LETTERS FROM ABROAD
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."
