As a young girl Toru Dutt developed a passionate love for nature. Living between Rambagan in Calcutta and the country house at Baugmaree, Toru gave a keener edge to her innate love for nature. The beautiful surroundings of Rambagan conducted her poetic instincts but the garden at Baugmaree being more beautiful and lovelier gave a spurt to her imagination. The different objects of nature proved to be a fine stimulus to her imagination.
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| Toru Dutt’s Poetry—Treatment of Nature |
Her unfailing love of nature is revealed in her numerous letters in which she expresses her passion for flowers, birds, gardens, fruits and trees. The letters are full of references to her garden house and garden, its flowers and fruits and birds: “I wish I could send you a basket of fruits of the season. It would gladden your eyes! Yellow or vermilion mangoes, red leeches, white jumrools, and deep violet jams.”
As a poet of Nature, Toru is notable for her keen observation of, and poetic sensitivity to the external aspects of nature - its sights, sounds and colours. The Baugmaree Garden House becomes the main source of inspiration for her nature poems. She immortalised this garden - house in her famous sonnet “Baugmaree” which presents the scenic beauty of the garden. This is purely a poem of nature expressing the poetess’ spontaneous rejoicing in a sea of foliage.
In her poems about nature, Toru expresses almost a Romantic feeling for nature in its Indian setting. As such we may call her the first significant Indo - Anglian nature - poet. Lovely and poetic descriptions of nature cover a large space in “Ballads”. Her nature poems contain descriptions of trees, rivers, flowers, gardens, fields, forests, hills brooks and the like. The two forest scenes in “Savitri”, the sunset - scene in “Sindhu” the description of the various trees and flowers in “Buttoo”, the hermitage scene in “Sita” etc., are remarkable for the descriptions of Nature. “The Lotus”, “Baugmaree” and “Our Casuarina Tree”— these constitute her nature poetry.
Comparing Toru Dutt and Sarojini Naidu as nature poets, Padmini Sen Gupta says, “Observations of nature of the two writers are also different. Toru's description of trees for instance are quite the opposite of Sarojini's who seems always to feel, possibly due to Gose's advice, that all she described must be Indian. To Toru the trees just happen to be Indian the tree she loves.” To Sarojini the trees must be described with an oriental background. Toru said:
“But nothing can be lovelier than the range
Of bamboos to the eastward when the moon
Look through their gaps, and the white lotus changes
Into a cup of silver. One might swoon
Drunken with beauty then, or gaze and gaze
On primeval Eden, in amaze.”
Sarojini cried in her Champak Blossoms:
“Amber petals, ivory petals,
Petals of carvan jade,
Charming with your ambrosial sweetness
Forest and field and glade.
Foredoomed in your hour of transient glory
To shrivel and shrink and fade!”
Toru is a lover of Nature. But she is not so great a poet of Nature as Wordsworth or Shelley. She uses Nature as an agent of beauty. Her heart dances when she sees the champaks and kokilas. She does not observe Nature as a scientist either. She is a romanticist and an aesthete. Many of her observations of Nature are minute and vivid. For example, mark the vividness of a beautiful description of the sunset on an Indian lake:
Upto the glassy surface fell
The last beams of the day,
Like fiery darts, that lengthening swell,
As breezes wake and play.
Osiers and willows on the edge
And purple buds and red,
Leant down, and mid the pale greens edge
The lotus raised its head.
And softly, softly, hour by hour
Light faded, and a veil
Fell over tree, and wave, and flower,
On came the twilight pale. “Sindhu”, pp.129-130.
Below is another panorama of Nature taken from Savitri describing the joyous marriage procession marching along the streets of Madra:
“Past all the houses, past the wall,
Past gardens gay, and hedgerows trim,
Past fields, where sinuous brooklets small
With molten silver to the brim,
Glance in the sun's expiring light,
Past frowning hills, past pastures wild,
At last arises on the sight,
Foliage on foliage densely piled......... “
The poetess was keenly sensitive to Nature especially to sound and colour. Her poems like “Baugmaree”, “The Lotus” and “Our Casuarina Tree” clearly bear it out. Here is an inventory of natural object in the ballad “Buttoo”:
"What glorious trees! The sombre saul
On which the eye delights to rest,
The betel – nut, a pillar tall,
With feathery branches for a crest,
The light - leaved tamarind spreading wide,
The pale faint - scented bitter neem,
The seemul, gorgeous as a bride,
With flowers that have the ruby's gleam,
…… ….. …… …… …… …… …… …….
The bamboo bough that sway and swing
‘Neath bulbuls as the south wind blows,
The mango - tope, a close dark ring,
Home of the rooks and clamorous crows,
The champak, bok, and South - sea pine,
The nagessur with pendant flowers
Like ear – rings, — and the forest vine
That clinging over all, empowers,
The sirish famed in sanscrit song,
Which rural maidens love to wear,
The peepul giant - like and strong,
The bramble with its matted hair,
All these; and thousands, thousands more,
With helmet red, or golden crown,
Or green tiara, rose before
The youth in evening's shadows brown." — “Buttoo”, pp. 115-116.
Thus in “Buttoo” alone we have references to numerous trees — saul, betel – nut, tamarind, neem, seemul, bamboo, mango – tope, champak, nagessur, sirish, peepul, bramble, green tiara, rose, etc.
