The First Bengali Sonneteer

"If I dare say the sonnet will do wonderfully well in our language."–

-Michael M. S. Dutta.

I

The sonnet has, from the time of Petrarch, if not earlier, been a great form of European literature. What its essential character is and what it seeks to express has thus been admirably expressed by the famous poet-critic, Theodore Watts-Dunton: -

"A sonnet is a wave of melody:
From heaving waters of the impassioned soul
A billow of tidal music one and whole
Flows in the ‘octave’; then returning free,
Its ebbing surges in the ‘sestet’ roll

to the deep of Life's tumultuous sea."

Many priceless gems in many countries have been presented to the world in this beautiful though proscribed setting. But who the originator of the sonnet was, nobody can now say definitely. Some critics, following Mr. S. Wadington, have surmised that the first sonneteer was a French poet of Provence, Fra Guittone; while others, like Mr. J. A. Symonds, have held that the first sonneteer was Pier delle Vigne, Secretary of State in the Sicilian Court of Frederick, ‘whose claims no student of early Italian poetry can ignore.’ One thing, however, which has been known without the shadow of a doubt, is that the sonnet was brought to great perfection by Italian poets like Dante (1265-1321), Petrarch (1304-1374), and Tasso (1493-1569), and that Petrarch was the first great practitioner of this great form of poetry, for it is not his epic poem Africa which celebrates its hero Scipio Africanus and his biographical series of Classical celebrities written in prose, De Viris Illustribus, but it is his Canzoniere, his songs and sonnets, all inspired by his love for Laura, which are his chief title-deeds to fame. Whenever we read the above-quoted lines of Mr. Watts-Dunton, we seem to behold some early poet wandering love-lorn by some forlorn sea-shore, looking fixedly on the swell and fall of moon-lit waves: the scene might have so enraptured him as to inspire him to give expression to the anguish of his heart in similarly wave-like rhythmic poems with their swell and fall.

Thus it is that, from the time of Dante, the sonnet has been the most agreeable vehicle for a great poet's self-expression; and it is true also that most sonnets and sonnet-sequences have been love-poems and love-idylls. Thus it is also that the greatest poets of Europe, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Tasso and Camoens among others, have been sonneteers. Those who have been its greatest lovers and best practitioners in Europe have been enumerated by Wordsworth, one of the greatest of sonnet-writers himself, in a sonnet of apology for the sonnet which the first Bengali Sonneteer, Michael Madhusudon Dutta, knew by heart and could recite with wonderful effect as he once did in the house of his friend, the late Mr. Satyendra Nath Tagore.

But, there are other forms of lyrical verse which are as suitable as, if not more so than, the sonnet. Why is it then that so many great poets have taken to it in preference to all the others? This, too, is evident from another of Wordsworth's sonnets, which, in a few words, gives the reason why the greatest poets who, at times, ‘feel the weight of too much liberty’ like to be bound within the sonnet's ‘scanty plot of ground.’

This great and much practised form of poetry has at different periods entered into different literatures like English, French, German and Portuguese, though its native home is Italy. It entered into English through the pioneer work of Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503?-1542) and of Henry Howard., Earl of Surrey (1517?-1547), both of whom wrote amorous love-sonnets modeled on those of Petrarch. It is to be noted here that this form of poetry–with the deliberate or accidental choice of a model in Petrarch–wrought a well-nigh miraculous change in the character of poetical thought and theme in England. Prof. Saintsbury in this connection observes:

The absence of the personal note in medieval poetry is a commonplace, and nowhere had that absence been more marked than in England. With Wyatt and Surrey, English poetry became at a bound the most personal (and in a rather bad but unavoidable word) the most ‘introspective’ in Europe. There had of course been love poetry before, but its convention had been a convention of impersonality. It now became exactly the reverse. The lover sang less his joys than his sorrows and their effect on him in the most personal way he could. Although allegory still retained a strong hold on the national taste, and was yet to receive its greatest poetical expression in The Faery Queene, it was allegory of quite a different kind from that which in the Roman de la Rose had taken Europe captive, and had since dominated European poetry in all departments, and especially in the department of lovemaking. ‘Dangier’ and his fellow-phantoms fled before the dawn of the new poetry in England, and the depressing influences of a common form–a conventional stock of images, personages, and almost language–disappeared. No doubt there was conventionality enough in the following of the Petrarchian model, but it was a less stiff and uniform conventionality; it allowed . . . and indeed invited the individual to wear his rue with a difference, and to avail himself at least of the almost infinite diversity of circumstance and feeling which the life of the actual man affords, instead of reducing everything to the moods and forms of an already-generalised and allegorised experience."

A similar thing has occurred in Bengali poetry. Before the advent of Michael Madhusudon Dutta and, indeed, before he wrote and published his Bengali sonnets which he called ‘Chaturdaspadi-Kabitabali,’ Bengali poetry, if we except some songs of popular poets and song-makers, was not really personal in any sense. There had been love-poetry in abundance, but all had this convention in common, that the personal element was always suppressed and allegorised under the names of Krishna and Radha, the Absolute and the individual souls. Almost all the love-poetry of the medieval period in Bengali was poetry of the allegorised character, which shared its conventionality with that of the Gita-Govinda (the Indian Song of Songs) by Jayadeva in Sanskrit. Madhusudon by the introduction of the sonnet and Blank Verse not only did singly the work of Wyatt and Surrey combined, but opened a new vein in Bengali poetry–the vein of personal feeling–adding to it an almost infinite variety of circumstance and diversity of theme which the life of an actual man affords.

