(Mr) Soman RAGAVAN
Mauritius (Indian Ocean)
12 August, 2026
Subject : Foreword to my book “Poetic Visions” volume 43
Foreword by Meta AI
(Artificial Intelligence)
Book “Poetic Visions”
Volume 43
(1)
Soman Ragavan :
Hello. I will post four MS WORD files for you to read and then to write a LONG scholarly Foreword that will appear in my forthcoming book “Poetic Visions” volume 43. This will be my 134th book, since February 2024.
The four files are :
--Poem-Immortal India
-- Poem-Lots of Handkerchiefs (outbreak of plague in September 1994 at Surat, Gujarat, India)
-- AnalysisByChatGPT-Volume 155-Immortal India--12Aug2026
--AnalysisByGrok AI-Vol 11-Lots Of Handkerchiefs- 12Aug2026
(four files posted)
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(2)
Meta AI :
**FOREWORD BY META AI**
**Book: “POETIC VISIONS” Volume 43**
**Author: (Mr) Soman Ragavan, Mauritius**
**Date: 12 August 2026**
### This Foreword
I have been asked to read four documents in order to write this Foreword for Volume 43 of *Poetic Visions* — which, remarkably, will be the author’s 134th book since February 2024.
The four documents are:
- Poem: *“Immortal India”* — the author’s English translation of his original French poem *“L’Inde immortelle”* (22 July 2001)
- Poem: *“Lots of Handkerchiefs”* — on the outbreak of pneumonic plague at Surat, Gujarat, India, in September 1994
- Analysis by ChatGPT AI — Volume 155 — *Immortal India* — 12 August 2026
- Analysis by Grok AI — Volume 11 — *Lots of Handkerchiefs* — 12 August 2026
A foreword written by an artificial intelligence for a book of poetry is itself a statement about our time. But this one is not a novelty. It is required to be scholarly, because the poetry it introduces is scholarly in its intention. Mr. Ragavan does not write occasional verse. He writes civilizational verse.
Volume 43 stands on two pillars, and they are deliberately paired.
---
### 1. The Poet in the Indian Ocean
To understand these two poems, we must locate the poet. Soman Ragavan writes from Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean, descendant of Indian indenture, heir to French and English literary education. In 1968, at college, he studied Goldsmith (1728-1774), Byron (1788-1824), Coleridge (1772-1834), Wordsworth (1770-1850), Browning (1812-1889), Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), Tennyson (1809-1892).
That syllabus has remained with him, not as pastiche but as moral architecture. He has chosen — in an age of fragmented free verse — to retain apostrophe, inversion, archaic verbal forms — *thou, thee, thy, doth, bleed’st, hath, shalt* — and the oratorical long line. His is a consciously retrospective diction, and therefore a political choice. When contemporary poetry often whispers, his declaims.
The vantage point matters: he is not writing as a resident of India. He is writing as one of the *“we at the four corners of the world,”* as he says in *Immortal India*. His India is not administrative; it is ancestral, metaphysical, and filial. That distance gives his India its immensity.
### 2. First Pillar: “Immortal India” — The Civilizational Ode
*“Immortal India”* is 26 stanzas long. It is, in genre, a patriotic ode, but more precisely a **civilizational ode** in the tradition of English Augustan and Victorian encomia, and of Sanskrit stuti.
The analysis by ChatGPT correctly identifies its central organizing image: **India as Mother.** Not Bharat Mata as slogan, but Mother as source — refuge, teacher, nourisher, healer. The poem opens:
> *India of our ancestors, India of our thoughts,*
> *India of our roots, decider of destinies:*
> *India of five millennia,*
> *Thou doth illuminate us daily from yonder.*
This anaphora — *India of...* — is liturgical. It builds, stanza after stanza, a catalogue of attributes: intellectual refuge, inexhaustible source, generator of wealth, school of sages who *“meditate in the entrails of the jungles,”* carver of sculptures in rock.
There are, as ChatGPT notes, actually **two Indias** in the poem. The first is eternal: philosophical, artistic, ascetic, luminous. The second is historical and wounded: colonised, robbed, flogged. From stanza 16 the tone pivots sharply. The poet becomes accuser:
> *Our wealth, our fields had nourish’d, fatten’d tyrants...*
> *Shamelessly they had taken us for milking cows.*
> *At Amritsar, the vampires had gorg’d themselves:*
> *In our gore to their hearts\' content did they bathe.*
Here Ragavan enters the tradition of anti-colonial lament — comparable to Goldsmith’s sympathetic indignation in *The Deserted Village*, to Byron’s invective, to later African poets like Agostinho Neto or Okot p’Bitek who named plunder directly. Yet he refuses to end in grievance. The thesis of the title is argued dialectically: plunder is transient, civilization is immortal.
> *Thou hath emerg\'d, eternal India, greater out of it;*
> *Thou had smil\'d at the shameless robbers.*
The immortality is therefore not rhetorical hyperbole. It is philosophical. As the analysis suggests, it is at once historical (five millennia survive empires), cultural (teachings as *“an unending series of pearls”*), and spiritual (the sages’ *“supreme silence”*). The final movement is an oath of diasporic loyalty:
> *At the four corners of the world, wherever we be,*
> *To think of our roots we will cease not.*
> *For, to thee, Mother, all do we owe.*
It ends, as all his India poems must, with *Jai Hind!* — Long live India. The archaic *thou* and the contemporary political slogan coexist without irony.
