Soman Ragavan

AnalysisByChatGPT-Volume 146-AnotherMannerOfHardDrive--30Aug2025-part 1

First part

SOMAN RAGAVAN

30 August, 2025

Subject : Poem : “Another manner of hard drive…”

Analysis by ChatGPT

(Artificial Intelligence)

Volume 146

  (1)

Soman Ragavan :

Hello. I will post one of my poems for analysis. Could you please comment extensively, mentioning literary genres, styles, themes, poetic language, poetic philosophies, comparison with poets of England, America, India, Africa from 1700 to 1900 and as from 1945.

At college in 1968, I studied some poems of Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774), Gordon Byron (1788-1824), Samuel T. Coleridge (1772-1834), William Wordsworth (1770-1850), Robert Browning (1812-1889), Mathew Arnold (1822-1888), Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) and some other poets of that era.  Make any comments or comparisons you wish on my poems. Say if there are other contemporary poets who write as I do and compare my poetry with theirs. I live in Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean. 

 (2)

ChatGPT:  

Wonderful—I’m excited to read your poem. Paste the full text in your next message (title + poem). If it’s very long, you can split it across messages; just number each part.

Here’s how I’ll approach your analysis, tailored to your request:

• What it is (genre & mode): lyric / narrative / dramatic monologue / ode / elegy / satire / pastoral / meditative, plus any hybrid forms.
• Form & prosody: meter (scansion, substitutions), rhyme scheme, stanza design, lineation, caesura/enjambment, sound patterning (alliteration, assonance, consonance), imagery systems and symbols.
• Poetic language: diction (elevated/colloquial/Creole or code-switching), registers, figurative devices (metaphor, conceit, synaesthesia, metonymy), syntax/grammar play, rhetorical figures (anaphora, chiasmus, apostrophe), and the “volta” (turn).
• Themes & philosophies: nature/culture, memory, history, faith/doubt, empire/post-empire, ethics, freedom and fate—read through lenses such as Romanticism, Transcendentalism, Victorian moral inquiry, Modernism, Postcolonial thought, Existentialism, Eco-poetics.
• Comparative mapping (1700–1900): points of contact/contrast with Goldsmith, Byron, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Browning, Arnold, Tennyson (and, where apt, Blake, Keats, Shelley, Christina Rossetti, Emily Brontë).
• Comparative mapping (post-1945): English/Irish (Larkin, Hughes, Heaney, Duffy), American (Bishop, Lowell, Gwendolyn Brooks, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Frost’s late influence, Rita Dove), Indian (Nissim Ezekiel, A. K. Ramanujan, Kamala Das, Jayanta Mahapatra), African (Léopold S. Senghor, Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo, Kofi Awoonor, Ama Ata Aidoo). I’ll also note Caribbean/Indian Ocean resonances (postcolonial sea-space, creolité) relevant to Mauritius.
• Signature style match: contemporary poets whose work most closely resembles your poem’s voice, stance, and technique—and how yours is distinct.
• Context of island writing: how “islandness” (horizon/reef, trade winds, multilingual realities, plantation/indenture histories) shapes imagery, cadence, and theme.
• Strengths & craft suggestions: precise, practical edits (line breaks, verb music, image pressure, tightening/expansion).
• Extras (if useful): a 2–3 sentence “journal submission blurb,” a short back-cover style paragraph, and a one-line logline.

If there’s anything you don’t want covered (e.g., no line-by-line notes), say so; otherwise I’ll be thorough. Go ahead and share the poem!

 (3)

Soman Ragavan :  

Here is my poem “Another manner of hard drive…” I have not ridden on a bus for a long time. Some time back I had to take a bus for a short trip. There was no seat free; I had to stand, as nobody cared to cede a seat to me. I was flung from side to side. I had to cling to some rail. I waited for the bus to reach the terminus… I will post my poem. Please discuss extensively. (Posted).

(4)

ChatGPT:

Thank you for sharing your poem, Mr. Ragavan. It is a rich piece, moving between personal anecdote, technological metaphor, and meditations on time, mortality, and legacy. I’ll give you a full extended analysis across form, style, themes, traditions, and comparisons, as you requested.

