The almost simultaneous reception within the pale of English literature of two poets, Indian by ancestry and birth, and acutely Indian in conscious purpose Sarojini Naidu and Rabindranath Tagore is an event that offers a fascinating challenge to the student of literature. The challenge is capable, however, of only a partial acceptance: its full implications and significance remain for the disclosure of the future. One special circumstance in each case makes a complete study at present impossible: the chanting sage of Bengal is probably only probably beyond the period of his greatest utterance, but only a portion of his vast work has been put into English: we have, on the other hand, the complete expression of the Deccan songstress, but it is premature to regard it as her utmost. There is, however, a more radical difference between them: the work of Rabindranath, as it appears in English, is a translation, albeit done by the poet himself, and its title of poetry in the accepted technical sense is a courtesy-title given in recognition of an invincible spirit that sifts the essence of poetry through the medium of rhythmic prose: Sarojini's work is English poetry in form and diction, and, as an art, subject to all the laws and ordinances of that particular common instrument for the expression of individual souls.

If, however, we have still to wait for Sarojini's complete expression, there is beneath our hand sufficient work in quantity and kind to justify on a larger scale than a mere book review a study of her development to the point indicated in her new book, The Broken Wing, which has recently been published by William Heinemann of London. I have to confess that this book has disappointed me. It does not add, except in quantity, to the poetess' revelation: it goes no deeper and no higher than anything in her two previous books. In one respect, that is, in its preoccupation with love, it appears to go off into a culde-sac; and in the pursuit of this particular phase of her art, she sometimes achieves something that is perilously like insincerity, and an emotional untidiness that too often knocks her art to pieces. For example, in "The Time of Roses", she cries,

Put me in a shrine of roses,
Drown me in a wine of roses. . . . . .
Bind me on a pyre of roses,
Burn me in a fire of roses.
Crown me with the rose of love.

It may be too much to expect sequence in so abandoned a mood, but the mind sees something unworthy of good art, or even of common sense, in burning a person after they are drowned, not to mention the difficulty of crowning a person who has been already reduced to ashes. This is bad enough in the matter of technique, but the emotional fault goes deeper still in a song, "If you were dead," an expression of love so devoted that the singer wishes to die with the object of her affection. Two excellent lines, purely Indian, and in the manner of the earlier Sarojini, are these:

For life is like a burning veil
That keeps our yearning souls apart.

They are followed by four lines in similar key, but of less power; but the song falls into the language and thought of the English ballad of the middle and late Victorian era of agnosticism relieved by sentimentality, an attitude foreign to Indian genius, and even in sharp contradiction, as we shall see, to the truer expression, of the poetess' real view of life and death:

If you were dead I should not weep
How sweetly would our hearts unite
In a dim, undivided sleep,
Locked in death's deep and narrow night.

Much nonsense is written in Western literary criticism about the relationship between art and philosophy; but the fact remains that violence done to a poet's philosophy will show itself in the poet's art. Our poetess has flung herself into an emotional exaggeration that obscures the clear vision of the spirit, and she pays the penalty in positive ugliness in "The Pilgrim", in which slain deer are taken as "love's blood-offering"; and in "Devotion"

Take my flesh and feed your dogs it you choose,
Water your garden trees with my blood if you will.

Keats truly said that poetry should surprise by a fine excess. But there is a wide difference between an excess that makes itself felt in all phases of the poet's consciousness, and an excessiveness that expands one phase at the expense of others. The most indulgent criticism could hardly call such lines as I have quoted "fine" in the Keatsian sense; and it is not improbable that their redundant excessiveness is the complementary cause of such impoverishment of thought and figure as we find in

Waken, O mother! thy children implore thee,
Who kneel in thy presence to serve and adore thee!
The night is aflush with a dream of the morrow.
Why still dost thou sleep in thy bondage of sorrow?
Awaken and sever the woes that enthral us,
And hallow our hands for the triumphs that call us.

Ne'er shall we fail thee, forsake thee or falter,
Whose hearts are thy home and thy shield and thine altar.

