Her Genius to Compose Short Poems—Lyrics and Songs:
Sarojini Naidu wrote no epic, dramatic or narrative poetry, nor any blank verse; she had no aptitude, flair or talent for them. Her genius strays into composing short poems—lyrics and songs, not even sonnets, although she wrote ten, three of which viz., The Lotus, In Salutation to My Father's Spirit and Imperial Delhi are good enough.
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| Sarojini Naidu—Traits As A Poet |
Her genius lay essentially in lyrics of which she wrote many. She is not a made poet; she had started singing at the age of thirteen, because she felt instinctively that she could not help doing it. She warbled because she must and had composed more than 3000 lines by the time, she was thirteen—not a mean achievement. Her heart would be stirred emotionally; in such moments she would instinctively be inspired to express herself, and she would do it in numbers that came to her naturally. All this would occur in happy innocence without having any purpose or end in view. Consequently, she remains a lyricist throughout without much of a distinct growth of poetic personality, as there is seen in her brother, Harindranath Chattopadhyaya.
Her Work Is Marked by Delicate Fancy and Haunting Melody:
Sarojini Naidu is a lyricist; as such her work is marked by a delicate fancy and haunting music. She has exhibited high workmanship and material dexterity in the composition of her poems, which are remarkable for their cadences that are mellifluous. Her poems are 'golden' cadences in 'silken' terms, dealing in scintillating and dazzling images. She shows in her art the influence of Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, the Pre-Raphaelites and Swinburne; but her art is not derivative. It is the outcome of complete absorption with what she has studied with interest and their echoes in her poetry are indirect and subtle. She, it is said, once dreamt that she would be the Keats of India. Her dream remained un- fulfilled; notwithstanding, certain images, left behind by her are sensuous, mythical, and colourful, like those of Keats. A new world of similes, metaphors and images with oriental luxuriance is discovered in her. The following two images are Keatsian in nature and are an example on her part to out-Keats himself,
“A caste-mark on the azure brows of heaven
The golden moon burns, sacred, solemn, bright.” —(Leili)
“Moonlight-tangled meshes of perfume,
Where the clustering Keoras guard the squirrel's slumber,
Where the deep woods glimmer with the jasmine's bloom.”
Her Dealing in Her Poetry with the Themes of love, Nature and the Indian Pageant:
Sarojini Naidu poetry exhibits a general feeling of aliveness to life with all its variety, its colour, its beauty and a general sense of not only the joy of it, but also of its poignant pathos. Major themes of her poetry consist of the simple joys and hopes and fears and lives of the common-folk in town and country, the irresistible fascination which Nature, particularly at Spring-time, casts over her, the aches and ecstasies of love, the ever-recurrent challenge of suffering and loss to the human spirit, of Death to life. These are her favourite themes and she returns to them again and again in spite of the fact that they sometimes overlap and are not mutually exclusive.
A Romantic of the elemental and simpler kind:
She may be described as belonging to, if at all, the Romantic school of poetry, chiefly of the simpler and elemental kind. She is a Romanticist like the one of the Elizabethan period. She, like the poets of the Elizabethan period, enjoys discovering and flaunting new words, new rhythms, new cadences, new expressions, people singing and people wearing 'ear' rings. She was, as it were, "a dreamer born in a dreamless age", a romantic born in an unromantic era.
Her Poetry Is Ornate:
Her poetry mostly is ornate and her poetic style is jewelled and exuberant. While Toru Dutt who preceded her, wrote in a simple and transparent style. Sarojini Naidu exulted in a flamboyant, highly ornamental and figurative style, which comprises plenty of similes, metaphors, symbols, images etc., and sometimes her thought or feeling, which she tries to express, gets blurred, if not altogether lost, in a profusion of words, mostly adjectives, substantives, and in rhetoric.
