write a summary of the poem the soul's prayer in about 70 - 80 words
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Sarojini Naidu calls herself the innocent child of God and feels pride to take birth from His breath but suddenly prays to be blessed with the power of tolerate like her master and has keen desire to taste the both aspects .
In this way she thinks that if God tells her the laws and mystery of life and death, she may get ready to bear the bitter experiences of life as joys and sorrows of human life with the greatness of God as she appears saying to, “Give me to drink each joy and pain:” The poetess prays to God to feel everything in the whole world, all life's joys and pain at the most intense levels. Not only she craves for bliss in life, but she is ready to keep abreast of every pang of strife and struggle. The poem has also an autobiographical tone when she desires to experience every types of situation in life as she is ever ready to face dangers, and though her own life is one long struggle with ill-health and chronic heart-weakness, she plunges headlong into the battle of life as also into the battle for India’s freedom. She believes that it is only when she passes through the trials and tribulations of life that her souls would be completely thirst of knowledge. Sarojini Naidu further asks God not to give her gift or grief. She is delighted because the soul might not have to come back to deal with vagabond issues. The knowledge of the grave is mystic because nobody knows what happens at the grave goes beyond one’s ordinary senses; one can’t experience it while in this body. Neither does he remember how it was or what it was before human birth.
The Lord answers her prayer. Before this, He has stated that He would not disregard encounter both passionate rapture and despair at the same time but promises her to provide her everything, that her soul will "know all passionate rapture and despair...drink deep of joy and fame...love shall burn thee like a fire, and pain shall cleanse thee like a flame." So the Lord will let her enjoy many intense emotional experiences both good and bad. Here God makes us clear that when we go through the experiences of desiring joy, fame and love, we feel very good at the beginning but as the time passes our desire pushes us into manipulation which comes at the price of expectation and ends in resentment when outcomes are not met. Desire, then, is not desirable. It always implies suffering as well as other dirty little tricks like judgment and punishment. We have to go through the pain in life but eventually we learn a lesson that – pain “cleanses us like a flame, purging the dross from our desire”. As the lines reveal the idea:
In the fifth stanza God promises the child to provide everything for what she prays. She is innocent. She doesn’t know for what she is pleading. She blindly prays for having the experiences of both good and bad. God informs her that after having experience of all the love, joys and highs and lows of life , her soul would not be satisfied but it will yearn to be released from the blind prayer and then tired and forgiven her soul will beg to learn about peace ,instead of intensity. It will want to know how to leave the fire and flame behind, the burning and cleansing, and simply experience quite, underrated peace. .
None never actually needed to learn through pain, and there was never anything to fear. Mystic mystery is a simple secret, nothing more. It’s God’s peace. At last the poet finds solace in the knowledge that Life and Death are merely the two faces of God-His Light and His Shadow. As the lines show:
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Here Sarojini Naidu compares life to a prism through which the color of life, including joy and sorrow are realization of the ultimate knowledge is achieved but death is like a shadow when the knowledge of the various aspects of life ceases.In the concluding stanza God bends from His sevenfold height with care to teach His children the meaning of His grace that where the sun has never shone there is also light, His light. A seeking cry comes not from us but from God Himself. God cries for us, His children, begging us to come home. The release is a call to the waking up that takes place when blind prayer turns into a sighted realization:
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Thus the poem concludes with a belief that life and death are interlinked between one another, reflecting each other. So Shadow and Light are just like birth and death, like night and day, like inhaling and exhaling. .
In this chapter, the writer contrasts two forms of art – Chinese art and European art by using two different stories. In China during the eighth century, the Tang emperor Xuanzong commissioned a painter Wu Daozi to decorate a wall in the palace. Upon seeing the wall painting, the Emperor started noticing the outer appearance of the painting but the painter drew his attention to a cave at the foot of the mountain. The painter told the Emperor that he would take him inside. The painter entered the cave and the entrance closed behind him. As soon as the painter clapped his hand, the painting on the wall was gone and so was the painter. In another story, a painter wouldn’t draw an eye of a dragon as he feared that the dragon would fly out of the painting. In another story to represent a European art form, a master Blacksmith falls in love with a painter’s daughter. The father didn’t approve of him because of his profession. The blacksmith sneaked into his painting studio and painted a fly on the painter’s latest panel. The fly seemed so real that the painter tried to hit it first before realizing it was in the painting. The painter accepted him as a trainee in his studio. The blacksmith married the painter’s daughter and later became one of the famous painters of his time. These stories revealed as to how art form is believed to be followed in two different regions in the world. In Europe, an artist wants the viewer to see a real viewpoint by borrowing his eyes. The art must be perfect and must be illusion likeness. Whereas, in China, the artist doesn’t paint a real one but uses his inner and spiritual voice to create an abstract piece. The viewer can enter the painting from any point and can travel according to his own imagination. The artist wants the viewer to enter his mind and create a path of its own. This concept is called ‘Shanshui’ which means ‘mountain water’. When they are used together, they make the word ‘landscape’.