My tryst with Dr. Seuss happened when I performed for The Script’s production – The Lorax.

Lorax is an interesting poem written by Dr. Seuss, who predominantly wrote for children. However, all his works had more than a clear relevance to adults as well. Lorax was a poem which depicted man’s devastating impact on the environment and urged people to develop a sense of responsibility towards mother nature.

In the poem, the character Lorax is the representative of all things green. And when Once-ler, owing to his ever increasing greed, starts chopping off truffula trees and depriving the Brown Bar-ba-loots their habitat, the Lorax appears in front of the Once-ler and appraises him of the disaster that he is causing by doing all this.

As is evident, Dr. Seuss was famous for coining terms and words that had no meaning but brought out the underlying concept beautifully. You can read The Lorax here. It is a beautiful poem and I thoroughly enjoyed performing this work on stage.

The Lorax, was one of Dr. Seuss’ most controversial works and many claimed that it was unfair to the logging industry.

Recently, I saw a movie adaption of Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who! This is a story about an elephant (Horton) who, by accident, gets in possession of a speck. The speck rests on a clover which the elephant carries around with him as an ornament. One fine day, he begins to hear voices coming from the speck. It is then revealed to us, the viewers, that the speck is a world in itself, with people there living ordinary lives very similar to ours. What happens next and how the elephant manages to save this speck from all external influences is a part of the story.

What I found more relevant is the metaphorical usage of the speck. As we all know by now, our planet too is a speck in the cosmic dimensions and although we might be fretting a lot about our daily lives, it could be that everything is based on chance and depends on an elephant living in another world who is carrying this speck around. It brings in some perspective of our place in this universe. Simplistic in its story line, Horton hears a Who! is a great movie with a universal appeal, if I may use that word.

You can read more about Dr. Seuss’ life in this Wikipedia article.

A poem for this Independence Week:

Adam Kirsch writes about the recently published The Notebooks of Robert Frost (Harvard, 688 pages, $39.95) at The New York Sun.

Excerpts:

To see the difference, consider Frost’s lecture “On Extravagance,” which he delivered at Dartmouth in November 1962, less than two months before he died. In this talk, Frost expatiates genially on “the extravagance of the universe. What an extravagant universe it is. And the most extravagant thing in it, as far as we know, is man — the most wasteful, spending thing in it — in all his luxuriance.”

This is the terror that has always loomed behind the willful optimism of the Emersonian tradition, and which Frost, very much like Nietzsche, was able to exhume from the corpse of Emerson’s gentility. Perhaps not even Nietzsche ever captured that terror in an image as striking and bottomless as Frost’s: “We get truth like a man trying to drink at a hydrant.” At such moments, Frost’s “Notebooks,” like his best poems, remind us that there has never been a more genuinely mystical American writer.

Although I haven’t been able to appreciate poetry very much in life, I consider Frost and Burns as two of my favourite poets. Burns scores a little extra on my scale solely for the reason that one of his poems forms the basis for that epic – Catcher in the Rye.