THE SOUL’S PRAYER

                                                                                                                       Sarojini Naidu

           Sarojini Naidu was one of the most gifted Indian poets. Her poems are appreciated not only in India but also in abroad. Popularly known as ‘the Nightingale of India’, Sarojini Naidu wrote in English about themes that are essentially Indian. Her poetry also reflects her love for her nation.

                 The poem The Soul’s Prayer reveals Sarojini Naidu’s mystic vision about the problems of life and death. The poem is an imaginary conversation between the poet and the God. The poet imagines herself to be a child of thirteen year old. She feels pride to take birth from His breath.  She pleads God to reveal the meaning of life and death.

Speak, Master, and reveal to me
Thine inmost laws of life and death.

The poet prays to God to give her not only the bliss of life but also the pain and sufferings of life. She strongly believes that only when she passes through the trials and tribulations of life, her soul will get satisfied. She further asks God to explain her the most complex thing of what happens to one before one’s birth and after one’s death. She wants God to tell this secret to her.

The God then answers her prayer. He promises her to provide her everything. He accepts to give her both “the passionate rapture and despair”. The God allows her to enjoy all emotional experiences both good and bad. She shall have both joys and sorrows, She shall have love that will burn her like fire and pain that will purify her like water.

God also informs her that even after having the experience of love, hatred, joys, sorrows, highs and lows of life, her soul will not get satisfied. It will have a strong desire to be released from the blind prayer. Her tired and forgiven soul will beg to learn about peace instead of intensity. It will want to know how to leave the burning and cleansing, and simply experience quite, underrated peace.

           At last, the poet finds solace in the knowledge that Life and Death, Light and Shadow are merely the two faces of God. Sarojini Naidu compares life to a prism through which the color of life, including joy and sorrow are realized. In the concluding stanza God bends from His sevenfold height with care to teach His children the meaning of His grace

           Thus, the poem concludes with a belief that life and death are interlinked with one another. So Shadow and Light are just like birth and death, like night and day, like inhaling and exhaling. .