Dhan Gopal Mukerji’s “Nisha” reads like a lullaby that the whole universe is singing to itself. Mukerji was born near Calcutta in 1890 and later moved to the United States, where he became a pioneering Indian voice in English-language literature; many students may know him as the first South Asian writer to win the Newbery Medal, but his early poetry shows a quieter side of his imagination. “Nisha,” whose title means night in Sanskrit, belongs to this early work, published in collections such as *Rajani: Songs of the Night* (1916). Written at a time when Indian poets writing in English were blending British Romantic lyricism with Indian spiritual ideas, the poem turns a simple moment of falling asleep into a vision of cosmic connection.
At first the poem seems to describe a dreamlike chain of events. The speaker is drifting off while hearing a melody that moves “from lip to lip.” Those lips do not belong to people; they belong to the stars, the wind, a rose, and a nightingale. The stars sing the melody to the wind, the wind carries it to the rose, the rose gives it to the nightingale, and the nightingale sings it back “to the stars, the earth and the sea.” There is no single source and no final destination. The central idea is that beauty, song, and life are not separate possessions but one continuous current passing through every part of nature. The speaker, simply by listening, is included in that current and falls asleep “dreaming,” not just resting.
The poem’s shape mirrors this idea. It is written in short free-verse lines that move with the ease of breathing or of a song handed from one voice to another. There is no regular rhyme scheme, but sound is carefully layered: “stars sang,” “rose shivering,” and the soft “s” sounds in “sang it / Back to the stars, the earth and the sea” make the lines feel hushed and musical. The repeated word “it” is small but crucial. Each time “it” appears, the melody is handed forward, so the grammar itself performs the poem’s meaning. The opening and closing also form a circle: the speaker begins by falling asleep and ends by falling asleep dreaming, while the melody travels out and returns to where it began.
Mukerji’s imagery relies on gentle personification. The stars, wind, rose, and nightingale are not background scenery; they are participants in a conversation. The detail of the rose “shivering in the cold of night” gives the poem a hint of tenderness and vulnerability, as if the song is also a form of warmth. “Melody” is the key word, more than simply music: it suggests something spiritual, a vibration that can be passed through bodies and elements without losing its wholeness. The repeated verb “fell” connects the speaker’s surrender to sleep with the melody’s movement, linking human and cosmic rhythms. And the final word, “dreaming,” transforms sleep from passivity into a way of listening.
What makes “Nisha” significant is the way its form and meaning are inseparable. It does not merely describe nature as connected; it enacts that connection through a circular, relay-like structure. For a school audience, it offers a different way of seeing the natural world: not as a collection of separate things to be used or observed, but as a living chorus in which each voice carries the same song. In just a few lines, Mukerji brings together the intimacy of a lullaby and the vastness of the cosmos, and he invites the reader to do what the speaker does—listen, and let the song carry us into a dream.