From Compassion to Conscience: A Critical Study of Selected Poems from 'Tell Me, Please...' by Vandna Yadav and Kavita Kumari

Abstract:

Abnish Singh Chauhan’s Tell Me, Please... (2025) offers a profound meditation on the emotional, moral, socio-cultural and spiritual dimensions of human existence. Marked by lucid diction, lyrical precision, and reflective depth, the collection charts a transformative journey from compassion to conscience, tracing the evolution of the self from empathetic awareness to ethical realization. This study interprets Chauhan’s poetic vision through the intersecting frameworks of Humanism, Ethical Modernism, and Postcolonial Poetics, examining how his verse reaffirms the sanctity of individual conscience while engaging critically with the moral and socio-cultural dissonances of contemporary life. Accordingly, the selected poems—“A Small Desire,” “Poetry,” “The Treasure,” “The Unread Book,” “The Mountain,” “Your Words,” “Silence,” “Spring,” “A Paper,” and “The People of Braj” embody a deeply humanistic ethos that harmonizes aesthetic sensibility with ethical reflection, positioning the poet as both contemplative seeker and moral participant. Situated within the evolving continuum of Indian English poetry, from early humanist articulations to post-liberal ethical modernism, Chauhan’s poems emerge as a significant contribution to the enduring dialogue between art and morality, reasserting the transformative power of verse as a vehicle for socio-cultural continuity, spiritual renewal and the enrichment of human understanding.

Keywords: Compassion, Conscience, Humanism, Ethics, Indian English Poetry, Modern Poetic Vision

Introduction:

Abnish Singh Chauhan’s Tell Me, Please…, published by Authorspress, New Delhi in 2025,  stands as a luminous and timely contribution to contemporary Indian English poetry, blending emotional immediacy with ethical reflection. The collection appears at a moment when literature across the globe is re-evaluating its moral purpose and humanistic commitment amid widespread socio-cultural fragmentation and religious unease. Chauhan’s poetry responds to this climate of disquiet by reasserting the redemptive potential of art— its ability to heal, elevate, and awaken the conscience. His poems traverse an inward journey from compassion to conscience, where empathy for the suffering human being deepens into a reflective awareness of ethical, socio-cultural and spiritual responsibility. Dr Satish Kumar writes:

 

Abnish Singh Chauhan (1979), a bilingual poet in Hindi and English, sings songs of humanity and envisions a better, happier future for mankind. His lyrics are conspicuous for soft, dulcet music. (A Survey of Indian English Poetry 382-383)

Marked by clarity of expression and restraint of emotion, Chauhan’s poetic voice captures both the anguish and aspiration of the modern individual negotiating the space between inherited tradition and contemporary change. His diction is simple yet resonant, allowing the poems to reach beyond linguistic ornamentation towards moral insight. In this sense, Chauhan inherits and renews the humanistic belief in the imagination as a moral faculty, while grounding his vision in the postcolonial realities of India, where poetry continues to serve as a mode of remembrance, resistance, and renewal.

Within this broader framework, Chauhan’s work participates in what may be termed the humanistic continuum of Indian English poetry— a tradition shaped by poets such as Swami Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore, Sarojini Naidu, Nissim Ezekiel, A.K. Ramanujan and Jayant Mahapatrya, and carried forward by voices like P.C.K. Prem, D.C. Chambial, C.L. Khatri, R.K. Singh, P.K. Padhy, S.A. Hamid, R.M. Prabhulinga Shastry, Binod Mishra, Sudhir K. Arora and Sudarshan Kcherry. These poets collectively affirm that poetry is not merely a linguistic or aesthetic exercise but a moral, socio-cultural and spiritual act— a means of engaging the self and society in the pursuit of truth and harmony. In extending this lineage, Chauhan’s poems fuse lyrical simplicity with moral profundity, reimagining poetry as a medium of social introspection, cultural conscience and spiritual awakening. In this regard, Dr Priyanka Chauhan rightly remarks: “His poems, often meditative and humane, extend the Indian tradition of sahitya as sadhana, where the act of writing embodies moral responsibility and creative devotion” (“Bridging Generations: Chauhan’s Poetry from India”).

