The first poetry I heard were lullabies in my mother tongue. I suppose my mother must have sung them to me, when I was in that state of infanthood before my tongue could speak and my brain comprehend language. Even though later science has show the beneficial influence of music or aural experience on the growth of an embryo or that of a baby, mothers seem to understand this instinctively, this provision of musical speech and its function in nurturing. However given the split, which I sometimes regret, I had with the language of my ancestors and this adoption of the “foreign” tongue, English, to speak, to think and write in, most of them are lost except snatches of those pieces which return in dream and memory.

The next encounter with poetry as well as language was as nursery rhyme: Jack and Jill, Baa Baa Black Sheep, Humpty Dumpty in pre school and Ol’ Mac Donald on a borrowed tape in primary school. The study of language however was and is considered a superficial (pre)occupation in India. Language’s utility was only in its function to do better office work or get a better paying job. This on further reflection is perhaps true in other places of the world as well.

However even at school, we had a whole section of poetry in our English textbooks, at the back, towards the end. I suppose it was something that was hard to teach and it’s banishment to the end and well as separation from the prosody was almost natural. And the consequence of this I don’t recall many of those poems, secondary stuff of school work, to be learnt only to answer inane questions on English exams.

I also recall reading a large dose of old English poets: Wordsworth’s “Daffodils”, Alfred Noyes’s almost musical piece “Highway Man”, Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussy Cat” with large doses of Keats, Browning and Tennyson.