A V-Day Gift: Scanning the Rhythms of Passion and Peace in Sarojini Naidu's "Indian Love Song"

Anapests and bacchics, ghost cups and half wands, ...and a note on reading aloud!

I had just finished scanning this passionate poem by Sarojini Naidu, which has been in my files for months, and was ready to post it here when I discovered that today (yesterday in India, but today in Costa Rica where I am now, if my math is right) is her birthday! Yes! I am hardly surprised anymore when such things happen; I have come to feel comfortable with the spirits of poets around me. But it still gives me delighted shivers every time! Happy Valentines, Day everyone, and Happy Birthday, Sarojini!

It seems especially appropriate to scan Naidu today because I consider Valentine’s Day a powerful day of celebration for feminine energy. Naidu, a good friend of Gandhi (who called her “the Indian nightingale”) was a feminist activist as well as a poet, and the first female Governor in India. She wrote her poems in English, so these are her own words.

I can tell a poem is metrically skillful when the process of scanning makes my mouth yearn to speak it aloud. Here’s a recording of me reading the poem; you will notice that I read the last line of the first stanza twice. I didn’t feel the first reading did the meter of the line justice, so I repeated it while looking at the scansion, making sure each syllable received due time. I hope you will agree it was worth it.

And I hope you too will enjoy the opportunity to #speakitthrice (or at least once), inviting the words into yur will, body, heart, and spirit as well as your mind, so they can cast their full spell for passion and peace!

Indian Love Song

By Sarojini Naidu (1879-1949)

HE:
\      u  |  u    /   |  u     /  | u   u    /  | u   u      /  |    u   u   /  |u    u       /   
Lift up the veils that darken the delicate moon of thy glory and grace,
   u       /    | u   \    /     |   u      u      /    | u     u     / | u  u    /  | u   u   / | u    u     /  

Withhold not, O Love, from the night of my longing the joy of thy luminous face,

   /      u | u    /    |   u      u     /  | u   u /  u /   | u     u       / |  u      /  

Give me a spear of the scented keora guarding thy pinioned curls,
  u    u   /| u     /    |   u      u     /  | u      u     /  | u    u      /   | u     u     /   |  u   u      /  

Or a silken thread from the fringes that trouble the dream of thy glimmering pearls;

 (u)  /  |   \      u    /    | u       u     /  |  u      u    /   | u    u       / |   u   u    /  | u        u      /   

Faint grows my soul with thy tresses' perfume and the song of thy anklet's caprice,

u    /  | u     \    /     | u    u       /  |u u / | u    u       /  |    u    u   / |u  u    u     /  

Revive me, I pray, with the magical nectar that dwells in the flower of thy kiss.

SHE:
\       u    |  u    /   |  u   u      /     | u   u    /    | u      /    |   u   u     /    |   u       / (u)

How shall I yield to the voice of thy pleading, how shall I grant thy prayer,
u     /   | u    u     /    |   \     /  | u   /  | u    u   /   | u    /   |    u    u      /  

Or give thee a rose-red silken tassel, a scented leaf from my hair?
u     /    | u    u     /   | u      \      /    | u   /    | u     /   |   u     / |   u    u     /  

Or fling in the flame of thy heart's desire the veils that cover my face,
u     /    | u       /  | u    u     / | u        /    | u   u   /  |  u   u     / |   u     /  

Profane the law of my father's creed for a foe of my father's race?
u      /    | \      u         /  | u    u    / | u     /  | u  u        /      | u     u   /  |  u     /  

Thy kinsmen have broken our sacred altars and slaughtered our sacred kine,
u      /    | u        /      /  |  u     u       / |    u    /     /  | u    /  | u   u     /   |  u   u  /  

The feud of old faiths and the blood of old battles sever thy people and mine.

HE:
\        u    |  u     /   |  u  u     /   | u   / | u      /    |   u   u    /  |  u    u    /

What are the sins of my race, Beloved, what are my people to thee?
u       /    |  u      u       /   |    u     /  |   u    /  | u       /    |   u   u    /  |    u    /

And what are thy shrine, and kin and kindred, what are thy gods to me?
/           /    |  u     u    /   |   u    /  | u   /  | u   u     /   | u      /  |   u     u    /

Love recks not of feuds and bitter follies, of stranger, comrade or kin,
u   /  | u   u   /   |   \       u     /  |   u    /   |   u     u  /    |  u   u   /  | u    /

Alike in his ear sound the temple bells and the cry of the muezzin .
  u       /  |     u     /  | u    u   /  |   u        /    |   u      /  | u   u    /  | u     /

For Love shall cancel the ancient wrong and conquer the ancient rage,
  u     /  |   u    u      /   |   u     /  |  u    u    /  | u     u       /| u  u   /  |  \    /

Redeem with his tears the memoried sorrow that sullied a bygone age.

