Kamala Das’ Greatness in Technique of Writing Poems:
Poetic Style in the poetry of Kamala Das reveals an impressive mastery of English, handled with striking ease and confidence. She has developed a distinct manner of expression marked by conversational straightforwardness and transparency.
Her vocabulary is extensive, and she possesses a sharp sensitivity to the exact meanings and subtle nuances of words. For an Indian poet composing in English, such linguistic command is fundamental, and in her case, English is the language she knows most intimately.
It becomes the natural medium through which she conveys her emotions, memories, desires, sexual experiences, frustrations, and disillusionments with great skill. In her hands, English becomes a truthful reflection of her inner life.
Her Selection of Words:
Gifted and mature in her craft, Kamala Das can summon words from a rich linguistic treasury, yet she refuses to wait for them to settle. She writes in the fiery urgency of emotion, not in the quiet when the “right” words drift into place.She says:
“Write without
A pause, don’t search for pretty words
Which dilute the truth, but write in haste, of
Everything perceived, and known and loved.” (Without A Pause)
Her Recognising the Value and Importance of Words:
When a thought sparks within her, the right words rise to meet it. This does not imply any casual handling of language; she is acutely aware of its weight and resonance. She chooses expressions that most faithfully and vividly capture the pulse of her feelings. Her poems become structures built from the most fitting words, arranged with deliberate artistry. Several instances in her work illuminate this distinctive quality of her craft:
“Puny, these toy-men of dust, fathers of light
Dust-children, but their hands like the withered boughs
Of some mythic hoodoo tree cast only
Cool shadows, and with native grace bestow
Even on unbelievers vast shelters.” (The House-Builders)
The terms “puny,” “toy-men,” and “dust-children” emphasise the smallness and apparent insignificance of the house-builder. Yet, beneath this outward frailty lies a deeper human worth—one overlooked by the wealthy, who consider themselves the “fathers of light.” Their delicate, vulnerable condition becomes visually striking through the image of “hands like withered branches.”
A Felicity of Diction and Phrase-making:
Kamala Das’s diction is remarkable for its precision and the graceful way in which she positions each word within her poems. Her verse overflows with vivid, evocative expressions such as “fiery gulmohur,” “sun-stained cheek,” “puddles of desire,” “the skin’s lazy hungers,” “an empty cistern,” “coiling snakes of silence,” “flamboyant lust,” “the hungry haste of rivers,” “the ocean’s tireless waiting,” and “pock-marked face.” These striking images not only illuminate her emotional landscape but also mirror her shifting moods with authenticity. Her choice of vocabulary is always closely aligned with the themes she explores, revealing her mastery of purposeful, theme-driven diction.
The Use of Several Remarkable Words, Phrases and Lines in “The Freaks”:
In this poem, Kamala portrays her husband’s mouth as a “dark cavern,” where the glint of her uneven teeth becomes visible. She notes that both their minds were inclined to hurry toward love as they lay side by side, yet their thoughts merely drifted, stumbling lightly over shallow pools of desire. She goes on to say that her skin’s languid cravings were indeed stirred by her husband’s touch, though the sensation failed to awaken anything more profound within her. Throughout these images, the choice of words is not only fitting but remarkably effective and even graceful.
Her Capacity to Use the right Words in the Poems Entitled The Sunshine Cat, The Invitation and Looking Glass:
In the poem entitled The Sunshine Cat, she calls her husband a ‘ruthless watcher’ and she describes herself as ‘burrowing her face’ into the hairy chests of her lovers. As she lies weeping, her bed becomes soft on account of the profusion of her tears and it seems to her that she is ‘building walls with tears’. In the poem entitled The Invitation, she says, “The sea is garrulous today”, and she later speaks of “this whiplash of memories”. In the poem entitled Looking Glass, she uses the phrase “the warm shock of menstrual blood” and the “endless female hungers”.
Her providing a Personal Touch and Intense Emotions to Her Style:
Kamala Das evolved a remarkable poetic voice—informal, conversational, fluid, and delicately expressive—which perfectly complements the confessional tone of her work. She does not concern herself with traditional themes of love or nature; instead, her poetry turns inward. She writes solely from the core of her own experiences, giving her language an intimate, personal resonance. Notice the plainness and effortless colloquial rhythm in the passage below, through which her deepest feelings find direct expression.
