4

AMRITA PRITAM’S THE REVENUE

STAMPA CRITCAL STUDY

This chapter discusses about Amrita Pritam’s life as depicted in her autobiography
‘The Revenue stamp’. Amrita as a poet and fiction writer is known in the country but the
Revenue Stamp has added a new height in her prestige as a writer. It is a journey of
emotions covered with literary expressions.

4.1 Amrita Pritam: A profile

This is a study of an autobiography of a woman who evolves from a

sentimental girl to an emotional woman and then to a passionate individual. Amrita Pritam
is considered as the first renowned poet, essayist and novelist of Punjabi literature. Amrita
was the first prominent poet of Punjabi literature, migrated to India from Lahore after the
India Pakistan partition in the year 1947. She was the only child of a poet and schoolteacher,
Kartar sings Hitkari.

She is most remembered for her poignant poem, ‘AjjAkhaan Waris Shah’
(Today I Invoke Warish Shah)an elegy to the 18th century Punjabi poet, an expression of her
anguish over massacres during the partition of India. As a novelist,she noted worked was
Pinjar (theSkelaon) 1950, in which she has created her memorable character, Pure, and an
epitome of violence against women. The novel was made an award winning film, Pinjar, in
2003.

1
 Known as the most important voice in Punjabi Literature, she became first
woman to win the Sahitya Akadami award for her poem Sunehre (message) later she
received Bharatiya Gynanpith, one of the India’s highest literary award.

The Padmashree was awarded to her in 1969 and finally Padma Vibhushan,
India’s highest civilian award in 2004.I n 1982, In ‘Kagaz Te Canvass’ (the paper And
Canvass) in 2004. She was honored with India’s highest literary award Sahitya academy of
letters, the Sahitya Academy Fellowship given to the immortal literature for her life time
achievements.

4.2 The Revenue Stamp: A critical study

The 'Revenue Stamp' is the book that confirms her artistic skills. It is an
affirmation of the life she lived as a woman and as a poet; her autobiography is her stamp on
the cognitive life vision of a woman, who has not only loved poetry, but also lived poetry.
The Revenue Stamp reflects her rebellious ideas; it is an expression of romantic mind and
the sufferings of woman in her.

The Revenue Stamp is an autobiography in the sense of the word, since it is

self-discovery of a mind. Amrita reveals an uncommon sense of self-analysis with no
conscious regard for social criteria of moral judgments. Being a poet, she maintains the
grace of her creativity while narrating the story of her life. Her vision of life is broad enough
to make her story the 'Stamp of Truth.' Her unusual feminine awareness explores a process
of development and she visualizes this process as a fulfillment of her quest for life.

Amrita Pritam was born on 31 August 1919 at Gujranwala, Punjab, now in

Pakistan, the only child of a schoolteacher and a poet. Her father was a pracharak, a
preacher of the Sikh faith. Amrita's mother died when she was eleven and there after she and
her father moved to Lahore. She was eleven years old and had not developed the sense of
reciprocity by then with either of her parents. She suffered a profound feeling of loneliness,
since she had no brother or sister to share her grief.

In her sixteen year, Amrita started writing love poems secretly and tore them,
as she was afraid of her father. He encouraged her to write poems but only on religious and
patriotic matters. Her father represents the patriarch of discipline and orderliness of life.
Amrita has no option but to follow the orders obediently. Apparently, she was praying to
show obedience to her father, but actually was thinking and visualizing about her friend
whom she had named 'Raj'. Her inner self was already moving towards the unconventional
ideas.

At the age of four, Amrita was engaged and was a teenager of sixteen when
she was married off to Pritam Singh of Lahore. Thus, the name 'Pritam' was suffixed to her
name from 1935 She married Pritam Singh an Editor, to whom she was engaged in early
childhood and changed her name to Amrita Pritam. Half A dozen poems were to follow in
as many years between 1936 and 1943.Though, she began her journey as a romantic poet
soon he sifted gear and became part of the progressive writers movrment and its effect was
seen in her Look Peed (peoples anguish) 1944, which was openly criticized. Amrita started
working at Lahore and Delhi Radio stations, as an announcer and writing poems, stories,
novels, articles on various themes.

