The Golden Threshold | Page 3

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THE GOLDEN THRESHOLD BY SAROJINI NAIDU WITH AN
INTRODUCTION BY ARTHUR SYMONS

DEDICATED TO EDMUND GOSSE WHO FIRST SHOWED ME
THE WAY TO THE GOLDEN THRESHOLD London, 1896
Hyderabad, 1905
CONTENTS
FOLK SONGS

Palanquin-Bearers Wandering Singers Indian Weavers Coromandel
Fishers The Snake-Charmer Corn-Grinders Village-Song In Praise of
Henna Harvest Hymn Indian Love-Song Cradle-Song Suttee
SONGS FOR MUSIC
Song of a Dream Humayun to Zobeida Autumn Song Alabaster Ecstasy
To my Fairy Fancies
POEMS
Ode to H. H. 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