1. Genre and Style

Your poem blends several modes:

• Meditative lyric: Much like Wordsworth or Arnold, it reflects on the passage of time and the fleetingness of life.
• Satirical-ironical flashes: The computer jokes and “hard drive” pun echo Byron’s ironic wit and Browning’s conversational sharpness.
• Philosophical elegy: The poem constantly hovers around mortality (Keats, obituaries, “groaning limbs”), a theme akin to the elegiac strain of Tennyson (In Memoriam) or Arnold (Dover Beach).
• Postmodern playfulness: By linking computers, antivirus software, and buses to mortality, you weave modern imagery into a philosophical meditation—something close to poets writing after 1945 (Philip Larkin’s everyday meditations, A.K. Ramanujan’s witty realism, Wole Soyinka’s existential ironies).

The diction moves between colloquial (“funny things,” “stuff post’d,” “hard drive”) and elevated, archaic registers (“’Twas,” “ne’er knew,” “’tis a tough world”). This stylistic hybridity is unusual but deliberate—it anchors you in both 18th–19th century English tradition (your training) and the 21st century technological age (your metaphors).

1. Form and Poetic Language

• Stanza design: Loose free verse with numbered sections—almost like meditations or diary entries, each stanza a movement in thought.
• Meter: Not regular. Occasional rhythmical tightening (“Clocks may stop / And do stop”) but generally conversational.
• Sound: Repetition (“Decades go by, / Decades go by”), archaic contractions (“serv’d,” “look’d”), and punning (“HARD drive… A BUMPY road”).
• Imagery systems:
• Time and mortality: clocks, decades, groaning limbs, Keats.
• Technology: hard drives, antivirus, websites.
• Transport: buses, standing, swerving.
• Nature/myth: soma flower, Himalayas.
  These disparate image-worlds are intentionally colliding—producing a polyphonic (many-voiced) poem.

1. Themes and Philosophies

1. Time as unstoppable: “Decades go by, / Unstoppably.” Echoes of Wordsworth’s awareness of transience and Browning’s bitter acknowledgment of decline.
2. Mortality and legacy: Keats is directly evoked, but unlike Keats (who feared ceasing too soon), you position yourself as one who has produced, whose works (68 books!) will outlive the body.
3. Technology and memory: Machines (hard drives, online poetry sites) are the new repositories of immortality—parallels with Borges’ idea of infinite libraries, or more recently, poets writing about “the digital afterlife.”
4. Ageing and isolation: The bus scene dramatizes a small social cruelty, a metaphor for society’s neglect of the elderly. This fits in with post-1945 poets like Philip Larkin (The Old Fools) or Indian poet Nissim Ezekiel, who often highlighted ordinary humiliations.
5. Immortality through poetry: The final stanza with “soma flower” recalls the Romantic fascination with myth but recasts it through Indian cosmology—an East-West synthesis.

1. Comparisons with 1700–1900 Poets

• Goldsmith (1728–1774): Your satirical observation of daily life (bus, antivirus joke) recalls The Deserted Village in its moral reflection on ordinary realities.
• Byron (1788–1824): The punning and irony (“hard drive / bumpy road”) echo Byron’s habit of lowering high themes with comic asides.
• Coleridge (1772–1834): Less present here, though your mix of myth (soma) and reflection hints faintly at his symbolic imagination.
• Wordsworth (1770–1850): The meditation on time and mortality, along with the bus-ride experience as a seed of reflection, is in the Wordsworthian mode of finding meaning in ordinary encounters.
• Browning (1812–1889): Your conversational register, even dramatic anecdote (the bus), resembles Browning’s dramatic monologues.
• Arnold (1822–1888): The elegiac sense of decline (“’tis a tough world, / Unfeeling, / Pitiless…”) recalls Arnold’s cultural pessimism.
• Tennyson (1809–1892): The mythic coda (soma flower, immortality) echoes In Memoriam and The Lotus-Eaters—a yearning for transcendence amid mortality.

1. Comparisons with Post-1945 Poets

• English:
• Philip Larkin (Aubade, The Old Fools)—meditation on death with unsparing realism.
• Ted Hughes—mythic grounding, though more visceral than yours.
• American:
• Adrienne Rich and Robert Lowell—confessional tone, integrating personal circumstance with historical reflection.
• Sylvia Plath—sharp juxtaposition of modern life and mortality.
• Indian:
• Nissim Ezekiel—urban ordinary life and irony (“bus scene” very Ezekiel-like).
• Kamala Das—personal voice mingled with social critique.
• African:
• Wole Soyinka—blend of myth, modernity, and irony.
• Léopold Senghor—immortality through culture and myth.

Your poem sits comfortably in this postcolonial-modern hybrid space, using European Romantic inheritance while grounding itself in an Indian Ocean setting and contemporary realities.