At the age of 28, she left Lahore at the time of partition she moved to Delhi
as a refugee. Here she expressed her anguish on a piece of paper as the poem,” Ajj Akhaan
Warish Shah nu”,‘I as a Warish Shah today;’ this poem became the most immortal work of
her creations and became the most poignant reminder of the horrors and violence of
partition. The poem addressed to Sufi poet Warish Shah Author of the tragic saga Heer and
Ranjha and with whom she share her birth place some excerpts of the poem is like this,

‘’ Ajj Aakaanwaris Shah Nun keiton Kabraan Vichchon vol,

Te Ajj Kitab-e-Ishq Daa Agla varkaphol UtahDard Dia uthtak apane Punjab,

Ajjbele Lakhan Bicchian Te Ik Roi Si di Punjab DiTu likh mare vane

Ajj Lakahann Dhian Rondia Tainan Warish Shsh Khain Lahu Di Bhari Chenab.”1

English Version’’; Today I call Warish shah speak from your grave and turn
Today, the book of love next affectionate page once a daughter of Punjab cried and you
wrote availing saga Today a million Daughters cry to you Warish shah Rise! O narrator of
the graving: rise1Look at your Punjab today, fields are lined with copses, and blood fills the
Chenab.
 Amrita worked until 1961, in the Punjabi service of All India Radio, Delhi.
After her divorce in 1960, her worked became more clearly feminist. Many of her stories
and poems drew on the unhappy experience of her marriage. A number of her works have
been translated into English, French, Danish and Japanese including autobiographical works
‘Black Rose’ and ‘Revenue Stamp ‘written in Punjabi. The first Amrita Pritam book to be
filmed was Dharti sagar slippiyan, as Kadambari as dakku. (Dacoit 1976directed by Basu
Bhattacharya. Chandra Prakash Dvewedi made her novel Pinjar, (The skeleton) into an
award winning Hindi movie because of its humanism.

Amrita is the first recipient of Punjabi Ratna Award conferred upon her by
Punjab Chief minister cap. Amrindar Singh and Sahitya Akadami fellowship, India’s
highest literary award in 2004. She has received DLitt honorary degrees from many
universities including Delhi University1973 Jabalpur University 1973 and vishwa Bharti
1983. In her career, over six decades penned 28 novels, 18 anthologies of poetry, 5 short
Stories and 16 miscellaneous prose volumes.

She was influenced by the poems of Sahir Ludhianvi the great Urdu poet. He
had a deep impact on her creative mind. During her student life, she had pasted the
examination of 'Vidawanee' in 1932 and 'Gyanee' in 1933. Her first collection of poems
'Amrit Lahare' in was published in 1936.

Amrita's autobiography 'The Revenue Stamp' was first published in 1976.

There are vivid pictures of her memories related meaningfully to the outer events and the
inner experiences. The book consists of six chapters entitle as
(1) Resurrecting time
(2) 'Meeting with centuries'
(3) Ordeal by fire
(4) In silence passion smote
(5) The phoenix dynasty and
(6) On one palm Henna,
On the other Blisters. The autobiography introduces a
decision theme; the writer’s deep impulse for the inward dimensions of the self, springing
from the compulsion to mediate and introspect.
 The Revenue Stamp is an extraordinary example of contemplative and
indulgent interpretation of her life, depicting the acquisition of her outlook. It is the
illumination of that sense of self-discovery, by the writer of which she was not fully aware
before she began to write.

An autobiography is usually expected to begin with the details of one's birth,

native place, description of parents and childhood. The autobiographer takes back imprints
of life from the earliest memories in childhood constitutes the original phase of life and of
autobiography. The Revenue Stamp begins in the usual way, stating the times, climate of
society as backdrop to her birth and childhood she traces back the source of her mental
structure of ideas, traits and tendencies to her childhood. She does not open her life story in
the past tense; but the beginning of her self-narrative with dramatically exclaimed
interrogative, actually questions the pastures of the past. She has entitled the first chapter
'Resurrecting Time' it starts:

‘’Is it doomsday? Moments of my life in the womb of time, lived a while and after the

span of time, seemingly entombed are today alive again, stalk past me.’’2

The lost childhood 'Seemingly entombed' can become a part of the present
alive existence, in the process of recollection and contemplation for autobiography. The
memories of childhood lie buried in the 'womb of time' but never die. She recalls how she
had a troubled sense of truth and its utterance right from her childhood:

"I never told an untruth to father; I can never lie to myself either "3

Amrita never told lie to her father to find herself 'the master' after the father
to whom she had always speak the truth, she confesses her first revolt to the fathers creed,
when her faith in God was shaken. She had offered a prayer to God during her mother's
sickness for her longer life and recover but her mother passed away. She refused to follow
the routine of prayer and argued with her father for the first time.

