| Summary: | Calls to decolonize the Victorian canon have contributed to increased critical interest in Indian poet Toru Dutt. Our current scholarly approaches have proffered nuanced evaluations of the relationship between colony and metropole in Dutt's English-language poetry. But admirable efforts to center Dutt's voice in scholarly readings of her work have deprioritized close reading of the English texts with which Dutt was in conversation. The effect of this approach has been to obscure the complexity of Dutt's poetic engagement with her English referents. This essay offers a Miltonic reading of Dutt's most anthologized poem, "Our Casuarina Tree," to show how attending to Paradise Lost as closely as Dutt did makes available new readings of her work. While a conventional interpretation of "Our Casuarina Tree" posits the poem as a meditation on the poet's fraught dual identity, I read the poem's deployment of Miltonic form, imagery, and thematics as a reflection on feminine labor and the work of the woman poet. Training a close eye on Milton's epic, I argue, helps us more fully credit Dutt's own poetic labor. Ultimately, I suggest that decolonizing our analytic frames requires enabling colonial poetry itself to direct our readerly attention.
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