.
"Punishment in Kindergarten" is a little autobiographical poem by the famous Indo-Anglian poet Kamala Das. She recalls one of her childhood experiences. When she was in the kindergarten, one day the children were taken for a picnic. All the children except her were playing and making merry. But she alone kept away from the company of the children. Their teacher, a blue-frocked woman, scolded her saying.
"Why don't you join the others, what
A peculiar child you are!"
This heard, all the other children who were sipping sugar
cane turned and laughed. The child felt
it very much. She became sad at the
words of the teacher. But the laughter
by the children made her sadder. She
thought that they should have consoled her rather than laughing and insulting
her. Filled with sorrow and shame she
did her face in a hedge and wept. This
was indeed a painful experience to a little child in the nursery school.
Now after many years she has grown into an adult. She has only a faint memory of the
blue-frocked woman and the laughing faces of the children. Now she has learned to have an 'adult peace'
and happiness in her present state as a grown-up person. Now there is no need for her to be perturbed
about that bitter kindergarten experience.
With her long experience in life she has learned that life is a mixture
of joy and sorrow. She remembers how she
has experienced both the joy and sorrow of life. The long passage of time has taught her many
things. She is no more a lonely
individual as she used to feel when she was a child. The poet comes to a conclusion that there is
no need for her to remember that picnic day, when she hid her face in the
hedge, watching the steel-white sun, that was standing lonely in the sky.
The poem is written in three stanzas, each having
different number of lines – the first with seven lines, the second with six and
the third with nine. The poem does not
follow any regular rhyme scheme. The
subject matter of the poem has two parts, the first of which being the
description of the painful experience of the kindergarten days and the second,
the adult's attitude to the incident at present when she is no more a child.
The poet seems to be nostalgic about her childhood
days. There are certain expressions in
the poem that are worth remembering. The
poet says that the child buried its face in the hedge and "smelt the
flowers and the pain". "Smelt
the flowers can be taken as an ordinary expression, but "smelt the
pain" is something very evocative and expressive. In the first stanza of the poem, the poet
describes the pain caused to the child, "throwing words like pots and
pans". This again is
beautiful. The phrase used by the poet
to describe the child's teacher, namely, "blue-frocked woman" can be
justified from the child's point of view.
But to the poet who is an adult the use of the phrase looks a little too
awkward. On the whole, the poem can be
taken as the poet's interest in remembering her childhood days.
