When the Sheaf appeared, Toru's verse was found to be ‘crude’ and ‘wooden’. The Englishman commented: “Miss Dutt's metre often limps, her grammar is not always faultless, and her expressions are sometimes quaint or tame.” Mr. Gosse also pointed out that at times “the rules of our prosody are absolutely ignored.”
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| Toru Dutt’s Versification |
Dr. Edward J. Thompson remarked: “It is easy to feel that, in the work done, she never escaped from the influence of her favourite English poets, such writers as Mrs. Browning, whose work did not furnish satisfactory prosodic models. The metres used by Toru Dutt are nearly always of the simplest, and her use of them is marred by much crudity. Yet against this must be set the many signs of haste and lack of opportunity to finish. The punctuation of the Ballads, for example is, chaotic........... Yet, even amid the many marks of immaturity and haste, there are signs that she would have escaped before long from many of her prosodic limitations. “Our Casuarina Tree”, merely the most remarkable poem ever written in English by a foreigner, shows her already possessed of mastery over the more elaborate and architectural form of verse. In any case, there is enough to show that experience and practice would have brought release from the cramping and elementary forms that she used.........."
Contrary to this view is the opinion of an Indian scholar - poet and critic, Sri Aurobindo: “Toru Dutt was an accomplished verse builder with a delicate talent and some outbreaks of genius and she wrote things that were attractive and sometimes something that had a strong energy of language and a rhythmic force.” Elsewhere he is quoted to have remarked: “she has written poetry not as an Indian written in English but like an English woman.” E.F. Oaten while appreciating Toru's real creative and imaginative power, has taken note of her ‘almost faultless technical skill.’
In the Sheaf, “the metre at least is smooth and suggestive of no labour or hard toil in its making.” Such for instance, is Berat's “My Normandy” or Peyrat's “Roland”. For the smoothness of rhythm and rhyme one can cite the last stanza of “My Normandy” as an example:
“There is an age, alas! in life,
When every idle dream must end,
An age of introspection, rife
With memories that cross and bend,
When such an age arrives for me,
And folds her wing my Muse, to rest,
May I behold my Normandy,
The favoured land I love the best.”
As mentioned earlier Toru not only handled the ballad metre, the rhymed octosyllbic ballad with dexterity but also wrote sonnets and tried her hand at blank verses. In a note to a piece by Louis Bouihet, she says: “Although a Frenchman would faint away at the idea of blank verse, which is not allowed in French poetry, we have not hesitated to render this piece in that form, as well as other.” Her lines are all end - stopped, and she is never really happy in blank verse, though a few lines in “The Death of the Wolf” and so in the Ancient Ballads, especially “The Royal Ascetic and the Hind”, “Dhruva” and “Sita,” lead us to believe that with more practice she would have been just as much at home in that form as in so many others, notably the sonnet. There are nearly forty sonnets in the Sheaf and two in Ancient Ballads.
Thus, Toru seems to have had a great preference for the sonnet form. In Ancient Ballads her two charming sonnets- “Sonnet Baugmaree” and “Sonnet - the Lotus” evince her dexterity in the sonnet form. In the Sheaf, there is an original sonnet addressed to the father, -one entitled “A mon Pere”.
The Sheaf is continuously uneven in merit. There are poems in it which read like bad prose translations, their closeness to the original being their sole worth, but there are others which are real products of genius. Her successful handling of the ballad quatrain is also noteworthy. For example, mark the following:
“I know in such a world as this
No one can gain his heart's desire
Or pass the years in perfect bliss;
Like gold we must be tried by fire..........”
Although her metrical skill could have matured given time, yet the critics complain that her metre limps at times, and her blank verse is monotonous and wooden. Sir Edmund Gosse too finds “rough and inoculate” metres in Ancient Ballads. And despite the faults, the delicacy and lightness of touch displayed in Toru's verse bear testimony to her refined poetic taste, and the music of her poetry is not the least negligible feature. There is a captivating simplicity and spontaneity in her verse.