Her Ideals:
The Bird- Like Quality of Her Songs:
The quality which lends charm to Sarojini Naidu's verse, according to Arthur Symons, is the bird- like quality of song, which it contains. The poems in which this quality may be particularly and perceptibly visible are To My Fairy Fancies, To My Children and The Flute-Player of Brindaban. She longed, in her own words, to be a wild free thing of the air like the birds, with a song in her heart.
This is an ideal which a poet in practice cannot always and permanently realise, and the same has been the case with Sarojini Naidu. She cannot achieve the ideal of "the bird-like quality of song", as her first volume of verses containing poems such as To India and The Royal Tombs of Golconda showed. Notwithstanding, this quality was never dead, as is evident from The Flute-Player of Brindaban, which is included in her last volume.
Her Enjoying Beauty:
She longed for beauty and was keenly desirous to write one poem. Even one line, which she could feel was beautiful and great. She pursued the ideal throughout her life, but she was, as the first volume of her poetry shows, no idle singer of an empty lay (song), intent merely upon the perfection of her own song. The creed that Art of poetry should be quite indifferent to practical and moral issues was not hers; she held, on the other hand, ardent and sensitive as she was, that a poet, a true poet, is not content with the attempt to create beauty, untouched by the active interests of his fellowmen. Shelley, one of the greatest lyric poets of the nineteenth century, possesses a supreme gift of natural song, yet he feels a call to reform the world; Keats, who is sometimes regarded as the type of the pure artist, broods over the moral problems of the world, young as he is; some of his finest lyrics are composed by Tennyson on patriotic themes and Swinburne, withdrawing himself from the larger political movements of his time, sings of the sea-epic of England. Likewise, Sarojini is a poet of beauty, devoted to the ideal of the joy of song and longing for beauty, but she has chosen not to shut her eyes from the problems of humanity at large. Her first ideal has best been set forth in the last stanza of Guerdons, where she states that the supreme reward of love and truth is:
“For me, O my Master,
The rapture of Song.”
Ideal of service to her country or to mankind:
This ideal finds expression in The Faery Isle of Janjira, where her duty invites her:
“Into the strife of the throng and tumult,
The war of sweet Love against folly and wrong;
Where brave hearts carry the sword of battle,
‘Tis mine to carry the banner of song.
The solace of faith to the lips that falter,
The succour of hope to the hands that fail,
The tidings of joy when peace shall triumph,
When Truth shall conquer and Love prevail.”
She invokes herself to prepare with all the power at her command to join the strife of the throng and the tumult to set right by the song of sweet love the wrongs let loose by folly and injustice, and to provide solace of faith and the succour of hope to the needy, who falter and fail, leading to the Triumph of Peace and the conquest of Love and Truth.
Her Methods of Handing Her Themes:
We have so far dwelt upon the ideals of the poetess; we now come to describe the methods with which she approaches and handles her themes, and they are various:
A direct expression of the poet's own personal feelings:
Poems such as Love and Death, Caprice, or The Soul's Prayer contain direct expression of the poet's own feelings. The poets feel that their emotions are not only of importance but they are also part of humanity; hence their wish for sympathy makes them share them with their fellow-beings, and they endeavour with this aim in view to give them due form. Their feelings have a universal quality i.e. they can be experienced by the readers, and they have the capacity in them for more apt, powerful and beautiful expression than the readers.
The poet's speaking dramatically or through the mouth of another person:
Another method used by the poetess to express her feelings is the dramatic method, wherein she speaks through the mouth of another person. It may take the form of monologue or dialogue. Browning used this method with success. Most of her folk songs from The Golden Threshold are instances of this method.
The method of description:
This method is employed with or without comment or reflection. Indian Dancers and Night Fall in the City of Hyderabad are examples of pure description. The Indian Gipsy and June Sunset are poems in which description is mingled with reflection. There are poems in which reflection dominates over description and in which the object is described just sufficiently to form the basis of reflection, and they are The Royal Tombs of Golconda and To a Buddha. The reflections in these poems are appropriate to poetry i.e. they are suffused by poetic emotion and are not mere reflection as in the reflective poems of William Wordsworth which may have been as well conveyed in prose without making pretence to great depths; they give us genuine poetry.
The method of direct address:
This method is used in the Memorial Verses on Ya Mahbub and Gokhale and the lines In Salutation to my Father's Spirit. This method has scope for reflection and may include description, as in Ode to H.E.H. the Nizam. In it the poetess addresses the subject of the poem directly.
Composite method:
This method relates to the use of description, reflection, personal feelings, all combined in one. At Twilight is a poem of this sort. It opens with description combined with the expression of the poet's feelings, followed by reflection, description, reflection again and lastly personal feeling. The poem deserves to be quoted at great length:
“Weary, I sought kind death among the rills
That drink of purple twilight where the plain
Broods in the shadow of untroubled hills:
I cried: "High dreams and hope and love are vain,
Absolve my spirit of the poignant ills,
And cleanse me from the bondage of my pain!
Shall hope prevail where clamorous hate is rife,
Shall sweet love prosper or high dreams find 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?"
………………………………………………….
E'en as I spoke, a mournful wind drew-near,
Heavy with scent of dropping roses shed,
And incense scattered from the passing bier
Of some loved woman canopied in red,
Bone with slow chant and swift– remembering tear,
To the blind, ultimate silence of the dead...
O lost, O quenched in unawakening sleep.”
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