A kaleidoscope is never named in the opening stanza, and that withholding is the poem's quiet cleverness. Balachandran V begins with "Turning it inward" and leaves "it" unexplained, so we squint down the tube at colour before we know what we are looking at. Only when the speaker shakes the "Glass" and cries "Viola'!", a chatty, spoken flourish like a magician's, does the object become a kaleidoscope. The title, "Monocular Views", then makes sense, because a kaleidoscope is held to a single eye. It also carries a hint of unease. One eye gives a partial view, so every pattern of love in the poem is one person's glimpse rather than the whole truth.
The first stanza is a slow scan, and the colours behave less like paint than like moods. The Blue is "pale", a flat and washed-out first impression. Then the speaker moves through "a bright saffron Red that excited me", greens he "always felt erotic", "Browns of barren lands" and finally "the White of the snow-capped hills". Read in order, this runs from desire to emptiness to cold distance. The poem never says so, but the sequence already sketches the emotional range that love will cover later. The capital letters turn each colour into something close to a character. The landscape words, "barren" and "snow-capped", suggest the speaker is travelling through a terrain before anything has been shaken loose.
Shaking changes everything. The second stanza fills with small, bright, ordinary things: "Sparklers and bangle pieces / Tinted glass and tiny beads". None of them is precious, and their cheapness is part of the charm. By the third stanza the comparison has dropped away. "Love, in its infinite patterns, Love" repeats the word as if the speaker cannot stop saying it, and the next line is disarmingly honest: "That I knew, and that I didn't." Love here includes what he has lived through and what he has only glimpsed or never understood. The line "So different from the other, so unique!" shows delight in variety, but the delight is about to turn.
The form is free verse with no rhyme, and the stanzas shrink and tighten, running seven, five, four, then two lines. The two-line stanza is the sharpest turn: "I shake, I roll and yet another appears / How disturbing, how fragile, how tender it is!" The short, parallel verbs mimic the mechanical turning of the tube, and the triple "how" builds to an unexpected word. "Disturbing" sits between "fragile" and "tender" and spoils the comfort of the list, since beauty that can be shaken into new shapes can just as easily be shaken apart. The verb "shake" runs through the whole poem. It begins as the speaker's action, the thing that makes the patterns, and then returns in the last stanza as a danger: "I stand still, lest my arms shake."
This is the poem's real insight. New patterns of love need movement, and movement destroys the pattern before it. To keep one lovely design, the speaker has to freeze, and he can do so only by "trying to forget, at least for the moment" what he is really holding. The closing line, "Is of broken pieces of glass...", trails into an ellipsis rather than a full stop, as though the thought will not finish. Love is built from fragments, from things that have already broken, and its loveliness depends on a steady hand and a willing blindness.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it does not oversell its comparison. It could have ended on the "myriad of love" and been merely pretty. Instead it lets the speaker admit that he is partly fooling himself, and that the fooling is a kind of tenderness. The language is plain and conversational, even a little loose in places, but that unpolished voice suits a speaker who is thinking aloud while holding something he is afraid to drop.