MAMATAR CHITHI AND THE RIVER MERCHANT’S WIFE: A COMPARATIVE STUDY

Mamata'r Chithi is one of the very few poems in which the Eliot's belief – that poetry is understood before it is communicated – is thoroughly illustrated. This poem can be read as a grim and painful commentary on withered love of an Indian widow. Here the poet candidly captures the ‘longing for loneliness' of a beautiful widow tormented both y her separation from her husband as well as by an unfriendly world. In our Indian societies, a widow's life is not a world of love and affection. After her husband's dead it is now a merely a routine and diseased existence infected with undane material obligations. The narrator letter-writer tries to escape the hard realities of life while being in a dream world by nostalgically recalling her Conjugal life.