Sonnets | Page 2

the human character. The Nawab could take pleasure in
reading poets as temperamentally dissimilar as Shelley and Scott,
Spenser and Byron,--to name only a few. Shelley, who was a spirit
utterly unable to understand this world or ordinary homespun human
nature; and Scott, who not only comprehended both without an effort,
but who combined the practical and the romantic elements successfully
in his own life, A devotion to Spenser, "the poet's poet," the poet of a
dreamy yet very real and living chivalry,--Spenser who used to forget
himself in his creations,--did not prevent the Nawab from
understanding Byron, who never could forget himself at all; and who,
with all his vivid impulses of generous sympathy for the oppressed, is
nevertheless generally classed to-day as a colossal egoist. (Unjustly so,
for no mere egoist would have toiled as he toiled for Greek
emancipation, in the nerve-racking campaign which cost him his life.)
In _India to England_--most characteristic of the war poems of
Nizamat Jung--we see traces of the influence of more than one of the
English poets he has read so lovingly. But the poem is none the less
poignantly personal. The same may be said of the Sonnets here
prefaced; for although they are related to the sonnets of earlier poets
whose work must be familiar to the writer, yet they are in no sense
imitations, nor are they echoes.
"_Poetry is the natural language of strong emotion_," the Nawab said
many years ago;--and if it may be asked why, holding this view, he has
chosen such an elaborate (and, some people might add, artificial) form
as the Sonnet, we can only answer that when an emotion or conviction
is deep-seated and permanent, it becomes clarified, concentrated, and
intensified under the stern discipline of compression within the

arbitrary yet expressive limitations of a sonnet.[A]
One of the main reasons why the Nawab's friends have urged the
publication of his Sonnets, is that despite occasional imperfections (of
which he himself is conscious), they form a consistent whole, and in
their spirit and sentiment they are akin to some of the most noble
utterances of the great minds and hearts whose words have been like
torches to show what heights a strong aspiring soul can climb.
"_The Will is the master. Imagination the tool, and the body the plastic
material_," said a famous physician, who was also a practical man of
the world;--and the poet who identifies his will and imagination with
the eternal truths, who looks up to the stars instead of down into the
mud, may always, even in his weariest hours, cheer himself by mental
companionship with the other resolute souls whose pens have been
used as swords in the service of Divine Beauty.
Of all the most famous writers of Sonnets, it is Michelangelo whose
words come back most vividly to memory as we read the Nawab's
expressions of faith.
"_Love wakes the soul and gives it wings to fly_."
"_All beauty that to human sight is given
Is but the shadow, if we
rightly see,
Of Him from Whom man's spirit issueth_."
"_As heat from fire, my love from the ideal
Is parted never_."
"_Oh noble spirit, noble semblance taking,
We mirrored in Thy
mortal beauty see
What Heaven and earth achieve in harmony_."
Thus wrote Michelangelo of Vittoria Colonna (Marchioness of Pescara),
"being enamoured of her divine spirit";[B] and though in the Sonnets of
the Nawab, who uses what is for him a foreign tongue, the ideal is
sometimes greater than the expression of it, yet the spirit shines out
with a light which none can mistake. And whether the average man
accepts or rejects the standards therein embodied, lovers of poetry will

recognise that the Nawab, in his championship of a high and noble
ideal, fights in the same army as Dante and Michelangelo,--neither of
them cloistered dreamers, neither of them arm-chair theorists, but men
who lived and loved and suffered amidst the turmoil of a world they
viewed with wide-open eyes and unflinching minds.
The chivalrous ideal of an exalted and inspiring love can be rejected if
we please;--but let none claim to be manly because this ideal seems too
ethereal. For it is by the most vigorous, most strenuous, and most
commanding souls and minds that this faith in the Eternal Beauty has
been cherished and upheld most ardently and resolutely.
_September 29, 1917_.
FOOTNOTES:
[A] See "Note on the History of the Sonnet in English Literature,"
below.
[B] Ascanio Condivi's "Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti."
NOTE ON THE HISTORY OF THE SONNET IN ENGLISH
LITERATURE
Now that Italy holds such a brilliant place among our Allies during this
the greatest war in the world's history--the war of chivalry (which is to
say moral and spiritual right) against the arrogant might of the Prussian
Octopus,--it is well to remember that it