Forensic Medicine ( Text Book ) - By Gieve Patel - Poem Explanation
About Gieve Patel
Gieve Patel (b. 1940) is a medical practitioner by profession and has earned a reputation as a poet, actor, dramatist and painter. His collections of verse are Poems (1966), How Do You Withstand, Body (1976) and Mirrored, Mirroring (1991). The plays to his credit are Princess (1970), Savakasa (1982) and Mister Behram (1988). Though sensitive to social injustice along with his own predicament as a Parsi poet, one of the preoccupations of his poetry is with the physical existence of human beings-not just the living world but also the human body itself. In his poetry, we see a careful craftsman at work using precise and direct images, economy of words, and vigorous and colloquial expression. His poems, though devoid of sentimentality are sometimes empathetic and always rich with irony.
Forensic Medicine (Text Book)' is selected from his second collection of poems, How Do You Withstand, Body. It is a poem that calls attention through its grotesqueness, to the violence inflicted upon the human body. It begins with an expert in forensic medicine commenting on a particular case of a woman who had induced abortion by thrusting hot iron rods into her womb. The poem goes on to describe, dispassionately, numerous ways of ill-treating a body whether of an infant or an adult. The clinical descriptions picturise the torture the human body is subjected to-perhaps while performing a post mortem or while inflicting brutal punishment. The repulsively violent images are used to shock the reader into an awareness of the objectification of the human body. The last lines of the poem remind us that such violence is not new either-it has been thought of and inflicted before.
Forensic Medicine
(Text Book)
A case in point, the expert says;
A woman thrust glowing faggots
Where properly
her son's sparrow should nest.
Puerile in-law practice, he says,
But good as any other
To set the story rolling, begin
With this burn in the sparrow's nest
To extend over all therefrom emerging
Fan and flourish of the world:
Hold the foetus tumbling through,
And before it may express
Surprise at a clean new blast of air,
Lay subtle finger over mouth and nose.. Watch it blue.
If rather you would be coarse, go ahead,
Use rope and hatchet, knife, stone, bullet,
All you would on the more aged;
Bodies whose gut of blood and skin
Have exchanged years against sweet air
Will not relinquish with ease.
Against these devise infinite means.
The pictures in my book will instruct. Change vantage point inch by inch
To discover them all: recall grace
Inherent to each new part, find
Weapon against it. Lop off limbs.
Smash teeth. Push splinters
Underneath nails and lever them
Off fingers; offer acid in a drink of wine,
The house of song is blasted. Soft skin
That clothes the gentlest dunes will retract Before knife and bullet. Proceed..
Flick pages. The regal column of the neck Upholding the globe of sight and sound
Is often undermined; or straight
Charge at speech and sight, chop off tongue,
Gouge eyeballs, hammer nails into the ear. When you have ravished all, missing
No entrail, do not forget
To return where you started: with a penknife
Splice the rising sparrow's neck;
With end of twine strangle the orbs
That fed him seed;
And outrage the sparrow's nest.
You are now full circle
With nothing
Not thought of, not done before.
Glossary
Line 1. case an instance of something
Line 2. thrust push with sudden force
Line 3. faggot a bundle of sticks or twigs bound together as fuel; here, a bundle of iron rods for heat treatment
Line 5. puerile trivial, immature, childish
Line 11. foetus an unborn child
Line 19. gut intestine
Line 21. relinquish surrender
Line 24. vantage a good position from which to attack, defend or see something
Line 27. lop off cut or remove a part from a whole
Line 28. splinter a sharp-edged piece broken off from a whole
Line 32. dune a mound
Line 37. chop off cut something with a blow
Line 38. gouge cut or force out something with a blade-like chisel
Line 39. ravish here, destroy
Line 42. splice join ends of (ropes) by interweaving strands
Explanatory Notes
Line 4. Her son's sparrow should nest: here, sparrow is an implicit metaphor suggesting a foetus that would have been her son. It is an implicit metaphor because the tenor (subject referred to) is not mentioned. In this line 'nest' is used as a verb to suggest, metaphorically, a womb that shelters a foetus.
Line 22. Against these devise infinite means: as the bodies of the adult (aged) are not as vulnerable as those of the infants', different methods are required to dissect them, therefore the need to devise a number of other means of dissection
Line 32. Dunes: literally means a mound of sand, but used here as an implicit metaphor suggesting mounds of flesh.
Lines 47-48. With nothing/Not thought of, not done before: a double negative is used here. A double negative is usually a statement in which two negatives are used to suggest an affirmation. What the lines actually mean is 'what you do is nothing new as it has been thought of and done before'. Note the concrete and abstract images/descriptions: we find in the poem vivid descriptions which use sensory images such as 'push splinters underneath nails'. Poets may make use of concrete or abstract images/descriptions. An abstract description is one in which sensory perceptions are not employed. For instance: 'he is a Puritan'-here the description of Puritan is conceptual and abstract. Forensic Medicine employs concrete descriptions.
Title: Forensic Medicine is the application of medical knowledge to legal problems. A text book of forensic medicine would necessarily include details about how a post mortem is to be performed. In such a text book, the attitude towards the dissection of a human body would be the same as towards any lifeless object. This objectification is one of the underlying themes of the poem.
Conclusion
Forensic Medicine is one of the best poem in Indian English Literature, so this poem is included in syllabus of graduation in many Universities.
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