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    The Sceptred Flute Songs of India - The Golden Threshold, The Bird of Time & The Broken Wing: With a Chapter from 'Studies of Contemporary Poets' by Mary C. Sturgeon
    The Sceptred Flute Songs of India - The Golden Threshold, The Bird of Time & The Broken Wing: With a Chapter from 'Studies of Contemporary Poets' by Mary C. Sturgeon
    The Sceptred Flute Songs of India - The Golden Threshold, The Bird of Time & The Broken Wing: With a Chapter from 'Studies of Contemporary Poets' by Mary C. Sturgeon
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    The Sceptred Flute Songs of India - The Golden Threshold, The Bird of Time & The Broken Wing: With a Chapter from 'Studies of Contemporary Poets' by Mary C. Sturgeon

    By Sarojini Naidu and Mary C. Sturgeon

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    First published in 1943, “The Sceptred Flute Songs of India” contains the complete poetical works of Indian poet and activist Sarojini Naidu (1879–1949). Naidu (1879–1949) was an Indian political activist and poet. She was a staunch proponent of women's emancipation, civil rights, and anti-imperialistic ideas, playing an important role in India's struggle for independence from colonial rule. Her work as a poet includes both children's poems and others with more mature themes including patriotism, romance, and tragedy, earning her the sobriquet “Nightingale of India”. Her most famous work is "In the Bazaars of Hyderabad" (1912), which remains widely read to this day. Contents include: “The Golden Threshold”, “Folk Songs”, “Songs for Music”, “Poems”, “The Bird of Time”, “Songs of Love and Death”, “Songs of the Springtime”, “Indian Folk-songs to Indian Tunes”, “Songs of Life”, etc. A fantastic collection not to be missed by fans of Naidu's seminal work. Other notable works by this author include: “Songs of Nature” and “Muhammad Jinnah: An Ambassador of Unity” (1919). This classic work is being republished now in a new edition complete with an introductory chapter from 'Studies of Contemporary Poets' by Mary C. Sturgeon.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRagged Hand - Read & Co.
    Release dateMar 6, 2020
    ISBN9781528789530
    The Sceptred Flute Songs of India - The Golden Threshold, The Bird of Time & The Broken Wing: With a Chapter from 'Studies of Contemporary Poets' by Mary C. Sturgeon
    Author

    Sarojini Naidu

    Sarojini Naidu (1879-1949) was an Indian poet and political activist. Born in Hyderabad to a Bengali Brahmin family, she graduated from the University of Madras at twelve before journeying to England to study at King’s College London and Cambridge. At nineteen, she married physician Paidipati Govindarajulu Naidu, with whom she would raise five children. Following the partition of Bengal in 1905, Naidu became involved with the Indian independence movement. A close ally of Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi, she travelled across India to speak on social issues such as welfare and the emancipation of women, as well as to advocate for the end of colonial rule. After travelling to London to work alongside Annie Besant, Naidu devoted herself to Gandhi’s Satyagraha movement, braving arrest during the Salt March of 1930 and promoting the principles of civil disobedience across the globe. As one of the most respected poets of twentieth century India, she published such collections as The Golden Threshold (1905), The Bird of Time (1912), and The Broken Wing (1917).

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      The Sceptred Flute Songs of India - The Golden Threshold, The Bird of Time & The Broken Wing - Sarojini Naidu

      Sarojini Naidu

      By Mary C. Sturgeon

      Mrs Naidu is one of the two Indian poets who within the last few years have produced remarkable English poetry. The second of the two is, of course, Rabindranath Tagore, whose work has come to us a little later, who has published more, and whose recent visit to this country has brought him more closely under the public eye. Mrs Naidu is not so well known; but she deserves to be, for although the bulk of her work is not so large, its quality, so far as it can be compared with that of her compatriot, will easily bear the test. It is, however, so different in kind, and reveals a genius so contrasting, that one is piqued by an apparent problem. How is it that two children of what we are pleased to call the changeless East, under conditions nearly identical, should have produced results which are so different?

