Snow Flames: A Metaphysical and Existential Cartography of Majrooh Rashid’s Poetic Vision

“Poetry, as Majrooh Rashid’s verse exemplifies, is not ornament but ontology-a revelation of the unseen, echoing Wallace Stevens’ “priest of the invisible” and Ibn Arabi’s view of mystical speech as inherently poetic. It is where the soul dwells, as Heidegger puts it, and where silence speaks, as Rumi and Dickinson suggest. Rashid’s metaphors-snow and flame-echo Rilke’s loneliness, Shahid’s longing, and Eliot’s quest for transcendence beyond personality. In his lines, we witness Frost’s union of thought and feeling, Adunis’s poetic liberation, and Nietzsche’s art against despair. His poetry is at once veiled and luminous-a metaphysical  and existential cartography of being.”

In every age, the finest poetry does not merely mirror the world; it reshapes the soul’s perception of existence itself, unveiling hidden harmonies between suffering and splendor, mortality , transcendence and pathways to transformative experience and awakening. The interplay between stylistic nuances, thematic depth and richness, and multifaceted socio-cultural context- varying traditions, histories and worldviews underscores the enduring power of poetry to reflect and transform the human consciousness.

In Prof. Majrooh Rashid’s “Snow Flames”-poetic collection  and his later corpus, we find such a rare alchemy: a poetic vision where the fleeting touch of snow and the restless hunger of flame conspire to dramatize the deepest metaphysical tensions of being and becoming with existential reflection.

A luminous first edition (2025) of nearly 270 poems across 288 pages, exquisitely published by Ink Links Publishing House, Pampore, with an evocative cover design by Rouf Qayasi. Enriched by Prof. Neerja Mattoo’s insightful foreword and profound reflections by scholars Prof. Bina Biswas and Prof. Santosh Bakaya, this timeless volume radiates poetic and intellectual brilliance with penetration as the key coupled with economy.

Prof.Majrooh Rashid’s  work rises beyond the confines of time and geography, resonating with the ancient wisdom of Rumi’s dance between annihilation and subsistence, with Hafiz’s sweet intoxication in the mystery of being, with Iqbal’s call to creative selfhood, and with the existential courage of Camus and Heidegger. Rashid’s verse transforms memory into revelation, pain into purification, and loss into luminous becoming, thereby inscribing himself into the perennial conversation of the spirit across civilizations. His poetry does not merely invite us to read-it demands that we awaken: to the miracle of impermanence, to the radiance that lies concealed within fragility, and to the soul’s indomitable yearning to turn every fall into flight. In an increasingly distracted world, Rashid reorients our attention to the essential: the mystery that trembles between the melting snowflake and the leaping flame, between silence and song, between dust and divinity.

 

In the subtle undercurrents of “Snow Flames”, one senses how  Majrooh Rashid masterfully reconciles the paradox of snow and flames, revealing profound emotional, philosophical, and existential forces that shape the human journey/condition through poetic realities. Majrooh Rashid’s “Snow Flames” and his later poetic corpus constitute a luminous exploration of the metaphysical tension at the heart of existence-the ceaseless dance between fragility and grandeur, loss and renewal, despair and transcendence. Drawing deeply from classical and modern traditions-Kashmiri, Urdu, Persian, Arabic, English, and existential European thought-M.Rashid crafts a vision that is simultaneously rooted in personal memory and cosmic yearning.

“Snow Flames” masterfully blends Modernist and Postmodernist sensibilities, juxtaposing existential despair with the celebration of paradox. It channels Modernism’s search for meaning amid fragmentation, capturing the tension between suffering and transcendence. Simultaneously, it embraces Postmodernist fluidity, challenging fixed narratives and highlighting the multiplicity of truths. Rashid’s poem invites readers into a world where beauty and pain, life and death coexist as inseparable forces, urging a redefinition of existence as a dynamic, ever-evolving journey. In this synthesis, “Snow Flames” transcends traditional boundaries, offering a timeless reflection on the complexities of being.