"I burst out in red-hot rage, God heeds no one, not even children … there is no
God"
 'You mustn’t say that'
'He has ways of showing his worth'
'Let Him! But how can he when he isn’t there?'
'How do you know?'
'Would He not have heard me…?
Had He been anywhere! I said please don’t let
my Motherdies.'
'Is He deaf?”4

It was the first moment of disillusionment and Amrita Pritam gave up all her
practice of routine prayer and meditation. This proves that rebellion is rooted in the soil of
discontent, disillusionment and disabling circumstances. Being a very emotional girl she
found it very difficult to be alone and happy. She inclined to imagine a companion who
would protects her everywhere. Her analysis is automatically profound to explicate the rise
of artist in her,

"I began writing and it seems to me that I wrote because I wanted to forget those

moments of rejection I felt in him …In addition, an every poem I wrote I carried the cross of

forbidden desires … My rebellious thoughts pushed me, giving me no peace. "5

Not that her father objected to her act of writing poems but he expected her
to compose either religion poems or conventional ones and she had no courage initially to
break his expectations. Catherine Brown has a relevant generalization about woman's
expression when she remarks,

"In a very obvious mode, a woman is expected to be attractive but passive, shy and

homely, up to the extent of timidity rather than assertive, active or competitive. Most woman

writers unconsciously adopt the expected image and find them guilty often whenever they

encounter bold decision or attitude in their own experience. "6

 To make her father happy, she wrote some orthodox poems and presented
herself, "like an obedient child". However, her real spirit conquered her presentation soon
and she explicitly started asserting her individuality. She recalls her,

"I questioned parental authority, I questioned the value of doing my work at school

by vote; I questioned what had been preached to me and I questioned the entire stratified

social scheme… I was thirsty for life… what I got instead was advice and constraint, which

only fed my rebellion.”7

Amrita's penetrations of how those small things and events in childhood

affected her development are so accurate that one cannot doubt her capacity of her
psychological penetration she ponders.

"I suppose everyone goes through this phase. However, it happened to me with three
time's greater impact. First, there was the drabness of middle class morality; then; the
dosage of 'don'ts' thrust down my throat, which somehow I felt I would have been spared,
had my mother been alive. There was the over bearing presentation of my father, a man
of religion.”8

The seed of her creativity and rebellious was thus down in her childhood and
teenage agony; this agony was resultant of loneliness and lack of love. Amrita's childhood
and youth passed without any great event except the loss of her mother with whom she also
lost her faith in God. A woman's life related to love in various forms. The affinity between
the two is so close that both seem to constitute the very core of existence. The concept of
love and woman's existence are so closely interrelated that love occupies a very valuable
space in woman's life as a determinant life it also occupies a very important place in
woman's autobiography, lord Byron, accepted in Don Juan,

"Man's love is of man's life a thing apart; it is woman’s whole existence.” 9

In the prologue to, The Revenue Stamp, Amrita Pritam declares that the
complete texture of her book is threaded by her personal feeling.She reveals her feminine
agony openly in this book and agrees that her other book too depict the same agonized
experiences and feelings but with a mask only in autobiography the writer can narrate in
confessional mode and also conceal through the reflections of self. Amrita Pritam's self-
reflections in the Revenue Stamp are the passages appropriately analyzing how a sensitive
woman finds it very difficult to talk about, to write about her love and life in love. Amrita
Pritam as a woman felt everything concretely and with stranger sense of being in touch with
life,

"Abstraction has no meaning for me. Each entity must take on some sort of shape

that I can touch … that in fact, can thrill me with a touch.”10

She has created this image of an ideal lover in her mental visions in girlhood.
She cherished this image with a romantic quest for realizing it in life. It was her dreamy
instinct in the beginning and a philosophical vision later on, she recalls,

"A deep dark shadow walked along my side… the face of my ideal lover and mines

that imagined growing wiser, stronger, and more mature. The layer deepest down was

inspired in which I sought to reveal something luminous in quality.”11

Her long cherished love was not voiced until the last stage of Sahir's life. It
is essential to note here that Amrita despite all her rebellion ideas and bold expression was a
very shy woman as a beloved. In the present autobiography, she confesses how she modeled
her male protagonists after Sahir and her deep love for him through the female ones Linda
Anderson finds the relationship between woman's autobiography and their apprehension of
sexual identity, relating it to their defining 'self' she produced fictional construction that
were invariably affected by the writers inscription within a sexual code.

