hello guys please do help me to write for an assignment.... critical appreciation to the poem "the harp of india ".? please answer ut in 400 words
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A marble plaque on the wall of the porter’s lodge next to the gates of an old house on one of the busiest thoroughfares of Kolkata announces in Bengali that this was where Derozio lived, ‘greatest of teachers, pathfinder of rationalism, and forceful warrior against the practice of widow-burning’. Characteristically, at least of local popular perception, no mention is made of his poetry at all. That Henry Louis Vivian Derozio (1809-31) became famous in his lifetime as India’s first ‘national’ poet, as one newspaper review at the time described, is ignored here, but the slip is typical of the disproportionate amount of attention that has been focused so far on the part he played in revolutionizing the social and political life of nineteenth-century Bengal.
Poetry has been, the least discussed aspect of Derozio. The legacy of the first modern poet of India has become confined to a parochial interest in his effect on Bengal and Bengalis, where work on the subject has achieved the status of something of a cottage industry. So why has ‘Derozio-the poet’ being neglected?Buddhadeva Bose, a noted Bengali critic, pointed out in his introductions to Kalidasa’ Meghdut that the body of Sanskrit Literature is like a vast and venerated corpse for the ordinary Indian reader primarily because of the divorce effected in modern life between the everyday and Sanskrit. Similarly, Derozio’s verses can be compared to Sanskrit in its often remote English literariness; even more pertinently, for the contemporary reader, it is the Romantic urn to inwardness and the Modernist turn to the quotidian that informsall of his or her understanding of what poetry is constitutive of. It is an aesthetic common to both these traditions which, especially in the first half of the twentieth century, has encouraged the reader to look at the poem in isolation; consequently, Derozio’s poems, to understand the concerns of which one must understand many of the political, cultural, and aesthetic values that he engaged with throughout his career.
Why hang’st thou lonely on yon withered bough?
Unstrung for ever, must thou there remain;
Thy music once was sweet – who hears it now?
Why doth the breeze sigh over thee in vain?
Silence hath bound thee with her fatal chain;
Neglected, mute, and desolate art thou,
Like ruined monument on desert plain:
O! many a hand more worthy far than mine
Once thy harmonious chords to sweetness gave,
And many a wreath for them did Fame entwine
Of flowers still blooming on the minstrel’s grave:
Those hands are cold – but if thy notes divine
May be by mortal wakened once again,
Harp of my country, let me strike the strain!
This is one of the most iconic poems of Derozio. In the first glance it might be just read as any other fourteen line poem, but the inclusion of the words ‘Harp’ and ‘India’ stimulate us to delve deeper into the contents of the poem. ‘Harp’ is a musical instrument mostly endemic to Ireland in the past two or three centuries, so how does it relate with a colonised country (in Derozio’s time) like India? Also, the inclusion of the word ‘India’ asseemingly separate independent unit in pre-independent era is indicative of much more than what is visible or apparently comprehensible. It also must be taken into account here that Derozio was of Indo-Portuguese origin, and the usage of ‘India’ in such a prominent manner can only indicate that not only did Derozio take India as his home country but was also concerned about the shackled state of India under the dominion of the British and along with it the hope that the music of India be restored and her dignityand glory be strung again.
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