Prose Poems of Tagore by Dr. Bina Biswas

VERSES OF SORROW

The evening star comes in the wake of departing day

And the breath of twilight is deep with the fullness of a farewell feeling.

…with my hungry eyes;

Seeking and crying, where art thou,

Where, O, where!

Where is the immortal flame hidden in the depth of thee! (Nishphal Kamona )

The aim of this chapter is to study Tagore’s poems of sorrow and his ultimate acceptance of the God’s ways to man.

As a young poet, deep in love with life, once romaniticised with death in one of his earlier poems Maron/“Death” little did he know that death would become his constant companion.   The Sanskritised diction of the poem shows the poet’s initial fascination for the classical writings and Vaishnava literature and all the poems in this diction are perhaps a revolutionary manifesto and the poet had clear ideas as to what he was doing.  An attempt is made here to translate the first two stanzas though typically the essence of the original is compromised where the poet prays to death by epitomizing him as Krishna, the dark god:

O Death,

   Thou art my Krishna.

Dark as cloud as thou

dark locks,

Bloodied palms with blood-drunk lips

Caress with thine icy, merciful palms

give Immortal nectar.

   Thou art my Krishna.

O Death,

   Thy name is Krishna 

Ever-artless thou, cruel Madhava

Thou cannot ferry my vessel.

wan Radha with two relentless

tearful eyes, wails

‘thou my Madahva, thou

 My escort,

Rid my pain.’

Death, thou come, come!

(Maron/“Death”, translation mine)

Death, living with him on terms of understanding and perhaps no one had thought more deeply on death than Tagore.  In 1884, at the age of twenty-three, the death of Kadambari was world-shattering for the poet.

Tagore made a mention of it in The Reminiscences:

In the meantime, death made its appearance in our family.  Before this I had never met Death face to face.  When my mother died I was quite a child…

The acquaintance which I made with Death at the age of twenty-four was a permanent one, and its blow has continued to add itself to each succeeding bereavement in an ever-lengthening chain of tears.  The lightness of infant life can skip aside from the greatness of calamities, but with age, evasion is not so easy, and the shock of that day I had to take full on my breast.

     That there could be any gap in the unbroken procession of the joys and sorrows of life was a thing I had no idea of, I could therefore see nothing beyond, and this life I had accepted as all in all.  When of a sudden death came, and in a moment made a gaping rent in its smooth-seeming fabric, I was utterly bewildered.  All around, the trees, the soil, the water, the sun, the moon, the stars, remained as immovably true as before, and yet the person who was truly there, who through a thousand points of contact with life, mind and heart, was ever so much true for me, had vanished in a moment like dram. What perplexing self-contradiction it all seemed to me as I looked around!  How was I ever to reconcile what remained with that which had gone?[1] 

Suddenly one day at this time, Tagore came across an old picture of Kadambari Debi.  In another sense too, the days of his youth were restored to him.  At the time of her death, when he had known her for seventeen years, he had written:

“Another seventeen years might pass by.  So many new events might occur which will not be related to her in any way,” (in Pushpanjali: Rabindra Rachanabali). This proved true. Did the poet himself remember her constantly during this long period?  Had she been reduced to a static picture amid the dynamic flow of the living world?  In the poem Chhabi/“The Picture” the poet asks himself, “Had I forgotten you?” Afterwards, he writes in the poem:

My forgotten youth of long ago Has suddenly sent me a letter

Recalling who knows what…

…I am your youth made eternal,

Dwelling in the land of the infinite. (Chhabi/“The Picture”)                            

Gitanjali/ Song-Offerings is remarkable for its quietness of spirit, it yet created a sensation amongst the English and European readers when it was published in 1912-13. In some poems the poet shows the endlessness of God’s will as it expresses itself through man.  When the poet is tired and his heart is hard and parched, God comes with a shower of mercy that gives him strength and joy.  The union with God becomes a reality and many new aspects of their relationship are revealed.  The important thing in this meeting of God and man is God’s infinite love which brings freedom and joy.  The dominant note in the poems of Shesh Lekha/Last Writings is a note of joyousness, a flood of joy seems to have overspread the world and the poet feels blessed. The union of God and man is now looked at with a new vision: Does man alone feel this ecstasy? The God who is Jivan-Devata/“Life God” also expresses this happiness in every flower that blossoms, the river that flows eternally or in the cloud-laden sky that rains or the lamb kid that rolls down the meadow chasing a butterfly.  It is not beyond Him to be glad with the gladness of the rhythm of life.

If God is only a partner of man’s joys then God also shares the sorrows of man.  The poet says that only by submitting to the ways of God is the acceptance of the greater truths of existence.  Like Milton pays tribute to God after becoming blind in the “Sonnet On Blindness”:

When I consider how my light is spent,

Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,

And that one talent which is death to hide,

Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent

To serve therewith my Maker, and present

My true account, lest he returning chide

‘Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?’

