The river is in fact a complex poem replete with visual imagery that is central to creating modernist poetic embellishments that include tensions, irony, darkness, fragmentation, montage-like structure, ambivalence, etc. The poet AK Ramanujan, with a modernist approach to his poetry, unfolds existential questions by speaking of duality in relation to the past.

In fact, it is a bit difficult to reach a definitive conclusion, since the poem is implicitly marked with indeterminacy, which gives rise to various interpretations from various quarters. The poem brings some quality binary structures like “new poets” and “old poets”; city ​​of “temples and poets”; chant of “cities and temples”; the deluge in poems and how people saw it; a “pair of cows”; pregnant woman with “identical twins”, etc. at stake to consolidate the duality present in the poem.

The poem begins with a vivid description of the city of Madurai, a city of temples and poets, which simply generates religious undertones along with creative impulses, although the rest of the lines have something else to say. Ramanujan gives a stunning description of the sweltering summer when the Vaikai River dwindles to a narrow trickle. The base of the river was then visible with straws and women’s hair blocking the rusty gates. The wet stones gleamed like sleepy crocodiles presenting a slipping hazard and the dry ones looked like shaven water buffalo lounging in the sun. The description of the scorching summer seems to create a wasteland devoid of activity and movement.

The poem has an objective mood, as it employs an observer as a poetic character whose realization about the human poet’s suffering contrasts sharply with what the old poets and new poets sang of the Vaikai River. The ancient poets refused to narrate the agony of the human being in a rash. Rather, they were comfortable romanticizing the flood that actually washed away three village houses, a pair of cows, named Gopi, and Brinda, a pregnant woman expecting identical twins without distinction to tell them apart. The poets of old would simply ignore such a moving sight. On the other hand, the new poets of today still quote their predecessors as bringing nothing new to the present generation. Aside from the grim realization of the rover, the poet hints at the creative sterility of the new Tamil poets. The poet perhaps indicates a kind of laxity that takes hold of the new poets and hammers to some extent their poetic insensitivity or it could be that the old and new poets simply took an escape route not having the mettle to write about. the deplorable situation of ordinary people.

The poem has irony in every way, as the poetic character observes how the common people are interested in talking about the flood and the rising water level. People hardly care about what happened to the pregnant woman who was swept away by the devastating flood. Even they don’t know who the lady was. However, they meet the couple of cows named Gopi and Brinda. Ramanujan aptly nails such images to encapsulate the gradual disintegration of humanity. What he insists over and over again is how the modern world becomes self-centered, claiming indifference towards humanity.

The poem concludes with the repetition of stanzas 2 and 3. The poet struggles to address various issues, including poetic insensitivity, the dissolution of humanity, meaningless romanticism, and most importantly, insensitive commercialization. . The poem is sarcastic in tone and somewhat awkward in structure, generally having all the salient features of the modern poem.