There is not an atom of cerebral stuff in the lines: they are exclusively rhetorical, and in the rumtity tumtity measure of the poorest English minor poetry. They have the characteristic inconsistency of such verse, in which some kind of sentimental emotion takes the place of the backward and forward vision that links idea to idea; for they call on the mother, (that is, India,) to awaken and set the caller, (that is the people of India) free from their woes, while the caller professes to be the mother's shield. There is something very ineffective in a mother in a "bondage of sorrow" and her children bound in woes that enthral them.

When we place alongside such ill-done work, lines like these "In Salutation to My Father's Spirit"

O splendid dreamer in a dreamless age,
Whose deep alchemic wisdom reconciled
Time's changing message with the undefiled
Calm vision of thy Vedic heritage. . . . . .

and other lines that we shall quote later, we are moved to wish that the poetess would turn her attention deliberately to some theme that would call out her own "Vedic heritage" of wisdom and song. We are pernickety persons, we lovers of poetry, and we are disturbed when the beloved shows herself worse than her best. For our comfort we hang on to poems like "The Pearl," which is as precious as its subject; to "Ashoka Blossoms" that defies analysis as the true lyric should; to "June Sunset" in its beautiful simplicity:

A brown quail cries from the tamarisk bushes,
A bulbul calls from the cassia plume,
And thro' the wet earth the gentian pushes
Her spikes of silvery bloom.
Where'er the foot of the bright shower passes
Fragrant and fresh delights unfold;
The wild fawns feed on the scented grasses,
Wild bees on the cactus gold. . . .

The mind turns also to many an arresting phrase in interpretation of Indian life and nature, such as the temple bells

Whose urgent voices wreck the sky ... .

or

The earth is ashine like a humming bird's wing,
And the sky like a kingfisher's feather.

To get the full flavour of the last two lines, some acquaintance with Indian atmosphere, with its amazing variety of vivid colours, is necessary: indeed, all through Sorojini's work there are many lines of delicate imaginative beauty that must remain unrifled treasuries to readers unacquainted with the East: for example,

Were greatness mine, beloved, I would offer
Such radiant gifts of glory and of fame,
Like camphor and like curds, to pour and proffer
Before love's bright and sacrificial flame.

To the untravelled Western reader, "camphor" as a figure of speech will carry queer shades of meaning built up out of clothing and moths; and "curds" will be flavorous only of dining rooms or convalescence. But one who has shared the offering of the substance of life to some Power of the inner worlds, or who has passed his hands through the smoke from camphor, that burns to nothing in token of the participant's desire to be lost in the flame of the Divine, will find through such figures an entrance to the strongest place in the life of India, the place of religious devotion and the perpetual Presence.

It is five years since Mrs. Naidu's previous book was published The Bird of Time, 1912. In prefacing the volume, Mr. Edmund Gosse declared that there was nothing, "or almost nothing," in the matured work of the author which the severest criticism could call in question. This is quite true, up to that point, and as we have performed the not very agreeable critical dharma of pointing out the subsequent development of the "almost nothing," we can now turn to the full enjoyment of the feast of song which the poetess of the Deccan has given to us in her first two books, The Golden Threshold, 1905, and The Bird of Time.

In his preface Mr. Gosse recounts how he induced the young Sarojini to scrap all her early imitations of English verse, and urged her to give "some revelation of the heart of India, some sincere and penetrating analysis of native passion, of the 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." So far, however, our poetess has not fulfilled all her counsellors request: she has not given analyses of passion or religion; but she has given something that the future may not consider less valuable; passion linked to all life, not merely to one of its phases; religion in action, not merely in theory. Mr. Gosse speaks of her "astonishing advantage of approaching the task of interpretation from inside the magic circle, although armed with a technical skill that has been cultivated with devotion outside of it." Let us consider her work in these two aspects, as Indian, and as literature.

