Vietnamese Poetry A Flower explicated

A  Flower by Mai Van Phan composed in Vietnamese

Translated into English by Pompen Hantrakoot

Explicated by Dr Ramesh Chandra Mukhopadhyaya

Tomorrow early morning a flower will bloom

The moon tonight

Has alredy spread its sweet fragrance

Explication

The poem Flower could be read as a companion poem of To Restart. To Restart depicted a harvested field. A harvested field looks like a banquet hall deserted. And there a stork reached from the skies like a meteor. The poet Mai Van Phan felt that it was an unkempt dawn. True . But the stork is the symbol of new birth as well. The morning   shows the day And may be the unkempt dawn  only resulted in a day full of confusion. But days must give in to nights.Our minds  move to and fro from the conscious to the unconscious. The day might stand for the conscious mind. But below that or beyond that there is the boundless night scape which could be read as the unconscious mind. It is unknown and unknowable. Once the poet is plunged into the silence of the unconscious he finds the moon at its full.

And the poet observes that the moon has spread  its fragrance. This is an instance of synaesthia. In the case of synaesthesia the object of one sense is transformed into the object of another sense perception. The moon is at its full in the night. And the world is bathed in its mellow light. The light is the  object to be perceived by the eye. But the poet transforms the light into fragrance-- the object of  perception of the nose. And at once that which is visible turns into something to be felt by the nose. Think of a world bathed in fragrance. Does the fragrance emit from the moon? In that case the moon must be a flower abloom in the sky. The sky could be then an inverted tree with its top looking downwards , looking towards the earth.Or else in the  fragrance  spread by the moon the future could be read.The poet prophesies that the next morning a flower will bloom. The flower before being born gives the intimation  of its birth in the offing.Coming events  spread their fragrance beforehand.This reminds us of the hour before dawn or the hour presently before the god men are born. There are intimations of the coming of a Buddha or a Jesus before they are born. Their advent could be guessed beforehand.Right now we are in the still of night when beasts of prey and ghosts and goblins are let loose. But it is in the night that we plumb  the unconscious  or the collective unconscious. And there our spirit  or the silver orb  is in its full efflorescence.  When the night will  yield its place to day the perception of the unconscious will disappear into the common light of the world without. In the world without the conscious mind has to ply its part. True. But it seems that whatever imagination seizes to be beautiful is destined to be true in the world of facts. The poet prophesies that the notion of peace which has kept alight the heart of the collective unconscious or the heart of darkness must be translated into physical reality in immediate future. Think of a world flooded with fragrance replacing  the world today where the smell of gunpowder reigns supreme. May be the stork of the previous dawn gave us the premonition of this new birth of a flower of a Jesus of a Buddha