My country!
In thy days of glory past
A beauteous halo circled round thy
brow
and worshipped as a deity thou
wast—
The meaning (i.e.,
significance: meaning expressed), and thus the relevance (i.e., pertinence to subject),
of the quote you ask about lies in the quoted lines directly above. This sonnet--with
concatenated rhyme at lines 3-4 with 5-6 and 7-8 with 13-14, thematically connecting the
first two quatrains and the couplet--focuses on the past splendor and glory of India.
Then, the poetic speaker--presumably Derozio himself--determines a way to pay homage to
India's glorious past.
The three lines beginning "My
country!" reveal the glory that was India's, with India described as having a gold halo
around its personified brow, "A beauteous halo circled round thy brow." India's glory
was so great that it was worshipped as a deity. With colonization (not explicitly
mentioned but implied), the mighty "eagle pinion" (a metonymy and a literal pinion
feather) that was "tied down" in captivity is now seen "groveling in the lowly dust."
(This is a metaphorical allusion to falconry's imprisonment of birds of
prey.)
In the passage beginning "Well--let me dive," the
speaker declares how he will reclaim a small fragment of India's past glory and extol it
to the world. He presents this aspiration as a metaphor describing salvaging the
treasure from a ship wreck. This metaphorical allusion compares salvaging to the act of
writing the sonnet that will immortalize India's past splendor. This follows a
traditional sonnet theme immortalizing things the poet values, like love and beauty, in
the ink of a sonnet, such as in Shakespeare's Sonnet
63.
The relevance (i.e., pertinence to the matter at hand)
is that the speaker's native land will not go quietly into the oblivion of subjugation
in colonization. What concludes the sonnet is the speaker's declaration that his guerdon
(i.e. reward, recompense) shall be that some reader might grant "one kind wish" for his
immortalized India.
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