Triveni Journal
1927 | 11,233,916 words
Triveni is a journal dedicated to ancient Indian culture, history, philosophy, art, spirituality, music and all sorts of literature. Triveni was founded at Madras in 1927 and since that time various authors have donated their creativity in the form of articles, covering many aspects of public life....
To those interested in the cultural renaissance of India, there are few subjects more fascinating than the study of Indian poets who have sought to express themselves in the English language. Ever since we had the privilege of belonging undoubtedly to the British Empire, mastery of the English language and craftsmanship therein have been the alluring aim of all education. Shakespeare defeated Kalidasa. And the lesser lights of Vernacular literatures became altogether dimmed. It was in the natural sequence of events that some of the people who learnt English should dabble in English versification and that some of those who so dabbled should achieve a certain distinction in that field. But, even so, the insignificant ratio of those Indians who could write tolerable English verse to the vast bulk of their educated countrymen is a significant fact. And more significant is the fact that even those who achieved some success did not achieve it in such a measure as to take by storm the entire world of English letters. Miss Toru Dutt in the last century and Mrs. Naidu in this have compelled some critics of the West to take notice of them. And Edmund Gosse and Arthur Symons were not men who could be too easily provoked to welcome and encourage writers without promise. Yet he were a bold man indeed who would maintain that any Indian ever wrote a poem in English which could stand comparison with what is first-rate in English poetry–say, with Wordsworth’s ‘Ode on Immortality’ or Shelley’s ‘Skylark’ or even Tennyson’s ‘Lotos-eaters.’
R. C. Dutt, one of the earliest among Indians to master English prosody, writes in his preface to ‘Lays of Ancient India,’ a translation of Indian legends into English verse: ‘I cannot help feeling my own unfitness for undertaking such a task in a language which is not my mother tongue.’ And this diffidence, we must remember, for almost a mere translation! The foreign-ness of the medium of expression should naturally be felt to a greater extent by those attempting original English verse. This is evident not merely from the style and metre of versifiers who failed to make a name, but also from the poetry of comparatively better artists in English verse like Manmohan Ghose, Toru Dutt and Mrs. Naidu. It is not the purpose of this article to prove or indicate that, had these artists adopted their own mother tongues, ‘they would have written finer poetry. The reverse may actually be true in some cases. We merely concern ourselves here with illustrating the dangers and difficulties of adopting a foreign language as the literary medium.
PROSODY
The initial difficulty is the mastery of English prosody. But prosody is not a synonym for poetry. As against but one Toru Dutt there are many of her countrymen who could write verse that rhymes and scans perfectly and who are yet deservedly unknown; whereas she, who could perpetrate many a technical blunder in versification, wrote some very remarkable poems. Mr. E. J. Thompson carries this point even into a comparison of the relative merits Toru Dutt and Mrs. Naidu. ‘It is natural,’ he says ‘to think of Sarojini Naidu when Toru Dutt comes to mind. It is undeniable that Mrs. Naidu has a metrical accomplishment and a skill in words, far beyond anything which her predecessor’s hasty effort attained. But in strength and greatness of intellect the comparison is all to Toru’s advantage.’
COMMAND OF LANGUAGE ETC.
The second difficulty is with regard to the vocabulary of verse or what we might call ‘poetic diction,’ borrowing the expression from the famous controversy of the Romantic Revival. An Indian learns the English language by reading it and not by speaking it. Although everyone of us rapidly acquires the subtleties of English slang, an Indian is rarely able to make his own the simplicity of the pure English language which, more than anything else, is necessary for the purpose ofwriting good English verse. It is, of course, a little different if the artist has lived in England for a considerable time and spoken the language for many years with the natives of England. But it appears as if that difficulty reappears even to such an artist, once he has left England and crossed the Channel. Manmohan Ghose, brother of Sri Aurobindo, went to England before he was ten and returned to India as a young man many years later. Careful students of his verse published as ‘Songs of Love and Death’ can find a certain difference in style between the verses he wrote in England and those he wrote later in India. Some of his verses about Myvanwy (obviously an English girl who meant England to him) written in the earlier period appeal to us not merely by their tenderness of sentiment but also by their simple charm of diction. In ‘Home Thoughts’ he writes, addressing his own country:
‘My soul may travel to you, but the sea
Sternly puts the pilgrim feet of life
With the harsh warning of necessity–’
Again, in a verse called ‘Myvanwy’ occurs this passage recollecting his native land:
‘Lost is that country and all but forgotten
Mid these chill breezes, yet still, oh, believe me
All per meridian suns and ardent summers
Burn in my bosom.’
