“The Bangle Sellers” begins with what feels like a scene from a fairy tale. A chorus of the titular bangle sellers—that is, peddlers who sell bracelets—sing together of how they carry their “shining loads” of jewelry to a beautiful “temple” to sell them. This poem, then, is their peddler’s chant, their way of attracting customers.
But right away, these guys don’t seem like ordinary street merchants. They’re not just offering simple jewelry, but:
[...] delicate, bright
Rainbow-tinted circles of light [...]
The imagery here suggests there’s something magical and extraordinary about these bracelets. Every color of the rainbow, they shine with a light of their own; clearly, they’re poised to mean something.
An early hint of the bangles’ symbolism arrives when the peddlers declare that these bracelets are made to be:
Lustrous tokens of radiant lives,
For happy daughters and happy wives.
These ornaments, in other words, are meant to adorn women living their best lives. And those best lives, this poem will suggest, are highly traditional ones. They’re also lives defined in terms of relationships. If one is a “happy” woman, the bangle sellers’ song suggests, one is either in the “daughter” phase of one’s life or the “wife” phase—identified, either way, by one’s connection to a family.
This, then, will be a poem in praise of a traditional way of feminine life (and, more particularly, an Indian way of life, as the reader will see). The bangle sellers aren’t merely offering jewelry, but symbolic tokens of a woman’s life well lived.
The poem will present its vision of female happiness and harmony in a fittingly harmonious form. Each of the poem’s sestets (or six-line stanzas) is written in flexible, pulsing accentual meter. That means that the lines all use the same number of beats (four, in this case), but don’t stick to any one kind of metrical foot. Here’s how that sounds in the first two lines:
Bangle sellers are we who bear
Our shining loads to the temple fair...
Readers might also notice that these two lines form a rhyming couplet. The whole poem will be written in these crisp paired rhymes.
All together, the poem sounds as harmonious and well-ordered as the idealized lives it describes.