Engaging resonances with Rumi’s mystical dialectics, Iqbal’s philosophy of selfhood, Hafiz’s celebration of spiritual intoxication, Khayyam’s elegies of impermanence, Heidegger’s ontology of being-toward-death, Camus’ revolt against absurdity, Eliot’s religious-existential landscapes, Schuon’s metaphysical timelessness, Whitman’s democratic mysticism, and Darwish and Miłosz’s witness to fragility and endurance,Majrooh Rashid’s work elevates itself into the perennial dialogue of soul with existence. This humble attempt traces the deep structures of Majrooh Rashid’s poetics, articulating how snow and flame emerge as twin symbols of the soul’s passage through time, suffering, beauty, and illumination.

T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’s existential paralysis mirrors the frozen intensity of “Snow Flames”, where inner fragmentation and societal disconnection blaze within a cold, unyielding world.” Snow Flames” mirrors the Dionysian and Apollonian dichotomy, fusing order and chaos to reveal the transformative beauty at the heart of existence.

Magee’s “High Flight” and M. Rashid’s Snow Flames both capture the soul’s ascent, transcending the temporal to touch the eternal in fleeting moments of grace.

His poetry becomes a cartography of existential navigation. Snow recalls the silence that pervades Arnold’s Dover Beach, where “ignorant armies clash by night” against a backdrop of cosmic indifference, yet M.Rashid refuses to yield to despair. Flame rises as a protest, much like Camus’ “invincible summer” that resides within the depths of winter. In this creative tension, M.Rashid echoes the Sufi tradition where “fire and light are but veils on the face of the One,” as Hafiz sings. Snow may melt; flame may consume; yet both point to a reality beyond their transient forms-the eternal Logos to which Eliot alludes when he writes, “the fire and the rose are one.”

Transformative poetic reflection through serendipitous selections

The poem “My Poems” distills the soul’s journey from fervent creative fire to serene dissolution. Through the alchemy of elemental symbols-fire ignited by passion, water poured from a “cloudy mind,” and the ashes of poetic longing scattered into the “lake of life”-it evokes the timeless transformation of self and art. It speaks to a universal truth: poetry, born of intensity, finds its ultimate peace in surrender. Profoundly resonating with global poetic traditions, My Poems captures the elemental transformation of self-fire into ash, passion into peace-mirroring Sufi annihilation (fana), Romantic transcendence, Zen stillness, and Bhakti surrender. The poet dissolves the self into the lake of life, echoing the timeless human yearning for unity, stillness, and ultimate truth.

My Poems

I was a fire,
but by the eternal ardour
aflame in my veins,
desirous of touching the blue sky,
soaked and was caught up
in the shower
rained down from your cloudy mind.
My poems ,
passions ashes
grew restless
for being scattered
into the lake of life
for attaining the ultimate peace
on the lakebed.

Profound in its metaphysical lyricism and rich in cross-cultural symbolic resonance, “Lyrical Limits” is a deeply evocative meditation on transcendence, embodiment, and the intimate dialogue between the finite and the infinite. The poem delicately blends the tangible-dance, arms, rhythm-with the intangible-eternity, emptiness, resonance-thus situating itself at the sacred threshold where aesthetic experience becomes spiritual revelation. The speaker’s vision of the sun “waking early” to witness a dance suggests a cosmic yearning, reminiscent of Vedic hymns where natural elements are personified in awe of divine expression. The “eternal song” echoes the Pythagorean and Sufi notions of cosmic music-the musica universalis and samaʿ-in which the soul becomes attuned to the divine through rhythmic, lyrical motion. The merging of form (“lyrical arms”) with formlessness (“assimilating into my emptiness”) recalls the mystical paradoxes in Zen haiku, Rumi’s ecstatic surrender, and the Bhakti poets’ longing for union through the body’s surrender to divine cadence.

It resonates with the mystical insight of Meister Eckhart-that “the eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me”-suggesting the dancer becomes both subject and object of divine perception.

Geographically and culturally, this poem traverses poetic and mystical traditions from Kashmir’s rich aesthetic-spiritual heritage, particularly the Rishi-Sufi synthesis, to the Persian ghazal’s metaphors of gaze and union, the Japanese aesthetic of yūgen (mysterious grace), and the Christian mystical tradition’s contemplative embodiment. It belongs to a lineage of verses where silence speaks, movement prays, and boundaries reveal the Absolute.

With its lyrical refinement, philosophical depth, and universal soulfulness, Lyrical Limits is not merely a celebration of beauty-it is a revelation of how form dances toward the formless, how the seen vibrates with the unseen, and how poetry itself is the dancer, disappearing into the eternal rhythm it invokes.

