Dhan Gopal Mukerji, born near Calcutta in 1890, was one of the first South Asian writers to reach a wide American readership. He later won the 1928 Newbery Medal for the children’s classic *Gay-Neck*, but his early poetry already reveals a distinctive mission: to turn Indian mystical feeling into English verse. “The Bells of Moonlight and Leaf” comes from that early period, written in the opening decades of the twentieth century, when many Western readers were drawn to Eastern spirituality. Mukerji gives them something stranger than exotic scenery—a landscape where nature becomes a silent liturgy.
The poem begins with an odd, almost riddling equation: moonlight and leaves are bells. Bells usually require striking, but these have “tongues of silence.” That paradox introduces the poem’s real subject—an order of experience that ordinary speech calls silence, but that the imagination hears as music. As the lines unfold through chiming in “silver, violet and green,” the scene stops being simply visual. Color, sound, smell, and touch blur together into one heightened, dreamlike attention.
Mukerji’s free verse shapes this blurring. He avoids a regular rhyme scheme, relying instead on alliteration and assonance—“shadow-sounds,” “dark threads of sleep”—to create an echo chamber of quiet music. Enjambment imitates the motion it describes: “Ringing, rising, then falling on / The ground” lets the phrase itself fall across the line break. The punctuation, full of commas and semicolons, acts like musical rests. When the poem shifts into simile, “Like liquid gems pouring to a measure / Of perfume,” the senses cross fully: sound becomes a liquid, perfume becomes rhythm, and “lavender tunes” makes color audible. The phrase “a dream-music of soundless sounds” compresses the whole method into one contradictory image.
One of the most important words arrives near the end: “tintinnabulation.” Edgar Allan Poe made the word famous in “The Bells,” where it rings with metallic noise. Mukerji borrows it and makes it “silver, silent.” That transformation is the poem’s argument. The music is not heard by the ear; it is perceived inwardly. The earlier phrases “tongues of silence” and “soundless sounds” prepare for this final paradox. The poem also expands through comparisons of increasing scale—from the ground to the deep sea to “an Eternal Dream.” The coral image, with its “pearl-harmonies” and “emerald tones,” pushes the synesthesia into an undersea, almost mythological space. Then comes the turn: “Ah! more than Eternal Dream, / This moment.” The passing instant is valued above timeless abstraction.
What makes the poem significant is its disciplined wonder. Mukerji does not merely describe nature; he makes language behave like the bells he imagines—silent, ringing, full of crossings between light and sound, color and touch. The “bells of moonlight and leaf” ring only in the reader’s attention. For a school audience, the poem offers a model of how poetry can refresh perception: it asks us to listen with the eyes and see with the ears, if only for one silver moment.