Compare the simplicity and the perfect rhythm of those lines with what is perhaps an extreme example of his later style. In a verse called ‘The Rider on the White Horse’ which occurs in his ‘Orphic Mysteries’ we find the following lines:
‘His hat was mystery
His cloak was history
Pluto’s consistory
Or Charon’s Shallop
Could not the dusky hue
Of his robe match.’
This almost sounds like the later Browning without Browning’s ‘thoughts hardly to be pack’d into a narrow act.’
Toru Dutt and Mrs. Naidu do not suffer in such a measure from this disability of diction. Edmund Gosse may write of the former that ‘the English verse is sometimes exquisite; at other times the rules of our prosody are absolutely ignored, and it is obvious that the Hindu poetess, was chanting to herself a music that is discord to an English ear.’ Even he cannot find fault with her language. Her ‘Ballads of Hindustan,’ in spite of the enthusiasm of Gosse, are comparatively pedestrian in their style and progress. They are almost ‘round unvarnished tales.’ But, as Mr. Thompson carefully points out, ‘the half-dozen intensely personal poems which follow the Ballads’ are of higher poetic value and contain some memorable lines. The sonnet ‘Baugmaree’ might have been written by Keats. Some of the lines are actually reminiscent of Keats. The ending,
‘One might swoon
Drunken with beauty then or gaze and gaze
On a primeval Eden in amaze.’
reads like a happy blending of the ‘Sonnet on Chapman’s Homer’ (with stout, Cortez staring) and the sonnet of ‘Bright Star, would I were steadfast as thou art’ that ends in a wish to ‘swoon to death.’ But this suggestion apart, the sonnet as a whole is remarkably alive with poetic reality. Wordsworth might have written the following lines, or Keats, or Tennyson–but the fact remains that Toru Dutt wrote them:
‘The light-green graceful tamarinds abound
Amid the mangoe-clumps of green profound
And palms arise like pillars gray, between,
And o’er th’e quiet pools the seemuls lean
Red,–red, and startling like a trumpet’s sound.’
Her sonnet on the ‘Lotus’ is a beautiful idea executed in beautiful language. And her poem ‘The Casuarina Tree,’ which in spite of all its inequalities, Mr. Thompon justly considers ‘the most remarkable poem ever written in English by a foreigner,’ has some lines (apart from the short quotation in it) which only an inspired Wordsworth could have written, and other lines recording personal sentiment eternally stamped with the sweet personality of ToruDutt:
‘But not because of its magnificence
Dear is the Casuarina to my soul.
Beneath it we have played; though years may roll,
O sweet companions, loved with love intense,
For your sakes shall the tree be ever dear!
Blent with your images, it shall arise
In memory, till the hot tears blind mine eyes!’