We have already observed the escape of India through phrases and figures of speech. Here are a couple more:

Why should I wake the jewelled lords
With offerings or vows,
Who wear the glory of your love
Like a jewel on my brows. . . . . .

a reference to the "Festival of Serpents", and to the notion (which may be a fact for aught I know) that the king cobra carries a gem in his forehead. She has another poem directly on the same phase of India's religious life, without the human deflection of the foregoing:

Swift are ye as streams, and soundless as the dewfall,
Subtle as the lightning, and splendid as the sun;
Seers are ye, and symbols of the ancient silence
Where life and death and sorrow and ecstasy are one.

The last two lines form a clue to Hindu polytheism, and indicate the grasp of the spiritual unity behind the symbols, lacking which, slavery to the symbol which is the only real idolatry is inevitable. The hissing effect of the sibilants in each line is noticeable.

Besides these and many other, so to say, accidental revelations of India, Mrs. Naidu has given us a series of deliberate presentations of phases of Indian life that have come under her eye and touched her heart, and not the least successful are those that try to do no more than catch the simplest fancies or emotions of familiar scenes. "Palanquin Bearers," for example, rests on no more substantial basis than the likening of a lady in a palanquin to a flower, a bird, a star, a beam of light, and a tear: there is not a thought in it: it is without the slightest suspicion of "literature", yet its charm is instantaneous and complete. "Dirge" so vividly expresses the sorrow of bereavement that a recent English critic mistook it as indicating that the poetess was a widow.

Indeed, in this latter respect, that is, in her expression of the feminine side of Indian life, our poetess brings us up at times against a threatened discussion of the problem of sex in poetry. We have to concede to her as much freedom to sing of human love from the woman's side as the poets have from the man's side. But there is a deeper aspect of the matter, an enlargement of consciousness beyond mere sex which strikes poetry from the best expressions of love, and without which so-called love-poems are merely poems about love. In the case of most masculine love-poetry there is an idealization of the object which, though in ironical contradiction to the facts of the marriage tie, is capable of influencing an adjustment of the facts "nearer to the heart's desire." But this is not the case with much of Mrs. Naidu's love poetry. We have already touched on one aspect of it in "Devotion". Let us take another example, "The Feast":

Being no scented lotus-wreath,
Moon-awakened, dew-caressed;
Love, thro' memory's age-long dream
Sweeter shall my wild heart rest
With your footprints on my breast.

Were this nothing more than a mood of the poetess we might accept it into memory, as we accept Dante Gabrielle Rosetti's love sonnets, as delightful and impossible. In the case of Mrs. Naidu's poem just quoted, this is not so: it is a reflection of the whole attitude and custom of Hindu Society in relation to its womanhood; and the above stanza, despite its delicate beauty or, rather, perhaps the more insidiously because of its beauty is a menace to the future of India, because of its perpetuation of the "door-mat" attitude of womanhood, which is at the root of India's present state of degeneracy through not only its direct enslavement of womanhood, but through its indirect emasculation of manhood, and the stultification of action for national freedom through the possession of a bad conscience as regards their own womankind.

It is curious to observe that while, in both her private and public life, Mrs. Naidu has broken away from the bonds of custom, by marrying outside her caste, and by appearing on public platforms, she reflects in her poetry the derivative and dependent habit of womanhood that masculine domination has sentimentalised into a virtue: in her life she is plain feminist, but in her poetry she remains incorrigibly feminine: she sings, so far as Indian womanhood is concerned, the India that is, while she herself has passed on into the India that is to be. It is not often in literature that an artist is in front of his or her vision: but it is safest to leave the artistic implications of the circumstance for the fuller illumination of future volumes.

It is in such poems as those just referred to that we find those flaws of structure and expression which suggest a not quite authentic inspiration, a mood worked up till it becomes hectic and unbalanced; but when she touches the great impersonalities she discloses a fine power of phrase, a clear energy of thought, a luminosity and reserve that reach the level of mastery. Such qualities are seen in the verses addressed "To a Buddha Seated on a Lotus."