Selected Poems: A Critical Study

In an age of linguistic fragmentation and moral relativism, Abnish Singh Chauhan’s Tell Me, Please… restores the humanistic function of poetry as a medium of moral reflection, socio-cultural awareness and spiritual inquiry. The very title of the collection gestures towards humility and supplication— a plea rather than a proclamation, signifying the poet’s openness to dialogue rather than dogma. Chauhan’s voice, though ethically charged and socially, culturally and spiritually alert, resists both didactic rigidity and metaphysical abstraction; it embodies what Matthew Arnold remarkably termed “the high seriousness” (“Mathew Arnold”) of poetry, which aspires not merely to instruct but to illuminate.

Comprising fifty-one poems, the collection harmonizes socio-cultural awareness with spiritual aspiration, transforming personal emotion into ethical insight and individual reflection into collective responsibility. Chauhan’s poetic vision, while contemporary in diction and accessible in form, is deeply rooted in an enduring moral imagination that has shaped Indian English poetry from Henry Louis Vivian Derozio to the present. In fusing aesthetic grace with moral consciousness, the selected poems—“A Small Desire,” “Poetry,” “The Treasure,” “The Unread Book,” “The Mountain,” “Your Words,” “Silence,” “Spring,” “A Paper,” and “The People of Braj” from Tell Me, Please… reaffirm the relevance of poetry as a living moral discourse— one capable of articulating compassion amid chaos, and conscience amid silence.

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The opening poem, “A Small Desire”, exemplifies Abnish Singh Chauhan’s humanist ethos and sets the spiritual tone for Tell Me, Please…. The poem begins with an intimate invocation:

 

Listen, my dear Mother!

Please listen to me,

I have a small desire:

‘to sing for the suffering ones.’ (Chauhan 33)

The voice here evokes the tenderness and humility characteristic of Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali, where prayer becomes an act of moral surrender rather than self-assertion. Chauhan’s “small desire” is paradoxically immense— it expresses a yearning not for power or fame but for compassion and service. This modest declaration becomes, in effect, a spiritual manifesto, aligning poetic creation with moral vocation.

The tremulous tone of the later lines— “why does my voice tremble, / why do my words tumble” (Chauhan 33) reveals a deep consciousness of human frailty before the infinite. The poet’s awareness of limitation, rather than diminishing his voice, intensifies its sincerity. It is this humility that transforms his lyrical self into a moral self, aware that art must arise from empathy, not ego.

From a Humanist theoretical standpoint, the poem embodies the conviction that moral truth resides within human experience. Like the Renaissance humanists, Chauhan affirms the dignity and potential of the individual conscience. His plea— “Could You please / lend your grace / to my trembling voice?” (Chauhan 33) is not a retreat into passivity but an appeal for alignment between human will and divine order. The poet seeks grace not as a form of dependency but as moral reinforcement, affirming that conscience requires both inner effort and transcendent guidance.

Critically, this aligns with Lionel Trilling’s concept of the “moral imagination” (Adam), wherein literature functions as a testing ground for ethical awareness. Chauhan’s invocation to the divine mother elaborates this very process: the moral imagination as a dialogue between the self and the sacred, emotion and ethics, the finite and the infinite. The poet thus redefines poetry as a moral practice— a “song for the suffering ones” (Chauhan 33).  His voice, trembling yet resolute, becomes a metaphor for the human condition itself: vulnerable but striving towards compassion and conscience.

(2)

The poem “Poetry” redefines the art itself as a cosmic and moral principle, putting poetic creation within both metaphysical and ethical dimensions. Chauhan opens with a sweeping assertion of poetry’s ontological role:

 

Poetry,

You are—

the atoms of the cosmic yajna,

from which

the world is born. (Chauhan 35)

Here, Chauhan fuses the Romantic vision of poetry as the generative breath of life with an indigenous metaphor of sacred ritual. His “cosmic yajna”, the primordial act of offering, renders poetry not merely a product of human creativity but a divine process of regeneration. This recalls Wordsworth’s conception of poetry as “the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge” (Popova), yet Chauhan’s adaptation transforms this Western Romantic ideal into a spiritual ecology rooted in Indian cosmology. Poetry becomes an act of consecration: each word an offering, each image a spark within the eternal fire of creation. The poet’s subsequent lines expand this metaphysical scope:

 

You are everything,

or everything exists within you—

the samskar of humanity,

etched on the earth

till date.

