Natural Indices in Rupi Kaur’s Poetry: An Ecocritical Reading

Abstract

Rupi Kaur is a Canadian young poet that employed natural elements in her poems to reflect the genuine human experiences. She has recently made great fame on social media and her poetry collections have made a great impact on Canadian literature. Her poetry can be analyzed through the ecocritical lens. Kaur’s poetry is not abstruse, or metaphysically oriented rather it is easy, and simple and reflects the plight of women and her journey from stumbling, falling, breaking, rising, and finally blooming. This journey sounds more like a non-human experience that is natural for instance the cycle of life of flowers. Through mobilizing several vivid images she channels the metaphors to human life in the form of natural images regarding feeling, shaping, flourishing, and prospering. The ecocritical approach is applied in this paper to pinpoint this common tendency among humans and their counterparts from non-human entities. Moreover, it casts the light on Kaur’s descriptive force and skillfulness in forming settings fit to her perpetual slippage from certain natural asset to the other. The paper also musters certain images, metaphors and other poetic devices to show the ecocritical awareness among people with reference to this modern approach that studies the interconnectedness between nature and culture. Applying of the ecocritical approach to Rupi Kaur’s poetry may afford a feasible solution to the physical/transcendental dualism, whereas we observe the formulation of hybrid identity that results from the merging of nature and human attitudes. This study traces the five sections of the Volume “The Sun and Her Flowers” and attributes them to the development of Rupi Kaur the woman.