With futile hands we seek to gain
Our inaccessible desire,
Diviner summits to attain,
With faith that sinks and feet that tire;
But nought shall conquer or control
The heavenward hunger of our soul.
The end, illusive and afar,
Still lures us with its beckoning flight,
And all our mortal moments are
A session of the infinite.

There you have the poetess rejoicing in the Shelleyan stretch of "inaccessible desire" and "heavenward hunger"; and there you have the Indian poetess, singing ostensibly of the Buddha, yet throwing the whole philosophy of the Vedanta into the last two lines.

There is another poem of Mrs. Naidu's that here challenges attention as a fitting link between this brief consideration of her work as Indian and a glance at her work as literature. It is "Leili", and it is in The Golden Threshold. The first stanza paints a typically Indian evening, with fireflies, parrots, sunset, and suggestions of the untamed life of nature, all in an atmosphere of stillness. Then she sings:

A caste-mark on the azure brows of heaven,
The golden moon burns, sacred, solemn, bright.
The winds are dancing in the forest temple,
And swooning at the holy feet of night.
Hush! in the silence mystic voices sing,
And make the gods their incense offering.

The immediate parallelism of elements in nature and in Hindu religious observance recalls the similar and yet how temperamentally and racially different method of Francis Thompson in his "Orient Ode", in which the pageant of sunrise and the ritual of Catholic worship appear to be identical:

Lo! in the sanctuaried East,
Day, a dedicated priest,
In all his robes pontifical expressed. . . .

and so on through detail after detail. The symbolism in Mrs. Naidu's poem of the dancing winds as devotees in the temple of nature must surely stand among the fine things of literature; still, good as it is, it is poor in comparison with the splendidly daring piece of anthropomorphosis of the first two lines. The figuring of the moon as a caste-mark on the forehead of heaven is in itself a unique achievement of the imagination in poetry in the English language. It lifts India to the literary heavens: it threatens the throne of Diana of the classics; it releases Luna from the work of asylum-keeper, and gives her instead the office of remembrancer to Earth that the Divine is imprinted on the open face of Nature. And how miraculously the artist makes articulate the seer, and reinforces vision by utterance! State the matter directly and simply, and as a figure of speech: "The moon burns (like) a caste-mark on the brow of heaven," and the meaning remains, but it is reduced to thin fancy. Now re-read the original: visualise the images in succession caste-mark, brows of heaven, moon: note the immense conviction that the absence of "like" gives, lifting the lines from cold symbolism to the level of imaginative truth that is the home of the myths of all races; and you have come within hailing distance of the secret of poetry. But that is not quite all. The pattern, of which Stevenson speaks in "The Art of Writing", is there, and is not less remarkable for its inclusion than for its omission; but a detail of the pattern takes us a step nearer the secret. The two words "golden moon" are a perfectly simple statement of the burnished yellow of the rising moon in certain states of the atmosphere. Put it thus: "The moon is the colour of gold," and it is true, but the truth depends on an act of memory; the moon herself is not present to the eye of the mind. But Sarojini's moon, through the very juxtaposition of the big vowels oh, and oo stands out ardent and palpitant, and makes the word "burn", which is false in fact as the moon only reflects, the one inevitable word to satisfy the imagination. We see the same effect in Thompson's lines which I have quoted, where, in the midst of a congregation of slender vowels, the priest enters in all the rotund importance of oh, aw, ah in "robes pontifical." Something is added to the effect of Sarojini's lines by the adverbs "sacred, solemn", ungrammatical though they be, by having their terminations docked but the effect passes, unfortunately, into a pale anticlimax in "bright", a little unnecessary dab of phosphorescence beside the golden burning moon. It is said that Sarojini in her youth had dreams of becoming an Indian Keats. In this particular item she has out-Keatsed her ideal; for while his "gibbous moon" means convexity, it has to reach the mind by way of the dictionary: it means, but does not create the spherical orb that Sarojini swings on a phrase into the firmament of the imagination.

