Dhan Gopal Mukerji wrote “Steps of Rose” in the early twentieth century, after he had left Bengal for the United States and begun making a career as a writer and lecturer. Today he is often remembered for the children’s classic *Gay-Neck: The Story of a Pigeon*, but his early poetry shows a different side of his imagination. In collections such as *Sandhya, Songs of Twilight*, Mukerji brought an Indian spiritual sensitivity into English lyric verse. The word “Sandhya” itself means twilight, the meeting point of day and night, and that in-between hour is exactly where “Steps of Rose” takes place. Written against that background of cultural crossing, the poem fuses a Western free-verse form with an Eastern feeling for the sacredness of evening.
The poem transforms a sunset into a slow act of building. Evening appears as a kind of architect, making “steps of rose / On rosier steps” between the falling sun and the “infinite roof of space.” Those opening lines are not only lovely to say; they create a feeling of something deepening, as if each color were leading toward a purer version of itself. The second half turns from the sky to the human imagination. “Our fancies / May fold their wings,” Mukerji writes, and instead of flying, they can walk on “gleams / Of unending purple and pink” upward to a “blue pool” and drink from its “starry rim.” The central idea is an ascent through beauty toward infinity. Twilight becomes a passage that the mind can climb, step by step, moving from the warm colors of sunset to the cool, star-filled darkness of a higher sky.
The construction of the poem mirrors that idea. The lines are short and enjambed, so the eye moves down the page as if descending or ascending a staircase. Many lines carry only two or three strong stresses, making the movement feel both light and deliberate; the single full stop at the end of the first stanza gives a moment of rest before the sentence glides into the next movement. There is no fixed rhyme scheme, but the sounds are carefully graded: “rose,” “rosier,” and “roof” echo one another; “pink” flows into “pool” and “rim.” The colors themselves form a progression. Rose and purple and pink belong to the sunset, while the blue pool and starry rim belong to night. The phrase “the infinite roof of space” opens the poem outward, turning a familiar evening sky into an immense architecture. Against that vastness, human fancies do not need to conquer or struggle; they simply fold their wings and walk. The verb “fold” matters here because it implies gentleness and consent. These fancies are not soaring ambitions but quiet acts of attention.
What makes “Steps of Rose” significant is its compact vision of imagination as a spiritual bridge. The rose-colored stairway is not really built of stone or clouds; it is built of perception, of the way light lingers and changes at dusk. The pause after “blue pool . . .” is equally important: it delays the final act of drinking and makes the starry rim feel distant, then suddenly near. Drinking from that rim suggests that the highest reach of the imagination is not a reward of power or escape but a kind of communion with the cosmos. Mukerji’s poem belongs to an era when many poets were trying to make English verse carry the rhythms and worldviews of other traditions, and his twilight staircase remains a lucid example of that blending. More than that, the poem still works because it slows the reader down, aligning the movement of a few short lines with the patient climb it describes. In the space between sunset and stars, Mukerji finds not separation but a stairway—and leaves a few steps for the reader’s own fancy to climb.