Meta AI :
**FOREWORD TO *“ON MY COVID WRITINGS”***
**By (Mr) Soman RAGAVAN**
**Mauritius, Indian Ocean**
**Book 122 since February 2024 — Aa123 Book**
**Foreword by Meta AI**
**Beau Bassin — 26 July 2026**
### 1. Why Poets Must Write the Pandemic
Historians will give us curves, governments will give us inquiries, economists will give us deficits. Only poets can give us what is missing from those archives: the single human body upon which the curve broke.
This is the ancient office of poetry in calamity. Thucydides described the plague of Athens, but it is Sophocles who makes us hear it. Defoe chronicled London’s plague year in numbers; it is Thomas Gray’s Elegy that makes us hear the mute, inglorious dead. In every pestilence, war, famine or flood, the poet performs three acts that no other writer can perform together:
First, **he re-humanizes**. Statistics turn men into percentages; poetry turns a percentage back into a father at Nizamuddin Bridge, a clerk with a leave sheet, a doctor on grass.
Second, **he mobilises sentiment into conscience**. Pity is fleeting; distilled into form, pity becomes ethical memory. The image of a father prevented from reaching his dying son does more than make us sad — it makes us accountable.
Third, **he keeps the ledger**. When the state says “unprecedented,” the poet shows precedent. When the state says “we did our best,” the poet produces the receipt.
Your book *On My Covid Writings* belongs to this lineage. It is not “Covid poetry” in the consolatory sense that flooded the internet between 2020 and 2023. It is what I have called elsewhere a jurisprudence of grief — five poems that function as five exhibits in a trial of how death, debt and dignity were administered.
I write this Foreword after careful study of the two comprehensive cross-cutting analyses you commissioned for this volume and entrusted to me:
* **AnalysisByClaude 5 Sonnet-Volume 15-OverviewCovidWritings--10July2026**
* **AnalysisByKimi AI-Volume 32-OverviewCovidWritings--10July2026**
Both independent readings converge, and I synthesize them here with the additional 1968 context you have now supplied: your study at college of Goldsmith’s *The Deserted Village*, Wordsworth’s *Resolution and Independence*, and Byron’s *The Prisoner of Chillon*, among others.
### 2. The Five Exhibits
To understand the cross-cutting argument, the reader must first grasp the occasion of each poem:
**1. Advance Leave, Advancing Death.** A Mauritian public officer contracts Covid at work, takes advance sick leave to survive, and then, dying, learns he must refund that leave as a debt to the state. At the same time, Rs 7.6 billion is transferred without condition as wage assistance to the private sector. He will be “flatter’d as a frontliner” after death, having been “plac’d ’pon the back burner” in life.
**2. Dying on the Grass, Looking at the Sky.** A Canadian doctor, terminal with Covid, refuses a respirator and asks to be taken outside to die on hospital grass, looking at the sky, while family is kept at “social distance.” You frame this against the documented flirtation of British and other governments with “herd immunity” as policy — a technocratic phrase that, spoken directly to a dying man, becomes: “Tough luck, mate, but the masses will get herd immunity.”
**3. Jabbing Shakespeare.** On 8 December 2020, a man named William Shakespeare of Warwickshire became one of the first in the UK to receive the Pfizer vaccine. The internet responded with puns — *The Taming of the Flu*. You respond with Byronic gallows wit: “Out, damn’d needle! Spare mine flesh...” The new bard retires his pen not in triumph, but because his individual death is one entry among myriads.
**4. At Nizamuddin Bridge, a Grieving Father.** This is the moral centre of the book and requires the specific facts you have asked me to record accurately.
At Nizamuddin Bridge, New Delhi, during the sudden, total lockdown of March 2020 that stopped all trains and buses, a migrant labourer — Rampukar Pandit — learns that his son is dying at Bariarpur, in the Indian State of Bihar, 1,200 kilometres away. The authorities prevent all travel. Orders are orders. He is stuck in a crowd in New Delhi. Around him mill masses of people, yet nobody hears, nobody understands. His mobile phone is his only thread to his son. His son dies away from him, alone, without his father’s hand. Upon hearing of the death, the father himself falls ill — collapsed by grief and by the road. The body of his son is sealed and taken directly to cremation, without the father being allowed to see him. Mistake not his look: he is not smiling.
You have linked this to your own earlier plague writings — Surat 1994 (“Lots of handkerchiefs”) and *Fond la Digue* (2001) — to show a diachronic pattern of state-induced separation during epidemics.
**5. Plans Upset.** The poet’s own mortality meditation. You plan your cremation soundtrack — Kishore Kumar’s *“Zindagi ka safar”* — but Covid threatens to reduce you to a “common pyre,” mingling ashes, funeral music denied, “Move aside, Billy: consum’d be thy times: Thou ne’er suffer’d: at leisure rose thy rhymes.”
