Decomposition — Zulfikar Ghose
Decomposition — Ghose’s Photograph of a Bombay Pavement
Zulfikar Ghose’s poem Decomposition describes a photograph the speaker once took in Bombay. It shows an old, grey-haired beggar asleep on a pavement. Years later, looking back at the photograph, the speaker starts to question his own motives for taking it — and for once calling it art. The poem moves from confident description to uneasy confession, and that movement is the key to understanding it.
The Story of the Poem
The speaker describes the beggar in unsettling detail: “grey-haired, wearing shorts and a dirty shirt,” his “shadow thrown aside like a blanket.” A crowd passes behind him, “bemused by a pavement trickster” but “indifferent to this very common sight” of an old man asleep on the street. Poverty here is so ordinary that nobody but the photographer stops to look twice — and even he, at first, looks only as an artist searching for a striking image.
Ghose uses dehumanising imagery to describe the beggar: his limbs are “cracks in the stone,” and he “lies veined into stone, a fossil man.” These images turn a living person into landscape and geology — something ancient, fixed and no longer quite human.
Poet and Context
Zulfikar Ghose writes about the uneasy relationship between an artist and the people that artist represents — especially when the artist comes from comfort and the subject does not. Decomposition puts this question at its centre: is photographing poverty a form of witness, or a form of theft? The poem never fully answers this, which is part of its honesty.
Themes: Looking, Guilt and the Presumption of Art
For most of the poem, the speaker sounds pleased with his work. He calls the photograph “a good composition” and gives it a title, “The Man in the Street,” treating the beggar as a typical example of India rather than as an individual. But in the final stanza, the speaker’s tone changes completely. He now notices the beggar’s face — “his head in the posture of one weeping into a pillow” — and admits his own “presumption at attempting to compose art of his hunger and solitude.” This shift, from self-satisfaction to guilt, is the poem’s volta.
The title Decomposition puns on two meanings at once: the artistic ‘composition’ of a photograph, and the physical decomposition — decay — of a body left to suffer on the street. By choosing this title, Ghose suggests that turning a person’s suffering into an artistic composition is itself a kind of violence done to them.
The poem’s imagery works to strip the beggar of individuality before restoring it. Early on, he is compared to landscape and fossil — “cracks in the stone,” a “fossil man” — and described as “Brain-washed by the sun into exhaustion.” The insects that might crawl over him are given “routes for the ants’ journeys, the flies’ descents,” as though his body were terrain rather than a person. Only in the final four lines does this objectification reverse, as the speaker finally pictures the man’s grief.
Ghose writes in a plain, documentary voice, close to the tone of someone captioning a photograph. This flat, matter-of-fact style makes the final confession — that his “good composition” was really a “presumption” — land with more force, because it breaks so sharply from the detached tone that came before.
The poem is built from five four-line stanzas (quatrains), and the argument develops steadily across them: the description of the photograph, the dehumanising stone and fossil imagery, the indifferent crowd, the speaker’s original pride in his ‘good composition’, and finally his present-day reconsideration. This structure mirrors how memory works — the speaker is not simply describing an old photograph, he is re-examining it, and his understanding changes stanza by stanza. The final image, of the beggar’s head “in the posture of one weeping into a pillow,” only becomes visible to the speaker, and to the reader, once his guilt has surfaced in that last quatrain.
Comparing Decomposition with Other Anthology Poems
Decomposition pairs naturally with Carol Ann Duffy’s War Photographer. Both poems are told from the point of view of someone who turns other people’s suffering into an image, and both end with guilt breaking through a professional, detached tone. Duffy’s photographer compares his darkroom to a church, himself to “a priest preparing to intone a Mass”; Ghose’s speaker admits his “presumption” at composing “art” from a stranger’s “hunger.” Both poets ask whether recording suffering can ever be separated from exploiting it.
The poem also connects to Wilfred Owen’s Disabled, which shows a wounded soldier reduced, by other people’s eyes, from a person to an object — girls’ hands “touch him like some queer disease.” Like Ghose’s beggar, Owen’s soldier is looked at rather than truly seen, until each poem forces the reader to notice what that looking costs him.
A third pairing works with Simon Armitage’s Remains, where a soldier is haunted by an image he cannot forget — the looter he shot, who “bursts again through the doors of the bank” in his mind. Both Remains and Decomposition show a single image returning to disturb its creator or witness long after the original moment has passed.
Why This Poem Matters for the Exam
If Decomposition is the printed poem on your paper, focus on the shift in the speaker’s attitude — from pride in his “good composition” to guilt at his “presumption.” Track how the imagery of stone, fossil and weeping supports that change. If you are choosing a comparison poem, War Photographer is the strongest match, because both poems interrogate the ethics of representing suffering as art; Disabled and Remains also work well if the question focuses on being watched, or on an image that will not leave the mind.