In nine short lines, Ram Krishna Singh drowns a speaker, traps them in a web, and holds a funeral, all without a single full stop. "Dying Light" is about a self caught inside its own destiny, and about how loss gets reflected back in the eyes of those who watch it.
The poem opens on a contradiction. "Shrieking in the sea" gives us a loud, desperate sound in a place that swallows sound. The cry is real, but the water is too large to hear it. The grammar adds to the unease. The shrieking has no clear subject until the next line, and when the speaker arrives, it is only as "my knotted self." This is not "I" but a thing, tied up and tangled and hard to undo. The poem gives us the distress first and the explanation never, and that withholding is much of its power.
In the second stanza the scene shifts from open water to the palm of a hand. "The lines on the palms" will remind most readers of palmistry, the old idea that the creases of the hand map a life. Singh never uses the word "fate." The image does that work for him. Then the metaphor turns dark: the lines become a "spiders' network," and a map of destiny becomes a trap. The word "gleaming" is the most unsettling choice here. A web glittering with light is beautiful, yet what shines in it is "corpses / that have no face." Judging by the imagery, these could be days, hopes, or possibilities that the pattern of a life has caught and consumed. The poem doesn't say, and the facelessness makes them anonymous and impossible to mourn individually. There is also a quiet link back to the first stanza. A web is made of knots, so the "knotted self" and the "network" belong to the same family of images. Drowning and snaring are two ways of being held with no escape.
The final stanza begins with "yet," a word that usually promises a turn toward hope. What follows is a ritual: "their funeral / mirrors the eyes." Even the faceless dead get a ceremony, though it appears only as a reflection, seen in someone's eyes. Whose eyes isn't stated, and they could belong to mourners or to the speaker. Then comes the poem's cleverest word, "waving." Eyes cannot literally wave, so the verb has to mean something else. It could be the flicker of a flame, a gesture of farewell, or the motion of water, which carries us back to the sea of the opening line. The poem curls round on itself like the web it describes. The "dying light" of the title can be a candle at a funeral, the last gleam of day on water, or the fading brightness in a pair of eyes. Singh lets all three coexist.
The form suits this compression. There is no rhyme and no punctuation, so the lines drift into one another with no full stops to pause on. Yet the poem is not shapeless. Most lines run to five or four syllables, alternating through the first two stanzas ("the lines on the palms," "spiders' network," "gleaming with corpses," "that have no face"). Only the last line stretches to six, as though the poem draws one longer breath before it ends. The sound is controlled too. Sibilance hisses through the opening ("shrieking," "sea," "self") and returns with "spiders'." Meanwhile the long *i* sound chimes through the closing lines in "lines," "eyes," "dying," and "light," a faint echo that ties the palm, the eye and the fading glow together.
What makes "Dying Light" worth reading is how much it does with how little. It takes a familiar image, the lines of the hand, and makes it frightening by adding a spider and a row of faceless dead. It also resists a neat ending. There is no consolation and no explanation, only a funeral reflected in eyes and a light going out. Students will notice that the poem asks us to do some of the work, to decide what the corpses are and whose eyes are watching. That open space is what lets a nine-line poem stay in the mind long after it ends.