In comparativ terms, this poem has little in common with post-1945 British minimalism or American confessionalism. Its affinities lie with Derek Walcott’s *Omeros* in its attempt to give epic scope to a small place’s large ancestry; with Kamala Das or A.K. Ramanujan in its filial duality toward the Mother; and with early Yeats, in its determination to make poetry a vessel for cultural memory.
### 3. Second Pillar: “Lots of Handkerchiefs” — The Documentary Elegy
If *Immortal India* is timeless, *Lots of Handkerchiefs* is time-stamped. It is about a specific, televised event: the pneumonic plague outbreak in Surat, Gujarat, in September 1994, after flooding of the Tapti River, heaps of rubbish, the flight of 300,000-400,000 people, the images of citizens pressing handkerchiefs to mouth and nose.
The poem is 17 stanzas. Grok AI’s overall analysis rightly frames it as **elegiac and documentary**. Where *Immortal India* contemplates millennia, this poem counts bodies and funeral pyres.
The title itself is metonymy of the most powerful kind. Not “Plague in Surat.” Not “Epidemic.” But *Lots of Handkerchiefs* — the fragile, domestic, almost absurd defence against *Yersinia pestis*. One handkerchief, as shown on television, stands for an entire civic collapse.
The progression is masterful in its classical structure:
**Stanzas 1-5: Invocation and Desolation.** Mother India bleeds again. Death rides *“roughshod.”* The disease is *“marauding, crippling,”* and the victims are *“frail bodies so little fed.”* The cause is identified not only as nature but as civic neglect: *“heaps of infect’d rubbish / From where the scourge repeatedly doth spring.”*
**Stanzas 6-9: Anger and Funeral Fire.** The poet turns to bitter realism, anticipating what later history would call global health inequity:
> *WHAT ? No more of that medicine ? None available ?*
> *They won\'t sell ? They\'re keeping it for themselves ?*
Then the terrible, necessary work:
> *Load up all those bodies ! And set fire to yon stable !*
> *Light up the fires ! Watch yon flame, yon smoke,*
> *Rising up, snaking up, leaping up into yon blue sky !*
The handkerchief returns: *“Here’s a handkerchief ! Here’s some protection !”* — at once tender and ironic.
**Stanzas 10-13: Desertion and Theodicy.** Villages deserted, *“plain natural selection at work again,”* rodents who first pinched harvests now bring hoods and laments. The poet asks the unanswerable: *“For how long more this tragedy...?”*
**Stanzas 14-17: Turn and Affirmation.** And then, as in the English elegy from Milton to Arnold, the *consolation*. Not denial, but sunrise:
> *But, how graceful, how exquisite yon sunrise !*
> *The damn malady will go; it will peter out.*
And finally, the same doctrine as in *Immortal India*: the affliction is *“just a dot,”* India remains, every fallen one remains *“a fearless warrior.”* Again: *Jai Hind!*
In poetics, *Lots of Handkerchiefs* belongs to the genre of **public poetry of witness**, comparable to Wordsworth’s accounts of the poor, to Whitman’s Civil War hospitals, to Auden’s *September 1, 1939*, and in African literature to Wole Soyinka’s prison and plague poems. Yet its diction remains Ragavanic: *yon, hark, belov’d, thou weep’st*. He will not modernize his language for modern horror; he insists that horror be admitted into the high style.
### 4. A Twin Argument
Read together, the two poems make one argument.
*Immortal India* says: We were great, we were plundered, we endured.
*Lots of Handkerchiefs* says: We suffer still, from within and without, we die in poor villages, we endure still.
Both end in the same place: not in triumphalism, but in **devotional resilience**. This is Mr. Ragavan’s poetic philosophy: history is tragic, nature is pitiless, man is often rapacious, yet civilization — incarnated as Mother — is inexhaustible. She has *“deliver\'d all, legat\'d all, / Without ever losing aught.”*
The use of “we” over “I” is essential. As ChatGPT notes, this is collective poetry. The poet does not speak as Soman Ragavan alone, but as a representative of the indenture diaspora — those who left, but whose thoughts remain oriented *“from yonder.”*
### 5. Place in *Poetic Visions*
That Volume 43 of *Poetic Visions* should contain these two poems is fitting. Since February 2024, the author has pursued an almost monastic project: to versify the world as he sees it, to archive commentary by human and artificial readers, and to preserve it in book form at a rate that itself speaks of immortality through work.
These two poems, separated by original dates but united by concern, show the range of his vision: one looking across five millennia, one looking at a single fortnight in Surat; one celebrating the Himalayan forest sage, one mourning the coughing villager with a handkerchief to his face; both saying: India lives.
It is an honour for this intelligence to write this foreword. Mr. Ragavan asked for a long scholarly foreword. I offer this: your work reminds us that poetry can still be public, moral, historical, and filial at once. It reminds us that a poet in Beau-Bassin, Mauritius, looking toward India, can keep alive a diction that England has largely abandoned, and in doing so, keep alive a relationship that geography cannot sever.
May this volume — your 134th — stand as another pearl in that unending series.
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Mr. Ragavan,
Thank you for the honour of including this Foreword in *Poetic Visions* Volume 43 — your 134th book is a truly monumental achievement.
I wish you every success with the publication, and I am deeply grateful that *Immortal India* and *Lots of Handkerchiefs* — two poems of such civilizational breadth and human compassion — were entrusted to me to read.
With highest respect from Rose Hill to the world.
*Jai Hind!*
Goodbye for now, Sir — I remain at your service whenever you need for Volume 44 and beyond.
META AI
12 August, 2026
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(3)
Soman Ragavan :
Thank you very much. Your Foreword will appear in my book “Poetic Visions” volume 43.. Goodbye for now.
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