Lyrical Limits

The sun too,
might have woken up early
in the morning ,
for cherishing the feast
of the swinging movements
of your dance
and might be
like me,
passing through
the by lane
to catch a glance
of your lyrical arms,
Shimmering with lush subtle rhythm,
attuned to the eternal song,
resonating in the back drop
assimilating into my emptiness,
pouring out my pores.
The blue sky outside,
proud of its expanse,
is envying your limits.

“The Gospel of Time” distills the metaphysical weight of existence into an elegant, timeless meditation on transience. The poem’s portrayal of time as a “viewless chariot” quietly dismantles illusions of permanence, evoking both the existential angst of modernist poetry and the mystical awareness of impermanence found in Eastern traditions. Echoing echoes of Eliot’s Four Quartets and the Sufi concept of fanaa, it offers a lucid, lyrical passage through memory, oblivion, and the soul’s fading scent-ultimately leaving us with a silence more articulate than speech.

The Gospel of Time

Time is a viewless chariot,
racing
from the Beginning,
constantly
along the highway,
lending to absolute stillness;
covertly passing by us,
who are lost in contemplation
of being and nothingness.
It takes along:
the fog in our minds,
scent that wafts out from the human hearts,
waking dreams
denied to the seeing eyes,
ultimately sinks them into oblivion,
at the end of dark tunnel.

(Inspiration: Naseer Ahmad Nasir’s poem)

Prof. Majrooh Rashid’s “Snow Flames” distills Kashmir’s spiritual and existential anguish into global resonance. “Hope” mirrors Agha Shahid Ali’s poetic defiance-life blooming amidst desolation and stands as resilient like Dickinson’s winged metaphor. “Darvesh” channels Rumi’s mystical arc: from ecstasy to inner illumination and whirls in Blakean spiritual fire. “A Soliloquy” recalls Eliot’s The Waste Land-memory’s weight and time’s erosion and mourns with Ghalibian introspection. “Hemlock” invokes Socratic martyrdom, echoing Neruda and Darwish-where words risk death but redeem truth a Luminous, timeless cartography of the soul.These verses, rich in Sufi, classical, and modern echoes, universalize the Kashmiri soul’s cry: poetry as resistance, remembrance, and renewal.

A Soliloquy

All my life,

stay busy

clearing the mind

of the debris

from the broken promises

and crumbling hopes,

gathering it

in the worn out palms

I went by the riverside,

buried it under the slopes of the great River.

And you,

you are there,

stuck in the past,

unaware of the brilliant present,

soon it will be all history.

Will sink into oblivion

second by second.

Hemlock

Last poetic lines ….

If only I were Socrates

I would drink the words

gladly

draught by draught.

Memory in M. Rashid’s poetry is not nostalgic reminiscence but an existential tethering to being itself. In poems such as “Mother’s Sermon” and “On Father’s Day,” loss is neither sentimentalized nor overcome; rather, it becomes the very site where absence calls forth the deepest forms of presence. This sensibility places M. Rashid in profound dialogue with Czesław Milosz, who wrote: “Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing.” Rashid’s recovery of tenderness through remembrance is not a retreat but an affirmation-an existential act that redeems the fleeting into the luminous.

Pain, far from being an accidental intrusion, becomes in poets’s vision the very forge of authentic selfhood. In “Pain Scented the Air” and “Celebrating Barrenness,” suffering emerges as a spiritual alchemy, mirroring Nietzsche’s intuition that “one must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star.” Majrooh Rashid neither wallows in pain nor romanticizes it; he recognizes, with Rumi, that “the wound is the place where the Light enters you.” Pain, distilled through the poetic process, becomes not a dead weight but a sacred burden-a cross carried in the hope of resurrection. His flames do not destroy but purify, recalling Schuon’s assertion that “to suffer in the world is to participate, however obscurely, in the universal mystery of purification.”

In Snow Flames, Prof. Majrooh Rashid fuses Kashmiri mystic and revolutionary traditions, weaving snow and flames into a living symbol of silent longing/endurance.In a sense like the Sufis, he reveals inner burning beneath stillness, while his voice, defiant yet tender, carries the timeless hope of renewal and transcendence.