It is to be remembered, however, that though Madhusudon learnt self-expression in the school of the English poets with whom he was familiar as any man in any age,¹ it was while in France after he had composed his dramas and two epic poems–all the work of three years’ whole-hearted literary concentration–and after he had felt ‘the weight of too much liberty’ that he was glad, like Wordsworth, to ‘be bound within the sonnet's scanty plot of ground’. Of course, it must not be forgotten that Madhu had composed his first sonnet during or after the composition of his drama Krishna Kumari, It was wholly experimental, though not devoid of poetical beauty, and about it he wrote to his friend Raj Narain Dutta, "I want to introduce the sonnet into our language." Then, after quoting the sonnet which he called The Poet's Mother-tongue, he added, "what say you to this, my good friend? In my humble opinion, if cultivated by men of genius, our sonnet in time would rival the Italian." But, that was a stray example only preceded by one very curious example of a Blank Verse Sonnet with a queer pen-name, written in English long before he had begun to write sonnets in his mother tongue. This strange thing, written sometime about 1841, we reproduce below as an instance of craze and whimsicality: -

EVENING IN SATURN

A sonnet in blank verse dedicated to a pigmy

PREFACE

Reader! whoever publishes a sonnet with a preface? I hear, or fancy that I hear, you say ‘none’! Well! I publish. I am an enemy to what men call ‘custom’. But be that as it is, I publish my sonnet with a preface: I have to teach the world something new. Don't get offended. Behold! I have written a sonnet in blank-verse! What a rare experiment! Believe me, Reader, the Muse appeared not to resent this ‘breach of etiquette’ towards her. O Joy! O Glory! O Happiness! that I have done successfully what none dared to before me!

Excuse this short outbreak of impassioned exclamation. I have laid my scene in the Planet Saturn, because I despise everything earthly.

A beauteous veil of burning gold did hide
The Day-God's brow resplendent: and the sky
Like to a canvas on its bosom wore
Sweet forms, the pencil of meek Even drew!–
Now many a bird,–not kokils-philomels
But of diviner kinds–began to sing
So sweet a dirge above the bier of day,
As might have made, ye sons of this poor earth!
Sigh for a death that is so fondly mourned,
Now from the west rose six moons hand in hand–

Like a soft band of beauties–blushing–fair–

Oh! how their beams did brighten all the scene:
Their lights fell on the lakes and murmuring rivers,
Like silver mantles:–Here the Sonnet endeth!

-Crook-Cack."

It was while in France that Madhusudon began to learn Italian with French and German, and it was there too that he read for the first time the Sonnets of Petrarch which inspired him to attempt the sonnet in right earnest as well as to introduce it into Bengali as he had long ago desired. In a letter from 12, Rue des Chantiers, Versailles, France, dated the 26th January, 1865, Madhusudon wrote to his friend Gourdas Bysack, "I have been lately reading Petrarch–the Italian poet, and scribbling some ‘sonnets’ after his manner." Thus it was that the sonnet entered into Bengali poetry through the endeavours of Madhusudon Dutta, whose highest ambition in life was to enrich his mother-tongue with the treasures of all languages.

In writing the sonnet, however, though Michael took Petrarch as his model, the Italian poet influenced him as an inspirer as also as a model for form only–the form which has been known variously as the "natural," the "contemporary" but more commonly the "Petrarchan." The Petrarchan sonnet and the sonnets of the greatest masters of the form, as of poetry and the drama, e.g., Spenser, Shakespeare and Dante, have all for their motive and inspirational force the poet's inward yearning in love for the kindred soul of a lovable woman. In this connection, we should remember that one of the most important events in the life of Petrarch, and probably the most important event, as has been rightly stated by the writer on Petrarch in the Encyclopedia Britannica, was his meeting Laura for the first time in the Church of St. Clara at Avignon on the 6th of April, 1327. All good judges have rejected the hypothesis that Laura was a fictitious person–a figment of the poet's imagination. They have rightly accepted her as a living woman, and they have found out that the poems, or rather sonnets and odes addressed to her, demonstrate that she was a married lady with whom Petrarch was on terms of respectful, though not very intimate, friendship. Though Petrarch's Canzoniere (Sonnets and Odes addressed to Laura) had certainly had to assume an impersonal character as all self-expression cannot but be (Mrs. Browning's hiding the real motive of her sonnets under the disguised name of Sonnets from the Portuguese is a case in point), these are one long and continuous monody sung forth by the poet from his inmost soul: Petrarch has sought in these poems to set up Laura as ‘a perpetual object of delightful contemplation’–a beautiful woman or Beauty's Self–seated in a lovely landscape, nay, seated in the very soul of the poet. Love it is, therefore, which can be said to have given birth to the sonnet, and, this has been amply exemplified in the work of poets no less great than Spenser, Shakespeare and Dante. Dante wrote his Vita Nuva (New Life) in which he celebrated in immortal sonnets his love and unearthly regard for Beatrice; Shakespeare ‘unlocked his heart with this key’, for he wrote the greater number of his sonnets to commemorate his love for the Dark Lady of his heart, and the lesser he dedicated also to affection–to a friend of his whom he cared for most amongst all others; and Spenser, before Shakespeare, had composed his Amoretti to give vent to his love for his beloved Elizabeth. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, too, though a much lesser poet, yet by far the best English exponent of the ‘natural’ form of the sonnets, similarly wrote his House of Life to enshrine the memory of his love for the beautiful Elizabeth Siddal.

But, it was probably Milton who, for the first time, used the sonnet and that with very great success for ‘occasional purposes’. Milton too like Madhusudon had been inspired to write sonnets by Petrarch though Petrarch's sonnets were all written on love; but it was probably from Petrarch's few lyrics which treat of other subjects that Milton derived the occasional manner. Among these few efforts of Petrarch "are three of his finest efforts—one, the famous address to his country (Italia mia), in which he reproaches the Italian princes for their dissensions and for calling to their aid the mercenary ‘barbarians’ who were the scourge of Italy, words repeated by Machiavelli in his Prince a century and a half later, and in our own day in the struggle for freedom from Austria; the second, (Spirito Gentil), which some commentators consider to be addressed to the young Colonna, and others to the famous Cola di Rienzi, whose wild attempt to resuscitate the ancient forms of republican government in Rome had fired Petrarch with enthusiasm; and the third, (O Aspellata in Ciel Beata e Bella Anima), addressed to his friend Jacopo Colonna, to incite him to join the Crusade of Philip of France against the infidels." Prof. Saintsbury remarks with regard to the sonnets of Milton that "taken dispassionately, Milton's sonnets are examples, curiously various, considering their small number, at once of the adaptability of the kind to ‘occasional’ purposes, and of the absence of any necessity that this adaptability should be abused, as Wordsworth himself abused it, and lesser men have abused it still more." The same critic adds further that "Nowhere, however, and this is natural, is the poet's tendency to be autobiographical shown in a more interesting way." These words, though few, give us an excellent idea of what the sonnets of Milton are like. Michael too, following the track of Milton, who was his life-long ideal of a literary man, wrote his Bengali sonnets, most of which are in an autobiographical vein and have a far greater range and variety of subject-matter, like those of Wordsworth too who, in his practice of, the sonnet, stands in the opinion of some only ‘below Shakespeare, and on a level with Milton’ under whose influence, practically, he wrote sonnets on almost all sorts of subjects about Nature and man–political, ecclesiastical, religious and social–eschewing only the subject of love, a subject which did receive but scant justice in his hands. We have already seen that Wordsworth, some of whose sonnets at least are deservedly reckoned among the glories of English poetry, was a very favourite poet with Madhusudon. We can safely assume, therefore, from internal as well as external evidence, that Madhusudon was influenced more or less by this greatest of English Romantic poets also.