I fondly ask: But Patience to prevent

That murmur, soon replies, ‘God doth need Either man’s work, or his own gifts; who best

Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best: his state is Kingly; thousands at his bidding speed,

And post o’er land and ocean without rest;

They also serve who only stand and wait.’ (Milton’s Sonnet “On Blindness”)

The God gives and He takes away.  The balance strikes thus.  Communion with God is achieved but at the same time God remains unachievable. The separateness, as well as union is what the Vedanta Philosophy calls Maya/Illusion.  The sense of separateness causes sorrow which is the part of the man’s greater existence and most poignant truth of his life.  The separation will be ended only when the man surrenders to Him, accepts His ways to men and leaves the fruits of his life behind him and move to the infinite mansion of the Lord.  The principle theme of the last group of poems is most appropriately death which breaks all barriers and enables the soul to return to its master like the flock of geese flying to the Infinity, Balaka/ “The Flight of Wild Geese”. 

          The achievement of simplicity through a mazy network thoughts, sentiments and images is the essence of Tagore’s poems dealing with the theme of death.  This theme prominently figures in many of his poems.  There is again variety and richness of the poems along with the poet’s muse of death. Life is imagined as a journey along a river at the call of the Boatman who beckons from the other shore.  The poet reinforces this idea by saying that it although people may smell flowers or critics may interpret poetry; the final purpose of all things – poems as well as flowers – is to point to God whom man meets in death.  The full realization of life comes through death.

In some poems Tagore adopts a more serious attitude.  The approach of death makes him enjoy the richness of life and the poet has no regrets.  The faith in God’s greatness enables the poet to rise superior to personal sorrow, because he knows that although his own finite world could not hold back his loved ones, they find place in the God’s infinitely large mansion where life is eternal.  Here the personal becomes universal and sorrow becomes peace.  Tagore wrote in his memoirs:  

…yet in the midst of this unbearable grief, flashes of joy seemed to sparkle in my mind, now and again, in a way which quite surprised me. That life was not a stable permanent fixture was itself the sorrowful tidings which helped to lighten my mind.  That we were not prisoners for ever within a solid stone wall of life was the thought which unconsciously kept coming uppermost in rushes of gladness.  That which I had held I was made to let go – this was the sense of loss which distressed me – but when at the same moment I viewed it from the standpoint of freedom gained, a great peace fell upon me…[2]

The young poet wrote Maron/ “Death” imitating the Vaishnava poetry but later in life, when the mind was ripe and aged the voice becomes different:

Stretching towards time past and time to come:

In the midst of this dense manifold suddenly I am not there.

Can that be the truth?

Is there anywhere even the minutest breach through which this arrogant negation might enter?

 Would that not by now have sunk this cosmic vessel.

 Had death been mere emptiness,

Rude denial of the vast manifold? (“Death”, translated by Sukanta Choudhuri)

And again in another poem in Maron-Milan/“Death-Tryst”:

 I’ll go where your boat awaits me,

       Death, my beloved death,

Where winds from the shoreless ocean

       The path of darkness tread.

If I see the north-east corner

        Darken with heavy clouds

And the lightning’s stinging cobra

         Raise its deadly hood,

I will not turn in false fear,

        

     But silently be sped

Upon that great red torrent,

           Death, my beloved death. (Maron-Milan/“Death Tryst”)

                                                                                             

Published in the magazine Bangadarshan in August-September 1902, it was composed before the spate of bereavements suffered by the poet.  The association between love and death, common in Vaishnava poetry, is a common theme in Tagore’s works.  Here he reverses the thrust of the association by making death the lover.  In this poem the poet has mystified death as Shiva and followed the mythology which goes like this:

Shiva was married to Sati, the daughter of Daksha, Vishnu’s Manasputra/Offspring of his divine mind.  But though Daksha married his daughter to Shiva at the behest of Brahma and Vishnu, he was hostile to his divine son-in-law, who, he thought, did not pay him due reverence.  The wedding was thus a tense and ominous event, especially as described in medieval Bengali folk-tales and mythological poems.  Some passages of the sixteenth-century poet Mukunda Chakrabarti’s Abhayamangal are particularly close to this poem.  The wedding described anticipates the “Daksha-yagna”, a sacrificial feast arranged by Daksha from which Sati and Shiva were pointedly excluded.  Sati, who attended all the same, gave up her life from anger and dishonour when Daksha insulted her absent spouse.  Shiva thereupon invaded the feast with his fearsome attendants and wrought havoc.  The scene presented here thus blends love and marriage with destruction and death:

How splendid were the nuptials When Shiva went to wed, how many were his trappings, Death, my beloved death!