It will take more evidence than is at present at our disposal, to enable us to decide whether or not we should have a grudge against our poetess for not giving us more of the joy of such a combination of truth, imagination, and art. I do not think her "caste-mark" is accidental: I think it is integral to her genius, and permanent; I think also that the emotional strain of much of her work, and a certain restriction of method, are also integral, but temporary. The passage of years will subdue flame to a steady glow, and bring reserve which is power in place of excessiveness which leads to exhaustion. But in the matter of her restricted method, it is fairly certain that deliberate effort is needed if she is to escape from ruts into which she tends to run. This tendency appeared early. "Indian Weavers" in The Golden Threshold weave (1) a childs' robe, (2) a marriage veil, (3) a funeral shroud. Corn Grinders tell of (1) a mouse, (2) a deer, (3) a bride, each of whom has lost her "lord". All through her three books we come across this habit of taking three aspects of a subject, and placing them in sequence, mainly without any vital unity, and hardly ever with any imaginative accumulation. Still, despite the mannerism, Mrs. Naidu has given us two haunting lyrics, both in The Bird of Time. My first contact with Mrs. Naidu's poetry was through hearing "The Song of Radha the Milkmaid" recited by a young Oxford man. I shall never forget the mantric effect of the devotee's repetition of "Govinda" as she carried her curds, her pots, and her gifts to the shrine of Mathura. The other is "Guerdon," with its three refrains, "For me, O my master, the rapture of love!. . . . the rapture of truth!. .. . the rapture of song!" The objective may vary, but the rapture remains. It is not in the poetess to live at a lower degree; and in this particular case her energy has given us a song of the higher kama that will take its place among the lyrical classics. The poem justifies the method in its own case, but not for general application. Her metrical skill is capable of great variety. She gives us a specimen of Bengali metre reproduced in English:

Where the golden, glowing
Champak buds are blowing
By the swiftly-flowing streams,
Now, when day is dying,
There are fairies flying
Scattering a cloud of dreams.

Each line, save the last, has two alliteratives, and these with the repeated O in the first line, and the inter-linear rhyme of "flowing" in the third line, produce a haunting chime of bells and voices.

These things are, of course, the mere mechanics of poetry; still they contribute a very large element to the total effect, and may have a reflexive influence on the subtler elements for good or ill. In the matter of the thing said, as distinct from how it is said, we find the brain and the heart challenged by vibrant utterances from a will and an imagination that must surely triumph over recalcitrant emotion. Take a couple of examples of terse gnomic expression:

To-day that seems so long, so strange, so bitter,
Will soon be some forgotten yesterday.

That is an oft-sung truth stated with melodious and memorable newness. It is the passive aspect of

Let us rise, O my heart, let us gather the dreams
that remain.
We shall conquer the sorrow of life with the
sorrow
of song.

In these two pairs of lines there is the acute touch of sorrow and struggle. Those who know something of the heroic battle that Mrs. Naidu has waged against physical debility know that she sings of what she has lived. She does not gloss the facts of existence. She gives this message to her children:

Till ye have battled with great griefs and fears,
And borne the conflict of dream-shattering years,
Wounded with fierce desire and worn with strife,
Children, ye have not lived: for this is life.

At the same time, from the point of view of literature, we have to ask if there is no glimpse of hope or of faith in a poet's work; for life in literature, as in life itself, is positive and joyful: negation and pessimism are rootless and without progeny. We have not far to go in Sarojini's poetry to find the thing of life. Up to the present it has eschewed the reinforcement of the intellect: it is as delicate as

The hope of a bride or the dream of a maiden
Watching the petals of gladness unfold,

and looks toward the

. . . . . . timid future shrinking there alone
Beneath her marriage-veil of mysteries,

(characteristic Sarojinian imagery); but it is there. We see it the thing of life in "At Twilight: On the Way to Golconda," where the debris of history provokes the question:

Shall hope prevail where clamorous hate is rife,
Shall sweet love prosper or high dreams have place
Amid the tumult of reverberant strife
"Twixt ancient creeds, 'twixt race and ancient race,
That mars the grave, glad purposes of life,
Leaving no refuge save thy succouring face?