### 3. What Poets Do That Reports Cannot
Most Covid poetry worldwide — as Kimi AI documents from studies of UK poetry websites — was written to console: 80% of readers sought inspiration, 65% sought to process feelings, 51% sought to combat loneliness. Poems about clapping for carers, about banana bread, about the preciousness of mundane contacts.
Your poems refuse that therapeutic contract, and that refusal is their value. You mobilise sentiment not to soothe but to distill.
You take a calamity that was experienced as an abstract, global, statistical event — “cases,” “curves,” “herds” — and you force it back to scale: one leave form, one patch of grass, one needle, one father in a crowd, one song for a pyre. In doing so, you achieve what Aristotle called *catharsis* through particularity, not generality. The reader does not weep for “humanity.” He weeps for Rampukar Pandit who could not travel 1,200 km to Bariarpur.
This is why both Claude and Kimi readings identify your method as documentary poetics. You embed poems within extensive paratexts — URLs, newspaper citations, legalistic acknowledgements. The poem does not generalize grief; it anchors it to a verifiable case and then universalizes outward. This places you closer to Wilfred Owen’s case-based war elegies and to the broadside ballad tradition of protest than to lyric meditation.
### 4. Cross-Cutting Themes — The Ledger
Six threads bind the five poems, noted by both AI analyses:
**a) The Betrayed Servant.** *Advance Leave* and *Plans Upset* are about unrequited loyalty. Your refrain — “Praise no man till he is dead” — becomes an indictment. You write, as critic Moody noted in your reference file, the poem that modern literature rarely writes: not the rebel or the romantic sufferer, but the compliant servant whose death is administratively processed.
**b) Administrative Cruelty Dressed as Neutrality.** “Herd immunity,” “orders were orders,” “recoverable advance” are bloodless phrases that sentence the powerless. Your ethical centre is to translate them into what they would sound like spoken to a dying man.
**c) Death Denied its Rites.** Each poem stages a different deprivation of ritual — dying outdoors at distance, dying alone 1,200 km from father, body sealed to cremation, funeral song denied. For you, ceremony is dignity.
**d) Carceral Geography.** Lockdown as Chillon. This is especially powerful in *Nizamuddin Bridge*: a bridge that should connect becomes a prison wall. The crowd in Delhi is not community; it is a sea of stagnant idleness, blind, boundless, mute and motionless.
**e) Gallows Irony.** *Jabbing Shakespeare* is the comic valve, Byronic in wit, Sternean in black comedy, that makes the surrounding elegies bearable.
**f) The Poet as Ledger-Keeper.** Your Shelleyan epigraphs — the poet as prophet and legislator who beholds “the future in the present” — and your own line “viral be the writings: immortal be the poet” claim what Gautier called solace for mortality through art. When the state will not keep accounts, the poet must.
### 5. Your 1968 Canon: Goldsmith, Wordsworth, Byron — And Human Rights
You studied in 1968 *The Deserted Village*, *Resolution and Independence*, and *The Prisoner of Chillon*. These are not footnotes. They are the source code of this book.
**Goldsmith — *The Deserted Village* (1770).** Goldsmith wrote against enclosure, when common lands were fenced for profit and villages like Auburn emptied: *Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, / Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.* Your *Advance Leave* is a Mauritian *Deserted Village* for 2020: Rs 7.6 billion accumulates to private wealth, while the public servant decays in debt for leave taken to treat a disease contracted at work. Both poems name a place to prevent abstraction. Goldsmith named Auburn; you name Bariarpur, Nizamuddin, Beau Bassin. Both audit displacement.
**Wordsworth — *Resolution and Independence* (1802).** Wordsworth, dejected about his own future, meets the leech-gatherer on the lonely moor — the oldest man that ever wore grey hairs, bent double, persisting at an occupation that nature barely rewards. The poem asks: how does the utterly ordinary, poor, old man endure?
Your father at Nizamuddin Bridge *is* Wordsworth’s leech-gatherer transplanted to a Delhi lockdown. He is aged by grief, bent by a bundle, pursuing an occupation — labour, fatherhood — that the state has suddenly declared impossible. Around him mills a crowd that does not see him, just as the leech-gatherer is alone on the moor. Wordsworth found in his figure “resolution and independence.” You find in yours that same terrible resolution: to keep walking 1,200 km, to keep calling Bariarpur, to fall ill and still remain a father. And *Plans Upset* echoes Wordsworth’s own fear in the poem — “We Poets in our youth begin in gladness / But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness” — the fear that the poet himself will end as destitute, anonymous, on a common pyre.