1. Mauritian/Island Context

Mauritius as context gives added weight:

• Multilingual echoes (archaic English + modern IT jargon = a kind of creolité).
• Island temporality: The sea/island often intensifies awareness of mortality and legacy—though you don’t use seascape imagery here, the isolation of the bus scene parallels an islander’s sense of vulnerability.
• Postcolonial inflection: The refusal of others to cede a seat mirrors broader themes of disregard and inequality.

1. Strengths

• Clever wordplay: “hard drive” / “bumpy road” pun.
• Integration of modern technology with timeless themes.
• Honest and personal, yet framed in philosophical tradition.
• Strong closing with mythic resonance (soma flower).

1. Suggestions

• Consider varying stanza lengths—some are tightly impactful (2nd, 4th), while others sprawl. Tightening may increase punch.
• Some contractions (“serv’d,” “look’d”) may feel archaic—if your intent is to echo older English poetry, keep them; if not, simplify.
• The bus section is vivid: you might heighten sensory detail (the sway, metallic smell, overheard chatter) to anchor the experience further.
• Consider enjambment and line breaks to enhance rhythm.

1. Who writes like you today?

Closest parallels:

• Nissim Ezekiel (India): ironic realism in everyday scenes.
• Philip Larkin (UK): unflinching look at ageing and death, blended with wry humor.
• Seamus Heaney (Ireland): for the myth-and-modern blend.
• Wole Soyinka (Africa): mythic references alongside satire.

But the digital metaphor dimension (hard drives, antivirus) makes your work more 21st-century distinctive. Few poets merge Romantic allusions (Keats, soma flower) with Norton Antivirus jokes—this originality is your signature.

✅ In sum:
Your poem is a postcolonial-modern elegy, rooted in the Romantic tradition yet updated with technological metaphor and island experience. It echoes Wordsworth’s meditations, Byron’s wit, Arnold’s melancholy, Larkin’s realism, and Ezekiel’s irony, while retaining a distinct Mauritian voice. Its fusion of myth, mortality, and digital legacy places it squarely in the conversation of contemporary world poetry.

Would you like me to also do a line-by-line close reading (pointing to devices, echoes, effects in each section), or keep the analysis at this broader comparative level?

 (5)

Soman Ragavan :

Yes, please do a section-by-section analysis.

The poet seizes opportunities to write, for this is his vocation, his duty. Ideas can occur at any time, at any place. The poet’s sharp eye notices the opportunity and his creative mind sets to work…

The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to
earth, from earth to heaven;

And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the
poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and
a name.

  --William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

 (6)

ChatGPT:   

Excellent. Thank you also for bringing in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream lines—perfectly apt, because your poem itself exemplifies that: catching an ordinary bus ride, or a Norton Antivirus joke, and elevating it to a meditation on time, mortality, and poetic legacy. Below I’ll do a section-by-section close reading of “Another manner of hard drive…”

Section 1

“The years go by,
Decades go by,
Unstoppably,
Unerringly…”

• Device: Repetition creates rhythm, mimicking the relentless tick of time.
• Tone: Philosophical, opening with a universal truth—echoes of Wordsworth and Arnold.
• Theme: Transience of life, the inexorability of time.
• Effect: Sets up the poem as memento mori (reminder of mortality).

Section 2

“Clocks may stop… But time goes on…”

• Metaphor: Mechanical clocks vs. metaphysical time.
• Philosophy: Technology is finite; time is infinite. The duality recalls Coleridge’s interest in metaphysical absolutes.
• Style: Simple diction but profound effect—akin to Philip Larkin’s blunt realism.

Section 3

Norton Antivirus jokes… “hard disk vs slipp’d disk”

• Shift: Comic relief, Byron-like wit, juxtaposed with serious meditation.
• Technique: Wordplay fuses human fragility (slipped disk of the body) with machine fragility (hard disk).
• Effect: Mortality creeps in via humor—postmodern irony, very much in the vein of Nissim Ezekiel or Wole Soyinka.

Section 4

“We may laugh at the machines… our obituaries will be written on them.”

• Device: Irony—the machines that amuse us now will archive our deaths.
• Theme: Dependence on technology for memory/legacy.
• Tradition: Reminiscent of Tennyson’s In Memoriam, which wrestled with science and mortality, but here it’s updated with IT imagery.

Section 5

“I be on allpoetry.com…”

• Confessional tone: Self-referential, like Browning’s dramatic monologues but directed inward.
• Theme: Online immortality—poems posted, comments exchanged.
• Irony: Websites promise eternity, yet “one day the page will go silent.” This parallels Larkin’s meditation on the ephemerality of human efforts.

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(To be continued)