But even Toru Dutt’s poetic command of the English language was actually limited. This is obvious when we remember that only when her personal emotion was intense could she write memorable verse-verse, even so, more memorable for genuineness of emotion than for beauty of expression. The greatest difficulty is always, of course, to feel intensely and not conventionally in a foreign language. Intense personal emotion when sincere and not sentimental is, however, sometimes capable in a great artist of over-riding natural difficulties of language, and of presenting itself in the simplest and most appealing garb even in a foreign tongue. One knows that the reminiscent mood in ‘Our Casuarina Tree’ and in ‘Near Hastings’ gives a solemn dignity to the poems, But the straightforward lyric describing one’s own emotions is not the entire field of poetry. If no other forms of poetry existed, we could not have had Browning and Tennyson and Milton and Shakespeare in their most characteristic forms. Poetry is more than one’s own reminiscences. Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ and Shakespeare’s ‘Lear’ are poetry without being personal lyrics. Browning’s ‘Abt Vogler’ and Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’ are not the reminiscences of the poets themselves. Toru Dutt’s poetic domain did not extend so far. Hers was not such a complete command of the Englishf language that she could write verse remarkable in bulk for sheer beauty of expression or sheer forcefulness of exposition. And even within her own domain of personal feelings, she left behind only a few poems. These facts may be attributed by some to temperamental incapacity or premature death; but it is almost certain that, if Toru Dutt with all her poetic sensibility had been born an English woman, she would naturally have had enough command of language to leave behind a greater variety of poems and a greater number of them.
Mrs. Naidu’s command of the English language is how-ever of a different order. She is always perfect in her command of it because she never attempted anything beyond the limited range of her poetic ability. Speaking of verses which Sarojini Chattopadhyay (as she then was) gave him, Edmund Gosse writes: ‘The verses which Sarojini had entrusted to me were skilful in form, correct in grammar, and blameless in sentiment, but they had the disadvantage of being totally without individuality. They were Western in feeling and imagery; they were founded on the reminiscences of Tennyson and Shelley; I am not sure that they did not even breathe an atmosphere of Christian resignation I laid them down in despair.’ He proceeds: ‘I advised the consignment of all that she had written in this falsely English vein to the wastepaper basket. . . . I entreated her to write no more about robins and skylarks in a landscape of our Midland counties, with the village bells somewhere in the distance calling the parishioners to church, but to describe the flowers, the fruits, the trees, to set her poems firmly among the mountains, the gardens, the temples, to introduce to us the vivid populations of her own voluptuous and unfamiliar province; in other words, to be a genuine Indian poet of the Deccan, not a clever machine-made imitator of English classics.’ Very truly are even the published poems of Mrs. Naidu ‘skilful in form, correct in grammar and blameless in sentiment.’ But it appears to us, with all due respect to her, that her poems are still devoid of individuality. They areno longer about ‘robins and skylarks in a landscape of our Midland counties.’ Instead we have the whole paraphernalia of Indian flowers and Indian birds and Indian scenes in poems which are either descriptive songs or conventional lyrics. When she writes the ‘Song of the Palanquin-bearers,’
‘Lightly, oh lightly we bear her along,’
or when she describes Devadasis,
‘Eyes ravished with rapture celestially panting,
what passionate bosoms aflaming with fire,’
it is an Indian subject with perfect metre and clear good sense,–but one fails to understand what compelling inner urge made her write these verses. Sometimes she gives the impression of deliberately sitting down to write a poem, whether it be about her four children, or about a cry she heard in the streets, or of a theme equally un-spontaneous. Take the verse, ‘Alabaster,’ in her Golden Threshold:
Like this alabaster box whose art
Is frail as a cassia-flower, is my heart,
Carven with delicate dreams and wrought
With many a subtle and exquisite thought.
‘Therein I treasure the spice and scent
Of rich and passionate memories blent
Like odours of cinnamon sandal and clove,
Of song and sorrow and life and love.’
Only some one very keen at the moment on writing something or other in verse could have found inspiration in that alabaster box.
Her descriptions are usually superficial and her sentiments are almost always commonplace. When for instance we read the lines in ‘Solitude’ (The Bird of Time),
‘To the glens, to the glade, where the magical darkness is flowing
In rivers of gold from the breast of a radiant cloud’
or,
‘Through the luminous hours ere of dawn shall reblossom
In petals of splendour to worship the lord of the world,’
we have the exuberance of words like ‘glen’ and ‘glade’ and ‘darkness’ and ‘river’ and ‘cloud’ and ‘dawn’ and ‘lotus’ and ‘petals’ without the lines conveying any steady , picture to our imaginations. It is the same tale again in her ‘Song of a Dream’ (The Bird of Time),
‘Lone in the light of that magical grove
I felt the stars of the spirits of Love
Gather and gleam round my delicate youth
And I heard the song of the spirits of Truth;
To quench my longing I bent me low
By the streams of the spirits of Peace that flow
In that magical wood In the land of sleep.’
