A NOTE ON PADMAVATHI’S POETRY
Harindranath Chattopadhyaya
(Harindranath Chattopadhyaya used to tell us about the
great poetry of a little girl who died when she was 16. Padmavathi wrote exquisite poetry comparable to that of Toru
Dutt who walked into the Walhalla of immortals when she was just slip of a
girl. Padmavathi’s total out put was 10 poems.) –Editor
I have in my possession a typed manuscript of verse written between July, 1917 and June, 1918, by our young poetess who left us, at the tender age of sixteen, in the first week of May, 1920. While she still lived, her exquisitely beautiful poem, “A Lament” was published in the first number of Shama’s, which she was not destined even to see.
“Stars of midnight, sing my dirge
In stillness of the lonely sky
Sad be the strain of life’s farewell
Yet mourn not long.....”
And the stars of midnight heard the prophet-voice within her soul and responded to her call.
Padmavathi was essentially a young mystic. Her utterances, though often uncertain and even incomplete, were still significant of a soul that was continually verging upon the dark night of mystics. Most of her verse is coloured with a sad strange feeling of “I want” ness and infused with the melancholy music of the “thirst for far-away things.”
“Pain, thou companion ever of me.
Wilt thou abide with me for ever?”
She questions that Being of whom AWE made a God. But there is invariably a flash of optimism with which she relieves the cloud-heaps of her life. It is the optimism of mystical girl-soul, who, learning to hug the jewel of pain to herself, discovers that it is many-coloured.
“Though bitter at first, I learn to love thee,
But when I love thee, lo! thou fliest
To make way for some unseen joy,”
The dedicatory poem strikes a wistful note with an almost poignant clarity:
“Years and years will flit, my friend,
Years of toil, and struggling years;
One, message across time I send
To wake dead Memory, my friend.
This message of my silent tears.”
Bearing this message in mind and always remembering that it is the message of the bad whose outer form faded before it could open its leaves to the light of day, we shall find much in the poetry of Padmavati, which will enable us to comprehend the souls of thousands of young women still among us, who ache for expression and yearn to give us their individual message.
Padmavati’s poem “To a friend” (written on the 19th February, 1918), throbs with the pantheistic mood in which poetess seem to be in communion with the Spirit behind all things, that which Yeats calls, “Eternal Spirit wandering on her way.” And words, which are, after all, beggars, can silence. The moment such a mood passes into words, it becomes a parody of its own Beauty...and Padmavati felt this intuitively when she wrote:
“How I love to sit with thee
O Sister! on my balcony.
And the dim sea that stretches far...
I yearn to tell thee all I feel
About the star, the sea, the sky,
But thoughts, like winged birds do fly...
In swift succession, lo! they come....
The words are long!...
There is also a strange yearning to be felt in her verse for this secret Beauty behind tangibility, and it is to Nature that she makes her girl’s appeal:
“Wild Wind! bear me on thy wing
To far-off lands where thou dost roam
To floral beds of dewy Spring ...
O take me to thy whirlwind home
Waft me across the deep blue sea,
Where rosy shells with wavelets dance,
To fleecy clouds, O carry me,
And into heaven’s wide expanse.”
The first verse is full of Blakean simplicity, and in the last line of the second verse we stand face to face with a genuine hunger of the finite for infinity. It is poetry of a high order and the utterance of a soul that was capable of responding to the mystical voice of Nature. Somewhere she has exclaimed, “Nature owns me. I am her child,” and goes on to tell us
“Then I roam
Among my comrades, Flower and Tree.”
The expression is as simple and as strong as the life of an ascetic. It is verse of such quality that compels us to acknowledge Padmavati as a true poet, as one of the few poets of India who have written in a foreign tongue.
Sometimes, Padmavati wrote as if she had been a woman of fifty...full of conviction, full of experience, full of crystalline judgment ...
“Art thou faithful in thy love?
Then thou art from heaven above.
Art thou fickle in thy mirth?
Then thou art a child of earth ...
If hatred be thy course ... Ah well!
Then thou art from the depths of Hell.”
One can hardly give more than a very faint idea as to the work left to us by this young poetess of sixteen. It is with pride that I have accepted to edit her work, and I feel sure that when a good Anthology of Indo-Anglian poets and poetesses is made, she will be included among them. For indeed, Padmavati’s message deserves to go into the world as the companion of the messages, already sent to it by Toru Dutt and by Sarojini Devi.
We now take the liberty of quoting a few poems from the collection which I have with me, and which, I hope, will be given to the world in a printed volme, at no distant date.
“On a happy summer morn
While dew lay on the corn
In the heart of a happy bird
A sweet song stirred” ...
******
It sang....
“The sun doth rise and shine above ...
The roses bloom so fresh and gay...
Wake up, wake up from slumber, love!
And smile on me as smiles the day.
Together we’ll fly, along the sky
In search of a land all sunny bright ...
Together we will circle high
To prove the youthful earth’s delight.”
******
The sun was setting in the West,
The night was creeping ... deep dark night ...
Above the tall palmyra’s crest
The evening star shone clear and bright,
Then sighed a lone bird on the tree,
In sad bird-loneliness it said -
“O Bird! O Bird! come back to me
How shall I live when thou art dead?
My bird! alone I sit and moan
Death has divided thee from me
In unknown worlds thou fliest alone
Say! dost thou ever think of me”?
******
While evening breezes pass me by,
And in the lonely clouded sky
The lightnings flash a while and die,
I sit and think of thee ...
O! dost thou ever ,think of me?
When the rain doth wet the tree
Nestless thou-abroad dost roam.
In my heart I make a home
Bird! for thy sad memory.
Dost thou ever think of me?
Oft in silent moon-lit nights
The branches stand like ghosts aghast
I see thy shadow fleeting past Above the heights.
It is then that I sit and think of thee...
Dost thou ever think of me?
******
Dost thou ever think of me ?
While the evening’s winds are blowing
And across the sky and tree
The lightnings ...
DAY AND NIGHT
Day: Night, O dark and cruel night!
Chase me not on swift black wings
Let me view the sunset bright
Lo! my lyre her farewell sings.
Wrapt the earth in twilight lies
Fades the flower so sad so sweet
To have me back my lotus cries,
One farewell, O! let me greet.
Night: O! smiling happy fleeting day
Thy happy hours so swift they fly.
The birds, they sing their songs so gay,
The sun doth shine in clear blue sky.
Yet linger on while twilight fades...
O, Let my woeful mantle cling
To the dark and lonely-lighted glades
Where my nightingale doth sing.
GOOD-BYE
A gust of wind across the sea
Blows through the midnight sky.
A farewell echo it sound to me ...
Is that your good-bye?
Not good-bye yet, my only dear!
Too soon it is from you.
I can return a tear on tear,
But not my last adieu.
“A day may come when these glad days
As lightning that hath pierced the Cloud
May vanish ...
Ah! then one boon I ask of thee;
When they lay me in my shroud
One little word to my sister say
I knew her just for one short day.”
(14th December, 1921.)