The Silken Tassel/Introduction
INTRODUCTION
I am told that Mr. Khabardar is a popular poet in his mother-tongue, Gujerati, and I can well believe it on the assumption that a poet’s wealth of ideas and metrical power is capable of spending itself through more than one language, In Mr. Khabardar’s case it obviously should be so. He has lived and listened so closely to Keats and Francis Thompson and other masters of lyrical English, and he has made their speech and method so fully his own—in these English poems of his—₮that it is only on the rarest occasion that a close reader comes on an accent which discloses the foreign lip. I f his technical mastery is so strong in a foreign language, his expression in his mother-tongue must indeed he as excellent as I am told it is. This gives one the feeling that, how ever fluently and sweetly he may sing in English of the joy of human love and Divine vision, one is still, in his English poems, only on the threshold of his genius. My introduction of Mr. Khabardar is, therefore, somewhat complicated. I cannot introduce him as an Indian poet, for he is not here singing in an Indian language, and if he was, I should unfortunately he none the wiser. I cannot introduce him as an English poet, because he is not one. But I can introduce him—as himself; as one who songs in this book melodiously and until fulness of that level of human life which is the common experience of all humanity, and (which is his special excellence) of that higher level of spiritual realisation which is familiar to Indian experience, and which may the sooner find utterance in English poetry by being voiced in the orient in songs such as these.