No More Learning

the Nizam of Hyderabad
In the Forest
Past and Future Life
The Poet's Love-Song
To the God of Pain
The Song of Princess Zeb-un-nissa
Indian Dancers
My Dead Dream
Damayante to Nala in the Hour of Exile
The Queen's Rival
The Poet to Death
The Indian Gipsy
To my Children
The Pardah Nashin
To Youth
Nightfall in the City of Hyderabad
Street Cries
To India
The Royal Tombs of Golconda
To a Buddha seated on a Lotus



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 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.