In this vision, poetry absorbs the accumulated impressions (samskars) of human civilization— its memory, pain, and aspiration, becoming the moral archive of existence. The poem thus moves beyond aesthetic contemplation into ontological affirmation: poetry as both substance and spirit, the inner life of the cosmos itself.

This universalistic impulse recalls the visionary ambition of Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri, where the poet’s voice seeks to reconcile matter and spirit through the medium of the word. Yet, unlike Aurobindo’s monumental grandeur, Chauhan’s tone is meditative, subdued, and interiorized—closer to A.K. Ramanujan’s lyric introspection, which transforms metaphysics into intimate reflection.

From a literary-theoretical perspective, “Poetry” operates at the intersection of Romantic and Modernist aesthetics. It inherits the Romantic faith in imagination as the site of unity and transcendence, while simultaneously acknowledging the Modernist awareness of fragmentation and alienation. In this synthesis, Chauhan articulates a poetics of humility— an awareness that poetry’s cosmic role coexists with the poet’s finite human voice. “Poetry,” therefore, stands as both metaphysical assertion and moral meditation: a testament to the enduring belief that art, even in its fragility, participates in the ongoing yajna of creation.

(3)

In “The Treasure”, Abnish Singh Chauhan meditates on the nature of literary tradition and creative continuity, reflecting on how poetic imagination is shaped by the echoes of preceding voices:

 

The pages

of some poets,

carrying

timeless messages,

lie scattered

across the garden

of my heart. (Chauhan 37)

This self-reflexive awareness aligns with both New Critical and Poststructuralist notions of intertextuality, the idea that every act of writing is a dialogue with prior texts. Chauhan’s “scattered pages” recall T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, where poetic originality is seen not as isolated inspiration but as an evolving conversation with the literary past. Yet Chauhan’s relationship with tradition is far more affective than analytical. His effort to “gather” the scattered pages is not an intellectual act of classification but an emotional gesture of reverence. In his vision, the inheritance of literature is neither a burden nor a theory— it is a living garden, where memory and creativity coexist.

When the poet concludes that a new book emerges, “titled— / ‘The Golden Treasure’” (Chauhan 37), he transforms creation into an act of preservation. This moment crystallizes his conviction that poetry is an ethical duty to conserve and renew cultural wisdom, however, imperfectly. The “treasure” thus signifies both the aesthetic wealth of tradition and the moral responsibility of transmission. Chauhan’s metaphor of gathering and compiling scattered poetic fragments resonates with Jayanta Mahapatra’s meditative verse, where the past is not a relic but a haunting presence that demands reinterpretation. In this way, “The Treasure” enacts a poetics of cultural memory, situating Chauhan within the continuum of poets who perceive literature as an ethical archive of civilization.

(4)

“The Unread Book” marks Chauhan’s transition from spiritual reflection to civic critique, where ethical inquiry becomes explicitly social. The poem opens with a stark image of systemic inertia:

 

Lakhs of cases

remain pending

in the courts,

and outside them too,

their numbers continue to grow— (Chauhan 48)

Chauhan adopts a measured realism that mirrors the bureaucratic paralysis of modern governance. The image of accumulation— cases piling “in and outside” the courts, extends beyond legal critique to evoke moral congestion, a society suffocated by its own apathy. This sense of ethical stagnation culminates in the poet’s rhetorical question:

 

They declare,

In their speeches—

…

and that all the issues

can be resolved

through mutual dialogue

and understanding.

