The Sceptred Flute is the name of a single volume of Sarojini Naidu's poems, consisting of her earlier three volumes—The Golden Threshold (1905), The Bird of Time (1912) and The Broken Wing (1917). All these three volumes appeared from London and were originally published by William Heinemann. The Sceptred Flute was originally published in America by Dodd, Mead& Co in 1943. It was reprinted in 1958 and subsequently by Kitabastan, Allahabad. Thus, it is the single collection of all the poem published by Sarojini in her life time, only one volume, The Feather of the Dawn appeared posthumously in 1961 from Asia Publishing House.
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| Sarojini Naidu’s The Sceptred Flute: Critical Analysis |
The Golden Threshold is divided into three sections: (1) Folk Songs. (2) Songs for Music, and (3) Poems. It contains forty poems including some of her famous poem such as “Indian Weavers”, “Coromandel Fishers”, “The Gift of India”, “Village Songs”, "Leili” and Ode to H.H. The Nizam of Hyderabad. The last poem is “To a Buddha Seated on a Lotus".
The Bird of Time is a collection of songs of life, death and spring. This collection is remarkable for her boldness of feeling, imagery and expression. It is divided into four sections: (1) Songs of Love and Death, (2) Songs of the Springtime, (3) Indian Folk Songs, and (4) Songs of Life. It contains some of Sarojini's popular poems like “The Bird of Time”, “An Indian Love Song”, “A Love Song from the North”, “Ecstasy”, “Vasant Panchami”, etc.
Qualitatively, The Broken Wing is better than The Bird of Time. There is more abandon, more freshness, more spontaneity. It was dedicated to "the Dream of Today and the Hope of Tomorrow." It contains the famous pieces such as “The Temple”, “Lakshmi, The Lotus-Born”, “The Imam Bara”, “Imperial Delhi”, “The Flute Player of Brindaban” and “The Lotus; it has 61 poems.
All these poems viewed together reflect Sarojini's genuine poetic talent and her lyrical and musical qualities, her ease and spontaneity, her superb craftsmanship, mastery of the metric forms, rhythms, and images, lyrical ardour, emotional intensity, romanticism, picturesqueness and sensuousness, love for Nature and Humanity and rich imagination and vivid and powerful metaphors and similes.
Sarojini Naidu herself has given a poetic announcement of the theme and sources of inspiration of her poetry in her poem, “The Bird of Time”:
“O Bird of Time on your fruitful bough
What are the songs you sing?
Songs of the glory and gladness of life,
Of poignant sorrow and passionate strife,
And the lilting joy of the spring;
Of hope that sows for the years unborn,
And faith that dreams of a tarrying morn,
The fragrant peace of the twilight's breath,
And the mystic silence that men call death.”
“O Bird of Time, say where did you learn
The changing measures you sing?...
In blowing forests and breaking tides,
In the happy laughter of new -made brides,
And the nests of the new-born spring;
In the dawn that thrills to a mother's prayer,
And the night that shelters a heart's despair,
In the sigh of pity, the sob of hate,
And the pride of a soul that has conquered fate.”
In the words of Dr. P.E. Dastoor, "The simple joys and hopes and fears and lives of the common folk in town and country; the irresistible fascination which Nature, especially at Springtime, exercises over her; the aches and ecstasies of love; the present challenge of suffering and loss to the human spirit, of Death of Life: these are her recurrent themes."
An objective and fair evaluation of her poetry is made my Arthur Symons. Referring to this the London Times remarked: "We find them all in her poems but chiefly remarkable, considering her nationality, is her passionate delight in the beauty of the sounds and the words of our tongue and the lilt of our measures. She reveals in the swing of her verse... Her poetry seems to sing itself, as if her swift thoughts and strong emotions sprang into lyrics of themselves. There are the same unity and spontaneity about such poems, as that "To a Buddha Seated on a Lotus”, It is a far cry from that to her descriptive poems- motion and sight turned to music—or to the quaint and charming little songs to her four children. In this case the marriage of Western culture with the Eastern has not proved barren. It has given the poet new eyes with which to see old things. The result is some things unique which we need not hesitate to call poetry." Sarojini's strength is her mastery of the medium and of epithets which she coins skilfully and of a beauty of phrase, and her subtle magic of imaginative temperament', The last one makes her illuminate by a single flash of epithet a world of new ideas and feelings.
As mentioned by K.K. Bhattacharya, "that unbroken flow of charming sonorous and dignified language, the symmetry, the verse, the passion and sensitiveness of her vivid imagery, her modulations, her silvery voice sometimes waxing warm and becoming piercing, sometimes mellowed, would keep the audience all the time in a state of animation."
At the same time her faults and limitations are numerous. In our age there has been a decline in Sarojini's reputation as a poet. She is not regarded as a major poet. Her poetic output is slender; her range and themes are limited; her genius is confined to lyrics only. Her poetry has been called, 'amateurish', 'confused', 'vague', and directionless.' She has also been accused of 'saccharine sweetness or sugar and spice sweetness'. Her poems have also been condemned for their 'mawkish school-girl sentimentality' for their lack of realms, and lack of profundity. She does not seek to grapple with life's problems as does the philosopher or abstract thinker. Her poems suffer from, a want of depth. Her treatment of love is also superficial on a number of occasions, and her poems of life and death too lack the 'fresh inward eye".
Nevertheless, it should not be forgotten that her range is small and that her poetry is a mere two square inches of ivory like Jane Austen's. But within her limited field she is flawless. "Her heart touched by the sights around and her imagination links the experience with the 'before' and the 'after' and the result is perfect lyricism.’
The stuff of Sarojini Naidu's poems is the soul of India. She excels when she sings of the coromandel fishers gathering their nets from the shore and setting their catamarans free, when she sings a Harvest Hymn in praise of Surya, Varuna, Prithvi and Brahma, when she sings of Indian weavers and Bangle-sellers and palanquin-bearers, when she sings of "rush-fringed rivers and river-fed streams", and of
"Fire flies weaving aerial dances
In fragile rhythms of flickering gold."
She also becomes superb when she artfully reproduces the lilt and the rhythm and the complicated movements of the Indian dancer; when she immortalizes in songs the "daughter of a wandering race", the Indian Gypsy; when she renders in moving verse the very heart- aches of the Hindu widow on Vasant Panchami day; or when she evokes typical Indian scenes like an ox- cart stumbling upon the rocks or a shepherd collecting his flock under the Pipal trees, or a young Banjara lifting up her voice in an ancient ballad of love and battle, set to the beat of a mystic tune.
According to Dr. Srinivas, Iyengar, "Sarojini Devi is superlatively gifted Indian poetess who has chosen as Conrad chose, English as her medium of expression: that really is all that need be said. As an English poetess, her easy mastery over English verse forms is obvious; but this fatal ease has once or twice betrayed her into a rhetorical sing-song unladen with thought...
"She particularly excelled in describing familiar things: a June sunset, the full moon nightfall in the city temple bells—Sarojini Devi threw on them all the colouring of her imagination, at once so sensitive and so feminine, and exquisite poems the rich, jewelled phrases resulted. She also excelled in contacting the sheer immensities and unponderables of the universe and reducing them to significant and all- subduing phrases..."
"Sarojini Devi's failure in songs are the result of her occasionally coercing her muse to play hand-maiden to a topical and popular theme. When, however, her inspiration is authentic, as it is in most of her poems, be the theme, common or unusual, her poetry has invariably a translucent bird-like quality, and is simple, sensuous and impassioned." (Dr. Iyengar).