4.3 Amrita Pritam: Life and Literature

Amrita Pritam's apprehension of her 'self' within a sexual code impelled her
to shield the image and reality of her ideal love that she could fictionalize. At one place,
Amrita writes that when Sahir would come to see her he would go on chain smoking and
she would intensively long to touch him but
 "Could not overcome... My own reservation.”12

My own reservation is an intensely painful revelation of her feminine code of

conduct, self-improved not to speak of social compulsions woman herself is effective agent
with her own reservation. In her reaction to Sahir's death, she recalls the purity she
cherished in their relationship,

"No words care between our friendships. It was a beautiful relationship in silence.

The dignity of a blank paper is even there today.”13

Another lover in her life is Imroz the painter who devoted himself to her care
and she finally accepted him as her ultimate man. In her narration she accepts,

"The course my lonesome state has been broken through… by Imroz… in the years

that followed I had Imroz he has had only loneliness.”14

The romantic love of Amrita Pritam's creative and unfathomable sensitivity

was a force sustaining her desire for life in the face of her doomed fall. She had accepted the
agonizing fact that her dream of love for Sahir would never come true and her compatibility
with Imroz as an artist would never cease her respect for him. For this, she offers an
explanation,

"By the time I came to write The Revenue Stamp everything was already paired by
me in fiction and poetry. I thought I should not report the same. Instead, I incorporated the
things I wanted to write could not.”15

Amrita Pritam narrates the public side of her life as a writer, part and puts her
career in the next of her autobiography her role as a beloved finds her womanly passion
irresistible and inevitable. In patriarchy as the dominant system everywhere in the world one
expects woman to present herself as being fulfilling the man-oriented roles.
 Autobiography offers women a chance to view themselves as individuals in
the surrounding social ethos and to explore those private lives as woman. At the same time,
the writer's position is multi-faceted in autobiography. It is normal for an autobiographer to
re-organize the vision of life from all perspective as aesthetic, social cultural or religion. For
woman writers the act of writing autobiography carries a dark burden on the one hand, they
have to maintain the aesthetic interest and the subjective shades of self on the other. They
cannot ignore that socio-cultural ethos which has been very source of their conflicts and
sufferings. As a writer, Amrita Pritam was disturbed to observe the religious riots at the time
of partition and afterwards the political upheavals due to it,

"At the line of partition all social, political and religious values came crashing
down lives glass smarted those crushed pieces of glass bruised my soul. I wrote my hymns
for the sufferers of those who have abandoned and raped. The passion of those monstrous
times has
been with me since, like some consuming fire.” 16

The noted, philosopher Bernard Russell expresses about theory of success of

marriage. In his words,

"Marriage is for a woman the commonest mode of livelihood and the total amount of
undesired sex endured by woman is greater in marriage than in prostitution."17

It is very significant to notice that Amrita Pritam did not offer much space
rather ignored and the details of her marital life and relationship with her husband. In her
narrative, there are brief references to marriage; husband and domestic life and these are
very casual. She exploits the autobiographers of freedom of editing and omitting especially
about the details of marriage and the husband.

The recuperation of life is terms as 'second reading' in an essay by Gudsoff

which he claims to be true than the fact. It can be inferred that Amrita Pritam's desperate
omission of the marital life and related details may be because of her search for self, with a
new acquired vision and clarity of values. In the Revenue Stamp Amrita claims,
 "Like my name my honor has not been departed on others I am proud of my
existence. If the earth of Punjab is like a poem, I am the means of the poem.”18

The explanation of her distancing from the marital memories can be found in
Estelle Jelinek's critical observation where she points at the psychological device activating
the autobiographer.

