ATTITUDES TO LOVE IN THE POETRY OF TAUFIQ RAFAT

Abstract

Critical work on Pakistani poetry in English remains scarce, and Taufiq Rafat — “the foremost poet of English in Pakistan” in Athar Tahir’s estimation — has received far less attention than his Indian contemporaries. This paper addresses that neglect through the register in which his range is widest: the love poems. In the Subcontinent the love lyric has traditionally carried mystical or political burdens; Rafat’s distinction lies in restoring it to the whole breadth of human attachment. The paper examines poems including “The Time to Love”, “The Squalor in Which Some People Live”, “The Medal”, “Poem for Fauzia”, “Death of a Carpenter” and “The Kite-Fliers”, together with the elegiac sequence “Flight to London”, “Shirt”, “Grass” and “Goodbye, Perhaps”, tracing love across its romantic, familial, fraternal and communal registers. Read through Reader’s Response Theory, these poems reveal a poet whose rural groundedness issues in a purity of feeling — love expressed simply, across its many colours. The paper argues that this body of work alone justifies renewed critical attention to Rafat’s achievement.