The introspective note seems unfavourable to Mrs Naidu's art: naturally so, one would conclude, from the buoyant temperament that is revealed. The love-songs are perhaps an exception, for one or two, which (as we know) treat fragments of the poet's own story, are fine in idea and in technique alike. There is, for example, "An Indian Love Song," in the first stanza of which the lover begs for his lady's love. But she reminds him of the barriers of caste between them; she is afraid to profane the laws of her father's creed; and her lover's kinsmen, in times past, have broken the altars of her people and slaughtered their sacred kine. The lover replies:
What are the sins of my race, Beloved, what are my people to thee?
And what are thy shrine, and kine and kindred, what are thy gods to me?
Love recks not of feuds and bitter follies, of stranger, comrade or
kin,
Alike in his ear sound the temple bells and the cry of the muezzin.
There is also in the second volume the "Dirge," in which the poet mourns the death of the husband whom she had dared to marry against the laws of caste; and which almost unconsciously reveals the influence of centuries of Suttee upon the mind of Indian womanhood.
Shatter her shining bracelets, break the string
Threading the mystic marriage-beads that cling
Loth to desert a sobbing throat so sweet,
Unbind the golden anklets on her feet,
Divest her of her azure veils and cloud
Her living beauty in a living shroud.
Even here, however, the effect is gained by colour and movement; by the grouping of images rather than by the development of an idea; and that will be found to be Mrs Naidu's method in the many delightful lyrics of these volumes where she is most successful. The "Folk Songs" of her first book are an example. One assumes that they are early work, partly because they are the first group in the earlier of the two volumes; but more particularly because they adopt so literally the advice which Mr Edmund Gosse gave her at the beginning of her career. When she came as a girl to England and was a student of London University at King's College, she submitted to Mr Gosse a bundle of manuscript poems. He describes them as accurate and careful work, but too derivative; modelled too palpably on the great poets of the previous generation. His advice, therefore, was that they should be destroyed, and that the author should start afresh upon native themes and in her own manner. The counsel was exactly followed: the manuscript went into the wastepaper basket, and the poet set to work on what we cannot doubt is this first group of songs made out of the lives of her own people.
There is all the hemisphere between these lyrics and those of late-Victorian England. Here we find a "Village Song" of a mother to the little bride who is still all but a baby; and to whom the fairies call so insistently that she will not stay "for bridal songs and bridal cakes and sandal-scented leisure." In the song of the "Palanquin Bearers" we positively see the lithe and rhythmic movements which bear some Indian beauty along, lightly "as a pearl on a string." And there is a song written to one of the tunes of those native minstrels who wander, free and wild as the wind, singing of
The sword of old battles, the crown of old kings,
And happy and simple and sorrowful things.
The "Harvest Hymn" raises thanksgiving for strange bounties to gods of unfamiliar names; and the "Cradle Song" evokes a tropical night, heavy with scent and drenched with dew—
Sweet, shut your eyes,
The wild fire-flies
Dance through the fairy neem;
From the poppy-bole,
For you I stole
A little, lovely dream.