There are Love and Truth and Peace with capital letters, but the whole picture of it is more vague and more superficial than even a dream need be.
And a great many of her poems have for their theme the conventional sadness of adolescence and immaturity. Joseph Auslander in an American edition of her poems talks of ‘a certain strange feverishness of texture in her poetry,’ and says, ‘Her poems flush. We touch heat.’ What we actually touch is this conventional sadness. She sometimes succeeds in giving to such vague and pointless grief a beautiful form in words and music. Lilavati’s lament in ‘Vasant-Panchami’ is thus:
For my sad life is doomed to be, alas,
Ruined and sere like sorrow-trodden grass,
My heart hath grown, plucked by the wind of grief,
Akin to fallen flower and faded leaf,
Akin to every lone and withered thing
That hath foregone the kisses of the spring.’
These lines are as beautiful as any in Pope’s ‘Heloise to Abelard,’ but not as full of feeling as Lear’s lament over Cordelia’s corpse. Sometimes her sadness is just a pretty idea and goes no deeper than that,–as in ‘Caprice.’
‘You held a wild flower in your finger-tips
Idly you pressed it to indifferent lips
Idly you tore its crimson leaves apart……
Alas it was my heart.
‘You held a wine cup in your finger-tips
Lightly you raised it to indifferent lips
Lightly you drank and flung away the bowl……
Alas it was my soul.’
The difficulty is always to find evidence in her verses that a sentiment has been felt by her and not been just thought out. When she sings in a verse called ‘In the Forest’
‘We are weary, my heart, we are weary, so long we have borne
The heavy loved burden of dreams that are dead, let us rest,
Let us scatter their ashes away, for a while let us mourn;
We will rest, O my heart, till the shadows are gray in the West,’
or when she throws ‘A Challenge to Fate’ in the lines,
Though you deny the hope of all my being,
Betray my love, my sweetest dream destroy,
Yet will I slake my individual sorrow
At the deep source of Universal joy–
O Fate, in vain you hanker to control
My frail serene indomitable soul,’
one feels that ninety-nine out of every hundred who had ever attempted versification in any language must (in their years of apprenticeship) have put in words the self-same sentiment, and that Mrs. Naidu has not risen above them. The ‘weary heart’ and ‘the frail serene indomitable soul’ are a common trick of trade in the early career of every poet. But Mrs. Naidu unfortunately never seems to have progressed beyond that stage.
There is also in Mrs. Naidu’s poetry an architectural quality, an excess of balance not merely in form but in thought. She decides to write a poem on ‘Bells’ and she arranges beforehand that there will be three stanzas, one on anklet-bells, another on cattle-bells, and a third on temple-bells. She wants ‘Suttee’ to be the subject of another poem and having in mind, to start with (as one might conjecture), the last lines of three contemplated stanzas:
‘Love, must I dwell in the living dark?’
‘Shall the blossom live when the tree is dead?’
Shall the flesh survive when the soul is gone?’
she spins out the rest of each stanza. The same quality is prominent in most of her other poems such as ‘The Illusion of Love,’ ‘Street Cries,’ ‘Harvest Hymn,’ ‘Caprice,’ and ‘Indian Weavers.’ The truest form of poetry grows like a tree and cannot be built like a house. Such thoroughly premeditated balance robs Mrs. Naidu’s verse of the impression of spontaneity. The balance is too obvious. The architecture is too apparent. Michael Angelo could never paint a picture without importing into it the quality of his own especial art, the immobility of the sculptor’s work. The figures of his paintings lack, a potential sense of movement and life. He painted, so to speak, out of sculpture. And therefore Raphael is infinitely the better artist on canvas. The rigidity of sculpture and architecture is as foreign to poetry as to painting. And it is in this manner that Mrs. Naidu, like many immature poets, has sinned most.