 

Can this happen

when the beautiful book

of our Constitution,

locked away in a cupboard,

remains untouched,

unread,

and unpractised

in its truest sense? (Chauhan 48)

From a postcolonial theoretical perspective, Chauhan’s interrogation of institutional decay reflects the disillusionment that shadows India’s post-independence modernity. The “unread Constitution” becomes a metonym for the nation’s moral stagnation— its failure to embody the ethical ideals it professes. In tone and technique, Chauhan’s civic irony recalls Nissim Ezekiel’s “The Patriot” and “The Professor,” where the poet exposes the contradictions of middle-class India. Yet, Chauhan’s voice diverges from Ezekiel’s urbane irony; his critique carries an elegiac tenderness— a sorrowful recognition of lost moral promise rather than sardonic detachment.

Viewed through Martha Nussbaum’s ethics of literature, “The Unread Book” enacts what she calls the narrative imagination— the capacity of art to reveal social suffering and moral complexity. Chauhan’s critique is therefore ethical rather than narrowly political: he does not advocate reform through agitation but through awakening of conscience. His verse becomes an appeal to restore empathy within systems that have grown mechanized and indifferent.

In this way, “The Unread Book” bridges the personal and the political, reaffirming Chauhan’s conviction that poetry, at its most responsible, serves as a mirror of collective conscience. It insists that moral literacy, the ability to “read” the Constitution of humanity itself, remains the highest form of civic virtue. 

(5)

This ethical engagement finds one of its most compelling expressions in Abnish Singh Chauhan’s poem “The Mountain,” where the poet embellishes endurance and moral integrity through the imagery of nature. The poem begins with an image of majestic stillness:

 

The mountain stood there,

holding its head high,

it had been there for centuries,

rooted like a star in the sky. (Chauhan 67)

The mountain’s immovable calm functions as a metaphor for inner steadfastness in a morally unstable world. Its physical solidity becomes an emblem of ethical constancy— of remaining “rooted” amid the flux of modern chaos. As the poem unfolds, the mountain’s silence endures through storms, snow, and even human violence, until it finally “trembled” and “cried,” as if confronting the existential threat of a mechanized, destructive civilization:

 

It trembled,

then cried,

as if fighting

for its existence,

alone,

in the modern world. (Chauhan 67-68)

Chauhan transforms what appears to be a natural description into an allegory of moral survival. The mountain, assailed by both natural and human forces, becomes a symbol of conscience under siege— its silence a mode of moral resistance rather than passive endurance. In this sense, the poem echoes both Stoic philosophy, with its emphasis on inner virtue amid external adversity, and Gandhian ethics, where non-violence and silence represent the highest forms of strength.

From a literary-theoretical standpoint, “The Mountain” can also be read through an eco-critical and existential lens. The poem’s juxtaposition of natural permanence and human destructiveness exposes the spiritual alienation of modernity. The mountain’s “cry” signifies not mere ecological lament but the moral anguish of a world that has severed its bond with nature. Yet, Chauhan’s diction remains restrained, his tone meditative; this quietness is deliberate, reinforcing the poem’s philosophical poise. Silence here is transfigured into moral speech— a gesture of ethical clarity that resists both despair and aggression.

The poem, therefore, encapsulates Chauhan’s broader poetic vision: endurance as moral eloquence, and silence as the ultimate articulation of conscience. Through this still, dignified symbol, Chauhan affirms that the strength of the spirit lies not in assertion but in steadfastness—a faith that poetry, like the mountain itself, must stand firm against the tempests of moral decay.

(6)

The poems “Your Words” and “Silence” probe the psychological and existential dimensions of love, communication, and emotional alienation. In “Your Words,” the speaker articulates the ambivalence of intimacy through a metaphor that captures both fascination and entrapment:

 

Your words are

like winding roads

in the hills,

full of turns and twists,

trapping my innocent mind. (Chauhan 52)

Here, Chauhan transforms language into a topographical maze— beautiful yet perilous, alluring yet confining. Words, instead of serving as transparent vehicles of meaning, become instruments of uncertainty. This ambivalence reflects a distinctly Modernist anxiety about communication, echoing the scepticism of poets like T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, for whom language was both bridge and barrier. The “winding roads” metaphor captures the instability of linguistic meaning, aligning with Roland Barthes’s structuralist insight that words “slip” from fixed reference and proliferate in ambiguity. Chauhan thus situates the emotional within the semiotic, suggesting that the fragility of human connection mirrors the inherent indeterminacy of language itself.

