THE GOLDEN THRESHOLD(金色的门槛)

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THE GOLDEN THRESHOLD

THE GOLDEN

THRESHOLD

By Sarojini Naidu

THE GOLDEN THRESHOLD

INTRODUCTION

It is at my persuasion that these poems are now published. The

earliest of them were read to me in London in 1896, when the writer was

seventeen; the later ones were sent to me from India in 1904, when she

was twenty-five; and they belong, I think, almost wholly to those two

periods. As they seemed to me to have an individual beauty of their own,

I thought they ought to be published. The writer hesitated. "Your letter

made me very proud and very sad," she wrote. "Is it possible that I have

written verses that are 'filled with beauty,' and is it possible that you really

think them worthy of being given to the world? You know how high my

ideal of Art is; and to me my poor casual little poems seem to be less than

beautiful--I mean with that final enduring beauty that I desire." And, in

another letter, she writes: "I am not a poet really. I have the vision and

the desire, but not the voice. If I could write just one poem full of beauty

and the spirit of greatness, I should be exultantly silent for ever; but I sing

just as the birds do, and my songs are as ephemeral." It is for this bird-

like quality of song, it seems to me, that they are to be valued. They hint,

in a sort of delicately evasive way, at a rare temperament, the temperament

of a woman of the East, finding expression through a Western language

and under partly Western influences. They do not express the whole of

that temperament; but they express, I think, its essence; and there is an

Eastern magic in them.

Sarojini Chattopadhyay was born at Hyderabad on February 13, 1879.

Her father, Dr. Aghorenath Chattopadhyay, is descended from the ancient

family of Chattorajes of Bhramangram, who were noted throughout

Eastern Bengal as patrons of Sanskrit learning, and for their practice of

Yoga. He took his degree of Doctor of Science at the University of

Edinburgh in 1877, and afterwards studied brilliantly at Bonn. On his

return to India he founded the Nizam College at Hyderabad, and has since

laboured incessantly, and at great personal sacrifice, in the cause of

education.

Sarojini was the eldest of a large family, all of whom were taught

English at an early age. "I," she writes, "was stubborn and refused to

THE GOLDEN THRESHOLD

speak it. So one day when I was nine years old my father punished me--

the only time I was ever punished--by shutting me in a room alone for a

whole day. I came out of it a full-blown linguist. I have never spoken

any other language to him, or to my mother, who always speaks to me in

Hindustani. I don't think I had any special hankering to write poetry as a

little child, though I was of a very fanciful and dreamy nature. My

training under my father's eye was of a sternly scientific character. He

was determined that I should be a great mathematician or a scientist, but

the poetic instinct, which I inherited from him and also from my mother

(who wrote some lovely Bengali lyrics in her youth) proved stronger.

One day, when I was eleven, I was sighing over a sum in algebra: it

WOULDN'T come right; but instead a whole poem came to me suddenly.

I wrote it down.

"From that day my 'poetic career' began. At thirteen I wrote a long

poem a la 'Lady of the Lake'--1300 lines in six days. At thirteen I wrote a

drama of 2000 lines, a full-fledged passionate thing that I began on the

spur of the moment without forethought, just to spite my doctor who said I

was very ill and must not touch a book. My health broke down

permanently about this time, and my regular studies being stopped I read

voraciously. I suppose the greater part of my reading was done between

fourteen and sixteen. I wrote a novel, I wrote fat volumes of journals; I

took myself very seriously in those days."

Before she was fifteen the great struggle of her life began. Dr.

Govindurajulu Naidu, now her husband, is, though of an old and

honourable family, not a Brahmin. The difference of caste roused an

equal opposition, not only on the side of her family, but of his; and in 1895

she was sent to England, against her will, with a special scholarship from

the Nizam. She remained in England, with an interval of travel in Italy,

till 1898, studying first at King's College, London, then, till her health

again broke down, at Girton. She returned to Hyderabad in September

1898, and in the December of that year, to the scandal of all India, broke

through the bonds of caste, and married Dr. Naidu. "Do you know I have

some very beautiful poems floating in the air," she wrote to me in 1904;

"and if the gods are kind I shall cast my soul like a net and capture them,

THE GOLDEN THRESHOLD

this year. If the gods are kind--and grant me a little measure of health.

It is all I need to make my life perfect, for the very 'Spirit of Delight' that

Shelley wrote of dwells in my little home; it is full of the music of birds in

the garden and children in the long arched verandah." There are songs

about the children in this book; they are called the Lord of Battles, the Sun

of Victory, the Lotus-born, and the Jewel of Delight.

"My ancestors for thousands of years," I find written in one of her

letters, "have been lovers of the forest and mountain caves, great dreamers,

great scholars, great ascetics. My father is a dreamer himself, a great

dreamer, a great man whose life has been a magnificent failure. I

suppose in the whole of India there are few men whose learning is greater

than his, and I don't think there are many men more beloved. He has a

great white beard and the profile of Homer, and a laugh that brings the

roof down. He has wasted all his money on two great objects: to help

others, and on alchemy. He holds huge courts every day in his garden of

all the learned men of all religions--Rajahs and beggars and saints and

downright villains all delightfully mixed up, and all treated as one. And

then his alchemy! Oh dear, night and day the experiments are going on,

and every man who brings a new prescription is welcome as a brother.