"The autobiographical fallacy of self-revelation is demonstrated not only by the

similar subjects usually availed in life studies by both sexes but also by the different means
of detachment with which they treat the material they do include.”19

Amrita Pritam does not regard worth marriage as a source of isolation of

attention. In the notes of her diary included in the autobiography, she has recorded her
reluctance and helplessness about marriage:

"I went up to the terrace and wept my heart out in the pitch-black dark, father knew
about my state of mind… I kept on telling him repeatedly, I do not want to be married. The
bridegroom and his party had already arrived. Both father and I had given prolonged
thought to this wedding… not having so much hard cash, he was stung to the quick when
he told me of this more from their side… my one and only thought was to put myself to
death then and there.” 20

Amrita Pritam's silent about her husband and in-laws in autobiography

carries a double sense of the experiences she had in marriage. She creates an impression that
she hates him enough not of mention even his name in her life story. The reasons why she
had to marry seems to be rooted in socio-familial compulsions, as she states,

"I had to repay, debt to society… but speaking for myself, I surely feel the weight of
that doubt.”21

She communicates that marriage was a social bondage forced upon all
women of her times. The reasons why she got separated from her husband on the other
hand, seem to be rooted in personal psychological compulsions." Fellow - traveler we are
parting company today. This distance between us will grow… However, this distance was
not related to any event. It was sometimes personal.

"…I feared the self within would fragment… In addition, I thought I could not
retain anymore… I have stolen shelter under this roof.”22

In Revenue Stamp she does not even mention about her children, their birth,
childhood and growth, she mentions that motherhood was an aspired dream for her and
recalls her, she longed for a baby until it was born. She mentions her desire that her baby's
face should be like her ideal love, imagined by her in Sahir,

"I had read about how a child is shaped by his mother's thoughts and I said to myself
if you always have Sahir's face in your mind's eye, he will groom to resemble him. I know
that I was merely feeding my frustrations. In this state of crazy love when my baby was
born… it was the face of Sahir in my mind.”23

Autobiography as a self-oriented writing, holds the consciousness of the

woman writer's perceptions in life-experience Amrita Pritam in her autobiography came out
candidly with her exploration of the private self so clearly that the day's prime-minister
Indira Gandhi admired her through a letter,

"It is you and yet there is something universal… most people bury their real selves in
some unfathomable depth of their being and just skin the surface of life. It is the privilege of
the artist and the poet to be more poignantly aware.”24

For a creative writer Amrita Pritam seems to care an autobiography is more a

way to self-acceptance that self-appraisal. It is the reality that the author seeks and finds
effortlessly, within the private self. Amrita Pritam is so acutely aware of the misconceptions
in the collective mind about autobiography that she clarifies in her text:

"All art consists of re-creating what was created before… As against the myriad of
fictional characters, the writer of autobiography attracts concentrated attention. The reader
and the writer are face to face. The writer invites the reader to his house beyond the
 threshold of normal constraint. In addition, compromised with the truth is an insult…not
to the invited but to the one extending the invitation?”25

Amrita's autobiography The Revenue Stamp is also the journey of her mind
into the world of private self where she combines her present insights with the visions of
past. It is in her mid-forties and afterwards that Amrita Pritam had a profound emotional and
spiritual sense of harmony and fulfillment in her life with Imroz. Imroz accepted her with all
her dreams his love tried to bring her private self to perfection. She commands:

"With Imroz… I have no regrets about the path chosen by us. Imroz’s personality is
like the flow of river uncontrolled by locks and slices should he be restrained; Imroz would
impetuously divert his course. A relationship with him can last any so long as there is
nothing to bind it… for hours we submerged in our silences very deep… then the
silence gives way to the beauty of words, Imroz breaks it with here we are giving each
other the Yogic exercise necessary for our health.”26

The vision of self in Amrita Pritam's case does reflect her isolation,
involvement and identity. It is related, to the autobiographer's self- narrative as the writer to
herbook is. Amrita cites this illustration in the beginning of her autobiography. Life is a
strange book, constructed by letters and sounds that combines and break, to scatter away and
change. After a long journey of consciousness, then comes a point when one finds the
courage of introspecting and scrutinizing all those past moments of failures and frustration
of restless noon's and gloomy evenings of painful mornings and sleepless nights… through
which one finds the hope of new sense of continuity and confidence to step forth to
transcend the consciousness of
‘I’ was trading upon the sense of me.”27