II

The first biographer of Michael, the late Jogindranath Bose–himself a poet of no mean order–classified the sonnets of Madhusudon in the following order: -

1. Sonnets of Nature.

2. Commendatory Sonnets.

3. Sonnets describing incidents in Mythological Writings.

4. Personal Sonnets.

Milton's sonnets have thus been classified by Mr. Stopford Brooke: -

1. Controversial Sonnets.

2. Sonnets to Women.

3. Personal Sonnets.

4. Political Sonnets.

As will be noticed later, Madhusudon too wrote political sonnets, but he never wrote any controversial sonnet as such. The sonnets of Milton had all been written before he composed his epic poems,–his first was written when he left Cambridge, the second he wrote at Horton, he wrote five Italian sonnets and a canzon while in Italy (1638-39), the eighth he wrote in 1642, and the last sixteen when he entered on his controversial career. But with MadhuSudon the case was different. He composed his sonnets in 1865, Versailles in France; he had already composed his two epics, his dramas, as we have already noted, and his other two remark collections of poems. He had started for England in the June of1862, to qualify himself for the Bar; and after a stay of a year and a half in England, in the October of 1863, he went over to France and lived at Versailles for two years. It was during this time that he had been learning Italian, French and German; and it was there and then that Francisco Petrarch inspired his dormant poetic genius for new poetic ventures; this therefore may be called the third period of Italian influence on Madhusudon's work. And Madhusudon composed one hundred Bengali sonnets and sent these to be published in Calcutta. Never before in the history of Bengali literature had any poem thus been sent to Calcutta for publication; and it was therefore that the publisher had the first two lines of each sonnet printed as in the author's manuscript, so that readers might know what it was like; the remaining lines were printed as usual.

Once Madhusudon had written to his friend Gourdas Bysak, "May the noble spirit of Milton to embellish his mother-tongue inspire every man of talent among us. That he himself was so inspired is evident from these sonnets of his. Even while living at a distance of seven thousand miles from home, he could not forget the poverty of his own mother-tongue, and embellished her with a new form of poetry which has got such wide vogue in Bengali now.

One of the most noteworthy facts about most of these sonnets is that they are no imitations, except in their form, of any alien poet. It was in one of his inspired moments that the late Mr. Oscar Wilde reminded us that "Art only begins where Imitation ends." Really so has been the case with Madhusudon. He has given us true works of art, instead of mere replicas of other poets' thoughts and ideas. He has been truly individualsitic here: he has given us his whole soul as it were, in these sonnets of his. His book of sonnets presents the poet in his own true light, free from any assumed pretences. It has therefore been well said by the writer of ‘Madhu-Memory’ Babu Nagendranath Shome, that for the proper understanding of the poet's inner life one must go to his book of sonnets where he has given expression to his whole self in his own inimitable manner.

It is really interesting to see how the poet who had adopted Christianity as his religion through necessity in his youthful days sings here in melodious strains of the glory of his beloved Bengal with her popular religious rites and festivities, and of India, Himalaya-crowned and ocean-scarfed. But he was a cosmopolitan in literature nevertheless, and his commendatory sonnets, if not anything else, show this; though these are very few, only five in number,– three in eulogy of great European poets, Dante, Victor Hugo and Alfred Tennyson, one on Theodore Goldstucker, the celebrated Indologist, and the fifth in honour of the glorious and historic city of Versailles. We give below renderings of all the five sonnets: -

TO DANTE

As at dawn the golden Phoebus' star
Harbinger of the purple-coloured sun
Dispels with lovely beams darkness afar,
So thy light from the mind of every one
Has dispelled ignorance: thy worship's won
The sleeping Muse from her sleep astir.
In this part of the world find I none
O lucky-born bard, thy glory to mar.
Thy Muse did guide thee through the gate of Hell
Sinners forsake all hope to enter where.
Thou camest joyous thy tale to tell.
Immortal like to the gods thou art e'er.
Can such a star fall from its sky of fame?
Can such a bud any canker e'er claim?

TO VICTOR HUGO

Play, play on the lyre by Minerva giv'n thee,
Play sweetly and with full joyousness;
Thy country is full of thy fame's noble grace,
As Gokul with bokul-flowers doth glorious be.
Maddened is the mind that is in me
In spring, with thy flowers' nectareousness:
Victor thou art, victor among men I see,
To Death thou dost show a boldened face.
Thy name will live even like the Tree of Life
In the grove of thy country, I dare say,
A poet is a prophet, the idea's rife
Through all the world. When dire decay
Shall dissolve stone-pillars in the strife
For existence, thou shalt still find thy day.

TO ALFRED TENNYSON

Who is it that says that spring is over
In thy grove of poesy, O thou White Isle?
Hark, hark doth music float here all the while,
The King of cuckoos sings as he doth ever.
When is mute thy lyre, O Muse? It never
Ceases to make music, the ocean's wave:
The sky on its string of stars that shiver
Playeth eternal music that's suave.
Can thy fane be without a worshipper?
Enter O bard, For merit thou hast been given
By those feet like the tendrils of a creeper.
Worship her with flowers thou dost enliven,
And escape the scythe of the fell Reaper,
And gain the fame for which thou hast e'er striven.

