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