Sir Nizamat Jung

“ From my sad heart, which ceases then to pine;
And Hope and Joy their quenched beams relume
And gild the universe with light divine.
XII ETERNAL JOY Truth is but as the eye of God doth see;
And Love is truth, and Love hath made thee mine.
What though on earth our lives may not combine,
Love makes us one for all Eternity!
God gives us to each other, bids us be
Each other's soul's fulfilment, makes Love shine
Upon our souls as His own light divine. ”

“ And whether the average man accepts or rejects the standards therein embodied, lovers of poetry will recognise that the Nawab, in his championship of a high and noble ideal, fights in the same army as Dante and Michelangelo,—neither of them cloistered dreamers, neither of them arm-chair theorists, but men who lived and loved and suffered amidst the turmoil of a world they viewed with wide-open eyes and unflinching minds.
The chivalrous ideal of an exalted and inspiring love can be rejected if we please;—but let none claim to be manly because this ideal seems too ethereal. ”

“ SONNETS BY THE NAWAB NIZAMAT JUNG BAHADUR "Love is not discoverable by the eye, but only by the soul. Its elements are indeed innate in our mortal constitution, and we give it the names of Joy and Aphrodite; but in its highest nature no mortal hath fully comprehended it."
EMPEDOCLES. "Every one choose the object of his affections according to his character.... The Divine is beauty, wisdom, goodness, and by these the wings of the soul are nourished." ”

“ This note on the structure of the Sonnet would fail in its purpose if it distracted the reader from the spirit behind the form;—for the spirit is the life,—and few who read these Sonnets will deny that the spirit of Nizamat Jung is that of the true poet, ever striving to look beyond ephemeral sorrows up to the Eternal Beauty—now hidden behind a veil, but some day to be revealed in all its splendour and completeness. ”

“ The ideal is to combine deep and exalted feeling with perfect expression, and produce a whole which goes to the heart like a beautiful piece of music, and satisfies the mind—like one of those ancient Greek gems which, in a small space, presents engraved images symbolic of sublime ideas vast as the universe.
The Nawab Nizamat Jung has written in English several sonnets which we should admire even if English were his native language. ”

“ Imagination the tool, and the body the plastic material," said a famous physician, who was also a practical man of the world;—and the poet who identifies his will and imagination with the eternal truths, who looks up to the stars instead of down into the mud, may always, even in his weariest hours, cheer himself by mental companionship with the other resolute souls whose pens have been used as swords in the service of Divine Beauty. ”

“ But despite the continued vogue of the Sonnet, and its association with the names of such masters as Dante, Petrarch, Tasso and Michelangelo in Italy; Ronsard in France; Camoens in Portugal; Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth and Rossetti in England—to say nothing of a host of minor poets, who, though one star differeth from another in glory, yet constitute a brilliant galaxy—it is remarkable that even now the average non-literary reader when asked "What is a Sonnet?" ”

“ The more successful a sonnet, the more the reader is apt to accept its beauty as if it had grown by a natural process like a flower. This, perhaps, is the best compliment we could pay the poet; but if the poet is one who boldly essays a most difficult and complex form, in a language which for him is foreign, then we should pause a moment to consider what it is that he has set out to accomplish. ”

“ Of my worn soul! Love whispered, 'This the meed
Of hearts that keep their faith amidst Love's woes.'
XXII TWO HEARTS IN ONE Two hearts made one by Love that cannot die
Whatever life may bring, shall never part;
In life they're one, and e'en in death one heart!
Are we not such, Belovèd, thou and I?
Ah, then, why mourn that 'neath another sky,
Far from these longing arms and eyes thou art? ”

“ His love of poetry and history, if on the one hand it has intensified his realisation of the sorrows and tragedies of earthly life, on the other hand has equipped him with a power to awake in others a vivid consciousness of the moral value of literature,—through which (for the mere asking) we any of us can find our way into a kingdom of great ideas. ”

“ As, however, while the Great War lasts, few of us have leisure for literary experiments, it will perhaps be best to read these Sonnets primarily for their soul and spirit. In melody and expression they are of varying degrees of merit and completeness, but in the inspiring ideal they consistently embody they rise to heights which have been scaled only by the noblest. ”

“ He loves not only human beauty, but everything that is beautiful and exquisite in its own kind,—marvelling at it with a wonderful admiration."
Here we see defined the temperament of the heroic poet, that inner nobility and exaltation without which mere technical skill can avail little in moving and holding the hearts of men. ”

“ But Truth, has many faces; and scarcely any poet (except perhaps Shakespeare) has come within measurable distance of expressing every aspect of the human character. The Nawab could take pleasure in reading poets as temperamentally dissimilar as Shelley and Scott, Spenser and Byron,—to name only a few. ”

“ How difficult this is for the poet can only be realised by trying to achieve it.
The earliest writers of English sonnets were two very romantic and gallant men of action, Sir Thomas Wyatt, and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey,—both destined to brief brilliant lives and tragic deaths. They were followed by Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney and a host of Elizabethan poets, courtly and otherwise. But it is Shakespeare whose Sonnets (though not conforming to the Petrarchan model) show the most force and fire of any in our language until those of Milton. ”

“ A famous British General (still living) was once asked, "What is the most essential quality for a great leader of men?" And he replied in one word "SYMPATHY." The General was speaking of leadership in relation to warfare ”

“ But this rule is by no means invariably followed; even Wordsworth and Rossetti often rhymed the first with the third, and the second with the fourth lines; and sometimes used only two sounds,—the first, third, and fifth lines making one rhyme and the second, fourth, and sixth the other.
As already said, these liberties are permitted, for the sestet is not under such arbitrary regulations as the octave.
There are writers who keep all the rules, and yet leave their readers cold ”