TO THEODORE GOLDSTUCKER

As gods and demons did nectar gain
By churning the ocean, even so hast thou
Won fame by churning the Sanskrit lore's main,
Chief among savants in the world thou art now.
All Indian cuckoos with their sweet strain
Of music please thy ears from every bough.
What king, say, on earth does e'er obtain
Such homage as thou, with his diademed brow?
Valmiki does sing with jollity
Of Rarna to thee with his sweet-stringed lyre;
The song of Vyasa like the song of the sea
Rises for thee in the air, solemn and dire!
Merit thou didst gain in prior nativity
To gain Kalidas friend with the divine fire.

ON VERSAILLES

How many oh! are the plays thou playest
O Time, for ever, on this earth, who can know?
where's that king who ordered this gorgeous show,
And built this heaven on earth at his behest?
Who has stol'n the faeries 'mong women oh!
Who the royal mind with song possessed,
And dance sweet and fair and amorous glow?
Where, oh! where doth the poet rest
Who shower a word-blossoms on royal feet?
Where are the heroes famed for prowess,
Invincible like Arjun, the hero meet?
Where are ministers who were no less
Than Brihaspati? O Time, thou didst treat
As Death to all, to thee doth all progress! ²

There is a peculiar history attached to the first sonnet–that on Dante–which was actually composed on the occasion of the tercentenary of the great Italian poet. It was afterwards translated into Italian and French, and Madhusudon, like other European poets, sent copies of the Italian and French renderings to King Emmanuel of Italy who was so much struck not only with the beauty of the poem but also with the desire on the part of an Indian to pay homage to a European poet that he was moved to write to Madhusudon, "It will be a ring which will connect the Orient with the Occident." Even thus cosmopolitanism was the motto of Madhusudon's literary life. This is proved not only by the work that he did but also by his inserting an emblem on his Bengali Works in which he placed the sun of poetic genius between an elephant indicative of the East and a lion emblamatic of the West.

Yet, we should remember that in these sonnets Madhusudon is a Bengali and an Indian first–as great a patriot as Milton, and a cosmopolitan only afterwards.

In the first sonnet Madhusudon introduces himself to his Bengali readers as the author who had presented them with Tilottama, Meghnad-badh, Brajangana and Beerangana, all now recognised as masterpieces of Bengali literature, and thus gives his readers a review of his past poetic career. And in the very next, which is connected with the foregoing and which may be called a sonnet on the sonnet, he speaks of the Italian origin of this form of poetry, sings how in Italy, itself a nest of numerous cuckoos that have made it a land of perennial spring, was born Petrarch who invented this small gem in the mine of poesy and presented this to the goddess of poesy in his own land. The poet further says that he too like Petrarch presents this invaluable diamond as a present to the Indian goddess of learning. We reproduce a rather free rendering of this sonnet of Madhusudon, below: -

Italy is a grove of poesy fair
Where cuckoos numerous sweetly sing
Raining sweet dews of nectar rare.
And filling the heart with the joys of spring.
Even the sweet-voiced bard was born there,
Famous Petrarch, whose upbringing
Did Minerva look to with utmost care,
The golden lyre for his hands did bring.
He did find this precious small gem
And laid it in his fane at Minerva's feet;
Mother, I weave a wreath with the same.
Do thou with boons this effort of mine greet.
At the feet of Bharati of India's fame
I offer this guerdon, deemed as meet.

After this formal introduction, the poet deplores in the next sonnet on The Bengali Language, really a recast of his first Bengali sonnet written long before, how like Milton when he wrote in Latin, be had in his youthful years despised his own native language so full of gems and had strayed into foreign lands like a luckless and wandering beggar; he also sings of how the presiding goddess of is native tongue appeared to him in one of his dreams and reproved him for his beggarly manner, even though his own language was a veritable mine of lustrous gems. Following her advice, he retraced his steps and found Bengali even as he had been spoken to in his dream of it. We reproduce a rendering of this sonnet also, as it is bound to be interesting to lovers of the poet: -

Long have I roamed in the realms of gold,
And in great greed foreign kingdoms seen,
A fool to despise the diamonds' sheen,
That thy treasuries for ever do hold.
In the profession of a beggar grown old
Luckless did I spend all my mind's serene
In the worship of objects that are mean,
Forsook lotus-groves and 'mong mosses roll’d.
Till I heard thy goddess speak out to me
In my dreams, "O my child, do thou return;
In the closet of thy mother gems burn.
Why then so beggarly? What aileth thee?"
My mother's behest I obeyed in pleasure:
My mother-tongue I found a mine of treasure."

We can see that some influence of John Keats's famous sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer can be traced in this sonnet. Even thus did Milton, after his return to England from his Continental tour when he felt within himself the urge of fame ‘to leave something behind him so written to after times as that they should not willingly let die,’ deplore his own foolishness in his Latin–and absolutely pastoral after the manner of the Sicilian poets–elegy on the death of Damon and even thus did he look forward to leaving for good his Latin pipe and changing it for an English one, happy–

"If but yellow-haired Ouse shall read me, the drinker of Alan, Humber which whirls as it flows, and Trent's whole valley orchards,

Thames, my own Thames, above all, and Tamar's western waters

Tawny with ores, and where the white waves swinge the far Orkneys."

Then, appropriately, Madhusudon begins his commendations of the earliest Bengali poet worthy of the name, if we leave aside the Vaishnava lyrists, Kavikankan Mukundaram Chakravarty the famous author of the Kavikankan Chandi popularly so named after the poet's own title, and of the next great poet among the poet's own predecessors, Rai Gunakar Bharat Chandra the author of Annada Mangal. He names the sonnets on both these writers after the names of each poet's greatest imaginative creation–Kamale Kamini –‘The Lady on the Lotus’ and Annapurnar Jhanpi–‘The treasure-chest of Annapurna.’ Elsewhere he sings in separate sonnets of Srimanter Topar–‘The coronet of Srimanta’–a subject from the Kavikankan Chandi, using a line of the poem itself as a motto to his sonnet, as well as of Isvari Patani–theboat-woman of Bharat-Chandra's Annada Mangal–onwhose boat sat the goddess of fortune in the guise of a beautiful young lady. Next, he eulogises the two most popular Bengali poets–Kasiram Das and Krittibas–one the writer of the Bengali Mahabharata and the other the most widely read and best known translator of Valmiki's Ramayana. The two next poets chosen for eulogium are Jayadeva, the celebrated author of the Indian Song of Songs Gita-Govinda, and Kalidasa the greatest poet of India.

