the prodigious tree, In a trance of grief
Stand the fallen man and wife."
However, the tragic sense does not degenerate into cynicism. This is
because childhood values continuing to exert their beneficial influence.
Thus, in 'Detail from Childhood', the grandmother comforts the sobbing
child by pointing to a spider that keeps climbing upwards in spite of
repeated falls. "I watch The spider straddle Its string Like an acrobat.
My sobs are dry now. They hurt like strings In my throat." This
recollection assures that consolation is available, and resilience
feasible, in the face of adversity.
Perhaps the outstanding aspect of natural piety that Alfreda succeeds
in preserving is the sense of compassion. We see this quality at work
even in a children's poem, such as 'Stilt Walker': After acknowledging
the entertainment value, the child notices the "sad face above his
shining rags and tatters" and wonders, "Where does he go After the fun
and laughter, When the street ends and there are no more children?" And
in the adult poem, 'Cormorants and Children', both the birds and the
children of nearby squatters feed on the leftovers of tourists and
picnickers, the poem ending, "Later, much later, Fat cormorants and
hungry waifs, Together they share the moon." And of 'The Coral
Gatherers': "One picks A carapace From which the life Has fled, As their
hearts Have fled their bodies; Another breaks a sea-flower Of coral As
their minds Have been broken Through years of deprivation.",
This compassion extends, as always with natural piety, to the natural
world. Only one whose childish imagination has been nourished by nature
can both mourn its desecration and celebrate the memory of its beauty.
This is the message of one of her best poems, 'The Rice Fields of
Pagoda':
"Now at one end of them the squatters' shacks Hurt the eyes with
their tin-white roofs, And the stench of rotting dirt Piled on the tree
roots Disturbs the old images. "Once these were fields Turned into seas
or mountains By childhood, and the wind's cries Were horses' hooves and
the whining grass A grandmother's tale one listened to In the
moth-brushed night.
"I remember the sun over these fields Like a fisherman netting In
green water, shocking everything with its Scathing radiance, On a day
that fell in the reeds And was irretrievable."
The "disturbing of the old images" tends to derange the poetic
imagination. Once it was fed by the grandeur of the natural scene, but
now it has to cope with the thought of its "irretrievableness." Yet the
beauty that once was can still be imagined by the adult whom, as a
child, it had enabled to imagine a world of make-believe. The poem
represents both the tragedy and the triumph of a poetic consciousness
founded upon the natural piety of the child.
Finally, there is the child's awakening to the reality of human
death, captured in 'The End of Childhood': "Once a dead bird On a
bloodied stone Roused my terror And now this sudden Discovery Makes me
scream Not to die...That night I dream I'm walking in the sea, And the
waves lash Around me hissing In the dark: They've told you nothing
Nothing, nothing at all" 'The Voice of Silence', one of her last poems,
shows that she has lost nothing of this childlike sense of the
unnaturalness of human death: "Death is heralded by a whisper. You're
gone before I can Hold it in memory....A vast imponderable quiet, An
awesome silence Descends on the evening, And waits to be unravelled."
Thus, with this harshest of bereavements, the loneliness of the child
comes full circle and is seen to have been the presentiment of the
tragic forlornness of the human condition.
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