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    The Golden Threshold: With a Chapter from 'Studies of Contemporary Poets' by Mary C. Sturgeon
    The Golden Threshold: With a Chapter from 'Studies of Contemporary Poets' by Mary C. Sturgeon
    The Golden Threshold: With a Chapter from 'Studies of Contemporary Poets' by Mary C. Sturgeon
    Ebook78 pages41 minutes

    The Golden Threshold: With a Chapter from 'Studies of Contemporary Poets' by Mary C. Sturgeon

    By Sarojini Naidu, Mary C. Sturgeon and Arthur Symons

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    First published in 1905, “The Golden Threshold” is a beautiful collection of Indic poetry by activist and poet Sarojini Naidu (1879– 1949). Contents include: “Folk Songs”, “Songs for Music”, and “Poems”. Naidu was a staunch proponent of women's emancipation, civil rights, and anti-imperialistic ideas, playing an important role in India's struggle for independence from colonial rule. Her work as a poet includes both children's poems and others written on more serious themes including patriotism, romance, and tragedy, earning her the sobriquet “Nightingale of India”. Her most famous work is "In the Bazaars of Hyderabad" (1912), which remains widely read to this day. Other notable works by this author include: “The Bird of Time: Songs of Life, Death & the Spring” (1912) and “Muhammad Jinnah: An Ambassador of Unity” (1919). This classic work is being republished now in a new edition complete with an introductory chapter from 'Studies of Contemporary Poets' by Mary C. Sturgeon.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRead Books Ltd.
    Release dateMar 6, 2020
    ISBN9781528789523
    The Golden Threshold: With a Chapter from 'Studies of Contemporary Poets' by Mary C. Sturgeon
    Author

    Sarojini Naidu

    Sarojini Naidu (1879-1949) was an Indian poet and political activist. Born in Hyderabad to a Bengali Brahmin family, she graduated from the University of Madras at twelve before journeying to England to study at King’s College London and Cambridge. At nineteen, she married physician Paidipati Govindarajulu Naidu, with whom she would raise five children. Following the partition of Bengal in 1905, Naidu became involved with the Indian independence movement. A close ally of Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi, she travelled across India to speak on social issues such as welfare and the emancipation of women, as well as to advocate for the end of colonial rule. After travelling to London to work alongside Annie Besant, Naidu devoted herself to Gandhi’s Satyagraha movement, braving arrest during the Salt March of 1930 and promoting the principles of civil disobedience across the globe. As one of the most respected poets of twentieth century India, she published such collections as The Golden Threshold (1905), The Bird of Time (1912), and The Broken Wing (1917).

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      The Golden Threshold - Sarojini Naidu

      Sarojini Naidu

      By Mary C. Sturgeon

      Mrs Naidu is one of the two Indian poets who within the last few years have produced remarkable English poetry. The second of the two is, of course, Rabindranath Tagore, whose work has come to us a little later, who has published more, and whose recent visit to this country has brought him more closely under the public eye. Mrs Naidu is not so well known; but she deserves to be, for although the bulk of her work is not so large, its quality, so far as it can be compared with that of her compatriot, will easily bear the test. It is, however, so different in kind, and reveals a genius so contrasting, that one is piqued by an apparent problem. How is it that two children of what we are pleased to call the changeless East, under conditions nearly identical, should have produced results which are so different?

      Both of these poets are lyrists born; both come of an old and distinguished Bengali ancestry; in both the culture of East and West are happily met; and both are working in the same artistic medium. Yet the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore is mystical, philosophic, and contemplative, remaining oriental therefore to that degree; and permitting a doubt of the Quarterly reviewer's dictum that Gitanjaliis a synthesis of western and oriental elements. The complete synthesis would seem to rest with Mrs Naidu, whose poetry, though truly native to her motherland, is more sensuous than mystical, human and passionate rather than spiritual, and reveals a mentality more active than contemplative. Her affiliation with the Occident is so much the more complete; but her Eastern origin is never in doubt.

      The themes of her verse and their setting are derived from her own country. But her thought, with something of the energy of the strenuous West and something of its 'divine discontent,' plays upon the surface of an older and deeper calm which is her birthright. So, in her Salutation to the Eternal Peace, she sings

      What care I for the world's loud weariness,

      Who dream in twilight granaries

      Thou dost bless

      With delicate sheaves of mellow silences?

      Two distinguished poet-friends of Mrs Naidu—Mr Edmund Gosse and Mr Arthur Symons—have introduced her two principal volumes of verse with interesting biographical notes. The facts thus put in our possession convey a picture to the mind which is instantly recognizable in the poems.

      A gracious and glowing personality appears, quick and warm with human feeling, exquisitely sensitive to beauty and receptive of ideas, wearing its culture, old and new, scientific and humane, with simplicity; but, as Mr Symons says, a spirit of too much fire in too frail a body, and one moreover who has suffered and fought to the limit of human endurance.

      We hear of birth and childhood in Hyderabad; of early scientific training by a father whose great learning was matched by his public spirit: of a first poem at the age of eleven, written in an impulse of reaction when a sum in algebra 'would not come right': of coming to England at the age of sixteen with a scholarship from the Nizam college; and of three years spent here, studying at King's College, London, and at Girton, with

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