But this alchemy is, you know, only the material counterpart of a poet's

craving for Beauty, the eternal Beauty. 'The makers of gold and the

makers of verse,' they are the twin creators that sway the world's secret

desire for mystery; and what in my father is the genius of curiosity--the

very essence of all scientific genius--in me is the desire for beauty. Do

you remember Pater's phrase about Leonardo da Vinci, 'curiosity and the

desire of beauty'?"

It was the desire of beauty that made her a poet; her "nerves of delight"

were always quivering at the contact of beauty. To those who knew her

in England, all the life of the tiny figure seemed to concentrate itself in the

eyes; they turned towards beauty as the sunflower turns towards the sun,

opening wider and wider until one saw nothing but the eyes.

She was dressed always in clinging dresses of Eastern silk, and as she

was so small, and her long black hair hung straight down her back, you

might have taken her for a child. She spoke little, and in a low voice,

THE GOLDEN THRESHOLD

like gentle music; and she seemed, wherever she was, to be alone.

Through that soul I seemed to touch and take hold upon the East.

And first there was the wisdom of the East. I have never known any one

who seemed to exist on such "large draughts of intellectual day" as this

child of seventeen, to whom one could tell all one's personal troubles and

agitations, as to a wise old woman. In the East, maturity comes early;

and this child had already lived through all a woman's life. But there was

something else, something hardly personal, something which belonged to

a consciousness older than the Christian, which I realised, wondered at,

and admired, in her passionate tranquillity of mind, before which

everything mean and trivial and temporary caught fire and burnt away in

smoke. Her body was never without suffering, or her heart without

conflict; but neither the body's weakness nor the heart's violence could

disturb that fixed contemplation, as of Buddha on his lotus-throne.

And along with this wisdom, as of age or of the age of a race, there

was what I can hardly call less than an agony of sensation. Pain or

pleasure transported her, and the whole of pain or pleasure might be held

in a flower's cup or the imagined frown of a friend. It was never found in

those things which to others seemed things of importance. At the age of

twelve she passed the Matriculation of the Madras University, and awoke

to find herself famous throughout India. "Honestly," she said to me, "I

was not pleased; such things did not appeal to me." But here, in a letter

from Hyderabad, bidding one "share a March morning" with her, there is,

at the mere contact of the sun, this outburst: "Come and share my

exquisite March morning with me: this sumptuous blaze of gold and

sapphire sky; these scarlet lilies that adorn the sunshine; the voluptuous

scents of neem and champak and serisha that beat upon the languid air

with their implacable sweetness; the thousand little gold and blue and

silver breasted birds bursting with the shrill ecstasy of life in nesting time.

All is hot and fierce and passionate, ardent and unashamed in its exulting

and importunate desire for life and love. And, do you know that the scarlet

lilies are woven petal by petal from my heart's blood, these little quivering

birds are my soul made incarnate music, these heavy perfumes are my

emotions dissolved into aerial essence, this flaming blue and gold sky is

THE GOLDEN THRESHOLD

the 'very me,' that part of me that incessantly and in- solently, yes, and a

little deliberately, triumphs over that other part--a thing of nerves and

tissues that suffers and cries out, and that must die to-morrow perhaps, or

twenty years hence."

Then there was her humour, which was part of her strange wisdom,

and was always awake and on the watch. In all her letters, written in

exquisite English prose, but with an ardent imagery and a vehement

sincerity of emotion which make them, like the poems, indeed almost

more directly, un-English, Oriental, there was always this intellectual,

critical sense of humour, which could laugh at one's own enthusiasm as

frankly as that enthusiasm had been set down. And partly the humour,

like the delicate reserve of her manner, was a mask or a shelter. "I have

taught myself," she writes to me from India, "to be commonplace and like

everybody else superficially. Every one thinks I am so nice and cheerful,

so 'brave,' all the banal things that are so comfortable to be. My mother

knows me only as 'such a tranquil child, but so strong-willed.' A tranquil

child!" And she writes again, with deeper significance: "I too have learnt

the subtle philosophy of living from moment to moment. Yes, it is a

subtle philosophy, though it appears merely an epicurean doctrine: 'Eat,

drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die.' I have gone through so many

yesterdays when I strove with Death that I have realised to its full the

wisdom of that sentence; and it is to me not merely a figure of speech, but

a literal fact. Any to-morrow I might die. It is scarcely two months

since I came back from the grave: is it worth while to be anything but

radiantly glad? Of all things that life or perhaps my temperament has

given me I prize the gift of laughter as beyond price."

Her desire, always, was to be "a wild free thing of the air like the birds,

with a song in my heart." A spirit of too much fire in too frail a body, it

was rarely that her desire was fully granted. But in Italy she found what

she could not find in England, and from Italy her letters are radiant.

"This Italy is made of gold," she writes from Florence, "the gold of dawn

and daylight, the gold of the stars, and, now dancing in weird enchanting

rhythms through this magic month of May, the gold of fireflies in the

perfumed darkness--'aerial gold.' I long to catch the subtle music of their

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THEGOLDENTHRESHOLD1THEGOLDENTHRESHOLDBySarojiniNaiduTHEGOLDENTHRESHOLD2INTRODUCTIONItisatmypersuasionthatthesepoemsarenowpublished.TheearliestofthemwerereadtomeinLondonin1896,whenthewriterwasseventeen;thelateronesweresenttomefromIndiain1904,whenshewastwenty-five;andtheybelong,Ithink,almostwhollytoth...

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