Published Paper Details:

The voice of the poetic persona is the first thing, of course after the title, that the reader listens to in order to observe the tone and follow the meaning. As the poem grows and develops, gradually, the speaker tries to connect himself or herself with the reader who has been listening to and attempting to understand what the speaker has been saying. So, both the reader and the speaker strive for the meaning. While the speaker desires to convey it, the reader wants to receive it. However, these two persons are not enough to generate the desired meaning and effect. Here comes the poet. With an end in view to properly transporting the meaning to the reader-listener, to "exactly" expressing the feeling of the poetic persona--whoever he or she is, perhaps the poet himself or herself as sometimes happens in the case of confessional poets--now the poet arranges the words, the lines, and creates music out of rhythm and sometime out of rhyme too. Such arrangements are seen in Vikram Seth's poem, especially in his relatively long poem "Ceasing Upon the Midnight". The way he has used different kinds of poetic devices that the form of the poem seems to articulate the necessary vibes along with the poetic persona. Truly, the diction, the rhythmic sound of the iambic beat, the rhyming couplets, the rhetoric, the imagery altogether constitute an entity that speaks to the reader and echoes the sense. Thus the voice of the poetic form makes the speaker's voice more telling. In this paper, I shall, therefore, argue for Seth's brilliant seasoning of meaning with the voice of the form of the poem cited above with a stylistic approach.