Page:The Silken Tassel By Ardeshar Khabardar 1918.pdf/13



''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''