Mrs. Naidu’s command of English prosody and poetic diction (which is in itself a great achievement) need not therefore be mistaken for more than what it is. Her individuality as a poet is not great. She never attempted themes that baffle bigger poets. On a frail raft she was content to remain very near the coast of conventional sentiment. She never ventuured far into the sea. And therefore her raft never failed her. Her perfection of form is admirable, for she alone achieved it so well when Toru Dutt failed. But her large output of verse compared to Toru Dutt’s is not so creditable as the finer quality of Toru Dutt’s half dozen personal poems. And this proves that there is something radically incomplete or imperfect about Mrs. Naidu’s otherwise admirable command of the English language. We said before that, had English been her mother tongue, Toru Dutt would have written a greater variety of poems and a greater number of them. Had English been Mrs. Naidu’s real mother-tongue the quality of her poetry would have gained in genuineness of thought and sentiment.
CHOICE OF A THEME
Thirdly, command of language was not however the greatest difficulty that confronted these Indian writers of English verse. The choice of a theme seems to have baffled the best among them. There is a certain natural incongruity about the treatment of an Indian theme in English verse. It is hard to rise to the full stature of the theme in a language unused to the sentiments of such a theme. Each lannguage of the world has a genius of its own and rests firmly on traditions that may not easily be defied. No translation of Goethe’s Faust reads like genuine Goethe because the spirit of Faust is in some manner wedded to the German language. We are told that Tagore’s poems are even more beautiful in their native garb than in translation. Shakespeare can never be translated into any Indian language and yet remain Shakespeare. It is at least as difficult to put an Indian theme into English verse as to translate Shakespeare and Goethe into an Indian language. And yet Indian writers of English verse at one stage or other feel the necessity of attempting an Indian theme. Something perhaps warns them that at least the theme must be Indian! Toru Dutt, immediately on her return to India, ‘began to study Sanskrit with the same intense application which she gave to all her work–and plunged into its mysterious literature.’ And she was eager to weave the legends of her own people into English verse. Mrs. Naidu, after divorcing ‘robins and skylarks in a landscape of the Midland counties’ fell on themes like ‘Humayun to Zebeida (From the Urdu)’, ‘The song of Princess Zeb-Un Nissa in praise of her Beauty (From the Persian)’, ‘To Buddha seated on a lotus,’ ‘Damayanti to Nala,’ ‘A Rajput Love-song’ and ‘Vasant-Panchami.’ And even Manmohan Ghose ‘began a drama on the story of Nala and Damayanti which was never finished.’ In Lawrence Binyon’s Introductory Memoir to Manmohan Ghose’s ‘Songs of Love and Death’ we find the conflict most clearly stated. ‘Mentally he was torn in two. I often urged him to take a theme from Indian legend and he attempted a poem on Savitri among other subjects. But it would not shape itself. He felt the need to Europeanise the atmosphere in some sort and then the essence evaporated. Thus he hovered between two hemispheres, not wholly belonging to either.’
