On the Beach-Poem-3

 

Activity for the First Year Students of Rajarata University of Sri Lanka (English Literature-ENGL 1122)

You are required to find the poem and read it for discussion.

On the Beach-Poem-3

This is a wonderful simple poem composed by Anne Ranasinghe, who was a jewish woman at birth and fled to UK to escape from Nazi persecution. She met a Sri Lankan professor there and they married and returned to Sri Lanka. AR had a tough time in her childhood days and she was naturally very much concerned about the violence, particularly of the Man's inhumanity to animals. This simple poem discusses about how a little puppy is tortured by three fun loving young boys at the beach. AR is very much moved by this dastardly insane behaviour of the three boys.

Anne Ranasinghe, born on October 2, 1925 as Anneliese Katz in Essen, Germany, is an internationally renowned poet from Sri Lanka. Escaping from Nazi Germany to England, she married a Sri Lankan professor and became a citizen of Sri Lanka in 1956. Her first collection of poems, And the Sun That Sucks The Earth to Dry, was published in 1971. Although primarily a poet, she has also published short stories, essays, and translations. Her works have been broadcast on radio and published in seventeen countries and translated into nine languages.

Drawing from her own life experiences, her writing has been described as "vibrantly sensuous or stark and deeply moving." The Holocaust is a recurring theme in Anne Ranasinghe's poetry and is contrasted with Sri Lanka's violent past as in "July 1983." Themes of alienation and minority persecution are found in many of her poems.

Anne Ranasinghe has won numerous local and international awards for her writing including the Sri Lanka Arts Council Prize for Poetry 1985 and 1992 and non-fiction in 1987. In 1994, she won the Sri Lanka Literary Award for best collection of short stories.

She is a founding member of the English Writers' Cooperative of Sri Lanka and regular editor of its journal, Channels. Her name has been included in the Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry (Oxford & New York: Oxford, 1994).