In his mystical poems such as “The Ladder of Mystery” and “Road to Light,” Majrooh  Rashid maps the arduous ascent of the soul toward the Real, yet his mysticism is stripped of escapism. As Whitman proclaimed, “I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,” so poet finds the sacred within the immanent, insisting that the ladder to heaven must be constructed with acts of compassion on earth. The “Road to Light” is paved with ethical awakenings, small fidelities to truth, beauty, and justice, rather than grandiose mystical flights. His vision recalls Muhammad Iqbal’s call for a dynamic, self-affirming spirituality wherein the ego (khudi) is not annihilated but perfected in service to the Divine.

Majrooh Rashid’s later poems-“Who am I?”, “The Cosmic Path,” “Black Hole,” “My Poems,” and “Typo“-move deeper into philosophical and ontological terrains. “Who am I?” voices the fundamental existential cry, the anguished questioning that Heidegger captures in Being and Time when he speaks of Dasein’s burden of existence. Rashid’s self becomes a question mark inscribed against the infinite, an echo of Whitman’s eternal query: “What is the grass?” “The Cosmic Path” charts the journey of the soul across the galaxies of meaning, risking the dark abysses of despair while bearing the secret hope of arrival. “Black Hole” warns of the self’s implosion into egotism and nihilism, a chilling affirmation of Camus’ warning that the only serious philosophical question is whether life is worth living. Yet Majrooh Rashid’s answer, like Camus’, is a defiant yes-not through naïve hope but through courageous fidelity to beauty and truth.

In a sense Snow Flames mirrors Einstein’s “theory of eternity” by collapsing time into a poetic simultaneity-where memory, loss, and longing coexist as luminous presences. Like Einstein’s timeless universe, Majrooh Rashid’s verses transcend temporal borders, turning snow and flame into symbols of enduring inner truths. The collection becomes a lyrical echo of eternal now-philosophical, mystical, and profoundly human.

“My Poems” and “Typo” reveal a profound humility before the mystery of language and being. Rashid’s acknowledgment of himself as a “typo” in the cosmic manuscript resonates with Eliot’s lament in Four Quartets that “every attempt / is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure.” Yet it is precisely through this recognized imperfection, this holy unknowing, that Rashid’s poetry finds its luminous authenticity. Like Hafiz’s cupbearer, he staggers but does not fall; he sings, albeit hoarsely, from the depths of the tavern of existence.

Prof. Majrooh Rashid’s “Snow Flames” and later works thus emerge not only as a chronicle of individual sensibility but as a profound cartography of the human condition itself-its agonies, aspirations, bewilderments, and triumphs. In weaving the delicate textures of snow with the consuming urgency of flame, he joins that timeless fellowship of souls-Darwish singing amid ruins, Miłosz memorializing imperilled beauty, Whitman embracing the cosmos within a blade of grass, Eliot plumbing the burnt-out ends of modern days.

Majrooh Rashid’s poetry offers no facile redemption, no utopian assurances; rather, it gifts us something rarer: the courage to dwell within the paradoxes of existence without losing wonder, the wisdom to embrace transience without capitulating to despair, and the faith to recognize, with Rumi, that “where there is ruin, there is hope for treasure.” In his incandescent verses, the ephemeral is transfigured into the eternal, sorrow becomes a deeper form of praise, and the burning of the heart becomes the dawning of true light. His is a poetry of witness and wisdom, elegy and awakening, brokenness and beatitude. In a time thirsting for depth, M. Rashid reminds us that the soul’s true home is not found in the vanquishing of suffering, but in its transmutation into love, vision, and song. And so, like snow flames melting into the fire of unseen suns, his words continue their quiet, inexhaustible work-rekindling the ancient human hope that even amidst the ash and ice, the soul may yet rise, luminous, whole, and free.

“Snow Flames” marks a luminous addition to the growing canon of Kashmiri English literature. That it springs from the pen of a discerning critic, gifted storyteller, and multilingual poet only deepens its resonance. It not only offers a path to personal transformation, but also nurtures a deeper connection with the self, nature, and the world.

In sum , Snow Flames is a luminous contribution to contemporary poetry, offering readers a rich tapestry of metaphysical and existential themes. Its introspective depth and stylistic fineness invite readers into contemplative space, reflecting the complexities of the human experience/condition. It is a work that deserves enduring recognition, and I wish both the book and its author every success on this meaningful journey.

Author can be mailed at  Shabirahmed.lone003@gmail.com