Men That Keep Attention: Life and Contribution: Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, The First Indian Poet in English

                                                       

The first Indian poet in English Henry Louis Vivian Derozio was born in 1809. By the early influence of his mother and teacher, establishing the dimension of his thinking and writing, he wrote The Fakir of Junghera, a Metrical Tale (1828) inspired by the gigantic rock rising out of a river and woven around a young Brahmin widow. Read More Men That Keep Attention This poem launched him on his rewarding poetic career- he came into contact with john Craft, Editor of The Examiner who helped him to get an important position in The Indian Gazette.

  

Henry L. V. Derozio

As a poet, creditable are his achievements, Derozio is to be chiefly admired for the great promise underlying his published work. Like Keats and Chatterton before him, like Toru Dutt and Aru Dutt after him, Derozio moved in the fields of poetry for all to brief a period: all of them were alike in the Shellian phrase, “inheritors of unfulfilled renown".  Read More Indian English Derozio’s sonnets and executed with good craftsmanship: again and again, he achieves that fusion between thought and expression, feeling and from, which distinguishes all his poetry. Read More Men That Keep Attention No doubt, the technique of most of his poems is, not unnaturally, derivative: writing as he did in the eighteen twenties, Derozio inevitably came under the spell of Byron and Thomas Moore. Derozio’s must ambitions work, The Fakir of Jungheera, is fill of Byronic echoes: The Brahmin widow Nadine is well delineated: she escapes sati at the last moment, being carried away by a robber chief: but other sufferings are now her portion in life and she loses her robber chief and is thus widowed a second thane, she claps the dead body frantically:

As if she dreamed of him in her embrace but they who thought. That life was tenanting her breast, and sought some answer from her heart to finish the doubt, found that its eloquence had all burned out. Naline has found her peace in blissful union in the fact of death.

While Derozio’s language is remind incest of Byron and Moore, his ardent love for his county, his passion for social deform and his tenor and courageous humanely, are entirely his own. Even on his death-bed, he did not lose either his equanimity or his brave faith. Read More Men That Keep Attention Life Donne, Derozio faces the awful mystery of Death challengingly, triumphantly:

“But man’s eternal energies can make an atmosphere around him, and so take Good out of evil, like the yellow bee that snacks from flowers malignant a sweet treasure o tyrant fate! Thus shall I vanquish thee? For out of sintering shall Gaiter pleas me.”

Derozio lived a beautiful life-it was fact the best poem that he wrote.  Read More Indian English He loved his pupils, he loved him vocation, and he loved his country, loved life in its seeming turmoil as also in its quintessential harmony: and when he could live in the world no more, barely at the age of twenty two, he was brave in the hour of death. Read More Men That Keep Attention His tomb is located in the south pack street burial ground in Calcutta and, to quote his own words: There all in silence let him sleep him sleep there are nothing o’er him but the heavens shall weep. There never pilgrim aid his serine shall bend, but holy parts shine, their mighty vigils clap!

Ardhendu De

Ref: 

Indian literature in English : Walsh, William, 1916- : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive. (n.d.). Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/indianliterature0000wals

Indian English literature since independence : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive. (n.d.). Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/indianenglishlit0000unse

Peterson. (2013). Victorian Poets, Politics, and Networks: Response. Victorian Studies, 55(2), 309. https://doi.org/10.2979/victorianstudies.55.2.309