His tiger-skin goes flapping,

His bull in roaring breaks,

Entwined about his top-knot

A lunging mass of snakes,

His cheeks blown out and booming

And skulls about his neck;

His horn breaks into music,

O death, beloved death. (“Death Tryst”)

On 10 September 1937 in Shantiniketan, Tagore suddenly lost consciousness, to regain it only two days later.  In the poem “When first my consciousness was freed”, he refers to this experience as a return from extinction’s cave; in a Bengali New Year’s speech a few months later, from ‘the cave of death’.  He seems to have heard his own death summons.  The phrase Mrityudut/“Messenger of Death” keeps recurring through the volume of Prantik/On the Margin, he begins to see his body as an entity distinct from himself:

                               

 I saw– in the twilight of tired consciousness, My body drifting down black Kalindi’s stream:…

(“When first my consciousness was freed”)

                          

or

My body, swollen with gatherings from the past,

Fall, cast down from the horizon…

(“When first my consciousness was freed”)

In the last, he asserts that

Had death been mere          emptiness,

Rude denial of the vast manifold.

                             (“When first my consciousness was freed”)

          Having emerged from the cave in Prantik, he no longer saw darkness but the realm of consciousness everywhere.

In a letter of 24 April 1940, referring to his terminally ill nephew Surendranath, he writes: “When one thinks that such a person can be fated to suffer so much, one feels a deep resentment against the universal dispensation.”[3] “Has the poet’s unwavering belief in positive existence been shaken at last?  Does he admit the triumph of a malefic order?”[4] Now he brings countering forces into play.  Lying on his bed of sickness in 1940, he feels:

The dire silence of the indifferent universe

Suddenly awakens terror…

(“On the bed of Sickness”)

In Patraput, in Prithivi/“Ode to the Earth”, there is a grand gesture which hardly bears out the poetics of prose poems.  A romantic undertone is not absent; but pitiless and Udashin Prakriti/“Indifferent Nature” seems to be more intensely aware of the contraries of experience.  It could not have written by the early, comparatively innocent Tagore.  Here are a few lines:

Accept, O Earth, my homage as I make the last obeisance of the day

Bowed at the altar of the setting sun…

You sway the life of man with unbearable conflict,

The cup that your right hand fills with nectar

Is smashed by your left…

Today I stand before you without any illusion…

O aloof, ruthless Earth,

Before I am utterly forgotten let me leave my homage at your feet. (Udashin Prakriti/ “Indifferent Nature”)

The homage to the Earth had its complement in homage to Nothingness, “The Black Cavern of Oblivion”, to which his last illness gave an entry.  The poetry gained from both.  The death hunted Prantik/ “On the Margin”, is grim, even at times murky.  The mechanism of perception out of gear, it is a different voice of the borderland.  Gifts of Krishna Arupata/“Dark Formlessness”, the first poem sets the tone for the rest:

The messenger of death had come, slow unannounced in

the heart of darkness, of a lightless world and the subtle

dust that had clung, layer upon layer in life’s farthest

horizon, was cleansed with the acid of suffering.

From Nihil the finger of light had touched the hem of the huge, stupefied darkness…

That meeting of light with darkness had created in the heart’s sky an illusion of the vague and the unexpressed,

At last the confusion ceased. The gross prison-wall of ancient hypnosis – in a trice the mirage vanished.

New life burst without check

In the first awakening of a consciousness pure, stainless.

(“The Black Cavern of Oblivion”)

How different is this awakening from the “Awakening of the Waterfall”!  If still lyrical, it is a lyric of the dark night of the soul, the fate of every man in the long journey towards the self-understanding.  The poems of Prantik hang in lonely splendour and their place in the corpus is still to be fixed probably amongst the bests. A rare energy, of enhanced awareness, runs through them.  In a rare, flushing mimesis, the archetypal Upanishadic prayer comes alive in Abasanna Chetanar Godhulibelaye/ “I Saw in the Twilight”:

In the twilight of an exhausted consciousness, I saw my body float among the dim tides, carrying its cluster of emotions, its mixed memories, hoardings since birth, as in a carved drawing,

Carrying its flute…,

A dark Mystery descends upon the world, on land and water.  My body merges into endless darkness, turning into a shadow, a point.

