Critical analysis of the poem Sujata The first disciple of Buddha

Indian-born poet Sujata Bhatt has been described as a confessional poet. This term brings to mind such intensely personal—and tragically doomed—figures as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Confessional in the sense of writing narrative verse may be an appropriate description, but if one can gauge the potential for suicide by reading the composition of poems, it must be said that the content of Bhatt’s verse does not immediate have one calling for the intervention of the suicide prevention hotline.

“There is that moment when the young human child stares at the young monkey child who stares back – ”

It is vibrant, impressive imagery to be sure, but hardly the same as Sexton’s notation of herself as an image drawn in watercolors which is easily washed away. Confessional is a loaded term when speaking of poetry. What is a confession to one person is simply an expression of a personal truth to another. The general thrust of the poem which confesses truths and pain perhaps left unspoken verbally tends to be interior emotional trauma. What passes as kneeling at confessional in Bhatt’s poetry is really just simply a narrative that penetrates into the heart of the character. The question becomes is the character the poet or is the character merely an extension of the creative imagination:

“In the morning, while Kalika combs her seven-year-old daughter’s glossy tangled hair, she looks at her face in the mirror; red-eyed, worn out.”

The evidence strongly points to the latter. Throughout the poetry of Bhatt are characters like Kalika. They verse presents images of a moment in their life that may be of great important or lack much significance at all. They are just interesting to the creator who felt moved to share them. A particularly illuminating example of the differentiation between confessional and narrative poetry in Bhatt’s piece titled “Baltimore.” One of the all-time great confessional poems in American history also take places in that city: “Incident” by Countee Cullen. Cullen’s is a short verse that recollects upon his first visit to the big city when he a young black kid. Though he spent nearly a year in the town, his only memory of it all those years later is a white kid sticking out his tongue just before calling him the “N” word. Bhatt’s story of the Maryland metropolis, by contrast, is thick with imagery as she recalls a summer wasted waiting. The entire season just extends through lack of action and direction into one long unmemorable evening reading Kierkegaard. It is confessional without being direct: it is a poetry as poetry while still telling a story. Cullen’s poem is confession of how that one moment of childhood that could not have lasted more than a few seconds at most nevertheless stuck to his psyche in a way that could never be peeled away.

The difference between the two poems taking place in Baltimore is a revelation of the difference between narrative as confessional poetry and narrative simply as a poem telling a story. This difference is revealed throughout the work of Bhatt. Once the heavy weight of confessional poet has been placed upon one, it is a difficult task to shrug it off. All it takes is one solid academic review and the dominos begin to tumble. And with the label of how you write comes the expectation of what you write as well as the obvious associations with the tragic outcomes to the legend of the style. Only time will if Bhatt’s poetry was hiding a message about a tragic ending, but to this point the evidence contained therein do not seem to point in that direction. She writes personal narratives, but that is not exactly the same thing as making a confession.