A Supreme Poet of Love:
Sarojini Naidu is the Indian Elizabeth, Browning or Keats or Donne. Love is her major theme. About one third of the total output of her poetry is about love. She deals with both the aspects of love— union and separation—in its various moods of despair, challenge, frustration, sorrow, hope, expectation, ecstasy, etc. She not only powerfully depicts various moods and states of love but also embodies various love situations—separation, jealousy and suspicion. She is able to give a mystic turn to her love experience.
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| Sarojini Naidu’s poetry—Major Theme of Love in Her Lyrics |
Her Romantic Conception of Love:
Sarojini Naidu's conception of love is romantic in tone and spirits. She has created an imaginative love-world which is entirely different from our mundane existence. It is regulated by its own laws. In it imagination occupies supreme place. Love is a fine madness in which all logic is reversed. Her love poetry echoes her deep and intense love for Dr. Govinda Rajalu whom she married despite parental and caste opposition. The following lines are resonant with profound personal emotion:
"Love reeks not of feuds and bitter follies, of stranger comrade or kin,
Alike in his ear sound the temple bells and the cry of the muezzin
For love shall cancel the ancient wrong and conquer the ancient rage,
Redeem with his fears the memoried sorrow that sullied a bygone age." (An Indian Love Song)
A Variety of Love Experiences:
Her love lyrics deal with a variety of love experiences. They are characterized by intensity and immediacy and draw both on the Hindu tradition of love-poetry and the Sufi Muslim tradition. Her attitude to love is typically feminine and is characterized by a total self-surrender of the beloved to her object of love. The beloved may be the divine, the supreme, or Krishna, the Eternal lover, and such lyrics derive their poignancy and appeal from the soul’s hunger for union with the object of love
Classical and Medieval Influence:
Her love poetry is also influenced by the classical and medieval love poetry of India. She is overpowered by the enchantment of the devotional love poetry and, hence, her love poems especially in triology The Temple are intermingled by her personal experiences and the romanticism of medieval devotional love poetry. The following lines vibrate with the romanticism and devotional quality of Indian love poetry:
"Bring no fragrant sandal-paste,
Let me gather, love, instead
The entranced and flowering dust
You have honoured with your tread
For nine eyelids and mine head.” (The Feast)
Suffusing with Joy and Highly Imaginative:
Her early love poems—Indian Love Song, Humayun to Zobeida, The Poet's Love Song, An Indian Love Song. The Dance of Love, A Rajput Love Song, Persian Love Song. The Song of Radha, the Milkmaid—are suffused with the spirit of joy and some of them are highly imaginative. In Indian Love Song the young lover and beloved who have not come across obstacles in the path of love are brimful of deep joy which finds spontaneous utterance in the following lines:
"Like the perfume in the petals of a rose
Hides thy heart within my bosom, O my love!
Like a garland, like a jewel, like a dove
That hangs its nest in the asoka tree.
Lie still, O love, until the morning sows
Her tents of gold on fields of ivory.”
An Identification of Two Souls:
In this early poem, Humayun to Zobeida, love is presented as an identification of two souls. This idea further deepens in her mature poems. The poet who is far away from his beloved has other mad dreams than those of love in noon-tide hours but in the night when silence pervades over mountain and deeps, the poet's soul hungers for love:
"O then,
Love, like the magic of wild melodies,
Let thy soul answer mine across the seas.” (The Poet's Love Song)
Love and Death Twin Mysteries of Life:
Love and death are the twin mysteries of life. Death has her silence of the dead. In an anguish of spirit, the poetess cries:
"High dreams and hope and love are in vain,
Absolve my spirit of its poignant ills,
And cleanse me from the bondage of pain."
The cold touch of oblivion is not meant for the poetess. She still must dream of life, of a bright future, of the opening of a new relation between man and man, race and race. Death can only quicken the pulse of life in her. At Twilight contains this inspiring message. But the trouble is that even all the love of a lover cannot save the beloved from throes of death. Love must give way to Death with all its rich and joyous experience.
Depiction of the Charm of an Old World:
A Rajput Love Song has an old world charm and is written after the romantic love poetry which was in vogue in ancient Rajasthan. Court bards composed ballads to depict chivalrous love between Rajput maidens and Rajput princes. Sarojini has successfully created the atmosphere of chivalry and romance, prosperity and oriental splendour. In this romantic background Parvati and Amar Singh express intense longing for each other. Both long for sunset when they will unite after day's separation.
Revelation of the Suffering of Maiden's Heart:
Her two short poems Caprice and Destiny reveal the suffering of maiden's heart which have been broken by fickle and inconstant lovers. There is a note of poignant pathos in both these poems. In Longing the broken-hearted maiden whose sad heart glides amid the gleaming pageant of life's gay and dancing crowd like a spectre in a rose-encircled shroud hopes to meet her lover. Love's memory stands the wear and tear of time. It is perennial. But the memory of love has two antithetical aspects—rapture and sorrow:
“Doth rapture hold a feast,
Doth sorrow keep a fast
For Love's dear memory
Whose sweetness shall outlast
The changing winds of Time,
Secret and unsurpassed?” (The Festival of Memory)
Love's Place in Nature Poems:
Love also finds place in her nature poems, especially Summer Woods and The Time of Rose. Both these poems are concerned with the ecstasy and fulfilment of love in the midst of natural surroundings:
"You and I together Love, in deep blossoming woods
Engirt with low-voiced silence and gleaming solitudes,
Companions of the lustrous dawn, gay comrades of the night,
Like Krishna and like Radhika, encompassed with delight.” (Summer Woods)
The Obstacles and Impediments in the Way of True Love:
The path of true love never runs smooth and the beloved has to pass through the path of tears. The eight poems in the second section are full of the sorrows of love which are the outcome of the lover who after a brief period of close association estranges himself away from the dear one. The beloved laments over the callousness, and sometime with hope, and sometime with despair cherishes his memory in her heart.
Presenting True Love as Immoral:
True love is immortal. In the brief span of life true lovers may be parted by hard necessities, worldly obstacles, pride etc. But they realise the fulfilment of love after death. Death is accepted as an inevitable fact which unites two souls.
An Identification with Folk Inheritance and Mystic Strain:
Much of Sarojini's love-poetry is rooted in Indian folk-lore, myth and legend. She reveals in her love poetry an unconscious creative identity with her folk inheritance which lends substance, and meaning, credibility to her psychology of love. We find in her love poetry a mystic strain as well as sensuous strain. The sensuous strain of love can be seen in numerous poems such as A Rajput Love Song, A Persian Love Song, Ecstasy and Poet's Love Song.
No Touch of Artificiality:
A great deal of Sarojini's treatment of love is realistic. But there is also something that is extravagant, needlessly wordy, or merely pretty. But in her treatment of love there is no touch of artificiality. Love is something that comes out of the depths of her being which she is unable to suppress or resist. It is the quality or downright sincerity and deep warmth that makes her love poems distinct. Her lyrics have beauty and charm, delicate fancy and gossamer imagination, emotional fervour and sensuousness and a touch of mysticism. Love is her essence.