Introduction:
On the basis of their themes, Sarojini Naidu's lyrics may be divided into five broad categories: (1) Nature-lyrics, (2) love-lyrics, (3) lyrics of life and death, (4) folk-lyrics dealing with the life of the common folk of India, and (5) miscellaneous lyrics, including patriotic lyrics. These are not watertight compartments, there is much overlapping and such division is made merely for the convenience of study.
(I) Nature lyrics:
Sarojini has a number of beautiful nature-lyrics to her credit. The seasons of India, particularly, the spring, fascinate her. She sings of the joys of spring in a number of lyrics. Some of Sarojini's best known nature lyrics are: "Leili", “Songs of the Springtime" (ten poems describing Spring in all its splendour), and “The Flowering Year" (six poems of which "June Sunset" is the most charming), "Spring in Kashmir", "The Glorison Lily", “The Water Hyacinth", etc. Mark the following lines from "Spring in Kashmir" included in “The Feather of the Dawn”:
“Heart, O my heart, hear the Springtime is calling
With her laughter, her music, her beauty enthralling.
Thro' glade and thro'glen her winged feet let us follow,
In the wake of the oriole, the sunbird and the swallow.”
The heart of the poetess is wholly taken up with the Spring. She has the feminine partiality for flowers and a number of colourful flowers bloom in her lyrics. Herself a song-bird, the songs of the birds fascinate her, and the Koel and the Papeeha are among her favourites. The Yamuna provides the background to a few of her love-lyrics, and one is surprised to find that there is no reference to the Ganges and the Himalayas which have been a perennial source of inspirations for Indian poets. Her response to nature is sensuous—she enjoys her beautiful scenes, and sights, her colours, her sweet melody and fragrance—and striking pen-pictures of nature in all her glory and majesty abound in her lyrics. Nature for her is a "sanctuary of peace", a refuge from the fever and fret of the world and is often coloured by human moods and emotions. It is also to be noted that though she has the romantic partiality for Nature, she is not insensitive to the charms of the city, as is evidenced by her lyrics on the city of Hyderabad. However, it shall have to be conceded that her picture of nature is one-sided, that we do not get from her nature, "red in tooth and claw." Neither does she philosophise nature, she is content to enjoy her sensuous beauty and to use it as a magazine of similes and metaphors.
(ii) Love-lyrics:
The love theme looms large in the lyrics of Sarojini. There are a number of fine love-lyrics scattered all over her four collections of verse. One may mention such beautiful lyrics as "Indian Love-Song", “Humayun to Zubeida", "Ecstasy", "The Poet's Love-Song", "Song of Radha, the Milkmaid", "The Temple", "The Flute Player of Brindaban", "The Gift", "The Amulet", "Immutable" and "Songs of Radha". However, “The Temple, A Pilgrimage of Love”, a collection of twenty-four lyrics, divided into three sections—The Gate of Delight, The Path of Tears, The Sanctuary—is her most extended and elaborate statement as a poet of love. Her love-lyrics deal with a variety of love experiences, are characterized by intensity and immediacy and draw both on the Hindu tradition of love-poetry and the Sufi-Muslim tradition. Her attitude to love is typically feminine and is characterized by a total self-surrender of the beloved to her object of love. The beloved may be the Divine, the Supreme, or Krishna, the Eternal lover, and such lyrics derive their poignancy and appeal from the soul's hunger for union with the object of love. They have an autobiographical interest also, and may be read as experience-expressions of her own deep and passionate love for Govind Rajalu Naidu, with whom she fell in love early in life, and whom she ultimately married.
(iii) Lyrics of Life and Death:
A large number of her finest lyrics deal with the problem of life and death. Life has its sorrows, and its pain and suffering, and it all ends with death. The poet is conscious of the pain of life and the inevitability of Death, and hence a note of melancholy runs through many of her lyrics. But the poetess bravely accepts the challenge of Death and is determined to enjoy her life, despite all sorrow and suffering. "Life", "To the God of Pain", "Damayanti to Nala in the Hour of Exile", "The Poet of Death", "To a Buddha Seated on a Lotus" "Dirge", "Love and Death, “Death and Life", "The Lotus", "The Soul's Prayer", "A Challenge to Fate", "In Salutation to the Eternal Peace" and "Invincible" are some of her lyrics of life and death. Sometime she may be seized with the fear of pain and death and in agony may cry out, as she does in the lovely lyric, “To the God of Pain”:
“Let me depart, with faint limbs let me creep
To some dim shade and sink me down to sleep.”
