On “The Frog and the Nightingale”

Vikram Seth’s poem, ‘The Frog and the Nightingale’ was published as a part of a collection of

his poems, titled Beastly Tales from Here and There. The collection contains ten poems in all. As

an introduction to the collection, Seth explains:

Because it was very hot in my house one day and I could not concentrate on my

work, I decided to write a summer story involving mangoes and a river. By the

time I had finished writing “The Crocodile and the Monkey” (in a cool room lent

to me by a friend), another story and other animals had begun stirring in my mind.

And so it went on until all ten of these beastly tales were born – or re-born.

Of the ten tales told here, the first two come from India, the next two from China,

the next two from Greece, and the next two from Ukraine. The final two come

directly to me from the Land of Gup.

It is an extremely slippery task to try and label or categorize the poetry of an author of such a

cosmopolitan background and personal nature. Seth writes in his introduction to his The

Collected Poems that he has often been asked the question, “Do I see myself as an Indian or

American or Commonwealth writer…?” He answers later “These imaginative categories are

fascinating, but in the final analysis irrelevant. I see myself as Indian…and primarily as a

poet…” The reason why I quoted this passage has to do with how I think this poem can perhaps

be seen.

My first reaction upon reading the poem was that it was similar in some ways to The Owl and the

Nightingale, a twelfth or thirteenth century Middle English poem. However, upon closer

inspection of Seth’s poem, I realized that the similarity lies merely in the dramatis personae, as it

were, rather than in the subjectmatter of the poem. The Owl and the Nightingale is written as a

débat in the French fashion, whereas ‘The Frog and the Nightingale’ comes nowhere near being

a debate. In form, I believe, ‘The Frog and the Nightingale’ perhaps resembles most closely the

ballad, in both its form and folk elements. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms

defines ballad as:

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a folk song or orally transmitted poem telling in a direct and dramatic manner

some popular story usually derived from a tragic incident in local history or

legend. The story is told simply, impersonally and often with vivid dialogue.

Ballads are normally composed in quatrains with alternating four-stress and three-

stress lines, the second and fourth lines rhyming; but some ballads are in couplet

form, and some others have six-line stanzas.

Vikram Seth writes elsewhere in his introduction to his The Collected Poems, “As for how I see

myself: this is a question I am often asked, especially by academics. While it is useful to

categorize a writer in order to analyse him, it is not something that the writer necessarily

subscribes to…” The content of Vikram Seth’s poems often contradicts the form. He himself

writes that The Golden Gate “is not included here [in The Collected Poems] because it is in

essence a novel in verse.” It is important to note that The Golden Gate is not merely written “in

verse”. It is in fact a series of sonnets which serve the purpose of narrating matters befitting a

novel. For this reason I think an understanding of the content of the poem might shed some light

on the form Seth is subscribing to.

The poem, it seems to me, talks of the nature of the relationship between the artist and the person

who sells the art to the consumer. Be it poet and publisher, be it musician and recording studio.

This surely is not the only interpretation, perhaps not even a correct one, but for me, the

nightingale represents the artist while the frog represents the producer, the pseudo-critic. More

than pointing out the evils of the producer or publisher of art, the poem concentrates rather on the

self-consuming nature of the “art industries”. These industries are both fed by art, and at the

same time consumers of the artists, often depriving them a life of free choice. The nightingale

falls into this dreadful trap. In a bid to become a popular artist, it allows itself to be molded by

the frog and eventually loses its artistic abilities and dies ‘not with a bang but a whimper’:

“Puffed up, burst a vein, and died”.

The point of discussing the content as I read the poem is to ascertain the poetic tradition to which

it belongs. I believe it can be read as a loose allegory. The allusion to Mozart in the fourth stanza

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(in my edition) adds to the idea of art being exploited by persons incapable of art themselves in

order to make money. Mozart’s father, Leopold Mozart (who himself was a composer of some

repute), “wanted to display his son's abilities as a performer and a rapidly maturing composer”,

and it served to feed the family. Vikram Seth is considerably well-versed in Western Classical

music, and I think this is a learned allusion, not a mere accident. In the poem the Nightingale

calls the Frog “Mozart”, and as I see it, Seth very cleverly does not mention that the parallel with

the frog is not with Wolfgang Amadeus, but with Leopold.

The poem, as I have mentioned earlier, among all available European categories, belongs

perhaps most closely in form or content to the ballad. However, as Vikram Seth claims himself,

he is an Indian at least by birth. He spent his early years in Calcutta and must surely have read

essential Bangla children’s literature. He mentions the Land of Gup in his introduction to this

collection of poems. The Land of Gup appears in Salman Rushdie’s novel Haroun and the Sea of

Stories. It is a fictional land of stories, from which all stories and tales are sent to Earthly story-

tellers. The reference to Haroun, which in turn makes several references to Bangla children’s

literature (Goopy and Bagha, etc), is significant. It seems to me that the closest parallel to Seth’s

poem (in terms of content) that can be found lies not so much in Western forms of poetry but in

Bangla children’s literature, especially in Upendrakishore Ray’s Tuntuni-r Galpa.

“The Walrus and the Carpenter”, a poem which appears in Chapter 4 of Lewis Carroll’s

Through the Looking Glass may be thought of as an antecedent (to “The Frog and the

Nightingale) as it tells a story, albeit not allegorical, through dramatic narration. “The Walrus

and the Carpenter” is broadly classified under “narrative poetry”, a genre which includes lays,

ballads and epics. By method of elimination, if by no other means, we can assume that since

“The Frog and the Nightingale” cannot surely be either a lay or an epic, the form it comes closest

to is the ballad.

One Middle English ballad, “The Three Ravnes” (“printed in the song book Melismata compiled

by Thomas Ravenscroft and published in 1611”) and its variant, the “Twa Corbies”, presents

three or two (as the case may be) birds in conversation about what they should eat. One of the

birds mentions a recently slain knight and as they reach the spot they find the dead body guarded

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and looked after, and the poem itself takes on an allegorical or fabular tone. Some of the broad

themes discussed in “Twa Corbies” following this are “the fragility of life, the idea that life goes

on after death, and a more pessimistic viewpoint on life”. These poems are classified as ballads.

Even though most ballads are conventionally set to tune, they may also have been written

initially without music.

The similarity of content most specifically seems to be with Upendrakishore’s children’s stories,

most of which are allegorical, dealing with animals and dialogues between themselves,

possessing the same musical and lyrical quality that can be found in Seth’s verse. However

animal allegories are found in Western literature too, mostly in the form of folk tales. It can

perhaps be categorized as a ballad narrating not the life and deeds of a person, but rather as a

ballad narrating what is essentially a folk-tale, with dramatic elements.

Sujaan Mukherjee