Popularly known as the "Bharat Kokila” or the Nightingale of India, Sarojini Naidu is the most lyrical woman poet. In her perfect Iyricism and mellifluous melody she is indeed the nightingale of India. She is a singer of India's glory, India's past and present, India's fauna and flora.
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| Sarojini Naidu, the Nightingale of India |
She pictures in melodious strains the landscape of the Deccan. Whereas the western critics would categorize her with Shelley and Keats, Mulk Raj Anand puts her in the Persian tradition: "And although she has adopted a Western language and a Western technique to express herself, she seems to me to be in the main Hindustani tradition of Ghalib, Zok, Mir, Hali and Iqbal."
Sarojini Naidu once described herself as “a wild free thing of the air like the birds with a song heart." This self-portrait reveals her essential poetic temperament and lyrical gifts. Spontaneity and naturalness of manner give her poetry a distinct bird-like quality and melodic beauty. Prof. Bhushan rightly observes: "She is first and foremost a melodist of high order-using nothing but winged words and making even ordinary words sound musical by placing them in peculiar contexts." Besides a melodist and a singer, she is a lover of beauty. She is a romanticist, too. She deals with love as a major theme in her poetry. Like Dylan Thomas she sums up her philosophy in one of her poems:
“To priests and to prophets
The joy of their creeds
To kings and their cohorts
The glory of deeds:
And peace to the vanquished
And hope to the strong...
For me, O my Master,
The rapture of Song!” —The Sceptered Flute. p.141.
A Similar idea is expressed in her well-known poem, “The Faery Isle of Janjira",
“Into the strife of the throng and the tumult,
The war of sweet love against folly and wrong;
Where brave hearts carry the sword of battle,
'Tis mine to carry the banner of song.
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.” —The Sceptered Flute, pp. 121-122.
Her poems reveal the authentic heart of India. Under advice from Edmund Gosse, she undertook to write on Indian themes and subjects. In the words of Dr. Amarnath Jha, “Mrs. Sarojini Naidu, a singer who more than almost any other Indian poet, has managed to remain Indian in her poetry...” Dr. Srinivas Iyengar, Lotika Basu R. Bhatnagar, C. Paul Varghese and other have praised her lyrical qualities and her Indianness. "Her ambitions are humbler. She sings to us "Songs of India". Indian springs and summers, Indian love-lores, the pledges of the songs and daughters of the mother to her. Indian streets and bazars, Indian scene and sights—these she attempts to put into words aglow with the fires of real passion and with a genius quick at metrical inventions." (R. Bhatnagar, Sarojini Naidu the Poet of a Nation).
Indeed, as mentioned by Dr. Iyengar, “With more of the lyric love and lyric instinct of Toru Dutt and less of the mystical longing Tagore, Sarojini Naidu infused into her poetry the bird-like quality song, at once piercing, melodious and even ephemeral."
"Her genius is essentially lyrical and her poetry full of music. But in trying to sing of Indian life she has succumbed to the temptation of making it picturesque. By doing this she merely continues the tradition of Anglo-Indian writers who would make India a land of romance and mystery. The song of the palanquin-bearers, the flute music of the snake charmer, and old beggar sitting in the street—all these she surrounds with a halo of romance...There is another aspect of her poetry which we must mention i.e., the philosophic aspect... In Mrs. Naidu's treatment of Indian subjects, she does not give a realistic picture of India; she merely continues the picture of India painted by Anglo- Indian and English writers, a land of bazaars, full of bright colours and perfumes, and peopled with picturesque beggars, wandering minstrels and snake-charmers." — (Lotika Basu, Indian Writers of English Verse).
As the nightingale of India, Sarojini Naidu is also sensitive to beauty, the beauty of living things, the beauty of holiness, the beauty of Buddha's compassion, the beauty of Brindavan's land. She didn't specially seek the bizarre, the exotic, the exceptional, but her poems lack neither the variety nor the flavour of actuality, Children's poems, nature poems, patriotic poem, poems of love and death, even poems of lyrical transcendence, Sarojini Naidu essayed them all, and with her unfailing verbal felicity and rhythmical dexterity, she generally succeeded as well. Seldom did she venture out of her depth; she was not interested in wild experimentation; she didn't cudgel herself towards explosive modernity, but she had genuine poetic talent, and she was a wholesome and authentic singer.