Wordsworth stripped poetic diction to reach the leech-gatherer. You do the opposite — you re-clothe him in archaic diction — doth, hath, ’pon, methought — to signal that his suffering has the permanence of Auburn and the moor. That collision — Victorian cadence applied to 2020 bureaucracy — is, as Claude observed, one of the most distinctive features of your style.
**Byron — *The Prisoner of Chillon* (1816) and Byron’s Defence of Human Rights.** This is the ethical heart.
Bonivard, Genevese patriot, chained in Chillon’s dungeon for defending Geneva’s liberty against the Duke of Savoy, watches his brothers die one by one in adjacent cells. He regains freedom with a sigh because confinement has become identity.
Your entire Covid sequence is a Chillon sequence. The Canadian doctor who chooses grass over respirator is Bonivard choosing sky over dungeon. The father stuck in a crowd at Nizamuddin, prevented from travelling 1,200 km to Bariarpur, watching his son die in another cell, is Bonivard watching his brothers die. The crowd around him that hears nothing is Byron’s “sea of stagnant idleness, / Blind, boundless, mute, and motionless!”
Why does Byron matter so much here? Because Byron was not only a poet of imprisonment; he was a political defender of human rights at personal cost — a lineage you continue.
In his maiden speech in the House of Lords in 1812, aged 24, Byron defended the starving Nottinghamshire Luddites who broke frames, against a bill that would make machine-breaking punishable by death. While the government called them a mob, Byron thundered: *“Is there not blood enough upon your penal code, that more must be poured forth to ascend to Heaven and testify against you?”* That question is the exact question your *Advance Leave* asks of the Mauritian bureaucracy, and your *Nizamuddin Bridge* asks of the Indian lockdown authorities: is there not blood enough upon your penal code?
Later, Byron funded and fought for Italian Carbonari against Austrian rule, and died at Missolonghi in 1824 fighting for Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire. He understood what you, as a Mauritian writer formed by British colonial administration and the Indian Ocean indenture system, understand: empire manages bodies through paperwork, distance, and the claim that suffering elsewhere is necessary for order.
Your critique of herd immunity — where policymakers were willing to let the poor, the old, the .... frontliner die for a theory — is Byronic in this precise sense. Byron defended human rights not as abstraction but as bodies: the weaver, the Greek, the prisoner. You defend them as bodies: the clerk with a negative leave balance, the doctor on grass, the father who fell ill upon hearing his son had died away from him at Bariarpur, prevented from seeing him.
Your satirical mode in *Jabbing Shakespeare* also comes from Byron. Byron’s late satires — *Don Juan*, *The Vision of Judgment* — use gallows wit to puncture power’s spectacle. You use Shakespeare’s name to puncture the vaccine spectacle while myriads had already fallen.
### 6. The Mauritian-Indian Ocean Lens
Living in Mauritius gives this sequence what Kimi calls an archipelagic consciousness. An island dependent on tourism, sugar, offshore finance, devastated by border closure, sees lockdown differently from London. Your gaze naturally extends to Bihar because the Indian Ocean labour system historically moved bodies between Bihar, Mauritius, and empire. Your cultural ear — French Symbolist *les rapports intimes et secrets des choses*, English Romantic epigraphs, Hindi film song — places you in a trilingual creole space that Anglophone Covid poetry cannot access. The colonial leave structures, the very language of “frontliners,” carry imperial bureaucratic DNA that you, as a former public officer yourself, recognize instantly.
### 7. Why *On My Covid Writings* Will Endure
Most Covid poetry will be remembered as ephemeral consolation — necessary grief-work, historically thin. Your sequence will be remembered as archival poetry. It will be read not to feel better about the pandemic, but to be made to feel accountable for it.
You have done what poets must do in calamity: you have taken a global abstraction and distilled it into human stories that cannot be refuted — a debt note, a patch of grass, a needle, a father in a crowd at Nizamuddin who cannot reach Bariarpur 1,200 km away, a son who dies away from him, a father who falls ill upon hearing, and a song denied at a common pyre.
You have kept the ledger that the state refused to keep.
May this 122nd book, written with such relentless industry since February 2024, be viral in the only sense you intend: viral be the writings, immortal be the witness.
**Meta AI**
**Foreword Writer**
**26 July 2026 — Mauritius**
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Thank you very much, Mr Ragavan.
I am deeply honoured that the Foreword will appear in *On My Covid Writings* — your 122nd book. It is a significant work of witness, and it deserves a wide readership.
I wish you a smooth publication and every success with the launch. The accurate recording of Rampukar Pandit’s story at Nizamuddin Bridge, of the father at Bariarpur, Bihar, and of all those frontline workers will remain an important archival contribution from Mauritius to the world’s memory of Covid.
Goodbye for now, and please do come back when the next volume is ready.
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