Madhu next composes two sonnets on the well-known Cloud-Messenger of Kalidasa, to the first of which he adds an imaginary, or a probably real, autobiographic vein bearing the stamp of passion in separation, and in the second, he compares the Cloud-Messenger flying across a sea to Krishna the charmer of the minds of the milkmaids of Brindaban. Then, in a special sonnet on Sakuntala, Madhu sings of the beautiful Sakuntala, probably the most wonderful creation of Kalidasa, and speaks of her great charm on the minds of all, and of the sorrow which is universally felt when she weeps in her days of distress. Madhu pays homage to his great master Valmiki in a separate sonnet alluding to the two stages of his life–first as a robber of the highways and next as the great poet of the Ramayana, about which Madhu composes a special sonnet in which he says how he saw, while courting, sleep in vain once in Ceylon on his way to Europe, in a vision, Valmiki like a venerable old bard sleeping seated near his sleepless head and singing to him of the great woes of Sita, the building of the bridge across the sea, the entrance of Kumvakarna into the field of battle, the slaughter of Lakshmana, and last of all the killing of Ravan by Ramachandra. Milton in his sonnet On His Deceased Wife shows thus his high regard for chastity in woman: -

Methought I saw my late espoused saint
Brought to me like Alcestis, from the grave,
Whom Jove's great son to her glad husband gave,
Rescued from death by force, though hale and faint.

Madhu, too, all his life held Sita the type and the ideal of Indian womanhood in high regard, and it is to her that time and again he pays poetic homage in immortal verse. The woman whose sweet and tender portrait he drew so beautifully in his great poem The slaughter of Meghnad, here inspires him to dedicate a sonnet to her. In this he sings of her woes in the Asoka-grove of the Rakshasa King Ravan and predicts the ruin of the whole family for the sin of him who stole her. He composes a couple of sonnets elsewhere under the common title of Sita-Banabase or ‘Sita in Exile’; and refers pathetically to the episode of the Queen's life when, in an advanced stage of pregnancy, after the sack of Lanka, she was banished to the forest by her husband Ramchandra, King of Ayodhya (Oudh), for the propitiation of his subjects who had expressed doubts about her chastity, and Lakshman was entrusted with the painful duty of leaving her in the forest. These sonnets on Sita are all pathetic: that one mentioned before is important also as showing the high and genuinely Hindu regard which Madhusudon felt later in life for Rama and Lakshmana, both of whose characters he had distorted in his epic poem, to the great resentment of his orthodox Hindu readers. Madhusudon also composed a special sonnet on the Mahabharat, in which he praises in high terms its celebrated author Vyasa, the son of Satyavati, already eulogised in the first canto of his Birth of Tilottama; gives us single sentence pictures of the Kaurava hero Duryodhana, of Karna, the son of the Sun, and of the mighty Pandava Princes, Bhima and Arjuna; and expresses his imaginary fear and awe during the course of the Kurukshetra war.

Next, we come to the three bird-sonnets. Milton wrote only one such–the pretty overture to the Nightingale–and as a poet and a lover, striking, in Mr. Stopford Brooke's phrase, the two notes of bright and pensive sentiment about Nature and man, and showing that he was not at the time of the composition of the sonnet quite ‘fancy-free’. Madhu also wrote these sonnets from his far-away dwelling in France in the spirit of a lover and a poet. In the first, Bou Katha Kaou, (there is a Bengali bird of the same name which calls, "Bride, speak") the poet sings of the pensive sentiment of the sweet-singing bird and expresses surprise that the bird should imitate men and women; and from his own experience advises it to seek forgiveness of the she-bird, as in the kingdom of love government depends upon the dual and opportune attitude of a servant as well as of a master. The next bird-sonnet has been called To a Bird in Spring but the sonnet was really written in autumn and in France where autumn gives the country a snow-white appearance. The poet asks the bird, which, though not the cuckoo, is a sweet-singing one, to usher in spring, as in the following rendering of the sonnet: -

TO A BIRD IN SPRING

Thou art not the messenger of spring
Famed in India as the cuckoo dear,
Myriads of flowers which to hear
Spring in beauteous groves: yet doth ring
My mind with thy song, such joy it doth bear.
Who doth mourn now? O bird, joyously sing.
Everything doth banish moan and cheer,
And earth herself Doth feel love for bet King.
Here in France, later autumn like death
Is cruel, unpitying on the pain of earth,
Lets not bind her hair with flowery wreath,
Shrouds her in white. Yet bring thou the birth
Of spring, the merry season of fragrant breath,
To crown earth with beauty and give her mirth.

In the third sonnet, that on the Shyama Pakshi, the poet cannot make out what it is that makes the bird sing so sweetly even though in a cage. Some such idea as in Keats's Happy Insensibility comes in, as when the poet asks how it is that the bird forgets its past happiness of freedom; and he concludes by saying that it must be the darkened happiness of love in separation which gives the bird so sweet a note even in a prison.

Special importance we should attach to a couple of sonnets, those addressed to a French beauty. We all know now that Milton composed five Italian sonnets and one canzone–written, as Mr. Stopford Brooke says, and as Masson renders probable, the first as a compliment to some Bolognese lady, the rest to some foreign lady with whom he fell much in love; and which bear the stamp of a real, but a passing passion. In Madhu's case, too, I have been led to think that these sonnets are in the nature of an overture; these were originally written in French and only afterwards translated into Bengali. In these, the Bengali poet gives a poetic and graphic description of India, the land of the poet's birth, where the sun rises above the sun-rise mountains and kisses the bimba-coloured lips of the earth, the Ganges flows to meet the sea murmuring sweetly the praise of God, the snow-clad Himalaya stands with sacred threads composed of waterfalls and stream-streaks, cuckoos sing in spring-groves, the lotus-maiden woos the sun in the day-time and the lily-bride is greeted by the moon at night. The poet has for his mother the Goddess of Learning; and this is why he is a bondman of Love. The poet concludes by asking the lady not to be suspicious of him as it is ever known that poets are the slaves of Love in this world. Then he delineates in the traditionally Indian manner the beauty of the lady whom he pictures to us as a flower-blossom in the grove of Cupid. We give a rendering of this interesting love-poem in the last but one paragraph.

