How Does the Poem “Factories Are Eyesores” Reveal the Ambivalent Attitude of the Poet?
Baldoon Dingra was one of the major poets of India before independence. His poems are full of promise and hope with an innate rhythm that catches the ear. His major collections of poems are ‘Symphony of Love,’ ‘Beauty’s Sanctuary’ and “Comes Ever the Dawn” Dhingra’s poem “Factories are Eyesores” reveals the ambivalent attitude of the poet towards nature and development. The poet at once agrees and disagrees with those conscious of the beauty of the landscape. It appears, his effort is to create for himself the image of a nature lover for which he makes use of the usual dictum of the environmentalists, ‘factories are eyesores’. The factories are eye sores because the black smoke emanating from the chimneys blackens the greenery. The beauty of the landscape thus gets marred by technical advancement. He wonders what impression the ugliness of the smoke belching factories would have made on a painter like Claude Monnet or how they would have inspired him to make a beautiful painting of the landscape. The fact that a beautiful painting could be created out of ugliness, in fact makes the statement ‘factories are eyesores’ lose its credibility.
The factories are referred to as eyesores because the black smoke emanating from the chimneys blackens the greenery of the landscape. The poet says that the factories make “iron lines against the sky standing in the east”. “The iron lines” is suggestive of the grim black smoke which the factories emit intermittently disfiguring the greenness of the landscape. The grim tall factories with their devilish appearance send out large amounts of smoke or flames marring the beauty of the landscape.
The poet draws a graphic picture of the weary and desperate factory workers toiling amidst the deadly and lethal atmosphere. The workers are desperate with their monotonous toil in the unpleasant atmosphere of the factory. Every now and then they turn their face away from the grim smoke and soil to seek relief.
The poet reveals how beauty could be created out of the ugliness generated by technical advancement. He pictures how the chimney shaft a thing of ugliness grows bright with light when the mountain tops bright with the sun flush down a spark of light.
The poet wonders what impression the ugliness of the smoke belching factories would have made on a painter like Claude Monnet or how it would have inspired him to make a beautiful painting of the landscape. The poet brings home the truth that beauty could be created out of ugliness. Thus the environmentalist’s dictum ‘factories are eye sores’ loses its credibility.