Lack of Intellectual Vigour and reflective power:
Her poetry is not marked by intellectual vigour. Her strength does not lie in reflective power or intellectual pith. On the other hand, she is at times sentimental. It is not her aim to grapple with life's problems as does the philosopher or the abstract thinker. There are, in fact, no problems for her to be pondered over, she only introduces situations that make her nerves tingle and stir her into quivering song. Life is not a riddle for her to be solved; it is a miracle to be celebrated and sung about. Its endless variety excites her, its colours dazzle her, its beauty intoxicates her. Her response to it is quick and it is not sicklied with the pale cast of thought. This lends the gift of perennial youthfulness to her poetry, with the aid of which she exercises a spell over young and impressionable hearts and revitalizes those who have suffered defeat and disillusionment. Her poetry serves as a sort of tonic which takes her readers out to breathe in the clear fresh air of life's elemental experiences, its recurrent joys and woes; its lavish gifts and its mysterious denials.
Dominant note in her work is joy, not pain:
She regards life as a mingled web of rainbows and romance, of sunlight and starlight, of death and deprivation. Life brings many and wonderful lights; it also brings shadows. But the dominant note of her work is joy, not pain; its dominant feature light, not darkness. For she, unequivocally, accepts life on life's terms. Even when the songbird's wing is broken, its spirit is unbroken and triumphant:
“Behold! I rise to meet the destined spring
And scale the stars upon my broken wing!”
In her work Life and Light are supreme, not Death and Darkness. The tints of twilight rarely deepen into shades of night. She takes death in her stride and accepts it too, and naturally, for to accept life is to accept death as well. There are poems in which she seems to be crushed by pain and grief, but the poems into which she has poured most of her poetic power and spirit are those in which there is a note of defiance and of victory over her circumstance. Her dominant note in poetry is one of courage. She like her own old woman, lonely and bent and blind "lifts a brave heart to the jest of the days." Grief is but a shadow which flits over the surface of life, but fails to darken its deeper recesses.
Small Output and Short Canvas:
The volume of her poetry is not large, nor is her poetic range wide. Her poetic canvas is small-'a mere two square inches of ivory' like Jane Austen's. The total output consists of 180 short poems and the poetic form only one—lyrics (comprising songs and a few sonnets), and the life's vision as well limited and confined, in so far as its range does not go beyond love-longings, a few romantic fancies and dreams, and a few common simple joys and sorrows. "Her genius", says Dr. Dastoor, "was not as a roaring flame; it was a brilliant incandescence that dispelled the darkness with a warm and cheery luminosity. Her poetic genius was neither deep nor far-ranging, but it was a rare vein all the same, from which poured out rich ore. There are, indeed, few of her effusions, which are not gems of purest ray serene."
Her Contribution to Poetry:
If not all her poems, at least some of her folksongs, viz., Palanquin Bearers, The Snake-Charmer, Cradle Song Bangle-Sellers, Song of Radha, The Milkmaid and Village Songs (from “The Bird of Time"), her songs of music, like Alabaster, To My Fairy Fancies, and her poems, like Leili, Indian Dancers, The Queen's Rival, To a Buddha Seated on a Lotus, Raksha Bandhan, A Song of the Khyber Pass, and her songs of life and death like the Lotus, Bells, The Pearl, The Flute Player of Brindaban and her songs of the spring-time, like Spring, Champak Blossoms, June Sunset and a few of her love-lyrics in The Temple, will always constitute her good poetry and will continue to haunt the readers forever by offering before them an irresistible charm. Her contribution to English poetry in general and Indo-Anglian poetry in particular is twofold: (1) Her creation of new metrical rhythms and setting some Indian folk-song tunes to them, (2) recreation of the colour, beauty, romance and pageantry of Indian life—the country's soul—in English verse.
Her Limited Vision:
Her vision as realized in her poetry is rather limited. No intellectual problems are sorted out by her; she dabbles and delights in mere romantic feelings, relating mostly to love and Vasant (Nature). Her love poems, which are many, depict love in its various aspects and moods, but its canvas, though vertically deep (it touches certain depths of devotional surrender and merger) is not horizontally wide, meaning thereby that it does not deal with the with the modernist's, realistic vision of love and its problems, like sex, mating, divorce intellectual companionship, etc. His nature poems, likewise, have a limited canvas, and do not seem to go beyond the confines of spring, its flowers, fragrances, birds, songs and colours. Nature in its vaster and terrific and mystic moods is absent. In June Sunset and Leili only has she marked a departure from the usual by touching different dimensions. Her realm of romance is also limited; Coleridge's supernatural beings don’t inhabit it; fairies appear only once in a while, without forming an integral part. There is nothing like the magic and mystery of the past, nor any aspiration for an idealistic future. She would, when the poetic mood overtook her, burst forth simply in a lyric and it was only rarely that she touched the mystic depths of life, and when she did it, she showed a glimpse into the heart of mystery.