Manmohan Ghose failed so thoroughly because he was completely out of sympathy with the spirit of his own language and the cultural heritage of his country. To the end of his life he would write poems with titles like ‘Popular Beech and Weeping Willow.’ or ‘Oak, Pine and Silver Birch’ or ‘Song of Britannia,’ and was incapable of reflecting his native surroundings in verse. Toru Dutt and Mrs. Naidu were otherwise. Edmund Gosse says of Toru Dutt: ‘She was pure Hindu, full of the typical qualities of her race and blood and preserving to the last her appreciation of the poetic side of her ancient religion, though faith itself in Vishnu and Siva had been cast aside with childish things and been replaced by a purer faith.’ ;The same critic says of Mrs. Naidu: ‘She springs from the very soil of India; her spirit, although it employs the English language as its vehicle, has no other tie with the West. It addresses itself to the exposition of emotions which are tropical and primitive……… If the poems of Sarojini Naidu be carefully and delicately studied, they will be found as luminous in lighting up the dark places of the East as any contribution of savant of historian.’ Of ‘tropical and primitive’ emotions we do not find much evidence in Mrs. Naidu’s poetry, but it is true to say that both Toru Dutt and Mrs. Naidu had a sincere appreciation of their national culture. Mrs. Naidu is at her best in some of her renderings into English of songs from the Persian or Urdu or Hindustani. One readily remembers the song of Zeb-Un-Nissa:
When from my cheek I lift my veil
The roses turn with envy pale,
And from their pierced hearts rich with pain
Send forth their fragrance like a wail.’
Most of her Indian love-songs are not however equally happy. Some of them may appeal to Englishmen as typically Indian merely because they are somewhat typically un-English, but the truth is that they are not masterpieces of Indian sentiment. She sings in ‘A Pilgrimage of Love,’
‘If you call me I will come
Swifter, O my love,
Than a trembling forest deer
Or a panting dove,
Swifter than a snake that flies
To the charmer’s thrall……
If you call me I will come
Fearless what befall.’
Elsewhere in the poem ‘Devotion,’ she sings,
‘Strangle my soul and fling it into the fire…..
Why should my true love falter or fear or rebel?
Love, I am yours to lie in your breast like a flower,
Or burn like a weed for your sake in the flame of Hell.’
As far as we could sift out these were some of the most ‘tropical and primitive’ emotions to be found in Mrs. Naidu’s poems. But they are surely not enough to justify the remark that ‘she springs from the very soil of India.’ This utter womanly elf-abandonment to the impulse and the object of her love is not purely a typical Indian sentiment. One would think that Sappho never lived and wrote, and that Mrs. Browning with all her ‘Sonnets from the Portugese’ was but a myth! There is a certain exuberance of imagery if not extravagance of imagination in some of Mrs. Naidu’s love songs which unwary foreigners might easily mistake for the essence of tropical Indian poetic thought. Take this example:
She:
Like a serpent to the calling voice of flutes
Glides my heart into thy fingers, O my love,
Where the night-wind, like a lover, leans above
His jasmine gardens and sirisha-bowers;
And on ripe boughs or many-coloured fruits
Bright parrots cluster like vermilion flowers.
He:
Like the perfume in, the petals of a rose
Hides my heart within thy bosom, O my love
Like a garland, like a jewel, like a dove
That hangs its nest in the Asoka tree.
Lie still, O, love, until the morning sows
Her tents of gold on fields of ivory.
Actually the whole poem is too pointless and confusing to be a complete expression of love in any climate. And love poetry in the languages of the Orient has qualities of directness and precision which are wanting in the poems of Mrs. Naidu. She has not been successful in making articulate anything typically Indian in so convincing a manner as to feel justified for having used a foreign medium.
