Introduction of the Poem:
“Self – Portrait”, one of Ramanujan's obscure poems, is puzzling, even bewildering. The speaker in the poem is unable to identify himself when he looks into a mirror but when he looks into the shop windows; he sees the portrait of a stranger with his father's signature in the corner.
Critical Summary:
When the poet looks into a mirror, he finds a stranger's reflection there, i.e., he fails to identify or recognise himself. But later when he looks into a shop window, he finds the portrait of a stranger, in which he finds his father's signature in a corner. Maybe he finds something of everybody in his personality— something of his ancestors, particularly of his father.
Chirantan Kulshreshtha regards Self - Portrait as one of Ramanujan's more representative poems. According to him, this nine line poem is “so deceptive in its neat directness that it can easily be supposed to reflect a basically insufficient and uncertain self, susceptible to influences from outside, and, consequently, alien to its own viewer”. Another way of reading this poem is to place it in the context of Yeats's statement that, unlike the man of the Renaissance and the Middle Ages, who looked at the mask to imitate Christ or a some classical hero, the modern man looks at the mirror to discover himself. The attitudes he assumes towards himself and Reality are, accordingly the different identities or points of view that figure in his life. Viewed thus, Self - Portrait not only illustrates, in Yeats' sense, a modern concern with the self but also provides the Matrix within which a discussion of Ramanujan's poetry becomes relevant.
The poem dramatizes a self whose essential passivity allows it to resemble others over an indeterminable stretch of time. The identification is important because it lends the self the freedom to share different identities and attitudes, each of them real in feeling and “mysterious” in apprehension (the windows defy the law of optics to reveal a stranger's face). Also subtly suggested is the problematic compulsion of being what one is, one's father's son, absurdly destined to assume an identity attached to oneself by forces beyond one's control and made always to feel the presence of one's past, of relations dead and alive. The tension dormant in Self - Portrait, says Kulshreshtha, between the compulsion to know and be what one is and to retain, at the same time, one's passivity characterises much of Ramanujan's poetry. The conflict receives an intense expression in Conventions of Despair, where the passive consciousness of its religious and cultural roots and longing to define itself in their mythic particulars rejects the fashionable postures of marginality, alienation, toughness and pacifism, and chooses to find “my particular hell only in my Hindu mind”.
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