The poem is anapestic, or really almost “mixed rising meter,” with almost as many iambs as anapests (both iambs and anapests are called “rising meters” because they emphasize the final syllable). There are seven feet per line but to call it “anapestic septameter” or “mixed rising septameter” doesn’t quite capture the fact that there is a strong caesura after the fourth foot of every line. The effect is of the old meter called “fourteeners,” a relative of the ballad stanza (which alternates 4 foot lines with 3 foot lines).

But while fourteeners are usually iambic (as, famously, in Arthur Golding’s version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses), Naidu’s here are primarily anapestic. I find something wonderfully wilfull about this choice, since I associate anapestic meter with will, passion, desire, sex, creativity, activism, and self-actualization, Naidu’s choice of anapests in combination with a traditionally iambic line-length, like the poem’s handling of Muslim-Hindu conflict, is both politically revolutionary and swooningly sensual. To assert the right to actualize passionate love in spite of the patriarchal “memoried sorrow that sullied a bygone age,” what meter could be more appropriate? As for the poem’s restless mixing of iambs with the anapests, it reminds us that the ballad stanza was not originally a tidy iambic creation as it is for Golding; its roots, from which the fourteener grew, extend back into pre-literate, matriarchal times, and the mixred meter advocates for the lovers on both ancient traditional and revolutionary grounds.

Naidu’s easy handling of her meter makes room for a counterpointing rhythm as well. Two of my very favorite lines in the poem are the last two lines of the first stanza, where the words of the male lover “faint” into “falling rhythm” (meters that begin with a stress). As the meter of the will, passion, and lust gives way to the countercurrent of the meter of the heart, love compassion, and unity, these two final lines of the stanza could easily be scanned as dactylic lines, like so:

(if you are not familiar with the backslashes, they are what I call “half-wands”; because these syllables are softer than the stronger syllables next to them, they could also be scanned as ‘unstressed” in which case they would be marked with u (“cup”) instead of \ (“half-wand”). Both can be correct. The choice of how strongly to hear a monosyllabic word can be a matter of individual choice. It is often part of the 20% of scansion that is subjective, a creative art. So, if you prefer to scan those sylalbles as cups, go for it):

  /       \      u   | /      \    u  |  /     u    u | /   u    u   |   /   u u | /   u u | / (uu)    

Faint grows my soul with thy tresses' perfume and the song of thy anklet's caprice,

(u) | /  u   u  | /      \    u  |  /    u  u | /   u u   |    /   u u | /   u u \ | / (uu)

Revive me, I pray, with the magical nectar that dwells in the flower of thy kiss.

To scan these two lines as dactyls requires only a few simple adjustments at the beginnings and ends of lines. The (u) symbol, which I call a “ghost cup,” is used to mark both missing syllables, as at the line endings, and also extra syllables, as with “revive” at the beginning of the second line. You may recognize this scansion technique from “extra-syllable line-endings” (once upon a time called “feminine endings”) that sometimes appear in iambic meter (e.g. “To be or not to be, that is the question”). When mapping the neglected scansion of noniambic meters, for example in my books A Poet’s Ear and How to Scan a Poem, I needed to name the same phenomenon in reverse, for falling meters. I chose the term “extra-syllable beginning,” nicknamed the “running start.” That is what you see with the word “revive” in the dactylic scansion of the stanza’s final line.

You will notice I have not chosen to scan these two lines as dactylic in my “official” scansion above. There is only one prosodist I know of who would do so, the Australian James MacAuley. While he makes an interesting case for scanning various lines in a poem according to their most obvious meter, I agree with the mainstream view that doing so causes chaos for no very good reason. My scansion above recognizes the poem’s predominant anapestic and iambic meter as the base meter, and I consider the beautiful dactylic rhythm that happens as “he” gives into the spell of love as a “dactylic countercurrent” to the anapestic meter in those lines.

There is much more to note in this metrically skillful poem-song. There is the way the jingling “song of thy anklet’s caprice” spans foot-boundaries as if dancing over and among them with exquisite agility. There is the extremely rare four-syllable foot (called a "‘fourth paean”) that dwells and lingers so deliciously and sensually on the “flower of the kiss”). And there are the two “bacchics” (scanned u / /) that add such a slow, bitter taste to the final line of the speech of “She’ in stanza two.

u     /    | u        /      /  |  u     u       / |    u    /     /  | u    /  |  u   u     /   |  u   u  /  

The feud of old faiths and the blood of old battles sever thy people and mine.

The best way to feel all this, and to celebrate Sarojini Naidu’s brithday in style, is to read the poem aloud—ideally three times. #speakitthrice!

May the magical blessings of the Meters help move you home, this Valentine’s Day and every day.

Yours in love, meter, and poetry,

Annie