“Another’s name brings tears, your’s
A calm, and a smile, and yet Gautama,
That other owns me; while your arms hold
My woman-form, his hurting arms
Hold my very soul.” (An Apology to Gautama)
Her using Repetitive Vocabulary:
Kamala Das often employs a distinctive stylistic technique: she repeats words, phrases, and sometimes entire segments of her poems. This strategy works effectively, as the repetition strengthens and highlights particular ideas or emotions. For example:
“…wide skirts going round and round Cymbals
Richly clashing, and anklets jingling, jingling.
Jingling……” (The Dance of Eunuchs)
“No more night, no more love, or peace only
The white, white sun burning, burning, burning.” (The Testing of Sirens)
In the poem Substitute, the repeated phrase “It will be all right” serves as a powerful poetic device. Interestingly, the insistence on these words emphasizes a sense of doubt rather than reassurance, highlighting a hidden anxiety beneath the surface.
Similarly, in An Apology to Gautama, the poet’s profound longing for affection becomes unmistakable through the thrice-repeated declaration of love: “I must hear you say, I love, I love, I love.” The repetition underscores her emotional desperation and desire for affirmation.
In the final lines of An Introduction, the persistent use of the pronoun “I” becomes a strong assertion of the poetess’ own self-hood and individuality, reinforcing her quest for identity and personal voice.
“It is I who drink lonely
Drinks at twelve, midnight, in hotels of strange towns,
It is I who laugh, it is I who make love
And then, feel shame, it is I who lie dying
With a rattle in my throat. I am sinner,
I am saint. I am the beloved and the Betrayed.”
Omission of Punctuation marks and the varying Length of Lines:
Kamala Das’ poems often appear challenging to the average reader because she frequently leaves out punctuation. Commas, quotation marks, and other such signs are regularly absent from her work. Her poems also display striking irregularity in line length—some lines stretch out, others are extremely brief, and a few consist of only one or two words, which can make the sentences feel disorienting. At times, she even omits capital letters at the beginnings of lines, adding further to the unconventional structure of her poetry.
The Use of Images and Symbols:
Kamala Das builds her imagery out of everyday experiences and ordinary surroundings, using them to illuminate the contours of her own life. Through these images, she expresses her unmet desires, her longings and physical cravings, her turmoil, emptiness, and emotional pain. Feelings of barrenness, weariness, illness, sorrow, and even a yearning for death take shape in her symbols of the human body, the sun and the heart, scenes of burial and burning, elements of nature, acts of love and sleep, and the enduring legend of Radha and Krishna.
Kamala Das often turns to the human body as a central symbol in her poetry. She is drawn to the splendour and elegance of physical form, yet simultaneously repelled by its overwhelming sensuality. In her work, desire can quickly transform the body into a site of decay and moral corruption. Her aversion toward the masculine physique—seen as a force that crushes female purity and personal identity—appears through stark, unsettling imagery.
The male lover who seeks only physical pleasure, neglecting the emotional needs of the woman, is depicted with grotesque features: his face is scarred and unattractive, a “filthy snob” in The Testing of Sirens; his mouth becomes a shadowy cave with jagged teeth glinting inside, as in The Freaks; his lips shrivel like drying petals, while his cheeks appear scorched and his hair resembles brittle grass in The Seashore. In another poem, The Stone Image, he is likened to an obese, aged spider spinning webs of confusion and entrapment.
The female anatomy is described through image of sterility and barrenness, of pathos and loneliness. The beloved’s heart is “an empty cistern, waiting/through long hours, to fill itself/with coiling snakes of silence”. (The Freaks). The woman-body is an image of sexual exploitation, ‘of skin’s lazy hungers’:
“He did not beat me
But my said woman body fell so beaten.
The weight of my breasts and womb crushed me.”
In The Looking Glass, Kamala Das portrays the female form—its curves, softness, and sensual details—not as a symbol of affection, but as something men often reduce to a vessel for their own desire. The poem presents both male and female bodies as instruments through which physical appetite, rather than emotional connection, is enacted. The woman’s body, described with its inherent elegance and fragility, is shown as being expected to yield before the assertive presence of the male body.
“All the fine details that make
Him male and your only man. Gift him all,
Gift him what makes you woman, the scent of
Long hair, the musk of sweat between the breasts,
The warm shock of menstrual blood, and all your
Endless female hungers.”