Sarojini's genius, like that of Shelley and Keats, was essentially lyrical. Although she has written a few ballads and narrative poems too, yet her main bulk consists of lyrics. She has attempted every species of the lyric-hymn, ode, elegy, sonnet, etc. Her lyrics may be divided into three categories: Nature lyrics, love lyrics and folk-lyrics. She has also written lyrics on miscellaneous themes. Her lyrics have a song-like quality--ease, simplicity and spontaneity, brevity, music and melody.
She herself wrote to Arthur Symons, “I sing just as the birds do, and my songs are as ephemeral." She may lack in intellectual depth or philosophical profundity here and there but she is "a supreme singer of beautiful songs bathed in melody and thought." Her lyrics are also remarkable for their emotional intensity and fervour, romantic note and passion. They have a Keats-like sensuous apprehension of thought and feeling, and opulence of diction and imagery. It had been said that we miss in her poetry the contemporary reality, the urban mark and roar, loneliness and anxiety, which characterize life in a modern city. Her picture of India has been called romantic, sentimental, in short "Kipling’s India.” It has been said that the palanquin-bearers, weavers, wandering singers, snake-charmers, coromandel fishers, bangle sellers, all evoke the image of and India which is romantic, sentimental and no longer true of India as it is today. Lotika Basu, P. Lal, Nissim Ezekiel and Paul Varghese have criticized her lyrics for their romantic-sentimentality, "saccharine-sweetness and tick-tock and precise rhythms". It is said that her over-opulent imagery blurs the visionary focus, and the meaning is lost in a cloud of words. But such critics forget that Sarojini's lyrics are remarkable of their lucidity of diction, liquidity of movement, spontaneity of expression, richness, of melody, wealth of imagery, splendour of simplicity, emotional intensity and Elizabethan romanticism. They are the poetic cry of joy and sorrow, fervour and exultation, love and beauty. They revolve round subjects of permanent interest—Man—Nature—Society. Furthermore, in her lyrics there is an integration of different traditions of different levels of experiences, thought and emotion. In the words of P.V. Rajyalakshmi, "It is never Western Romantic feeling working in isolation that we have in her poetry. Romantic assertion is Sanskritized, even as Vaishnavite affirmation is Persianized, and Sufi- mystic intuition is Westernized. In her poems on Nature and Love, as in her devotional poems, there is an exciting union of an acquired ethos and inherited myths, a continual sensation of passage, merger, increase and premonition which lends depth and meaning to her poetry."
Sarojini does not represent the mystic soul of India. She is a trumpet call. Words come to her as leaves to the spring." (R Bhatnagar)
Sarojini Naidu's poetic diction depends more on the melodic phrase than on verbal adhesion, and in this she clearly follows the Sanskrit example of samasa (synthesis). “Pomegranate-gardens of the mellowing dawn", "Night's hyacinthine gloom", "the wise compassionate glory of your face", "Mute leashed, patient, poignant multitude", "No fear of time unconquered space", And smiles... entwining like magical serpents, "the poppies of lips that are opiate sweet", etc., are romantic, or Pre-Raphaelites, only on the surface. In reality they affiliate themselves to the massive compositional technique in Indian vernacular poetry. If we ignore their idiom, they give the impression of Swinburnian effusion, or amplitude, spaciousness and improvisational freedom and adjustability of Sanskrit poetry. Her diction thus shows classical austerity and simplicity. Many of her lines have epigrammatic terseness and brevity. But as she was influenced by the English romantic poets–Keats and Shelley—and the Pre-Raphaelites, like Swinburne and Rossetti, her diction is steeped in warmth and more often than not decorated with a Pre-Raphaelite tapestry.
Her similes and metaphors are drawn from the common scenes and sights of nature, and are vivid and graphic. Images like that of the moon being a "caste-mark" on the azure brow of heaven are highly original and fresh and startle in the manner of Shelley, as in "Palanquin- bearers". Sarojini's imagery is usually pictorial and visual, and is a source of perennial joy for the readers. Sarojini is a great metrical artist. She has experimented with a number of verse-forms and stanza- patterns. She is a lover of music. Alliteration, refrain, assonance, concentration of vowel sound, and the use of liquid consonants, are some of the devices restored to by the poetess to create musical effects.