Victory, in Ram Krishna Singh's «Feat», lasts exactly one line. "He thinks he's achieved a feat": the verb "thinks" already sounds doubtful, and the next two lines confirm it. The feat was "seeking security through division", but "the fear haunts and thought multiplies". The poem never says what was divided. It could be the self, a relationship, or one part of life from another. That openness is deliberate. The poem is less interested in the circumstances than in the logic of the move: he tried to make himself safe by splitting something apart, and it did not work.
The vocabulary is quietly arithmetical. "Division" is answered by "multiplies", and then comes "the problem", which reads as a sum that won't come out. What the division leaves behind is "the gap between / what is and what may be". Dividing didn't bring peace. It opened a space, and the mind filled that space with possibilities, mostly frightening ones. The title helps too. "Feat" and "fear" differ by a single letter, and the poem slides from one to the other in a few words, as though the achievement and the anxiety were always one thing seen from two sides.
After this abstract opening, the third stanza turns physical, and the writing becomes more uncomfortable. "The itch inside the skin" is a precise image: an irritation with no outer cause, impossible to scratch because it is under the surface. It is also one of the few lines with a steady beat, three stresses falling evenly, and the short repeated "i" sounds of "itch", "inside" and "skin" give it a scratchy, restless texture. Then the poem makes a painful contrast: "memories of love-making / and routine pleasures now nightmare". The word "routine" is telling. Ordinary comforts, the kind people barely notice, have turned frightening. The cause is given in cold, clinical language, "chemical change in blood and nerves". The poem does not say whether this means illness, medication, or simply what fear does to the body. Judging by the wording, the speaker wants us to see that the mind's trouble has become a bodily fact, something happening inside the man rather than outside him.
The final image is the oddest. He "licks the tulip in drawing room". The tulip is delicate and decorative, and the drawing room is the most polite, ordered space in a house. Set against them, the verb "licks" is almost animal, a gesture that belongs to neither the room nor the flower. The effect is of a man whose behaviour no longer fits his surroundings. The poem's own comment comes straight after: he "thinks thoughtlessly mindlessly". These are near-contradictions, since thinking should involve thought and a mind. The phrase suggests a mind going round in circles without ever getting anywhere. The poem has also come back to where it began: the first line has "thinks" and the last stanza has "thinks" again. The man has gone through the whole poem and ended up in the same place, now "inflicting more pain" on himself.
Formally, the poem keeps close to speech. It is free verse with no rhyme, and its stanzas of three, two, four and three lines are uneven, so the poem never settles into a pattern. Every line begins in lower case, and there are no full stops anywhere. Only the colon after "the problem" interrupts the flow, and even that works like a pause before stating a diagnosis. Without end punctuation, the thoughts run into one another, which is how obsessive worry feels. The tone is cool and detached, using "he" rather than "I", as though a doctor or a patient observer were reading the case aloud.
That detachment is the poem's main strength. It does not ask for pity, and it does not explain. In about a dozen short lines it shows how a decision made to feel safe can become a source of fear, and how a mind that tries to solve itself by cutting things apart may end up with more pieces to worry about. Few poems of this size manage to be both a joke about arithmetic and an account of suffering.