Brief Notes on "Our Casuarina Tree"

• “ ‘Our Casuarina Tree’ ends the little volume. It opens with a description of the giant tree, festooned with the crimson flowers of a great creeper which winds round and round it ‘like a huge python’. By day and by night it is a centre of busy life and sweet bird-song. It is the finest object on which the poetess’s eyes rest as she flings wide her window at dawn, and sometimes in the early light

A grey baboon sits statue-like alone

Watching the early sunrise.

The shadow of the tree thrown across the tank makes the white water-lilies there look ‘like snow enmassed’. Yet, grand and beautiful as is the tree, it is dear chiefly for the memories that cluster round it—memories of a time when happy children played under its shade. The thought brings out an intense yearning towards the playmates lost:

O sweet companions, loved with love intense,

For your sakes shall the tree be ever dear!

To the poetess’s imagination, the tree in sympathy sounds a dirge ‘Like the sea breaking on a shingle-beach’. That ‘eerie speech’, she thinks, may haply reach the unknown land and strike a chord of memory there. Such a wail had always this power over her own mind. Even when heard by the sea-shore in France or Italy, it had always sent thought winging its way homeward bringing remembrance of the Tree as seen and loved in childhood.

The last verse of the poem, with its note of Romanticism, hints at a desire for immortality of verse, and ends with the beautiful line:

May Love defend thee from oblivion’s curse.

The eleven-lined stanza in which the poem is written is a new and very successful experiement.

For its rich imagery, the music of its verses, and the tenderness and pathos with which it is instinct, we would place this poem second to none in the volume (Das 340-341).

(Introductory material from: Das, Harihar. Life and Letters of Toru Dutt. London: Oxford University Press, 1921.)

• Additional introductory material in Edmund Gosse’s “Introductory Memoir” to Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan:

“In a poem now printed for the first time, Toru refers to the scene of her earliest memories, the circling wilderness of foliage, the shining tank with the round leaves of the lilies, the murmuring dusk under the vast branches of the central casuarina-tree. Here, in a mystical retirement more irksome to an European in fancy than to an Oriental in reality, the brain of this wonderful child was moulded” (Gosse, xi).

• In Life and Letters of Toru Dutt, Harihar Das notes that Dutt was familiar with John Milton’s Paradise Lost. On her reflections of her youth, Dutt states, “We used to read Milton with [Babu Shib Chunder Bannerjea] latterly; we read Paradise Lost over and over so many times that we had the first book and part of the second book by heart” (255).

(Text from University of Pennsylvania website: http://www.english.upenn.edu/Projects/knarf/Milton/pl4.html )

Our Casuarina Tree

Our Casuarina Tree¹

LIKE a huge Python², winding round and round
The rugged trunk, indented deep with scars,
Up to its very summit near the stars,
A creeper climbs, in whose embraces bound
No other tree could live. But gallantly
The giant wears the scarf, and flowers are hung
In crimson clusters all the boughs among,
Whereon all day are gathered bird and bee;
And oft at nights the garden overflows
With one sweet song that seems to have no close,
Sung darkling³ from our tree, while men repose.

When first my casement is wide open thrown
At dawn, my eyes delighted on it rest;
Sometimes, and most in winter,—on its crest
A gray baboon sits statue-like alone
Watching the sunrise; while on lower boughs
His puny offspring leap about and play;
And far and near kokilas⁴ hail the day;
And to their pastures wend⁵ our sleepy cows;
And in the shadow, on the broad tank cast
By that hoar⁶ tree, so beautiful and vast,
The water-lilies spring, like snow enmassed.

But not because of its magnificence
Dear is the Casuarina to my soul:
Beneath it we have played; though years may roll,
O sweet companions, loved with love intense,
For your sakes, shall the tree be ever dear.
Blent with your images, it shall arise
In memory, till the hot tears blind mine eyes!
What is that dirge-like⁷ murmur that I hear
Like the sea breaking on a shingle-beach?
It is the tree’s lament, an eerie speech,
That haply to the unknown land may reach.

Unknown, yet well-known to the eye of faith!
Ah, I have heard that wail far, far away
In distant lands, by many a sheltered bay,
When slumbered in his cave the water-wraith
And the waves gently kissed the classic shore
Of France or Italy, beneath the moon,
When earth lay trancèd in a dreamless swoon:
And every time the music rose,—before
Mine inner vision rose a form sublime,
Thy form, O Tree, as in my happy prime
I saw thee, in my own loved native clime.

Therefore I fain would consecrate a lay
Unto thy honor, Tree, beloved of those⁸
Who now in blessed sleep for aye repose,—
Dearer than life to me, alas, were they!
Mayst thou be numbered when my days are done
With deathless trees—like those in Borrowdale⁹,
Under whose awful branches lingered pale
“Fear, trembling Hope, and Death, the skeleton,
And Time the shadow¹⁰;” and though weak the verse
That would thy beauty fain, oh, fain rehearse,
May Love defend thee from Oblivion’s curse.


1 For brief notes on this poem see this post.
2 In The Life and Letters of Toru Dutt, Harihar Das notes that Dutt was familiar with Milton's Paradise Lost. Reflecting on her youth, Dutt states, "We used to read Milton with [Babu Shib Chunder Bannerjea] latterly; we read Paradise Lost over and over so many times that we had the first book and part of the second book by heart." (255).
3 The word Darkling very likely comes from Thomas Harding's "The Darkling Thrush" or John Keat's "Ode to a Nightingale."
4 The kokila is a bird of India, similar to the nightingale.
5 "To go forward, proceed; to journey, travel; to take one's way" (OED)
6 "Of trees, woods, or the like: Grey from the absence of foliage; showing the bare grey stems; Grey with age, venerable, ancient." (OED)
7 "A song sung at the burial of, or in commemoration of, the dead; a song of mourning or lament." (OED)
8 Dutt's brother, Abju, died in 1865, and her sister, Aru, died in 1874.
9 "The Borrowdale valley and lake, near Keswick, Cumbria, in the lake district. Location of Wordsworth's poem "Yew-trees."
10 An allusion to Wordsworth's "Yew-trees."

Dutt, Toru. Ancient ballads and legends of Hindustan. 2nd Edition. London: Kegan
     Paul, Trench & Company, 1885. 131-132. Print.