In contrast, “Silence” produces the aftermath of failed communication, where the exhaustion of words yields to existential emptiness:

 

He claims

to hear my silence—

the one

who never cared

to listen

when I spoke to him. (Chauhan 63)

and later:

he will hear

the silence

of my defeated heart,

pressing his ear

to my chest,

only to confirm

that I am dead. (Chauhan 63) 

The shift from linguistic entrapment to absolute muteness marks the trajectory from alienation to annihilation. The speaker’s “silence” becomes both protest and epitaph— a testimony to emotional abandonment in a world desensitized to genuine dialogue. From an Existentialist standpoint, the poem captures the absurdity of human communication: the paradox that language both reveals and conceals, connects and isolates. Chauhan’s minimalist diction intensifies this tension, allowing the void between speech and silence to speak for itself.

In tone and structure, these poems align Chauhan with Kamala Das and Eunice de Souza, who employed emotional candour and stark introspection to expose the fractures of intimacy in modern life. Yet Chauhan’s approach differs in its moral undercurrent: his exploration of linguistic and emotional dissonance is not merely confessional, but ethical. The failure of speech becomes a reminder of the need for empathy, and silence, though tragic, emerges as the final gesture of truth.

Through “Your Words” and “Silence,” Chauhan extends his broader humanist project into the private sphere, revealing that moral consciousness is as vital in personal relationships as in public life. The poet thus transforms love and language into arenas where the struggle for authenticity continues— a struggle between the eloquence of the heart and the eloquence of words. Sudhir K Arora rightly observes in “Tell Me, Please…: Reflections in the Foreword”:

 

The poet in Abnish Singh Chauhan is simple and natural in his poetry collection Tell Me, Please… where he seems to be one with the reader who also possesses a desire ‘to share’ and ‘to be shared’ what he feels. (Chauhan 19)

(7)

The poem “Spring” exemplifies Abnish Singh Chauhan’s dialogic engagement with nature, not as a passive backdrop for emotion but as a living interlocutor in the moral and spiritual life of the self. The poet opens with a note of unmediated wonder:

 

Spring fills my heart

with hope and joy.

The hope— to fly,

like Garuda in the sky.

The joy— to bloom,

like Krishna’s eyes. (Chauhan 74)

Here, Chauhan reanimates the Romantic tradition of nature as moral pedagogue, recalling Wordsworth’s faith in the instructive power of the natural world, yet he simultaneously extends it through an Indian mytho-poetic idiom. The inclusion of Garuda and Krishna sacralises the natural experience, transforming the aesthetic delight of spring into a symbolic yearning for spiritual ascent and divine beauty. Nature thus becomes both mirror and metaphor of the soul’s striving. However, Chauhan’s vision is not naïvely celebratory. The poet’s question— “Why does it fold its wings/ just after a short flight,/ giving space to Autumn?” (Chauhan 74) introduces a note of philosophical disquiet. This awareness of impermanence transforms the poem from a pastoral reverie into a meditation on the cyclical temporality of existence. The fleetingness of spring mirrors the ephemerality of joy and human aspiration, echoing the Modernist preoccupation with time and transience found in T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, where “the moment in and out of time” (“Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot”) captures both revelation and decay.

Yet Chauhan does not yield to melancholy. His prayer to Girdhari (Krishna) for “a Spring that never folds its wings” (Chauhan 74) envisions a movement from the cyclical to the transcendent— from natural recurrence to spiritual continuity. This gesture of transcendence places Chauhan within what Northrop Frye would term the mythic mode, where natural cycles become archetypes of renewal and redemption. In this symbolic structure, Spring represents not merely a season but a metaphor for resurrection— the eternal return of faith and moral vitality amid the flux of worldly change.

