“The Striders SE FF LY SEES ° INTRODUCTION It is one of the most oft-quoted poem by A.K. Ramanujan. It is fairly representive also of his themes and technique. It was the title poem of Ramanujan’s first anthology published in 1966. It is marked by complex and multi-layered imagism. Its outward simplicity is deceptive. It has literal, figurative as well as spiritual connotations and therefore the poem has an open-ended nature, with a number of possible readings and interpretations. The rime and rhythm pattern add to the artistry which envelopes the intricate meaning of the poem. TEXT And search {for certain thin- ‘stemmed, bubble-eyed water bugs. See them perch on dry capillary legs weightless on the ripple skin ofa stream. No, not only prophets walk on water. This bug sits ona landslide of lights and drowns eye- deep into its tiny strip of sky. EXPLAINATION (LINE: 1-8) ‘The poem seems to celebrate the here and now, the present. It emphasizes the importance of particulars. The poet under the influence of the imagists, presents the image of striders floating on top of the ripple skin of a stream. The description of the striders is most picturesque. They have been described as “thin-stemmed” and “bubble-eyed”. Their legs are like dry capillaries. The surface of the stream has been described as “ripple skin”. The opening is quite abrupt and dramatic in the manner of a typical metaphysical poem. The speaker asks us to search for “striders” and watch how, with their thin legs, they sit with remarkable felicity on the waterysurface of a stream. The juxtaposition of motion and stasis isremarkable : the fixity of the water bugs contrasts very clearly with the movementllike a ripple of the surface of the water. This inherent opposition in the images, enlivens the whole picture in the readers’ mind. EXPLAINATION: (tines 9-16) . -In the second stanza the whole image in the first part—of the striders fixed against a rippling background—acquires a rich density of meaning with suggestive parallels and implicit allusions. At the surface level, the idea is that like prophets, these water bugs are also capable of walking on water. The obvious parallelism fuses the real and the spiritual. This strider, sitting on the “landslide of lights”, drowns or dives “eye-deep” into water which reflects the sky. “This bug” is capable of sitting on a “landslide of lights” (divine light) and of drowning. The allusion to the Hindu god Vishnuis obvious. Vishnu stands still in the fluxand his devotees dive or drown into his depths. Set against this background, the act of drowning, by thé water bug (which may be taken to stand for the poet-persona) into the depths of water (which may be taken as symbolic of Lord Vishnu) would scem the literary equivalent of the endeavour of the devotee tomerge with the divine. The stanza can be taken to stand for the act of transcending the immediate world and entering into the divine.