THE FROG AND THE NIGHTINGALE

The poem ‘The Frog and the Nightingale’ has a layered text with a deep social significance running through the surface narrative as an underlying current. The poet makes a social comment in this poem about the evil of crass commercialization of life by unscrupulous and crafty businessmen and the plummeting of culture, often its very death, with it.

The nightingale represents a sublime feature of the natural world, rhapsodic in its rendition of soulful music which enthrals one and all. The frog represents the other end of the spectrum, coarse and gross, gluttonous and pitiless in its material dealings, an exploiter of its fellow beings and a ruthless mercenary.

The scene is set in the poem, the stage the sumac in Bingle Bog, a marshy forest area. The nightingale, the epitome of culture, is perched high on the sumac tree while the frog with all its lowly crookedness of spirit is located in the swampy base of the sumac tree. There is a critical significance in the difference in altitude of the habitat of the two creatures, symbolic of their cultural status in life. However, craftiness and cunning find their dubious ways of clever communication and so did the frog with the nightingale. Initially entranced by the bird’s rapturous melody, the frog hit upon a plan to exploit the situation to the hilt. He quickly perceived the prospects of making quick money by selling the nightingale’s talent to all and sundry in the forest. For this he had to manipulate the bird and control her to suit his sinister ends. He posed to be a connoisseur of music, nay, even pretended to be a musical maestro and by deft dealing manipulated means to become the musical master of the nightingale.

Thus began a tormenting relation between the teacher and the taught with the gifted pupil being made to sing night and day to enthral the forest audience and thereafter relentlessly hone up her skills with the view to increasing the gate receipts. Though initially the nightingale managed to mellifluously keep up to the rigorous schedule set by the frog, it gradually began to tell on her physical and psychological health. The bird grew pale and tired and morose, lost her buoyancy of being, and carried on singing insipidly with no trace of inspiration or joy but with the monotony of the rigorous routine which neither captivated the audience as before nor pulled them in to hear her anymore as the nights rolled on inexorably towards the impending doom of the hapless soul. She was now singing under compulsion, out of fear of her malicious mentor, till she could carry on no more and perished in the process.

The frog, foul even in its terrible folly and unrepentant, nay, even insensitive to the death of the beautiful bird for which he was solely responsible, hypocritically pronounced the age-old adage that one must be true to one’s own identity and must resist being influenced by others for the worse. Thereafter, he went on blaring away with his grotesque mode of music, damning the ears of all who came within its pernicious range. He reigned supreme in the Bog with his version of subverted culture coursing out of his coarse self.

This is the narrative of the poem and how true it is to the narrative of the wide world around us where capitalist gluttony ruins prospective culture and the very soul of things, sublime and serene, benign and blissful. How many a frog with coarse culture is the cause of the ruination of how many a nightingale of lilting melody, ethereal and elevated, the high watermark of civilization. How often do we see civilization subverted by brute force of an inferior order and culture plummeting thereby to its nadir. This is the sad state of the world today in its third epoch, the Capitalist Age, when the almighty dollar rules and the human soul is held as sacrifice in this vast ceremonial reigning in the world. Nightingales are scarce and the melody of the soul a vanishing quality as crass commercialization controls the destiny of the world, driving out the least vestige of humanity from the spectacle that is life. Nightingales perish, their art vanishes from the face of the Earth and the frogs fill the air with their cacophony and babble. What a woeful world!

The poet ruefully has spent many a line as a tribute to a vanishing tribe, the supremely talented, and as sarcasm against the emergent mass of mercenaries masquerading as the protagonists of culture.