Mai Van Phan the Poet of Nose in hidden face flower by Dr Ramesh Chandra Mukhopadhyaya

Mai Van Phan the poet of smell

It was Campbell who said  - Coming events cast their shadow. That was about battles lost and won. The shadow is espied by the eye and it is uncanny.But when sweet  fragrance   is spread all over one infers a new birth in the offing.Mai Van Phan fond of synaesthesia smells fragrance in the landscape bathing in moonlight. Fragrance here becomes visual. This is time and again.

And of course fragrance is the source of sweet notes. The poet notes that the voice of tree pies comes from each raceme of flowers,The twitter of a bird is an arousing fragrant incense . Here sound and smell are identified. It explicates the Chinese flower and bird paintings of the Ming period. Incense is used when we invoke gods. Here the poet invokes new leaves.

The wind carries the cargo of fragrance.The poet is situated in a place where lotuses are abloom.The lotuses are abloom in the heart of the poet.The wind could stand for restless and random thoughts. They become imbued with compassion  or karuna. They lift up the essence of lotus when they blow across the heart  of the poet

The path towards peace and liberation is tough and stony.It is the fragrance that leads the poet around mountains where some sharp stony slopes are descried.

And on his road to peace the poet comes across thorns.But the poet braves the thorns and discovers that they donot hurt each other. On the contrary they cluster together.In other words misfortunes donot come singly. But to our surprise the poet finds a fragrance passing through them. In other words the poet welcomes pain in life. Because true happiness passes through the wounds caused by the pounding of life by the thorns of sorrow.

But the poet holds his breath when obnoxious smell is there like a dewdrop that holds its breath hanging over a dirty puddle of water.

The dirty puddle of water signifies cities. The place where gods live is the antithesis of the same, The poet gives us the location of heaven .It is located just beside the scent of flowers.How does one distinguish heaven from other places? Well it is more fragrant than any other place. This is a description of heaven perhaps no where else found in prose or rhyme. Does not fragrance here suggest a kind of space which is different from the space we talk of?

And of course  two flowers injected aroma to each other.This is what true love is. Love does not mean physical union.Aroma implies the spiritual. The love between two flowers is Platonic indeed. True love is found between the poem and its competent reader. The reader reads his own mind in the poem. The poem provokes the reader to read his own mind in the poem.It is the objective correlative of the readers musings. Thus there is an aesthetics