Coulee City dispatch. [volume] (Coulee City, Wash.) 19??-19??, 1937-04-01
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
WHO'S NEWS
THIS WEEK.
| BY Lemuel F. Parton
Kashmir Poetess Recalls Glam0r0us
DAYS of -NinetieS

'
Kashmir Poetess Recalls Glamorous
Days Of -Nineties
|NEW YORK.-In Victorian
~ England of the Nineties,
Arthur Symonds wrote of the
shy, young poetess, Sarojini
Naidu, ''her eyes are like pools
and you seem to- fall through
them to depths below depths"
Her exquisite Kashmir beauty
has faded now, but it is she and
no other who starts cables and
linotypes gathering all over the
world with the news that Lind
bergh blushed.
It was her poetic laudation Of the
colonel at the meeting of the parlia-
ment of religions at Calcutta, in
which he was compared to Buddha,
which flushed the rose tint on the
colonel's cheek and made news that
sidetracked all other events of the
world parliament of religions. That
was the headline and the story. 1t
is an interesting citation of compar-
alive news values.
In London of the eighties and nine
ties, fame was bestowed when Aub-
rey Beardsley, Burne-JOnes and
Watts painted the portrait Of any
new entrant. Thus Lily Langtry
was converted from singularly in
ept and fumble-footed actress to
great lady of the stage. Sarojini
Naidu was both beautiful and intelli-
gent. Ignoring veil and caste, the
first of her Brahmin line to do so,
she entered Girton, at Cambridge.
Sir Edmund Gosse discovered her
poetry and gave it his august lit
erary sanction. The above painters
rushed in with their mail sticks and
brushes, and the poets with psaltery
and harp-Ernest Dowson among
them Richard LIE Caffeine and
Max Beerbohm in their wake. Her
poems were recited, sung, chanted
at all great salons.
Like Lindbergh, then in times
suspense file, she climbed down
from her Pegasus to a blare of
fame and adulation. Her gorgeous
native dress, her beauty, her silken
"sari," her exquisite voice, her en-
chanting verse were more familiar
to the empire than the growing ten
sion of Johannesburg, Algeciras,
and Agadir.
She went back to India to war on
the incoming machine age which
was to make the later Lindbergh
the Siegfried of its iron niebelung.
She put aside her silken gown and
wore the coarse skhaddar" of Gan
dhi's early civil disobedience move
ment. She went to Jail, two or three
years altogether.
She married out of her caste, as
sailed the caste system, led crowds
through the city streets, gave her
property to the nationalist move
ment. In 1925, she became presi-
dent of the Indian national congress.
In England they still sing her po-
ems, set to music by Liza Lehman
and Coleridge Taylor.
She is fifty-six years old, the
mother of four children, with a
slight figure and lined, gentle face,
an ally of Annie Besant in the
''swaraj" movement in the latter's
years. A strange transit Of epochs
and cultures, this, stirring an astro-
nomical blush over the seven seas.
The Burne-Jones salon was Saro-
JIM Naidu's LIE Bourget field. 1t
would be interesting to eavesdrop
at heart-to-heart talk between the
colonel and the poetess about con-
formity and dissent and whether it
is better to 60 to glory or to jail,
and whether she is sorry she ever
put aside her silken gown. At any
rate, in Lindbergh, she hymns chiv-
airy and courage, no matter what
she thinks of his epoch.
When "New Freedom" Was New.
JOSEPH P. TUMULTY never
y quite caught step in the Roose-
welt parade, but there he was, after
all these years, on the Presidents
left at the recent "victory dinner"
with less hair than he had in the
early days of the "new freedom"
but with Irish eloquence unin-
paired. He reports Democratic
fires burning in the hills and val
AZ