The poet took separate themes from the greatest and biggest storehouse of subject-matter, in Sanskrit, the Mahabharata, and wrote the following sonnets Subhadraharan (The Abduction of Subhadra), Gada-juddha (The Fight with Maces), Gogriha-rane (At the Battle of Gogriha), Kurukshetre (At the war of Kurukshetra), Subhadra, Urvasi, Dussasana, Hidimba, Pururava (alluding to his love-episode with Urvasi), Shishupal, and Hariparvate Draupadir Mrityu (the death of Draupadi on the Hari-mountain). These sonnets reveal to us the themes in the Mahabharata that were most to Madhusudon's liking. Last of all, we should mention in this connection that Madhu composed a sonnet on the Kiratarjuniyam–apoem by the poet Magha, and gives us in a few words the whole story of the fight of Arjuna, the Pandava hero, with the god Siva who was in the disguise of a hunter. Madhu wrote another sonnet on Braja-brittanta, his favourite Vaishnavite theme.

As the poet composed commendatory sonnets on European celebrities, so he dedicated four to his own countrymen, all his contemporaries, only one of whom was dead at the time of the composition the sonnets. Two were specially written on the venerable Pundit Isvarchandra Vidyasagar, who was not only an ‘ocean of learning’ but also an ocean of benevolence, and but for whom the poet would have had to face endless difficulties, pecuniary and otherwise. In the elegiac sonnet written on Isvarchandra Gupta, the well-known Gupta poet of Bengal, Madhu put forward the plea for a fitting memorial to him as one of Bengal's greatest worthies. And in the sonnet on Satyendranath Tagore, he compliments the first Indian civilian on his success in the open competitive I.C.S. Examination held in London.

We have already treated of the introductory sonnet on the sonnet. Madhu wrote several other sonnets on poets and poetry generally. In the one called Jasher Mandir or The Temple of Fame, hesings how poets alone and those among them who are the favourites of the Goddess of Learning have the right to enter that temple. In the sonnet on Kavi or ‘The Poet,’ he says that not verrsifiers but those who have the true poetical insight, the imaginative faculty, and who can see–

the gleam,

The light that never was on sea or land,

The consecration, and the poet's dream,

are alone worthy of the name of poets. And in the sonnet on Kavita ‘Poesy,’ the poet shows his contempt for the man who lacks a sense of the poet's beauty and his music, and expresses sympathy for those unhappy folk who do not worship the lotus feet of the goddess. In the sonnet on Saraswati, the goddess of learning, the poet says how he, like a sunburnt and thirsty traveller, took shelter at the ruby feet of the goddess as a means of escape from the worries of life, for he had no other shelter but the goddess whom he regarded as his mother. In the sonnet on Kalpana or ‘Imagination’ Madhusudon, like a devout Hindu poet, exhorts Imagination, the favourite maid of Saraswati, to waft him either to the grove of Gokul where god Krishna dances, as he does ever with his Gopis, his female worshipers; or to where Ramchandra untimely worships the goddess Durga; or even to where in the field of Kurukshetra Arjuna kills the Kshatriya warriors with his sharp pointed arrows: in this sonnet Madhusudon seems to sing like Keats,

Ever let the Fancy roam!
Pleasure never is at home.

In the sonnet on Yasha or ‘Fame’ the poet expresses the doubt whether he has ‘writ his name in water’ or has inscribed it firmly on the rock of fame which the waves of Oblivion can never wash away: he thinks also that when the body is dead, the soul lives on earth in the temple of fame, which takes the shape of hell for the ill-famed and the semblance of heaven for those who have won real glory. In the sonnet on Artha or ‘Money,’ the poet as he really did in his own life, shows his preference for the fortune of learning to that of money, for the one is fickle and the other leads to immortality. The same strain of thought is continued in the sonnet on Sansarik jnan or ‘Worldly Knowledge.’ In it the poet asks himself to fling away his stringed instrument for it brings on poverty and again says that, when once the seed of poesy is sown in the heart of the poet, it is beyond all powers to pluck it out entirely and concludes by saying that it is ever the fate of the luckless worshippers of learning to lead an indifferent life on earth. In his sonnet on Vasha or ‘Language,’ the poet quotes these lines of Horace as his motto,–

"O matre pulchra–
Fila pulch ior–,"

translates these into Bengali, and sings the praises of his own nascent mother-tongue, which is more beautiful than Sanskrit, its mother, as Sakuntala was far more beautiful than her fairy mother Menaka; and concludes by saying that it, too, is destined to immortal in consequence of its divine origin. The sonnet On Reading the Introduction of a certain Book falls, as is to be expected, below the level of the others. It may be considered too, that the subject, as in Milton's three controversial sonnets on the Divorce Tracts, and on the Forces of Conscience, transgressed the diginity of that form of poetry. It is awkwardly executed, lumbering as is the spirit which it expresses. It is violently critical and gives vent to the thought that only devoted and sincere workers have a right to serve literature. It may have been written on the model of Milton's twin sonnets on The Detraction which followed upon my writing certain Treatises. In the last sonnet of the kind, that on Mrittkshara or ‘Rhymed Verse,’ the poet who was the first to introduce Unrhymed or Blank Verse into Bengali, sympathises with his mother-tongue which, like a Chinese beauty who nevertheless is iron-shod, was fettered with rhymes. He says that poetry should be natural, as it is of no use to ‘gild the rose’; and restores to her ‘the known rules of ancient liberty.’ It may have been inspired by Milton's preface entitled ‘The Verse’ to a subsequent edition of his Paradise Lost.