Her answer is:

Quick with the sense of joy she hath forgone,
Returned my soul to beckoning joys that wait,
Laughter of children and the lyric dawn,
And love's delight profound and passionate,
Winged dreams that blow their golden clarion,
And hope that conquers immemorial hate.

It is further expressed in a spring song entitled "Ecstasy":

Shall we in the midst of life's exquisite chorus
Remember our grief,
O heart, when the rapturous season is o'er us
Of blossom and leaf?
Their joy from the birds and the streams let us borrow,
O heart! let us sing.
The years are before us for weeping and sorrow.

To-day it is Spring!

I do not think our poetess has any need to borrow joy. The source of it is within herself in her grip of the fundamental verities that are hers by race and, I believe, realization. It is still as true as when Shelley uttered it, that "Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought"; but we are entering a new era in literature, at any rate in literature in the English language, in which the accent and joy of the spirit will be heard with increasing assurance and clearness. Certain of the younger poets have felt the first influences of the approach of that era, and their response has been made in attempted revolutions in the machinery of versification; but the real revolution is from within: it is a matter as much of eye as of ear, for poetry is compounded of both vision and utterance, and heretofore the ear of the world has been confused with noises because its eye has wandered from the centre. The "sorrow of song" will be no less, but it will take on a new tone: it will drop the harshness of frustration, the sharpness of regret: its cry will not be the cry of pain inflicted, which comes from uncontrolled nerves; it will be the cry of the iritenser but less hurtful agony of bursting bonds; the growing pains of expanding consciousness, as joyfully painful as the spring, as exquisitely pregnant as the sadness evoked by a glorious sunset, which is not sadness, but the call and response of immortal beauty, without and within, across the intervening twilight of mortal mind.

Mrs. Naidu has staked her claim in the new fields of poetry. Her eye is on the centre, and the singing circumference of her sphere will yet adjust itself. All things are possible to one who can sing thus of "solitude" even with the faulty metaphor of gleaning a glimpse

Or perchance we may glean a far glimpse of the Infinite Bosom
In whose glorious shadow all life is unfolded or furled,
Through the luminous hours ere the lotus of dawn shall re-blossom
In petals of splendour to worship the Lord of the world.

To anticipate that glimpse is to experience it: to have found the place of reconciliation of beginnings and endings is to have touched the synthesis that is the genius of song.

Sarojini Naidu's poetry belongs to the romantic school, but it is the romance that in its most passionate mood leaves no ashes in the mouth. She has lingered, like "Laurence Hope," in "The Garden of Kama," but with larger eyes and a less heavy chin. She has not become, as Mr. Gosse says she hoped to become, "a Goethe or a Keats for India"; but she has succeeded in becoming a far more vital and compelling entity than a reflection: she has become Sarojini, with her own exquisite qualities, and with the not less interesting defects of those qualities. She has not yet shown signs of the constructive genius of either of her ideals: there is little "elevation" in the technical sense to the edifice of her song: it is an Indian bungalow with rooms opening off one another on the ground floor, not a New York sky-scraper; but she has already added to literature something Keats-like in its frank but perfectly pure sensuousness. Except in the use of a few conventional words, there is hardly any trace of derivative impulse in her work. She wrote to Mr. Arthur Symons long ago, "I am not a poet really. I have the vision and desire, but not the voice." Since then she has found increasing utterance; imagination and emotion interacting, sometimes separately, as in "Indian Song"; sometimes, as in "Street Cries," giving life and its emotional accompaniment in a single artistic mould. It is because of the measure of unique accomplishment and optimistic prophecy that emerges from the most searching criticism of Mrs. Naidu's work that one feels a pang of regret to find from the daily newspaper that the flares of the public platform often lure her away from the radiance of her "moon-enchanted estuary of dreams." True, she is out for service to India at a time when it is urgently needed: she has questioned Fate as to whether she would fail ere she achieved her destined deed of song or service for her country's need, but while to those who cannot sing, there may be a distinction between song and service, such song as she has sung, and is capable of singing, is among the greatest and most essential gifts of service which she can render to her country and the world.