“How felt he when he first was told
A slave he ceased to be;
How proudly beat his heart, when first
He knew that he was free !—-“
These are the opening lines to the poem and they instantly communicate the theme. This particular poem is a forthright celebration of freedom and a rejection of the acceptance of being a slave. That makes this quote applicable on a broader scheme within the poet’s body of work. Many of his poems focus on this same concept of fighting against oppression and the glory that comes with being free. Although there is nothing in this poem that directly connects the cry of being free to the state of British colonialism in India, that situation permeates throughout the author’s verse. In another poem, for instance, he equates the Persian massacre of Spartans with a celebration of freedom by insisting that the true victors of the battle were the Spartans for refusing to bow down and accept slavery. Freedom and the pride which stems from it is most explicitly celebrated in these opening lines of this poem, but are touched upon if only tangentially throughout much of the poet’s canon.
“Brown, and withered as ye lie,
This, ye teach us, 'tis to die;
Blooming but a summer's day,
To fall in autumn quite away.”
These opening lines to this poem are preceded by quote from Percy Shelley. The author was deeply influenced by the Romantic poets of England, especially Shelley and Lord Byron. One of the consequences of this influence is a number of poems celebrating nature. The celebration of nature was a defining element of the Romantics. These lines set the stage for not just a celebration of leaves but the transformation of them into a metaphor for all living things, including humans. The poem opens with the speaker describing the leaves not at the height of their colorful bloom but with fall already behind. Rather than brilliant red or yellow or green, the leaves have turned brown. That height of glory experienced by the leaves before is already a memory. The poem begins from this point because it leads to the final stanza in which the metaphorical comparison is completed. The speaker, inspired by the end of the life cycle of leaves, moved to contemplate the reality that life is a cycle for everyone that will likely end before it is expected even though we all know what is coming.
"My country! In thy days of glory past
A beauteous halo circled round thy brow
and worshipped as a deity thou wast—
Where is thy glory, where the reverence now?"
These are the opening lines to what is probably the author’s best-known poem. It asserts in miniature a theme that also comes to permeate throughout his body of work. Derozio is actually referred to as India’s first national poet. He arrived at this celebrated honor through writing a series of poems that extol the virtues of India’s past and question its future as a result of British occupation. The exclamation of possessorship of his country that begins this quote is one which characterizes much of the author’s other poems. This declaration of ownership of his country is not intended to be taken politically but culturally. The subtext is that India belongs to its native people yet at the time of writing was in danger of losing its history and culture to the forced assimilation of British history and culture as a result of that nation’s imperialist spread of colonization around the world. The final words carry more than a hint of accusation in its suggestion that the British have brought no glory of their own to the country. Nor can those natives find much to be reverent toward under the influence of this foreign intrusion.
