A storm should settle something. Lightning ought to set things burning, rain ought to put them out, and either way the world would end up changed. In Ram Krishna Singh's «Nirvana I», the sky does neither. It "frightens with lightning and rain" and then "raises neither fire nor quenches the earth." There is plenty of noise and no consequence. The speaker's own life follows the same pattern: "I've lost a chance to create despite ritual." Something was prepared and the proper steps were followed, yet nothing came of it.
The poem is about the distance between spiritual or creative ambition and an ordinary evening of disappointment. Its central idea is that grand words like "nirvana" go flat when you are sitting alone and let down. The last line says so bluntly: "it's stupid to talk about nirvana." The speaker is not claiming to have outgrown the idea. He seems to be embarrassed by his own talk of it.
The construction rewards a slow look. The poem is two tercets with no rhyme and no fixed metre, though most lines hover around ten syllables, and that steadiness makes the longer third line feel slightly overloaded, as if the speaker is straining to say too much. The grammar of line two is lopsided in a way that seems deliberate. "Neither" sits before "fire" and "nor" before "quenches," so the two halves don't quite balance, and the sentence limps just as the storm does. There is also no punctuation after "rain," so the lines run on without a pause, as though the sky's empty display can't even earn a full stop.
Sound does some quiet work here. The long *i* of "sky," "frightens," "lightning," and "fire" builds through the first lines and returns in "I've" and "despite." The speaker's own voice enters on the same note as the weather, and the effect hints that the storm is a projection of his inner state. "Create" is deliberately open. It could mean making a poem, or making something with another person. The second stanza nudges toward the latter, though that is an inference from the text. "Ritual" is open in a similar way. Fire is part of ritual in many traditions, so line two's fire and line three's ritual echo each other, even though the poem never says what the ritual was.
The second stanza leaves the sky for a room. "end of the day and her parting with a kiss:" is a fragment with no verb, and the colon promises an explanation. What arrives is "now sulking with a glass in the dark." The woman is defined only by a gesture, a kiss at leaving, and the poem never says why she goes or whether the kiss was tender or dutiful. "Sulking" is a small, almost childish word, and it punctures any heroic pose. The unnamed "glass" invites us to supply the drink. "In the dark" answers the lightning of the opening, since the brief flash is gone and nothing has caught fire. The change of register is also visible on the page. Stanza one begins with a capital and moves through weather. Stanza two is entirely lowercase and has no closing full stop, so it trails off like a mood that is simply not finished.
One more layer is worth noticing. The word "nirvana" comes from Sanskrit and literally suggests a flame being blown out. Read that way, the fire and quenching of the first stanza are about nirvana all along. The speaker is stuck between the two states: he isn't ablaze with creative or erotic energy, and he isn't at peace either. The title's numeral suggests a sequence or a first attempt, but the poem itself doesn't say, so it is safest to treat it only as a hint that the subject might be revisited.
The poem matters because it refuses consolation. A more comfortable version would let the storm break, or let the glass in the dark become a moment of insight. Singh gives us a failed storm, a departed lover and a mildly ridiculous man, and he lets the big word shrink beside them. The mockery lands on the speaker, and that self-deflation makes the poem credible. In six short lines it suggests that wanting transcendence and feeling sorry for yourself can happen in the same breath.