but such death-wish, such a mood of despair, is rare with her. A heroic response, to the challenge of Death, to pain and suffering, is more characteristic of her. In "Transience", the poetess, working within the Hindu spiritual tradition, concludes that sorrow is transient, whereas joy is permanent. Ananda is the unperformed but potential or evolutionary end of creation. Time is, therefore, only "an artifice of Eternity", and its melancholy contingencies are but a passing phase in the cosmic process. This simple faith is expressed without any metaphysical density, in the folk experience of India, which cuts across religious diversities and cultural differences-her conception of life and death rests on the Hindu vision of the unity and oneness of the individual soul with, "the soul of all the world", The Atma and the Brahma are one, and Death is merely the soul's return to its prime origin. As she observes in "Love Transcendent":
“So, you be safe in God's mystic garden,
Enclosed like a star in His ageless skies,
My outlawed spirit shall crave no pardon,
O my saint with the sinless eyes.”
(iv) Folk-lyrics:
The folk-theme predominates in the lyrics of Sarojini. The opening section of The Golden Threshold is entitled 'Folk-Songs', and in The Bird of Time one of the sections is 'Indian Folk-Songs'. The folk-theme also appears in many of the lyrics of the other sections. Sarojini loved the common folk of India and their land and she celebrates their occupations, their joys and sorrows, in a number of beautiful lyrics. The pageantry of Indian life fascinated her, and she sings of it with zest. Like her own Wandering Singers, she sings of "Happy, and simple and sorrowful things", which characterize the life of the common man in India. Her lyrics are a veritable portrait gallery of Indian folk-characters. The palanquin-bearers and the pardah-nashins may be memory of Kipling's India, but the weavers, and the bangle-sellers, and fishers and beggars, and even the snake-charmers, are still authentic presences on the Indian scene, although they seem to be simply picturesque, decorative and ornamental. Sarojini invests them with a sense of personality. The nature and quality of their experience, as well as their style of confrontation with the laws of being, genuinely reflect the Indian culture and tradition. Whether romantic, mystic, or symbolic, they breathe the genius of that land out of which they arise. They are presented not as faded types, but as live individuals acting out their humanity in the general drama of life, with its fluctuating tides of joy and sorrow. There is no sense of alienation in them: no breakdown of communication between their sense of self and the sense of life. Sarojini deals not with outmoded or faded types, but rather with figures who had so far been ignored, and who the first time in her poetry, emerge from folk-life to claim a place in the world of literature.
They are all individualized by their human passions and aspirations, and thus also linked up with humanity at large. Sometimes, the folk theme is invested with the richness of all gory as in "Indian Weavers”, “Palanquin-bearers", “Corn-grinders", etc. Sarojini's folk-lyrics also reveal her awareness of the synthetic nature of the Indian folk-culture. "Despite the political polarization, and tension between the Hindu and Islamic sides of the Indian personality, there has always existed a synthesis and fusion of their religious and spiritual elements in the folk-culture. In rural India, the Hindus pay homage to Muslim saints, while the Muslims exchange gifts and benedictions with the Hindus on festive occasions. Steeped in the folk customs and rituals, Sarojini captures the true spirit of Muslim folk-festivals. Her lyrics are resonant with the muezzins, prayer-calls, litanies and incantations of Islam. "The Night of Martyrdom" is a splendid evocation of the spirit of sacrifice and brotherhood, through suffering and purification, which underlies the Muslim festival of Moharram. As a mark of faith and devotion, the act of martyrdom is dramatically relieved by the followers of Mohammad who take out a procession and perform the fire-walking. Moharram, with its religious trance and magical ordeal and procession, assumes the quality of a collective rite of renewal and restoration. The festival has, like the Holi, Deepavali and other Indian festivals, the intensity and freedom of folk-drama. It aims at a reintegration of the individual into the total culture, through a revival of the memories of the sacred history.
(v) Miscellaneous Lyrics:
A number of Sarojini's lyrics deal with miscellaneous themes not covered under the above mentioned four categories. The more important of such lyrics are those which throb with her patriotism or in which she pays tribute to someone or the other of the contemporary personalities. The Gift of India is the finest of her patriotic lyrics, and The Lotus, the lyrics in which she pays her homage to Mahatma Gandhi, is one of the finest of her lyrics in which she celebrates contemporary personalities. In Salutation to My Father's Spirit, an elegy on the death of the poetess' own father, is the finest of her topical lyrics.
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