A poet of wide sympathies:
It is difficult to conceive of a lyrical poet with narrow sympathies. Swinburne had some strong antipathies, which he expressed strongly, sometimes even violently. But his range of poetic sympathy was wide, for varied aspects of human life and of Nature found lyric expression in his verse. Mrs. Naidu has kept her antipathies, likewise, out of her poetry, but her sympathetic interpretation has covered a wide range of themes. She was inspired, as in poems like Corn Grinders and The Pardah-Nashin, by sympathy with humble and everyday suffering or affliction; she feels equally akin, as a poet should, with all forms of natural and innocent joy. She feels one with the vital rhythm of the world in her songs of spring-time, and the flowering year becomes almost a part of the expanding life of bird and flower. This quality is also perceptible in a pronounced degree in her attitude towards the varying religious beliefs of India. In the Call to Evening Prayer the external side of each of the great religions is dealt with equal sympathy and reverence, The Imam Bara, so faithfully does it capture the spirit of Islam, it seems as if it has been composed by a follower of Islam. The claims of human sympathy and feeling are stronger than ancient antagonisms of creed—this fact has been clearly expressed in An Indian Love Song.
Her power of dramatic interpretation:
Her ready sympathy of feeling and imagination lies at the root of her power of dramatic interpretation. The Song of Radha, Vasant Panchmi, Damyanti to Nala and Suttee are all examples of this sympathy woven into dramatic form.
Descriptive Power:
She, like Tennyson, when she describes, does not introduce too much detail and knows what to omit. She adopts the method of severe selection and focusses the light on the really significant features, describing them freshly and effectively, with the result that the reader sees not only a picture, but a picture that is clear and pleasing. Instances of her descriptive power may be found in The Indian Gipsy, Nightfall in the City of Hyderabad, June Sunset, or Indian Dancers. Nearly all the songs of spring-time and the flowering year are marked by happy touches of description. The Bangle-Sellers contains another kind of description, where the distinctions between a number of delicately described colours are brought out with the help of apt similes. The description is occasionally couched in words which are not only vivid and skilful, but also poetical and yet so apt as to seem quite natural as in
“Fireflies weaving aerial dances
In fragile rhythms of flickering gold.” (A Song in Spring)
We get another effectively little picture from the same poem:
“Wild birds that sway in citron branches,
Drink with the rich, red honey of spring.”
Poetic Transformation of the Commonplace:
A poet by dint of the transfiguring light of imagination, which he possesses, can transform the ordinary and the commonplace into quite a new light and make it interesting and even attractive. Mrs. Naidu is also not devoid of this power. Indian Weavers and Bangle-Sellers are instances of it.
Bird-Like Quality of Song:
The quality which seemed to Sir Arthur Symons to give her work its peculiar attractiveness was its bird-like quality of song. This quality is specially to be felt in poems like the Fairy Fancies, To My Children and The Flute-Player of Brindaban. She longed, to use her own words, to be "a wild free thing of the air like the birds, with a in my heart." It is an ideal which life did not permit her always to realize, for she turned sometimes to themes, as in To India and The Royal Tombs of Golconda, wherein a bird-like quality would be impossible, or if possible, hardly suitable. But that this quality was not altogether dead is demonstrated from The Flute Player of Brindaban, which appears in her last volume.
Desire for beauty:
Although she was always eager for beauty and longed to write one poem, even one line, which she could feel was both beautiful and great, she was no ideal singer, intent merely upon the perfection of her own song. She did not believe in the creed of art for Art's sake, when it is taken to mean that the artist should be quite indifferent to practical or moral issues, and that Art is more important than life. She did not rest content with the attempt to create pure beauty untouched by the active interests of life and one's fellowmen. She never avoided casting a glance at life.
