Studies of Contemporary Poets Part 16

Green gla.s.s, goblin. Why do you stare at them?

Give them me.

No.

Give them me. Give them me.

No.

Then I will howl all night in the reeds, Lie in the mud and howl for them.

Goblin, why do you love them so?

They are better than stars or water, Better than voices of winds that sing, Better than any man's fair daughter, Your green gla.s.s beads on a silver ring.

Hush I stole them out of the moon.

Give me your beads, I desire them.

No.

I will howl in a deep lagoon For your green gla.s.s beads, I love them so.

Give them me. Give them.

No.

But in his more representative work, the intellectual realism which comes from an acute sense of fact is clearly operative. We have seen, too, from the earliest published verse of this poet, the continual struggle of what one may call a religion of reality--belief in the sanct.i.ty and beauty and value of the real world--for spiritual mastery.

In the later poems the two elements become deepened and are more closely combined: they are, too, seeking expression through a technique which is directed to the same realistic purpose. And as a result we get such a piece of quiet fidelity as "London Interior"; or a tragedy like "Carrion," in which the logic of life and death, controlling emotion with beautiful gravity, is suddenly broken by a sob. It is the last of four war-poems; a series representing the call of battle to the soldier, his departure, a fighting retreat, and finally, in "Carrion,"

his death--

It is plain now what you are. Your head has dropped Into a furrow. And the lovely curve Of your strong leg has wasted and is propped Against a ridge of the ploughed land's watery swerve.

You are fuel for a coming spring if they leave you here; The crop that will rise from your bones is healthy bread.

You died--we know you--without a word of fear, And as they loved you living I love you dead.

No girl would kiss you. But then No girls would ever kiss the earth In the manner they hug the lips of men: You are not known to them in this, your second birth.

Hush, I hear the guns. Are you still asleep?

Surely I saw you a little heave to reply.

I can hardly think you will not turn over and creep Along the furrows trenchward as if to die.

_Sarojini Naidu_

Mrs Naidu is one of the two Indian poets who within the last few years have produced remarkable English poetry. The second of the two is, of course, Rabindranath Tagore, whose work has come to us a little later, who has published more, and whose recent visit to this country has brought him more closely under the public eye. Mrs Naidu is not so well known; but she deserves to be, for although the bulk of her work is not so large, its quality, so far as it can be compared with that of her compatriot, will easily bear the test. It is, however, so different in kind, and reveals a genius so contrasting, that one is piqued by an apparent problem. How is it that two children of what we are pleased to call the changeless East, under conditions nearly identical, should have produced results which are so different?

Both of these poets are lyrists born; both come of an old and distinguished Bengali ancestry; in both the culture of East and West are happily met; and both are working in the same artistic medium. Yet the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore is mystical, philosophic, and contemplative, remaining oriental therefore to that degree; and permitting a doubt of the _Quarterly_ reviewer's dictum that "Gitanjali" is a synthesis of western and oriental elements. The complete synthesis would seem to rest with Mrs Naidu, whose poetry, though truly native to her motherland, is more sensuous than mystical, human and pa.s.sionate rather than spiritual, and reveals a mentality more active than contemplative. Her affiliation with the Occident is so much the more complete; but her Eastern origin is never in doubt.

The themes of her verse and their setting are derived from her own country. But her thought, with something of the energy of the strenuous West and something of its 'divine discontent,' plays upon the surface of an older and deeper calm which is her birthright. So, in her "Salutation to the Eternal Peace," she sings

What care I for the world's loud weariness, Who dream in twilight granaries Thou dost bless With delicate sheaves of mellow silences?

Two distinguished poet-friends of Mrs Naidu--Mr Edmund Gosse and Mr Arthur Symons--have introduced her two princ.i.p.al volumes of verse with interesting biographical notes. The facts thus put in our possession convey a picture to the mind which is instantly recognizable in the poems. A gracious and glowing personality appears, quick and warm with human feeling, exquisitely sensitive to beauty and receptive of ideas, wearing its culture, old and new, scientific and humane, with simplicity; but, as Mr Symons says, "a spirit of too much fire in too frail a body," and one moreover who has suffered and fought to the limit of human endurance.

We hear of birth and childhood in Hyderabad; of early scientific training by a father whose great learning was matched by his public spirit: of a first poem at the age of eleven, written in an impulse of reaction when a sum in algebra '_would not_ come right': of coming to England at the age of sixteen with a scholarship from the Nizam college; and of three years spent here, studying at King's College, London, and at Girton, with glorious intervals of holiday in Italy.

We hear, too, of a love-story that would make an idyll; of pa.s.sion so strong and a will so resolute as almost to be incredible in such a delicate creature; of a marriage in defiance of caste, a few years of brilliant happiness and then a tragedy. And all through, as a dark background to the adventurous romance of her life, there is the shadow of weakness and ill-health. That shadow creeps into her poems, impressively, now and then. Indeed, if it were lacking, the bright oriental colouring would be almost too vivid. So, apart from its psychological and human interest, we may be thankful for such a poem as "To the G.o.d of Pain." It softens and deepens the final impression of the work.

For thy dark altars, balm nor milk nor rice, But mine own soul thou'st ta'en for sacrifice.

The poem is purely subjective, of course, as is the still more moving piece, "The Poet to Death," in the same volume.

Tarry a while, till I am satisfied Of love and grief, of earth and altering sky; Till all my human hungers are fulfilled, O Death, I cannot die!