In “Sindhu” the twilight is a befitting background for the death of Sindhu and, then, of his parents. The landscape of thickening darkness is vividly described:
“And softly, softly, hour by hour
Light faded, and a veil
Fell over tree, and wave, and flower.
On came the twilight pale,
Deeper and deeper grew the shade,
Stars glimmered in the sky,
The nightingale along the glade
Raisd here preluding cry.”
Toru Dutt's miscellaneous poems, “Near Hastings”, “The Lotus”, “Baugmaree” and "Our Casuarina Tree”, are her famous nature poems. Sensuousness and sensitiveness to colour are the outstanding characteristics of these poems. In “Baugmaree” she appears to be a landscape painter in words and reminds us of Keatsean picturesqueness:
“A sea of foliage irds our garden round,
But not a sea of dull unvaried green,
Sharp contrasts of all colours here are seen
The light - green graceful tamarinds abound
Amid the mango clumps of green profound,
And palms arise, like pillars gray, between,
And o'er the quaint pools the seemuls lean
Re - red and startling like a trumpet's sound.
But nothing can be lovelier than the range
of bamboos to the eastward, when the moon
Looks through their gaps and the white lotus changes
Into a cup of silver. One might swoon
Drunken with beauty then, or gaze and gaze
On a primeval Eden in amaze.”
In “Sita” we have a landscape painted by Toru Dutt in words:—
“A dense dense forest, where no sunbeam pries
And in its centre a cleared spot, — There bloom
Gigantic flowers on creepers that embrace
Tall trees; there in a quiet lucid lake
The white swans glide; there whirring from the brake
The peacock springs; there herds of wild deer race;
There, patches gleam with yellow waving grain;
There dwells in peace the poet anchorite.”
In “Our Casuarina Tree” Nature is a befitting medium for the expression of personal feelings. The first stanza of the poem reveals Toru Dutt’s observations about the Casuarina Tree. The stateliness of the tree is objectively described in pictorial style. Its trunk is rugged and it is indented deep with scars. A creeper, which is massive like a python, winds around its trunk. The huge creeper around it looks like a scarf worn for the sake of ornamentation. Toru's senses responded keenly to the sights and sounds of nature. How beautifully she blends the senses of sight and sound:
“But gallantly
The giant wears the scarf, and flowers are hung
In crimson clusters all the boughs among,
Whereon all day are gathered bird and bee,
And oft at nights the garden overflows
With one sweet song that seems to have no close
Sung darkling from our tree, while men repose.”
In the second stanza the poetess expresses her sweet memories and impressions of the tree. In the third stanza the tree is linked up with the reminiscences of her brother and sister. Here we find a purely subjective approach to the tree. The tree is dear to the poetess not because of its magnificence and beauty but due to its association with her childhood. Her brother and sister are now no more. But still the Casuarina tree is dear to her soul because beneath it we have prayed, though years may roll,
“O sweet companions, loved with love intense,
For your sakes the tree be ever dear!
Blend with your images it shall arise
In memory, till the tears blind my eyes?”
The soft murmuring noises of the tree are its lament, “an eerie speech / That haply to the unknown land may reach.”
In the fourth stanza the poetess humanises the tree. The poetess in her imagination heard the sweet mournful music of the tree from far off France and Italy:
“When earth lay tranced in a dreamless swoon
And every time the music rose, before
Mine inner vision rose a form sublime
Thy form, O Tree, as in my happy prime
I saw thee, in my own loved native clime.”
Toru Dutt bestows tender human feelings on the casuarina tree. Thus Nature in her poetry is presented as a background for the expression of human feelings. In the hermitage Savitri fell in love at first sight with Satyavan. An aroma of joy, expressive of the joyous feeling in Savitri's heart, dawned on surrounding nature:
“A ray
Shot down from heaven, appeared to tinge
All objects with supernal light
The thatches had a rainbow fringe,
The cornfields looked more green and bright.”
Nature works for the good of Savitri and Satyavan. How lovingly they go the forest on the fateful day of Satyavan's death:
“Oh lovely are the woods at dawn,
And lovely in the sultry noon,
But loveliest, when the sun withdraws
The twilight and a crescent moon
Change all asperities of shape..........”
Toru Dutt's descriptions of nature are noted for minute observation and extreme sensitiveness to colour. Had she lived longer, she would have been a great colourist and landscape painter in Indo Anglian poetry, and as a poetess of nature, she would have secured a privileged place beside Keats - like sensuousness and sensitiveness to colour are common in the poetry of Toru Dutt.
Her nature poetry has an important place in Indo - Anglian poetry. Nature did not make any appeal to her predecessors Derozio, Michael Madhusudan Dutt and Kashiprasad Ghose. For the first time we find sensitiveness to nature in Toru Dutt's poetry. She does not find moral meaning in nature. Nature is a background for the revelation of profound human feelings of love, sympathy, obedience, etc. She excels all other Indo - Anglian poets of the nineteenth century as landscape painter. Nowhere in the Indo - Anglian poetry of the nineteenth century we discern such minute observation and sensitiveness to colours and sounds as in the poetry of Toru Dutt. Had she lived full life, she would certainly have attained a front rank place in Indo - Anglian nature poetry. H.A.L. Fisher rightly remembered Toru as the “child of the green valley of the Ganga.” She has justified this title by her Indianness and by her love of Nature. She has presented in her poetry the landscape of the Gangetic plains whereas Sarojini Naidu has presented the landscape of the South.