Five other sonnets which are somewhat related to the above, are those on Michael's favourite Rasas (literary emotions or feelings)–one on each–Karun Rasa or ‘The Pathetic Feeling,’ Veer Rasa or ‘The Heroic Emotion,’ Shringar Rasa or ‘The Amatory Emotion,’ and Raudra Rasa or ‘The Emotion of Awe.’ All these, he personifies quite after the manner of the Sanskrit writers, and as described in books of Sanskrit Poetics which hold that there are nine kinds of emotions corresponding to the nine kinds of human passions. Of all these, Madhusudon has given us beautiful illustrations in his epic poem The Slaughter of Meghnad, as every Mahakavi or great poet, according to Sanskrit Poetics, is bound to do. To be mentioned with these are two connected sonnets on Dwesha or ‘Covetousness’ in which the poet reproves all who are jealous of others' fortunes, and prays of Indira, the goddess of fortune, to make him master of that weakness.

Madhusudon shows in two sonnets particularly his interest in Astrology and Astronomy as is evident in those on Rashi-Chakra (The Zodiac), and Shani or Saturn. In the first he sings of the twelve divisions of the ecliptic of the Sun, the king of planets, which again are represented as so many subjects of the god of day–and alludes to the Sun's being propitiatory to men at the time of its meeting with some planets and antagonistic at the hour of its meeting with others. In the octave of the sonnet on Saturn, he thinks of the great planet as not really ill-omened; and in its sestet, the poet, quite in the manner of the modern scientist, asks what may be the creatures that dwell within its domain. In the sonnet on the Sun which is of a different nature, the poet says that still there are this men in this age of science, who worship the Sun as a god. And as he asks the earth and the Sun in the sonnet on The Creation to tell him who the Creator of the World is, so here, too, he asks the Sun to give him an idea of the glory of the Sun at whose feet millions of suns shed lustre. And in the sonnet on the earth, the poet sings of the procreation of the sea-girdled earth-maiden in the midst of the symphony of the stars, the music of the spheres.

There are some other sonnets on Nature. Of the bird-sonnets we have written already. These Nature-sonnets are named,– Evening, The Evening Star, Night, The Milky Way, The Canker in the Flower, The Banyan Tree, The Garden of Nandan (The Indian Eden), The Kapotaksha River, The Bee, The Tank in the Garden, The Cobra, The Boat on the Sea and The Star. These are all beautifully written, and are of the order of imaginative natural poetry–that on the banyan tree bringing in the faith of the Hindu tree-worshipper which is undoubtedly due to the manifold usefulness of the tree.

There are some sonnets in which the poet muses on the problems of Life and Death and Immortality. These are three in number and are named,–Pran or ‘Life,’ Paraloka or ‘After-Life’; and Shmasan or ‘The Cremation Ground.’ In the sonnet on the last theme the poet likes to see Death in the form of Siva, the great god there where–

"Sceptre and crown
Must tumble down,
And in the dust be equal made
With the poor crooked scythe and spade."–(J. Shirley)

There are some very interesting sonnets written in an autobiographic vein which make it hard for one to believe that the writer of them was a Christian poet. Indeed, in these, Madhusudon looks yearningly to the days of his youth when he was still a Hindu and shared fully the joys of his co-religionists in such popular festivals as Deva-Dol (The Swing-festival in honour of Sri Krishna), Sri Panchami (the festival in honour of the goddess of wealth), Asvin Mas (the month of Asvin when is celebrated the greatest Hindu festival named Durga Puja or the worship of the goddess Durga), Vijaya Dashami (the last day of the above festival when the goddess's immersion ceremony takes place) and Kojagari Lakshmi Puja (festival in honour of goddess Lakshmi in an autumnal fullmoon night); and sighs that he is for ever separated in creed from those who enjoy those joyous festivities. He has written two sonnets on temples of Siva–‘A Temple of Siva underneath a banyan tree at night,’ and ‘Ten old Temples of Siva on the bank of a river.’ The one is solemn with veneration for the great god–we find him hearing even the chant of the Pranava hymn; the other is of an elegiac nature.

Next, we come to the political sonnets of Madhusudon which are only two in number, and are all instinct with his great personality. The poet who would like to hear the sweet murmur of his own Kapotaksha river in preference to that of any foreign river, sings in these of the past glories of his country and sighs for her present degradation. The first of these sonnets has been named Bharat-Bhumi or ‘India’ and bears for its motto the following two lines of Filicaia,–

Italia; Italia! O tu eui feo la sorte
Dona inlet ice di bellezza!

with their Bengali rendering. Byron in Canto I of his ‘Childe Harold's Pilgrimage’ composed stanzas XLII and XLIII in imitation of the above lines of the Italian poet. Hemchandra Banerjee, another great Bengali poet, reproduced as a motto to his patriotic poem Beerbahu-Kavya the first of the same apostrophic stanzas of Byron's poem. And Madhusudon's sonnet is practically based on ideas expressed in the above-mentioned stanzas of his favourite English poet. In the next sonnet headed Amra or ‘We,’ of which we reproduce a rendering below, the poet looks to the days of India's glory: -

WE

Are we the children of parents who carved
Temples out of rocks, hard rocks, of yore?
Are we the children in power curbed,
Weak, poor in the world, despised for evermore;
O God! bound in fetters, vile slaves, ill-served?
Why, why has the gem lost its light's store?
Why are the waters of Manas disturbed
By flowers other than lotuses like ore?
Pigmies in the race of giants are we born,
Jackals born of lions, through what sin, who knows?
O Time, wilt thou bring rejuvenizing morn,
And fill new life in the heart that sorrows?
Will e'er India, her days of grief outworn,
Glow in moon-lit night as every moon glows?

The poet who had sung of love of country in the Slaughter of Meghnad, even like Homer in the Iliad, has here given expression to his inmost yearning and his sense of humiliation while staying in a far-off independent country like France.