When we return to Toru Dutt we find that in a characteristic manner Edmund Gosse prefers her ‘Ballads of Hindustan,’ and pronounces them her ‘chief legacy to posterity.’ Commenting on some of her stories (in verse) from the Vishnu Purana he says: ‘In these we sea Toru no longer attempting vainly though heroically to compete with European literature on its own ground but turning to the legends of her own race and country for inspiration. No modern oriental has given us so strange an insight into the conscience of the Asiatic as is presented in the stories of ‘Prehlad’ and ‘Savitri’ or so quaint a piece of religious fancy as the ballad of ‘Jogadhya Uma.’ It is obvious at a glance that Gosse is in raptures not over Toru Dutt’s poetry but over the stories of ‘Prehlad’ and ‘Savitri’ and ‘Uma’ and over the sentiments as old as India which these stories reveal. His appreciation of the poet is almost merely his gratitude to her for her having presented those sentiments in his own language in a simple and direct manner. He has no special praise for her style or treatment beyond mentioning a certain ‘Vedic simplicity.’ And this is natural in a Western critic who till then is mostly unfamiliar with Eastern mythology. He frankly maintains (to begin with) that any competition with ‘European literature on its own ground’ is absolutely futile. And he considers that the greatest good a Toru Dutt can do is to enlighten him and his countrymen about the ancient legends of India. He is pleased with her because she is doing something so extremely useful. His advice to Mrs. Naidu which she acknowledged as guiding her to her ‘Golden Threshold’ was given in the same spirit. He was anxious to avail himself of an opportunity to know more about India. ‘From a young Indian of extreme sensibility who had mastered not merely the language but the prosody of the West, what we wished (italics ours) was, not a rechauffe of Anglo-Saxon sentiment in an Anglo-Saxon setting, but some revelation of the heart of India, some sincere penetrating analysis of native passion, of principles of antique religion and of such mysterious intimations as stirred the soul of the East long before the West had begun to dream that it had a soul.’ The ‘what we wished’ of the quotation sounds very much like ordering a special dish in a restaurant. For it is nothing short of ordering a poet as to what she is to give to her public, and this militates against our fundamental conception of how great poetry comes to be written. The incongruity of the situation in this case is to be traced not, however, to the artistic insensibility of the critic but to the unfortunate combination of an Eastern poet and a Western medium.
Mr. E. J. Thompson, having been in India for a great many years and not having had to read Toru Dutt in order to understand the legends of the Hindus, disagrees with Gosse about the merits of the ‘Ballads of Hindustan.’ ‘The facts remain,’ he maintains, ‘of carelessness, and what is more serious, lack of sympathy in the author. She stands outside her themes and does not enter deeply into them. Nor can I consider those themes as of anything like first-class value. Some have a rustic charm which strikes the mind pleasantly enough, but not deeply.’ And this is also how her ‘Ballads’ strike her readers who are Indians and who have known Prehlad and Savitri and Uma ever since their inarticulate childhood. The literary merits of her ‘Ballads’ are little more than the merits of Romesh Chunder Dutt’s ‘Lays of Ancient India.’ They have nothing specially commendable about them. They are certainly inferior in poetic value to the few intensely personal poems that she wrote. And the Indian-ness of her themes did not save her ‘Ballads’ from , being’ jut ordinary.
To sum up a rather discursive article: - There is danger at every turn in the use of a foreign medium for poetry. It is difficult to master prosody. But, when mastered, prosody by itself is not a great achievement. It is difficult to master the language for the special purpose of versification. And even if one succeeds in mastering it, the essential strangeness of the language restricts either the bulk of verse, or the quality of verse, or, more commonly, both. This was why Toru Dutt could not write more than five or six really representative poems which in themselves lack variety. This was also why Mrs. Naidu could not achieve anything beyond exquisite verse, rather superficial description and very conventional sentiment. It appears as if one has to concentrate so much on the correct manipulation of the foreignmedium that the subject matter of the verse suffers thereby. The medium being European there is always the temptation even with an Indian theme to Europeanise the atmosphere’ because of the inherent relationship between any language and the life of those who speak it. And accordingly any attempted interpretation of one’s self or of one’s country in a foreign medium fails of its purpose. Such poetry lacks a soil to sustain itself. It is deeply rooted neither in the traditions of the East nor in the habitual thought of the West. A few unknowing Western critics may be Pleased with the superficial knowledge of this country which verses in the foreign medium reveal, but it is an elementary fact that a country’s heart cannot be laid bare in a language that is not the country’s.
If these is to be a cultural renaissance in India from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin and from the Indus to the Irrawady, the part to be played by Indians writing English verse must be forejudged as almost insignificant. Mrs. Naidu calls one of her volumes of poetry ‘The Broken Wing,’ and she sings,
‘Behold! I rise to meet the destined spring
And scale the stars upon my broken wing.’
Verily, it is a broken wing, for the wing is a foreign literary medium. And scaling the stars seems to require a stronger means of flight.