The Power of Music
by Sukumar Ray
About the poet
Sukumar Ray was a Bengali writer, illustrator, and poet known for nonsense verse and absurd, comic storytelling in the tradition of Edward Lear — using exaggerated, playful scenarios to make a point land more memorably than a straightforward statement could.
What happens in the poem
Bhisma Lochan Sharma is a singer whose voice is so unnaturally loud and harsh that it wreaks havoc wherever he performs, from Delhi to Burma. Bullock carts overturn, horses bolt in panic, birds scatter, and fish dive for cover — his singing, meant to entertain, instead terrorises everything around him.
People beg him to stop, but nothing works — until a billy goat steps up and answers his singing with an even louder bellow of its own, matching and finally overpowering him. Faced with a noise even more overwhelming than his own, Bhisma Lochan Sharma is finally silenced, and peace returns.
Theme: what the poem is really about
Underneath the comedy is a simple, serious idea: force used without restraint causes harm, even when it comes from something as ordinarily pleasant as music. Ray isn't mocking singing itself — he's mocking the refusal to notice, or care, about the effect you're having on everyone around you. The billy goat's intervention adds a second layer of irony: the only thing that can stop excess is another, equally excessive force — a comic way of saying that unchecked behaviour rarely stops on its own.
Exam-style questions and model answers
Q. How does Ray use exaggeration in the poem, and to what effect?
The chaos caused by the singing — carts overturning, animals fleeing across regions — is deliberately absurd, which makes the poem funny while still making its point about excess vividly memorable.
Q. Why is it a goat, specifically, that finally silences the singer?
The image of an ordinary animal out-bellowing a human singer adds to the poem's comic irony — it takes something equally loud and undignified to match his excess, since reasonable requests have already failed.
Q. What lesson does the poem teach about the use of power or talent?
That any strength or gift, used without consideration for others, can become destructive — and that restraint, not intensity, is what makes a talent genuinely valuable to those around it.