Sarojini Naidu is a poet of ardour, agony and ecstasy. In her perfect lyricism and mellifluous melody, she is indeed the Nightingale of India. Her poetic sensibility is essentially romantic. In ‘Summer Woods’ she communicates her aversion to the artificiality of the pseudo-modernism that she thrived in. She seeks to discover refuge in Nature from the monotony of her existence and her mechanical routine.
She begins by ranting that she is sick of ‘painted roofs and soft and silken floors’ or the mendaciousness of the so-called civilized and sophisticated life. She probably refers to the process of automation and industrial revolution. On the other hand, she craves for summer-houses with over-hanging canopies of bright-red Gulmohars. These appear lovely and enchanting when accompanied by the breeze-like wind. She is also fed up of strife and song and festival and fame. The affectation and luxury of the contemporary times seems too hollow for her tastes. They only leave in her a sense of void. She yearns to retreat into the forests where the cassia flourish and aspires to dwell in the rapturous and enthralling atmosphere there.
She implores her lover to recoil with her to the pastoral vicinity of Nature where passion and instinct reign over calculation and manipulation. It is where the koels call to each other call to each other from glades and glens. Their voices enflame our passions .She wants to let go of the flamboyance of social living, and the ostentation of public life. She ardently desires to put her worries aside and lie in the company of her beloved below the entangled boughs of tamarind,molsari and neem that assuage their fatigue with their natural shades.
The poetess wants to join their brow with jasmines. They long to play on carved flutes to awaken the slumbering serpents among the thick banyan roots .The serpent has phallic connotations .The poetess has utilized it as a symbol of phallic fear in a village song. Later at dusk, she wishes to roam with her lover along the bank of the river and bathe in water lily pools where golden panthers drink.
In the concluding stanza, the poetess tells her love that they should lie with love-voiced silences in the deep blossoming woods. These love voiced silences are more eloquent than simulated speeches and affected dialogues. They are companions of the bright day, merry comrades of the night and shall be encompassed with delight like Krishna and Radhika.
The transition in the three stanzas from day to dusk to night, sends out the impression that she wants to spend all of her time with her beloved. In the movement from stanza to stanza, she transcends from vegetation to animal existence, and then further to the divine level of Krishna and Radha. It signifies the elevation of her spirit. At another level she transcends from refined reality to the raw reality of myth(in the form of Krishna and Radha). This appears to be her panacea to the Nihilism that exists in the modern living, this is her concept of existentialist escapism.
© Rukhaya MK 2008
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February 19, 2018 at 4:48 pm
GOOD !