It is at my persuasion that these poems are now published. The
earliest of them were read to me in London in 1896, when the
writer was seventeen; the later ones were sent to me from India
in 1904, when she was twenty-five; and they belong, I think,
almost wholly to those two periods. As they seemed to me to have
an individual beauty of their own, I thought they ought to be
published. The writer hesitated. "Your letter made me very
proud and very sad," she wrote. "Is it possible that I have
written verses that are 'filled with beauty,' and is it possible
that you really think them worthy of being given to the world?
You know how high my ideal of Art is; and to me my poor casual
little poems seem to be less than beautiful--I mean with that
final enduring beauty that I desire." And, in another letter,
she writes: "I am not a poet really. I have the vision and the
desire, but not the voice. If I could write just one poem full
of beauty and the spirit of greatness, I should be exultantly
silent for ever; but I sing just as the birds do, and my songs
are as ephemeral." It is for this bird-like quality of song, it
seems to me, that they are to be valued. They hint, in a sort of
delicately evasive way, at a rare temperament, the temperament of
a woman of the East, finding expression through a Western
language and under partly Western influences. They do not
express the whole of that temperament; but they express, I think,
its essence; and there is an Eastern magic in them.
Sarojini Chattopadhyay was born at Hyderabad on February 13,
1879. Her father, Dr. Aghorenath Chattopadhyay, is descended
from the ancient family of Chattorajes of Bhramangram, who were
noted throughout Eastern Bengal as patrons of Sanskrit learning,
and for their practice of Yoga. He took his degree of Doctor of
Science at the University of Edinburgh in 1877, and afterwards
studied brilliantly at Bonn. On his return to India he founded
the Nizam College at Hyderabad, and has since laboured incessantly,
and at great personal sacrifice, in the cause of education.
Sarojini was the eldest of a large family, all of whom were
taught English at an early age. "I," she writes, "was stubborn
and refused to speak it. So one day when I was nine years old my
father punished me--the only time I was ever punished--by
shutting me in a room alone for a whole day. I came out of it a
full-blown linguist. I have never spoken any other language to
him, or to my mother, who always speaks to me in Hindustani. I
don't think I had any special hankering to write poetry as a
little child, though I was of a very fanciful and dreamy nature.
My training under my father's eye was of a sternly scientific
character. He was determined that I should be a great mathematician
or a scientist, but the poetic instinct, which I inherited from him
and also from my mother (who wrote some lovely Bengali lyrics in her
youth) proved stronger. One day, when I was eleven, I was sighing
over a sum in algebra: it WOULDN'T come right; but instead a whole
poem came to me suddenly. I wrote it down.
"From that day my 'poetic career' began. At thirteen I wrote a
long poem a la 'Lady of the Lake'--1300 lines in six days. At
thirteen I wrote a drama of 2000 lines, a full-fledged passionate
thing that I began on the spur of the moment without forethought,
just to spite my doctor who said I was very ill and must not
touch a book. My health broke down permanently about this time,
and my regular studies being stopped I read voraciously. I
suppose the greater part of my reading was done between fourteen
and sixteen. I wrote a novel, I wrote fat volumes of journals; I
took myself very seriously in those days."
Before she was fifteen the great struggle of her life began. Dr.
Govindurajulu Naidu, now her husband, is, though of an old and
honourable family, not a Brahmin. The difference of caste roused
an equal opposition, not only on the side of her family, but of
his; and in 1895 she was sent to England, against her will, with
a special scholarship from the Nizam. She remained in England,
with an interval of travel in Italy, till 1898, studying first at
King's College, London, then, till her health again broke down,
at Girton. She returned to Hyderabad in September 1898, and in
the December of that year, to the scandal of all India, broke
through the bonds of caste, and married Dr. Naidu. "Do you know
I have some very beautiful poems floating in the air," she wrote
to me in 1904; "and if the gods are kind I shall cast my soul
like a net and capture them, this year. If the gods are
kind--and grant me a little measure of health. It is all I need
to make my life perfect, for the very 'Spirit of Delight' that
Shelley wrote of dwells in my little home; it is full of the
music of birds in the garden and children in the long arched
verandah." There are songs about the children in this book; they
are called the Lord of Battles, the Sun of Victory, the
Lotus-born, and the Jewel of Delight.