Ideal of service to the country:
Mrs. Naidu expresses in her song both the joy of song and the desire for beauty and the ideal of service to her country or mankind. It is these two ideals which sustain her and which she follows throughout. Her first ideal is set forth in the final stanza of Guerdon, wherein she has asked for the guerdons of love and truth, and the poem ends with a prayer for the third and supreme reward:
“For me, O my Master,
The rapture of Song.”
Her second ideal finds expression in The Fairy Isle of Janjira in which her duty calls her:
“Into the strife of the throng and the tumult,
The war of sweet Love against folly and wrong;
Where brave deeds carry the sword of battle,
The solace of faith to the lips that falter,
The succour of hope to the hands that fail,
The tidings of joy when Peace shall triumph,
When Truth shall conquer and Love prevail.”
A poet of yesterday and to-morrow, not of to-day:
Ours is an age of the bizarre, the grotesque and the whimsically ugly in art, however perverse and ill-conceived. In its search for novelty our generation dismisses with a shrug of shoulders the traditions of the cult of the beautiful and practices unspeakable abominations of ugliness and abortions and distortions of formlessness perpetrated in the name of modernism and under the pretense of extending the boundaries of art. In an age like this it was difficult for a poet like Sarojini Naidu to stand still, as in her poetic outlook and execution she was in the direct line of the romantic poets, and could not ignore all the yesterdays of either Eastern or Western literary history. Rather fall in line with the modernists, she preferred to plough her lonely furrow, by virtue of which she spreads her net, howsoever in a limited sphere it may go. There are echoes in her work of Shelley and Swinburne, Keats and Tennyson. Her love-lyrics may well pass for the outpourings of a more passionate Elizabeth Barrett Browning, a more self-effacing Sappho, or a more sensuous and earthlier Mirabai. The luxuriousness of her imagery and the abundance and colourfulness of her metaphors are reminiscent of the Persian poet and here and there her nature-poems remind us of Tagore. She was, it is evident from her themes, not progressive; she had hardly heard of Socialism as a panacea for all our social and economic ills. She was not a post-war poet as the critics of the nineteen-twenties and thirties understood the term; she wrote no violent verse either as propaganda for non-violence, and she didn't fight wordy pacifist's war against war. She was artistically orthodox, and refused to join the congregation of "advanced artists to whom the uses of the world, more or less, seem to be weary, stale, unprofitable and flat". The tremendous social and economic problems did not wake any echoes in her. She is not an English poet at all; the songs she sings are a singular outburst of the oriental spirit in English verse. She, like Tagore and Iqbal, has expressed, surprisingly enough, for the spirit of the twentieth century is not coeval with it, her awareness of the mysteries of life and death in imagery that is as fresh as the world's first dawn and as old as history. There is much in her poems which the modern readers do not like. They are a little buoyant and optimistic; they are over-exuberant in spite and wordy almost to the point of tiresomeness. They are more effervescent than full of substance. The diction is elaborately remote and romantic; the air is a little too full of poetic butterflies. Her genuine poetic vision is too often expressed in an idiom and style that tend to smother and befog it.
She is what she is, regardless of the trends and fashions which smote her generation. She is a poet of to-day only by the accident of birth. She was a poet of yesterday and to-morrow rather than of to-day. Her themes were the timeless ones: Her songs, in her own words, were mostly about "happy and simple and sorrowful things." Like Keats, she was unaware of the stirring events occurring in the world around her.
Command of language and meter:
She possessed a remarkable command both of the poetical resources of the English language as well as the subtle points of its idiom. Joseph Conrad, who was a Pole, displayed a command over the English language, which was foreign to him and despite the command he had over it, he would here and there, betray himself, by some little turn of phrase that he was not an Englishman. This was not the case with Sarojini Naidu, who had a full and perfect command of the English language which was foreign to her. She has equally a unique gift of feeling for English meters and English prosody. Her poems exhibit a delicate and sensitive ear trained in the best poetic tradition. They display a prosodical correctness and regularity, which seldom, if ever, becomes merely mechanical. Though she follows the main and great English poetical tradition in diction and prosody, her style is her own, and gives us the impression of individuality, a fact which was noted by Mr. Symons. She hardly imitates any particular English poet, or belongs to the school of any one master, or follows the formula of any one particular group. She gathers the juice of native as well as foreign flowers and turns into the honey of her poems.