      Both of these poets are lyrists born; both come of an old and distinguished Bengali ancestry; in both the culture of East and West are happily met; and both are working in the same artistic medium. Yet the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore is mystical, philosophic, and contemplative, remaining oriental therefore to that degree; and permitting a doubt of the Quarterly reviewer's dictum that Gitanjaliis a synthesis of western and oriental elements. The complete synthesis would seem to rest with Mrs Naidu, whose poetry, though truly native to her motherland, is more sensuous than mystical, human and passionate rather than spiritual, and reveals a mentality more active than contemplative. Her affiliation with the Occident is so much the more complete; but her Eastern origin is never in doubt.

      The themes of her verse and their setting are derived from her own country. But her thought, with something of the energy of the strenuous West and something of its 'divine discontent,' plays upon the surface of an older and deeper calm which is her birthright. So, in her Salutation to the Eternal Peace, she sings

      What care I for the world's loud weariness,

      Who dream in twilight granaries

      Thou dost bless

      With delicate sheaves of mellow silences?

      Two distinguished poet-friends of Mrs Naidu—Mr Edmund Gosse and Mr Arthur Symons—have introduced her two principal volumes of verse with interesting biographical notes. The facts thus put in our possession convey a picture to the mind which is instantly recognizable in the poems.

      A gracious and glowing personality appears, quick and warm with human feeling, exquisitely sensitive to beauty and receptive of ideas, wearing its culture, old and new, scientific and humane, with simplicity; but, as Mr Symons says, a spirit of too much fire in too frail a body, and one moreover who has suffered and fought to the limit of human endurance.

      We hear of birth and childhood in Hyderabad; of early scientific training by a father whose great learning was matched by his public spirit: of a first poem at the age of eleven, written in an impulse of reaction when a sum in algebra 'would not come right': of coming to England at the age of sixteen with a scholarship from the Nizam college; and of three years spent here, studying at King's College, London, and at Girton, with glorious intervals of holiday in Italy.

      We hear, too, of a love-story that would make an idyll; of passion so strong and a will so resolute as almost to be incredible in such a delicate creature; of a marriage in defiance of caste, a few years of brilliant happiness and then a tragedy. And all through, as a dark background to the adventurous romance of her life, there is the shadow of weakness and ill-health. That shadow creeps into her poems, impressively, now and then. Indeed, if it were lacking, the bright oriental colouring would be almost too vivid. So, apart from its psychological and human interest, we may be thankful for such a poem as To the God of Pain. It softens and deepens the final impression of the work.

      For thy dark altars, balm nor milk nor rice,

      But mine own soul thou'st ta'en for sacrifice.

      The poem is purely subjective, of course, as is the still more moving piece, The Poet to Death, in the same volume.

      Tarry a while, till I am satisfied

      Of love and grief, of earth and altering sky;

      Till all my human hungers are fulfilled,

      O Death, I cannot die!

      We know that that is a cry out of actual and repeated experience; and from that point of view alone it has poignant interest. But what are we to say about the spirit of it—the philosophy which is implicit in it? Here is an added value of a higher kind, evidence of a mind which has taken its own stand upon reality, and which has no easy consolations when confronting the facts of existence. For this mind, neither the religions of East nor West are allowed to veil the truth; neither the hope of Nirvana nor the promise of Paradise may drug her sense of the value of life nor darken her perception of the beauty of phenomena. Resignation and renunciation are alike impossible to this ardent being who loves the earth so passionately; but the 'sternly scientific' nature of that early training—the description is her own—has made futile regret impossible, too. She has entered into full possession of the thought of our time; and strongly individual as she is, she has evolved for herself, to use her own words, a subtle philosophy of living from moment to moment. That is no shallow epicureanism, however, for as she sings in a poem contrasting our changeful life with the immutable peace of the Buddha on his lotus-throne—

      Nought shall conquer or control

      The heavenward hunger of our soul.

      It is as though, realizing that the present is the only moment of which we are certain, she had determined to crowd that moment to the utmost limit of living.

      From such a philosophy, materialism of a nobler kind, one would expect a love of the concrete and tangible, a delight in sense impressions, and quick and strong emotion. Those are, in fact, the characteristics of much of the poetry in these two volumes, The Golden Threshold and The Bird of Time. The beauty of the material world, of line and especially of colour, is caught and recorded joyously. Life is regarded mainly from the outside, in action, or as a pageant; as an interesting event or a picturesque group. It is not often brooded over, and reflection is generally evident in but the lightest touches. The proportion of strictly subjective verse is small, and is not, on the whole, the finest work technically.

      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

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