"My ancestors for thousands of years," I find written in one of
her letters, "have been lovers of the forest and mountain caves,
great dreamers, great scholars, great ascetics. My father is a
dreamer himself, a great dreamer, a great man whose life has been
a magnificent failure. I suppose in the whole of India there are
few men whose learning is greater than his, and I don't think
there are many men more beloved. He has a great white beard and
the profile of Homer, and a laugh that brings the roof down. He
has wasted all his money on two great objects: to help others,
and on alchemy. He holds huge courts every day in his garden of
all the learned men of all religions--Rajahs and beggars and
saints and downright villains all delightfully mixed up, and all
treated as one. And then his alchemy! Oh dear, night and day
the experiments are going on, and every man who brings a new
prescription is welcome as a brother. But this alchemy is, you
know, only the material counterpart of a poet's craving for
Beauty, the eternal Beauty. 'The makers of gold and the makers
of verse,' they are the twin creators that sway the world's
secret desire for mystery; and what in my father is the genius of
curiosity--the very essence of all scientific genius--in me is
the desire for beauty. Do you remember Pater's phrase about
Leonardo da Vinci, 'curiosity and the desire of beauty'?"
It was the desire of beauty that made her a poet; her "nerves of
delight" were always quivering at the contact of beauty. To
those who knew her in England, all the life of the tiny figure
seemed to concentrate itself in the eyes; they turned towards
beauty as the sunflower turns towards the sun, opening wider and
wider until one saw nothing but the eyes.
She was dressed always in clinging dresses of Eastern silk, and
as she was so small, and her long black hair hung straight down
her back, you might have taken her for a child. She spoke
little, and in a low voice, like gentle music; and she seemed,
wherever she was, to be alone.
Through that soul I seemed to touch and take hold upon the East.
And first there was the wisdom of the East. I have never known
any one who seemed to exist on such "large draughts of intellectual
day" as this child of seventeen, to whom one could tell all one's
personal troubles and agitations, as to a wise old woman. In the
East, maturity comes early; and this child had already lived through
all a woman's life. But there was something else, something hardly
personal, something which belonged to a consciousness older than the
Christian, which I realised, wondered at, and admired, in her passionate
tranquillity of mind, before which everything mean and trivial and
temporary caught fire and burnt away in smoke. Her body was never
without suffering, or her heart without conflict; but neither the
body's weakness nor the heart's violence could disturb that fixed
contemplation, as of Buddha on his lotus-throne.
And along with this wisdom, as of age or of the age of a race,
there was what I can hardly call less than an agony of sensation.
Pain or pleasure transported her, and the whole of pain or
pleasure might be held in a flower's cup or the imagined frown of
a friend. It was never found in those things which to others
seemed things of importance. At the age of twelve she passed the
Matriculation of the Madras University, and awoke to find herself
famous throughout India. "Honestly," she said to me, "I was not
pleased; such things did not appeal to me." But here, in a
letter from Hyderabad, bidding one "share a March morning" with
her, there is, at the mere contact of the sun, this outburst:
"Come and share my exquisite March morning with me: this
sumptuous blaze of gold and sapphire sky; these scarlet lilies
that adorn the sunshine; the voluptuous scents of neem and
champak and serisha that beat upon the languid air with their
implacable sweetness; the thousand little gold and blue and
silver breasted birds bursting with the shrill ecstasy of life in
nesting time. All is hot and fierce and passionate, ardent and
unashamed in its exulting and importunate desire for life and
love. And, do you know that the scarlet lilies are woven petal by
petal from my heart's blood, these little quivering birds are my
soul made incarnate music, these heavy perfumes are my emotions
dissolved into aerial essence, this flaming blue and gold sky is
the 'very me,' that part of me that incessantly and insolently,
yes, and a little deliberately, triumphs over that other part--a
thing of nerves and tissues that suffers and cries out, and that
must die to-morrow perhaps, or twenty years hence."