Amrita Pritam's vision of womanhood is so clear and without inhibitions. Her

mind was communicative in its perceptions and she could visualize the male mind through
her characters, she could also sympathize with their agonies. She never denied the gender
orientation harshly as a feminist world. The recognition of gendered experiences and that of
gender roles was felt by her as an artist more profoundly than any common being. She has
been too sensitive to adopt the posture of a radical feminist. She seemed to offer some
feminist implications in her philosophized observations of woman's identity and existence.
In the same contemplative mood, she continues her analysis,

"I don't claim any ideal in womanhood. I do not idealize woman what is important

for me is the mental set-up and its evaluation. The only difference between male mind and

the female mind is that their drawbacks are different. Economy in man's control makes him

forceful and imposing while the lack of power makes woman reserved jealous and

slavish… I think slavory is a part of mind rather than gender. It is equally related to man

as to woman… the difference is in face not in the mind.”28

Amrita Pritam is supremely confident of her originality as an artist and

knows very well that a woman autobiographer's self-presentation is more significant as
based an aesthetic order than on the historical factual details of events and temporal
happenings. The Revenue Stamp is a like a shell in which the waves of her emotional crisis
are still surging. Its, her lonely mind, that crept into the writings of her passionate verses, in
quest for warmth and truthful self-investigation G D Narsimhiah has all admiration for her
and observed,

"Amrita Pritam of India hardly had any to run down Indian society considering
the Europhobia that surrounds her in and outside her language. Yet she permitted -
herself to complain that it is easier for a woman to be accepted as a harlot than as a poet
in Indian
society.”29

For a sensitive poet like Amrita Pritam, it has been an instinctual -

collaboration of the creative 'I' with the feminine 'I'. The Revenue Stamp is the record of her
creativity and poetic career more than of the biographical or physical life experience. The
re-publication of her autobiographical after a gap of Thirty years in the New form 'Akshoron
ke Saye' proves the writers quest for progressive and mature manifestation of 'I' she calls it
'antaryatra' the journey of inner mind. As she writes,
 "the voyage of my life and my contemplation consists in 'I' but it is endless and
troublesome… many a times the gloom of melancholy darkens so much that one is afraid
of missing the way… This is the voyage from 'I' to 'I' from slavory to love, from matter to
conscience, from sand to sense from the limits to the limitless, that is from mutable to the
eternal.”30

The feminist generalization, however, is not appropriate for Amrita Pritam's

Revenue Stamp it is true, as the beginning of the comment to assess or define the past as
men, through autobiography, diverted from the common path, Amrita Pritam wrote herself
story to fulfill what she calls

"The writer’s own need. A conscious process leads to one reality to another.”31

It was a casual suggestion to her from the elderly author, Khushwat Singh
that she should, write an autobiography exceptional in its reflection of her creativity the
autobiography, metaphorically proved the 'Stamp' of self on her 'revalue of writings'. She
narrates in her preface. One day Khushwat Singh casually said, "What is there in your life?
Just one or two incidents.

“If you wish to write an autobiography the back of a Revenue stamp is sufficient
space!”32

He said 'a Revenue Stamp' probably to suggest that all other stamps keep
changing their size. The Revenue Stamp remaining the same for lifetime. He was right
whatever happened in my life, inside the depths of mind and it was all submitted to novels
and poems,

“Then what remained? Still, I am writing some lines as if to place the revenue stamp
upon the accounts of life; as if to confirm those rough writings finally as mine.”33
4.4. Conclusion

One thing exceptional about Amrita Pritam as an autobiographer is her

passion for revision of her autobiography. Each time a new edition of her autobiography
was published, it carried a new cover jacket with a painting by Imroz with fresh
acknowledgements and prefaces and addition of her selective photography.

Amrita Pritam's autobiography is shades by her romantic idealism, which is

self-imagined. In the world of self, she forgets the external drudgery of life, escapes into,
and visions that inspire her creativity. Her autobiography reveals her courage of
consideration and psychological insight yet believes in the intuitive knowledge of prophetic
gestures and suggestive dreams.

It is the language of a writer that makes his style. In anautobiography, the

'self-preferentiality' becomes an important part of language. The autobiographer refers to
herself, modestly, confidently, apologetically, boldly, proudly and feelingly. Her language is
both expressive and impressive. She writes in a self- restrained style with powerfully
scholastic references recurring in the flow of her thinking. It is not simply a poise of learned
vocabulary and continuous imagery of visual account but a fine collaboration of poetic
expression that romanticizes, and philosophizes.