The Golden Threshold | Page 4

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. My health broke
down permanently about this time, and my regular studies being
stopped I read voraciously. I suppose the greater part of my reading
was done between fourteen and sixteen. I wrote a novel, I wrote fat
volumes of journals; I took myself very seriously in those days."
Before she was fifteen the great struggle of her life began. Dr.
Govindurajulu Naidu, now her husband, is, though of an old and
honourable family, not a Brahmin. The difference of caste roused an
equal opposition, not only on the side of her family, but of his; and in
1895 she was sent to England, against her will, with a special

scholarship from the Nizam. She remained in England, with an interval
of travel in Italy, till 1898, studying first at King's College, London,
then, till her health again broke down, at Girton. She returned to
Hyderabad in September 1898, and in the December of that year, to the
scandal of all India, broke through the bonds of caste, and married Dr.
Naidu. "Do you know I have some very beautiful poems floating in the
air," she wrote to me in 1904; "and if the gods are kind I shall cast my
soul like a net and capture them, this year. If the gods are kind--and
grant me a little measure of health. It is all I need to make my life
perfect, for the very 'Spirit of Delight' that Shelley wrote of dwells in
my little home; it is full of the music of birds in the garden and children
in the long arched verandah." There are songs about the children in this
book; they are called the Lord of Battles, the Sun of Victory, the
Lotus-born, and the Jewel of Delight.
"My ancestors for thousands of years," I find written in one of her
letters, "have been lovers of the forest and mountain caves, great
dreamers, great scholars, great ascetics. My father is a dreamer himself,
a great dreamer, a great man whose life has been a magnificent failure.
I suppose in the whole of India there are few men whose learning is
greater than his, and I don't think there are many men more beloved. He
has a great white beard and the profile of Homer, and a laugh that
brings the roof down. He has wasted all his money on two great objects:
to help others, and on alchemy. He holds huge courts every day in his
garden of all the learned men of all religions--Rajahs and beggars and
saints and downright villains all delightfully mixed up, and all treated
as one. And then his alchemy! Oh dear, night and day the experiments
are going on, and every man who brings a new prescription is welcome
as a brother. But this alchemy is, you know, only the material
counterpart of a poet's craving for Beauty, the eternal Beauty. 'The
makers of gold and the makers of verse,' they are the twin creators that
sway the world's secret desire for mystery; and what in my father is the
genius of curiosity--the very essence of all scientific genius--in me is
the desire for beauty. Do you remember Pater's phrase about Leonardo
da Vinci, 'curiosity and the desire of beauty'?"
It was the desire of beauty that made her a poet; her "nerves of delight"
were always quivering at the contact of beauty. To those who knew her
in England, all the life of the tiny figure seemed to concentrate itself in

the eyes; they turned towards beauty as the sunflower turns towards the
sun, opening wider and wider until one saw nothing but the eyes.
She was dressed always in clinging dresses of Eastern silk, and as she
was so small, and her long black hair hung straight down her back, you
might have taken her for a child. She spoke little, and