Then there was her humour, which was part of her strange wisdom,
and was always awake and on the watch. In all her letters,
written in exquisite English prose, but with an ardent imagery
and a vehement sincerity of emotion which make them, like the
poems, indeed almost more directly, un-English, Oriental, there
was always this intellectual, critical sense of humour, which
could laugh at one's own enthusiasm as frankly as that enthusiasm
had been set down. And partly the humour, like the delicate
reserve of her manner, was a mask or a shelter. "I have taught
myself," she writes to me from India, "to be commonplace and like
everybody else superficially. Every one thinks I am so nice and
cheerful, so 'brave,' all the banal things that are so comfortable
to be. My mother knows me only as 'such a tranquil child, but so
strong-willed.' A tranquil child!" And she writes again, with deeper
significance: "I too have learnt the subtle philosophy of living from
moment to moment. Yes, it is a subtle philosophy, though it appears
merely an epicurean doctrine: 'Eat, drink, and be merry, for
to-morrow we die.' I have gone through so many yesterdays when I
strove with Death that I have realised to its full the wisdom of that
sentence; and it is to me not merely a figure of speech, but a
literal fact. Any to-morrow I might die. It is scarcely two months
since I came back from the grave: is it worth while to be anything
but radiantly glad? Of all things that life or perhaps my temperament
has given me I prize the gift of laughter as beyond price."
Her desire, always, was to be "a wild free thing of the air like
the birds, with a song in my heart." A spirit of too much fire
in too frail a body, it was rarely that her desire was fully
granted. But in Italy she found what she could not find in
England, and from Italy her letters are radiant. "This Italy is
made of gold," she writes from Florence, "the gold of dawn and
daylight, the gold of the stars, and, now dancing in weird
enchanting rhythms through this magic month of May, the gold of
fireflies in the perfumed darkness--'aerial gold.' I long to
catch the subtle music of their fairy dances and make a poem with
a rhythm like the quick irregular wild flash of their sudden
movements. Would it not be wonderful? One black night I stood
in a garden with fireflies in my hair like darting restless stars
caught in a mesh of darkness. It gave me a strange sensation, as
if I were not human at all, but an elfin spirit. I wonder why
these little things move me so deeply? It is because I have a
most 'unbalanced intellect,' I suppose." Then, looking out on
Florence, she cries, "God! how beautiful it is, and how glad I am
that I am alive to-day!" And she tells me that she is drinking
in the beauty like wine, "wine, golden and scented, and shining,
fit for the gods; and the gods have drunk it, the dead gods of
Etruria, two thousand years ago. Did I say dead? No, for the
gods are immortal, and one might still find them loitering in
some solitary dell on the grey hillsides of Fiesole. Have I seen
them? Yes, looking with dreaming eyes, I have found them sitting
under the olives, in their grave, strong, antique beauty--Etruscan
gods!"
In Italy she watches the faces of the monks, and at one moment
longs to attain to their peace by renunciation, longs for Nirvana;
"then, when one comes out again into the hot sunshine that warms
one's blood, and sees the eager hurrying faces of men and women
in the street, dramatic faces over which the disturbing experiences
of life have passed and left their symbols, one's heart thrills up
into one's throat. No, no, no, a thousand times no! how can one
deliberately renounce this coloured, unquiet, fiery human life of
the earth?" And, all the time, her subtle criticism is alert, and
this woman of the East marvels at the women of the West, "the
beautiful worldly women of the West," whom she sees walking in the
Cascine, "taking the air so consciously attractive in their brilliant
toilettes, in the brilliant coquetry of their manner!" She finds
them "a little incomprehensible," "profound artists in all the subtle
intricacies of fascination," and asks if these "incalculable
frivolities and vanities and coquetries and caprices" are, to us,
an essential part of their charm? And she watches them with
amusement as they flutter about her, petting her as if she were a
nice child, a child or a toy, not dreaming that she is saying to
herself sorrowfully: "How utterly empty their lives must be of
all spiritual beauty IF they are nothing more than they appear to be."
She sat in our midst, and judged us, and few knew what was
passing behind that face "like an awakening soul," to use one of
her own epithets. Her eyes were like deep pools, and you seemed
to fall through them into depths below depths.