Tone of The Gift of India by Sarojini Naidu: 2022

In this article, we discuss the tone of the poem The Gift of India by Sarojini Naidu. The tone of the poem is predominantly patriotic. The speaker evokes a sense of patriotism as well as a kind of emotional response in the readers. The speaker of the poem is Mother India who expresses immense pride in the sacrifice of her sons to ensure a better future. Her sense of grief and despair at the loss of her sons is overwhelmed by a sense of pride in their achievements. The brave and courageous soldiers who lost their lives in foreign lands to serve British interests are given the utmost respect in this poem. Sarojini Naidu portrays a picture of the fearless soldiers who thought about the country’s pride before themselves. Being a patriot herself, Sarojini Naidu anticipates the existence of a world in which love overwhelms hatred, peace overwhelms chaos and harmony overwhelms wars. She repeatedly mentions the heroic deeds of the patriots who went to foreign lands to fight foreign wars just to make sure that they obey their call of duty.
The disheveled and fragmented bodies of the dead Indian martyrs on the blood-tainted battlefield brings forward a picture of the cruelty existing in the world. However, the speaker hopes that all these suffering and sacrifices would get the people of India a productive outcome. She prays for the dead soldiers and also for a better world devoid of savagery and brutality. There is a note of condescension of the British to the Indian soldiers as Sarojini Naidu suggests that the British eulogized their dead soldiers but not the Indians who supported them selflessly. The patriotic mood pervading the poem is intensified in the last stanza as the poetess urges people to respect and honor the soldiers who left everything behind just to live up to the global commitments of the nation. Thus, the tone of The Gift of India is of patriotism and bravery.