In its fusion of Romantic rapture, Modernist awareness, and Vedantic yearning, “Spring” encapsulates Chauhan’s distinctive poetic vision. Nature, in his work, is not a sentimental refuge, but a moral landscape— a field where beauty becomes a form of inquiry and transience a path to truth. Through its restrained lyricism and symbolic clarity, “Spring” reaffirms Chauhan’s conviction that poetry, like nature itself, is a dialogue between temporality and eternity, emotion and insight, form and faith:

 

A poet’s response to the landscape of his country, his sense of the tradition and culture of the land of his birth and many other factors go to the back, to make him assume an identity of his own. (Das 106)

(8)

From a New Critical perspective, Abnish Singh Chauhan’s poems display remarkable structural integrity and tonal coherence— qualities that render his art both disciplined and affectively potent. His preference for short stanzas, minimal punctuation, and direct diction contributes to what Cleanth Brooks famously described as “the well-wrought urn”— a poem that achieves organic unity, where form and meaning are mutually generative rather than externally imposed.

In “A Paper”, for instance, Chauhan transforms an ordinary object into a metaphor of moral fragility and human endurance:

 

Sometimes it twists

in pain

and expresses its agony

before the self-loving men,

living in their closed dens. (Chauhan 40)

Here, the poem’s spare imagery and compressed rhythm enact the very vulnerability the poem describes. The paper’s movement— “twists,” “rises,” “falls,” and finally “burns” mirrors the existential oscillation of the human condition under socio-cultural, ethical, and emotional strain. The rhythm, alternating between tension and release, becomes an expressive analogue to suffering itself, demonstrating what Cleanth Brooks called the “language of paradox” (Brooks 1), wherein fragility becomes a form of moral strength.

Chauhan’s stylistic restraint, his avoidance of excessive ornament or rhetorical flourish, recalls the Modernist discipline of conciseness associated with poets such as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Yet unlike their irony-laden detachment, Chauhan’s minimalism retains a human warmth, blending precision with empathy. His economy of language intensifies rather than diminishes emotional resonance, allowing each word and pause to carry ethical significance.

Thus, within the New Critical framework, Chauhan’s poetry emerges as a paradigm of formal balance and emotional control— a lyrical architecture where structure embodies moral poise, and aesthetic compression becomes an act of conscience.

(9)

The second last poem, “The People of Braj”, brings Abnish Singh Chauhan’s poetic journey to a luminous close by affirming the moral intelligence and emotional balance of socio-cultural and spiritual life. The poet observes with quiet admiration:

 

They may not know—

the policies of nations…

But they know

something profound—

how to live

a fulfilling life in Braj. (Chauhan 93) 

In these lines, Chauhan contrasts the epistemology of simplicity with the alienating sophistication of modern existence. The simple inhabitants of Braj, though far away from global politics and technological progress, embody an intuitive wisdom grounded in community, compassion, and spiritual continuity. Their knowledge is not analytical but experiential, not cosmopolitan but cosmic.

Read through the lens of Postcolonial literary theory, the poem performs an act of cultural reclamation. It recuperates indigenous epistemologies— ways of knowing rooted in locality, faith, and shared moral practice— that modernity has marginalized. The opposition between “international summits” and the “chanting of the divine names/ of Radha and Krishna” (Chauhan 94) reflects what Homi Bhabha calls the “contest of narratives” (“Arthurian Border Writing”) between the global and the vernacular. Chauhan’s Braj becomes a symbolic geography of resistance, where spiritual intimacy counters bureaucratic abstraction and ethical rootedness defies the dislocation of globalization.

In this sense, Chauhan’s vision aligns with the postcolonial revaluation of the local found in Jayanta Mahapatra’s evocation of Odisha and R.K. Narayan’s fictionalized Malgudi — both spaces where tradition mediates modernity. Yet Chauhan’s Braj, suffused with the sacred aura of Radha and Krishna, expands this realism into a moral ecology, where devotion and daily life are seamlessly intertwined.

The poem thus realizes what Edward W. Said described as the “counterpoint of belonging” (Said): the articulation of cultural identity not through exclusion, but through a dialogic harmony between the rooted and the universal. By ending his collection with this affirmation, Chauhan redefines home not as nostalgia but as ethical habitation— a mode of being that resists fragmentation by nurturing compassion, reverence, and balance.