We know that that is a cry out of actual and repeated experience; and from that point of view alone it has poignant interest. But what are we to say about the spirit of it--the philosophy which is implicit in it?

Here is an added value of a higher kind, evidence of a mind which has taken its own stand upon reality, and which has no easy consolations when confronting the facts of existence. For this mind, neither the religions of East nor West are allowed to veil the truth; neither the hope of Nirvana nor the promise of Paradise may drug her sense of the value of life nor darken her perception of the beauty of phenomena.

Resignation and renunciation are alike impossible to this ardent being who loves the earth so pa.s.sionately; but the 'sternly scientific'

nature of that early training--the description is her own--has made futile regret impossible, too. She has entered into full possession of the thought of our time; and strongly individual as she is, she has evolved for herself, to use her own words, a "subtle philosophy of living from moment to moment." That is no shallow epicureanism, however, for as she sings in a poem contrasting our changeful life with the immutable peace of the Buddha on his lotus-throne--

Nought shall conquer or control The heavenward hunger of our soul.

It is as though, realizing that the present is the only moment of which we are certain, she had determined to crowd that moment to the utmost limit of living.

From such a philosophy, materialism of a n.o.bler kind, one would expect a love of the concrete and tangible, a delight in sense impressions, and quick and strong emotion. Those are, in fact, the characteristics of much of the poetry in these two volumes, _The Golden Threshold_ and _The Bird of Time_. The beauty of the material world, of line and especially of colour, is caught and recorded joyously. Life is regarded mainly from the outside, in action, or as a pageant; as an interesting event or a picturesque group. It is not often brooded over, and reflection is generally evident in but the lightest touches. The proportion of strictly subjective verse is small, and is not, on the whole, the finest work technically.

The introspective note seems unfavourable to Mrs Naidu's art: naturally so, one would conclude, from the buoyant temperament that is revealed.

The love-songs are perhaps an exception, for one or two, which (as we know) treat fragments of the poet's own story, are fine in idea and in technique alike. There is, for example, "An Indian Love Song," in the first stanza of which the lover begs for his lady's love. But she reminds him of the barriers of caste between them; she is afraid to profane the laws of her father's creed; and her lover's kinsmen, in times past, have broken the altars of her people and slaughtered their sacred kine. The lover replies:

What are the sins of my race, Beloved, what are my people to thee?

And what are thy shrine, and kine and kindred, what are thy G.o.ds to me?

Love recks not of feuds and bitter follies, of stranger, comrade or kin, Alike in his ear sound the temple bells and the cry of the _muezzin_.

There is also in the second volume the "Dirge," in which the poet mourns the death of the husband whom she had dared to marry against the laws of caste; and which almost unconsciously reveals the influence of centuries of Suttee upon the mind of Indian womanhood.

Shatter her shining bracelets, break the string Threading the mystic marriage-beads that cling Loth to desert a sobbing throat so sweet, Unbind the golden anklets on her feet, Divest her of her azure veils and cloud Her living beauty in a living shroud.

Even here, however, the effect is gained by colour and movement; by the grouping of images rather than by the development of an idea; and that will be found to be Mrs Naidu's method in the many delightful lyrics of these volumes where she is most successful. The "Folk Songs" of her first book are an example. One a.s.sumes that they are early work, partly because they are the first group in the earlier of the two volumes; but more particularly because they adopt so literally the advice which Mr Edmund Gosse gave her at the beginning of her career. When she came as a girl to England and was a student of London University at King's College, she submitted to Mr Gosse a bundle of ma.n.u.script poems. He describes them as accurate and careful work, but too derivative; modelled too palpably on the great poets of the previous generation.

His advice, therefore, was that they should be destroyed, and that the author should start afresh upon native themes and in her own manner. The counsel was exactly followed: the ma.n.u.script went into the wastepaper basket, and the poet set to work on what we cannot doubt is this first group of songs made out of the lives of her own people.

There is all the hemisphere between these lyrics and those of late-Victorian England. Here we find a "Village Song" of a mother to the little bride who is still all but a baby; and to whom the fairies call so insistently that she will not stay "for bridal songs and bridal cakes and sandal-scented leisure." In the song of the "Palanquin Bearers" we positively see the lithe and rhythmic movements which bear some Indian beauty along, lightly "as a pearl on a string." And there is a song written to one of the tunes of those native minstrels who wander, free and wild as the wind, singing of

The sword of old battles, the crown of old kings, And happy and simple and sorrowful things.

The "Harvest Hymn" raises thanksgiving for strange bounties to G.o.ds of unfamiliar names; and the "Cradle Song" evokes a tropical night, heavy with scent and drenched with dew--

Sweet, shut your eyes, The wild fire-flies Dance through the fairy _neem_; From the poppy-bole, For you I stole A little, lovely dream.

In its lightness and grace, this poem is one of the exquisite things in our language: one of the little lyric flights, like William Watson's "April," which in their clear sweetness and apparent spontaneity are like some small bird's song. Mrs Naidu has said of herself--"I sing just as the birds do"; and as regards her loveliest lyrics (there are a fair proportion of them) she speaks a larger truth than she meant. Their simplicity and abandonment to the sheer joy of singing are infinitely refreshing; and fragile though they seem, one suspects them of great vitality. In the later volume there is another called "Golden Ca.s.sia"--the bright blooms that her people call mere 'woodland flowers.'

The poet has other fancies about them; sometimes they seem to her like fragments of a fallen star--

Or golden lamps for a fairy shrine, Or golden pitchers for fairy wine.