The very fact that we have turned our face towards the East fills my heart with joy. For me my East is the poet’s East, not that of a politician or a scholar. It is the East of the magnanimous sky and exuberant sun-light, where once upon a time a boy found himself straying in the dim twilight of child-consciousness peopled with dreams. That child has grown, but never grown out of his childness. I realise it all the more strongly when some problem, political or otherwise, becomes clamorous and insistent, trying to exact its answer from me. I rouse myself up, strain my mind, raise my voice for prophetic utterances and in every way try to be worthy of the occasion, but in my heart of hearts I feel exceedingly small and to my utter dismay discover I am not a leader, not a speaker, not a teacher, and farthest of all away from being a prophet.
The fact becomes fully evident to me, that I had forgotten to grow. It comes of an incorrigible absent-mindedness. My mind has ever wandered away from those things that mature one into wisdom and old age—I have neglected my lessons. And this utter want of training makes me such a wretchedly bad reader of journals dealing with the practical questions of the day! But I am afraid the present time is a tremendously difficult one in India for the child, for the poet. It is no use protesting that he is lacking in understanding—that he is congenitally incapable of paying attention to anything urgent and serious. No, he must attend meetings, or write editorials; cultivate cotton-fields, or accept some responsibility of grave and national import, in order to make a fool of himself.
And yet my heart is aching and longing to meet, with proper ceremony, the first day of the rainy season, or fill every pore of my mind with the smell of mango blossoms. Is that allowable at the present moment? Does our south breeze still enjoy all the frivolities of spring days? Have our sunset hours taken the vow of discarding all traces of colours from their cloud turbans?
But what is the use of complaining? The poets are too primitive for this age. If they had not ignominiously been discarded by the law of evolution, they would long ago have grown into their career as politicians. But the mischief is—they have been left behind in a world which has stopped growing, where things are still important which have no use or market value. The more the call for action grows loud from across the sea, the more I feel conscious of the poet in me, that cries, “I am of no use—leave me alone to my utter inutility.”
But I know, when I reach India, the poet will be defeated; and I shall piously study the newspapers—every paragraph of them. But, for the present, even the poet is at a disadvantage—for the sea is rough, my head is swimming and the English language is extremely difficult to manage in a rolling ship. *