“The People of Braj”, therefore, functions as a coda to Tell Me, Please…, synthesizing its socio-cultural, spiritual, ethical, and aesthetic concerns into a vision of renewal. It reminds the modern reader that wisdom need not be sought in distant abstractions; it endures in the quiet rhythms of a community that still knows how to live “a fulfilling life in Braj.”

3. Conclusion

Abnish Singh Chauhan’s Tell Me, Please… stands as a compelling testament to enduring ethical and humanistic vocation of poetry in an age of fragmentation. Compact in form yet expansive in moral reach, Chauhan’s selected poems transform the lyric into a medium of conscience, where the tremor of the individual heart resonates with the broader rhythms of social and cosmic order. His deliberate simplicity, grounded in clarity rather than ornament, reveals a profound faith in the communicative and redemptive power of language— a faith that quietly resists the scepticism and irony that define much of postmodern aesthetics.

Viewed through the intersecting frameworks of Humanism, Romanticism, and Postcolonial poetics, Chauhan’s work reasserts literature as a vital space for moral imagination and ethical renewal. Like Tagore’s Gitanjali or Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri, his poetry envisions the act of creation as both sadhana and service— an offering of self and spirit to humanity and the divine. The poet’s voice, imbued with humility and conviction, transforms artistic expression into a mode of moral engagement and socio-cultural and spiritual reflection.

Within Chauhan’s poetic world, the poet is neither a detached observer nor a passive dreamer, but an active participant in the moral drama of existence. His “small desire/ to sing for the suffering ones” (Chauhan 33) becomes emblematic of a larger human aspiration— to recover faith in art, in values, and ultimately, in the indomitable power of the human spirit. In fusing aesthetic grace with ethical consciousness, Chauhan’s poetry transcends the boundaries of genre and sentiment. It emerges not merely as a collection of verses, but as a living manifesto of compassion and conscience, reaffirming the timeless role of poetry as a bridge between emotion and ethics, imagination and truth.

Works Cited:

Adam, Christopher. “Fiction as an agent of the moral imagination.”  Christopheradam, January 10, 2021, https://christopheradam.ca/2021/01/10/fiction-as-an-agent-of-the-moral-imagination/. Accessed July1, 2025

 

“Arthurian Border Writing.” History on the Edge, https://manifold.umn.edu/read/history-on-the-edge/section/3b466fd5-c5e7-4316-9761-3e1cd31e4b87. Accessed July 4, 2025.

 

Brooks, Cleanth. “The Language of Paradox.” The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1968, pp. 1–16.

 

Chauhan, Abnish Singh. Tell Me, Please…. Authorspress, 2025.

 

Chauhan, Dr Priyanka. “Bridging Generations: Chauhan’s Poetry from India.” Tell Me, Please…, Sep 24, 2025, https://tellmepleasebyabnish.blogspot.com/2025/10/bridging-generations-chauhans-poetry.html. Accessed Sep 26, 2025.

 

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Said, Edward W. “On Counterpoint.” PIERRE BOULEZ SAAL, 2019, https://www.boulezsaal.de/en/edward-w-said/edward-w-said-days-on-counterpoint. Accessed July 3, 2025.

 

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Aurobindo, Sri. Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1954.

 

Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Hill and Wang, 1975.

 

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Eliot, T.S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The Sacred Wood, Methuen, 1920.

 

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Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton University Press, 1957.

 

Mahapatra, Jayanta. Selected Poems. Oxford University Press, 1987.

 

Nussbaum, Martha C. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford University Press, 1990.

 

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About the Authors:

Vandna Yadav is a Research Scholar (Ph.D) at Department of English, BIU College of Humanities & Journalism, Bareilly International University, Bareilly, India

Kavita Kumari is a Research Scholar (Ph.D) at Department of English, BIU College of Humanities & Journalism, Bareilly International University, Bareilly, India

Courtesy: 

Yadav, V., & Kumari, K. (2025). "From Compassion to Conscience: A Critical Study of Selected Poems from Tell Me, Please… by Abnish Singh Chauhan." International Journal of Law Management and Humanities, 8(6), 993 - 1008. https://doij.org/10.10000/IJLMH.1111149