The Songs of Sarojini Naidu

Long ago a poet prayed. “Let me be the maker of my nation’s songs. I care not who shall make its laws”. Fortunately Sarojini Naidu was in the happy position of making the nation’s songs as well as its laws. Sarojini Naidu was one of Mother India’s most gifted children, who is enthroned in the hearts of all the Indian people. She distinguished herself in both the fields of politics and poetry which are as different as chalk and cheese. Her political career was a brilliant record of self-less patriotism. She was a rebel who fought for the progress of the Feminist movement and freedom from the foreign rule. Sarojini’s lilting songs with the added charm of her personality, ministered to the mirth and political awakening of the people. The twirls ofrhythm and music, im­part a subtle aura to her poetic work. Here we can quote John Gunther’s phrase that she had a ‘beautiful pen’. She had the gracefuland mellow suav­ity that glides like her own palanquin in a rhythmic manner, borne by the people in a swinging movement.

‘Lightly, O lightly, we bear her along.
She sways like a flower in the wind of our song;
She skims like a bird on the foam of a stream,
She floats like a laugh from the lips of a dream,
Gaily, O gaily we glide and we sing,
We bear her along like a pearl on a string.’

She conforms to a cult of beauty which is more or less Keatsian. These lines from ‘Princess Zeb-un-nissa’ reveal this aspect. They are unmatched in delicacy and fancy that touches the heart-strings of any sensi­tive person.

‘When from my cheek I lift my veil
The roses turn with envy pale
And fromtheir pierced hearts, rich with pain
Send forththeir fragrancelike a wail.
Or if perchance one perfumed tress
Be loosened to the wind’s caress,
The honeyed hyacinths complain
And languish in a sweet distress.

“Languish in a sweet distress” is the quint-essence of lyricism!

Sometimes this fanciful mood changes into sorrow and borders on tears as in the following lines ­-

Would you tear from my lintels these sacred
green garlands of leaves?
Would you scare the white, nested,
Wild pigeons of joy from my leaves?
“Tarry a while, O death, I cannot die
With all my blossoming hopes unharvested,
My joys ungarnished, all my songs unsung,
And all my tears unshed.”

The bitterness of tears is carried to the tragic climax in the following lines which are a curious amalgam of pathos and music.

“What comfort can we give
For joy so frail, for hope so fugitive?
The yearning pain of unfulfilled delight,
The moonless vigils of her lonely night,
For the abysmal anguish of her tears.
And flowering spring that mock her empty years.”

Perhaps no other poet could give more touching expression to heart­broken love and romantic sentiment. It is fine frenzy. There is something in her song “The Hussain Sagar” which reminds us of Byron’s passionate at­tachment to the ocean. Hussain Sagar is a mini - ocean of Hyderabad which is a potential mega-city.

“What secret purple and what subtle rose
Responsive only to the wind, thy lover.
Only for him thy shining waves unfold
Transculent music answering his control:
Thou dost, like me, to one allegiance hold.
O lake, O living image of my soul”.
There is a beauty allied with reverence for the past in her majestic tribute to “Imperial Delhi”.
“Thy changing kings and king doms pass away
The gorgeous legends of a by gone day,
But thou dost still immutably remain
Unbroken symbol of proud histories;
Unaging priestess of old mysteries
Before whose shrine the spells of death are vain”.

She is pre-eminently a poet of love and Nature-description. In the following passage we feel as though we are taking a leisurely stroll in Nature or a bird sanctuary!

“I hear the bright peacock in
glimmering wood lands
Cry to its mate in the dawn;

I hear the black koel’s slow
tremulous wooing.

And sweet in the gardens the
calling and cooing

Of passionate bulbul and dove...
But what is their music to me,
papeeha
Songs of their laughter and love,
Papeeha.
to me forsaken of love”.
There is a fine piece of land­scape painting and ample evidence of descriptive flair in the following ­

“See how the speckled sky
burns like a pigeon’s throat
Jewelled with embers of opal and
peridote.
See the white river that flashes
and scintillates.
curved like a tusk from the
mouth of the city gates”.

In these specimens of sweet description. Nature is brush-painted with vividness and fidelity coupled with telling phrase. Spring has a fasci­nation for her and her songs of springtime abound in metaphorical beauty and rich feeling.

“Wild birds that sway in the citron branches
Drunk with the rich, red honey of spring
Fire- flies weaving aerial dances
In fragile rhythms of flickering gold.
What do you know in your blithe, brief season
of dreams deferred and a heart grown old?”.

Sarojini has sympathy for the poor working class - toilers and moil­ers. She had deep emotion and feeling towards the hard-working Indian masses. Hence, she sang melodiously about the Snake-Charmer, the Corn­-Grinders and the Bangle Sellers. These lines from the Bangle Sellers also re­veal her traditional outlook towards the Indian culture and heritage of customs which are still observed in semi-urban towns and villages.

“Some are meet for a maiden’s wrist,
Silver and blue as the    mountain mist...
Some are like fields of sunlit corn.
Meet for a bride on her bridal morn...
Some are purple and gold­ flecked grey.
For her who has journeyed through life midway.
Whose hands have cherished, whose love has blest
And cradled fair sons on her faithful breast.
Who serves her household in fruitful pride.
And worships the Gods at her husband’s side”.

She was all out for national inte­gration and communal harmony. Some of her songs exalt the ideal of Hindu-Muslim unity and breathe a note of enlightened patriotism which envisages a united humanity welded together with unity of purpose and identity of out-look. She writes four songs each of which terminates with the prayer of a religion:

“Allaho Akbar”, “Ave Maria”, “Ahura Mazda”, and “Narayana”, She firmly believes in the concept of “Vasu­dhaika kutumbam” or “Global Vil­lage” as it is now talked about.

The sublime sentiment of John Donne, “The death of any man dimin­ishes me, because I am involved in mankind” is expressed in the follow­ing lines written in praise of the sol­diers who laid down their lives for a good cause.

“Gathered like pearls in their alien graves
Silent they sleep by the Persian waves,
Scattered like shells on Egyptian sands.
They lie with pale brows and     brave, broken hands,
They are strewn like blossoms mown down by chance
on the blood-brown meadows of Flanders and France”.

Further, the songs of Sa­rojini Naidu are clad in the celestial light associated with the ancient seers and saints whose ideas form the warp and woof of Indian philosophy. There is a spiritual under-current in some poems. The heaven-ward hunger of the soul is found in “To a Buddha Seated on a Lotus.”

“The wind of change forever blows
Across the tumults of our way
Tomorrow’s unborn griefs depose.
The sorrows of our yesterday.
Dream yields dream, strife yields strife
And death unweaves the webs of life”.

In these lines the profundities of philosophical thought and Vedanta are expressed in poetry.

Even her philosophy is a prod­uct of composite culture, the best ele­ments of all the religions. These lines from “A Song from Shiraj” reveal her condemnation of social antipathies. She sings one hymn of national inte­gration and universal peace, where the discords are delightfully resolved into a choric harmony.

“The singers of Shiraj are feasting afar
To greet the Nauroz with sarang and cithar,
But what is their music that calleth to me           
From glimmering garden and glowing minar?
From the mosque towers of Shiraj ere day light begin
My heart is disturbed by the loud muezzin
But what is the voice of his warning to me
That waketh the world to atone­ment of sin”.

Her lilting musical lines are iridescent with oriental imagery. The streak of mysticism that sometimes makes its way into her poetry, is but a manifestation of her love that “teases thought out of eternity”.

“You held a wild flower in your finger tips
Idly you pressed it to indifferent lips
Idly you tore its crimson leaves apart
Alas I it was my heart”.