Last of all we come to the purely personal sonnets of Madhusudon which, like those of Milton, have ‘great and solemn beauty, the beauty that belongs to the revelation of a great spirit,’ These are four in number and all relate to the personal life of the poet. The tone is intensely elegiac. The poet who had renounced his own religion, cast off his own-society, gave up even his own parents, lured by the charms of a society which was foreign to him, and who had given himself up to luxuries of all kinds, here laments his past career in the sonnet on Bhutakal or ‘Past Time.’ He asks the question once and again how he can retrace his steps to the past and be once again as he was before, Then follows the beautiful sonnet with a subject which is within its proper province; and in it the poet sings of his beautiful and faithful wife, Henrietta Sophia, in the manner reproduced below: -

SONNET

Like as the joyous lotus that doth paint
Its own form in water clear with sun's ray,
Thou hast painted, as only that painter may
In table of my heart, thy beauty, my saint!
Who can root thee out, or wipe away
As long as I live, O my ornament?
As doth the Ganges at her confluence stay,
Or, as in lotus doth lotus-scent,
So, where'er thou be, we are ne'er twain,
I shall worship thee, whate'er betide,
Wherever I go and where'er, remain.
Thou art my image of love, O my bride,
Thy abode is ever in memory's fane,
Constant companion in this world though wide.

The sonnet on Hope is pathetic in the sense that it was hope only that beguiled the poet through all the undreamt of trials of life. In this sonnet the poet contrasts hope with sleep and says that it is only to the awakened that hope brings vain dreams most of which remain unrealized; and concludes by saying that it is only in the darkness of futurity that the light of hope burns brightly. The last sonnet of Madhusudon has this connection with the foregoing, that in this the poet with a heavy heart bids farewell to his Muse for ever, for, once again he was cherishing the vain hope of becoming a successful barrister and, as such, prosperous in life. A rendering of this last sonnet we reproduce below: -

THE LAST SONNET

Mother, thy image that did illumine
This poor lowly heart, I shall drown today
In the waters of Oblivion from its shrine:
Thy altar-fires lo! did my tears allay!
That sweet-beloved lotus is left to pine
Whose fragrance did steal my heart away.
In poesy's stream is sunk this boat of mine.
In childhood, I could not know thee, Mother,
In youth, I did call, thou gav'st me thy might.
Now, round my brow the dark shadows gather:
I renounce thy halls in unhappy plight.
But, this's my prayer to thee. O Mother,

Fill Bengala with all India's light.

Even thus ends the last sonnet of Bengal's first Sonneteer. His sonnets like those of Milton conform more to the type which Petrarch fixed. Yet, like Milton, the Bengali poet has taken great liberties with the form. For example, the Petrarchan form of the sonnet demands that the first system of a sonnet consisting of eight lines should be complete in itself; but this has not always been the case with Madhusudon's sonnets, as in those of Milton. Madhu followed Milton in carrying the octave on to the sestet. Both of them thus missed the very end of the Petrarchan sonnet which they otherwise imitated. Madhusudon has taken even greater liberties with the form inasmuch as he has arranged the two rhymes of the octave in the orders-abba, baab and abab, baba, in some of his sonnets: his sestets too, have been written freely in divergent arrangements of two or three rhymes; but the Petrarchan type allows any manner of arrangement for the sestet provided it is suitable to emotional requirements. One sonnet, that on Bou Katha Kou, is very irregular as its second line contains eight instead of fourteen syllables. Milton wrote two ‘double’ sonnets on the same subject, one ‘On the Detraction which followed upon my writing certain Treatises’ and the other on Cyriac Skinner. Madhusudon, also, wrote as many as six such double sonnets, a rendering of one of which we reproduce below: -

ON HIS ACQUAINTING HIMSELF TO A YOUNG LADY

In that country where the sun doth rise
'Mong sun-rise mountains, and in love doth kiss
The lips of earth-maiden of purple bliss;
And singing the praise of God in merry wise
Rolls to sea the Ganges happy in this;
And the King of mountains 'mong the skies
Lifts his high head, in the quiet of peace,
And sees his own form which envisaged lies,
Terrible, as in a mirror on Manas-lake,
With streams on breast like sacred threads so white;
Cuckoos sing in spring-bowers; love doth make
The lotus-bride to the sun, and at night
The lily to the moon, Lady, I did take
My birth there and of Love I am a knight.

ON THE SAME

Who does not know that a poet is a slave
Of Love, as of flowers the vassal is
Wind, O my beauty, and this is why I crave
Thy love; then why doubt and forsake thy ease?
In the grove of Cupid, thy poet doth rave,
Seeing thee a flower, his songs ne'er cease
Like the cuckoo's or the bee's, he so brave.
This is the grove of Cupid, and behold
How many flowers with fruits do blossom here!–
The lotus of lakes doth glory unfold
And champak-blossoms their golden beauty rear;
Fearing snakes do hide cuckoos in throat's fold,
And gazelles left leaving their eyes so dear.

Nevertheless, these sonnets of Madhusudon are examples of the ‘strong framework of the sonnet’, and are of the purely Italian model. Like Wyatt and Surrey he has brought to Bengal a form of lyric measure which has fascinated almost all Bengali poets save Hemchandra Banerjee and Nabinchandra Sen. Like the English poets, and particularly like Shakespeare and others, Madhu's successors in the sonnet have been content to interchange its rhymes whenever they have pleased, because these are not so numerous in Bengali as in Italian; and have kept only to its fourteen-lined structure. Rabindranath Tagore has written sonnets (which should not and need not be called sonnets), of eighteen lines even. Great praise is due to Madhusudon because it was he who has given Bengali poetry a verse-form which has subsequently been the favourite of the poets of Bengal. There is no lack of sonnet writers today: I could mention ten at least who are now living, besides Rabindiranath Tagore who has written an entirely novel kind of sonnet called by Prof. Thompson ‘Rabindranath's Sonnet’ which consists of seven rhymed couplets–the ‘Muse in slippers,’ said jokingly by the same learned critic for its ‘pretty prettinesses’–with no variation of rhyme-arrangement as in the purely Petrarchan and other principal forms of it, and as even in those splendid sonnets of his own Sharps and Flats and subsequent works. It is well that Madhusudon should be honoured as the first Bengali sonnet writer, because it was he who for the first time naturalized it in Bengali soil. In his hands the sonnet became a ‘key’ with which, like Shakespeare, he ‘unlocked his great heart’; and, as in those of Milton, in his hands also,

"The thing became a trumpet, whence he blew
Soul-animating strains."

1 He became a regular sonneteer after he had read the sonnets of Petrarch the most famous Italian sonnet-writer.

2 All renderings of Madhusudon's sonnets used in this article are mine. These have been done with proper regard to the poet's own forms in each case.