Standing, alone, at the foot of the starry altar, gazing upward, with, folded hands, I cry…

O Fosterer, you have withheld your rays of light

Now reveal to me your form that is best and loveliest,

Let me see the Self one in you and me. (“I Saw in the Twilight”)

                     

The volumes that follow– Senjuti/Evening Lamp, Akashpradip/ Skylight, Nabajatak/ New Born, and Sanai/ The Shehnai – are on the whole tired poems.  Only in Nabajatak/New Born there is a hint of a new phase.  It is really in the last quartet – Rogsajyae/On the sickbed, Arogya/Healing, Janmadine/On My Birthday and Sesh Lekha/No Last Word, and in the last poem that was published posthumously his energy returns for last time, may be the last flicker of flame before it goes out.  There comes a new focus, a new vision of life on the borders of death.  Pity and terror did not spare Tagore and the poet who sang lovely songs of delight also went through the pain:

In this vast universe

the gigantic wheels of pain rotate…

Filling this body of clay

Sweeps the red, rambling tide of tears. (“Last Writing” translation mine)

His wife Mrinalini was only twenty-nine when she fell ill in Shantiniketan and was brought back to Jorasanko house. By this time the poet had become a poet of the world and he could not take care of the ailing wife. This could be justified in the following lines: “The doctors were unable to diagnose what was wrong with her and she gradually pined away. The last time he saw his mother Rathindranath said she could not speak; instead tears rolled silently down her cheeks.  Significantly Rathindranath did not mention his father’s reaction during the illness.  Rabindranath did not nurse Mrinalini for two months day and night, as loyally claimed by his biographer Kripalini; he remained absorbed in the running of the school, often away from Jorasanko.  After she died on 23 November, he showed no visible emotion and returned to Shantiniketan.”[5]  There his feelings came out in a series of poems written in December, Smaran/“Remembrance”, bearing the austere dedication 07 Agrahayan 1309/23 November 1902.  His grief was notably impersonal and generalized, with the exception of one or two poems where he spoke, for instance, of having found a few of his old letters secretly hoarded in his late wife’s room:

Who will provide them with a place of rest?

They belong to no one here, yet they exist.

Just as once you guarded them with your affection

Mustn’t someone now be giving you protection? (“Remembrance”)

Here it is too tempting to quote the following lines where Tagore

…on the other hand, did not bother to keep his wife’s letters.  The harsh truth was Rabindranath did not much miss his wife, either after her death or in later life. Tagore was ambivalent about family life.  He was devoted to his wife and children, but he increasingly saw them less as individuals than as part of greater cause to which he felt his life was dedicated. The result for all concerned would be much unhappiness, even tragedy.[6]

In 1896 he wrote a poem that expressed this tension.  This is his own translation, revised by W.B. Yeats:

At the midnight the would-be ascetic announced:

‘This is the time to give up my home and seek for God.  Ah, who has held me so long in delusion here?’

God whispered, ‘I,’ but the ears of man were stopped.

With a baby asleep at her breast lay his wife, peacefully sleeping on one side of the bed.

The man said, ‘Who are ye that have fooled me so long?’

The voice said again, ‘They are God,’ but he heard it not.

The baby cried out in its dream, nestling close to its mother.

God commanded, ‘Stop, fool, leave not thy home,’ but still he heard not.

God sighed and complained, ‘Why does my servant wander to seek me, forsaking me?’(Bairagya/ “Salvation”)

The poet seeks the infinite within the finite like the ‘Flight of Geese’ flying away to the eternity and the poet exclaims: “Not here! Elsewhere! Elsewhere! Somewhere else!” As a hardcore Romantic  Tagore sees the Nature as the Creator, Preserver and Destroyer, who like Mahakala/Shiva plays the game of destruction and creation. His “Death” poems have sorrow, pain and agonies of parting at the same time show the strength to come out of it and be a part of the Infinite where his personal sorrow becomes Universal grief.  The personal tragedies momentarily held the poet back but he could rise over them to attend to the larger and bigger vision that he has for himself.  

In other images, natural objects are not utilized as mere suggestive parallels but there is a complete infusion of humanity or divinity into Nature.  This identification of a feeling with its image enables the poet to express his most intense yearning which, without such aid, would be incommunicable.  As an example of transitional image one may mention the following song in Bengali aei korecho bhalo nithuro he:

                                   

 Amar ae dhoop na jalale, gandho Kichui nahi dahle, amar ae deep na jalale daeye na kichui alo

                              

For my incense never yields its

                             Perfume till it burns,

                             and my lamp is blind till it is

                             lighted. (Aei korecho bhalo nithuro

           He, translation mine)

In this image the incense and lamp only furnish the poet with examples of how through the fire of pain he may expect to realize the deeper purpose of his life, but in the intensity of agonized expectation, he also becomes one with the incense and the lamp. 

There are occasions when human life with its network of feelings and associations supplies the poet with hopes immortality.  The poet reviews his life with its daily surprises, its intimate connections with Nature and sees how in all periods flowers and insects, birds and clouds have had their fullest value of wonder for him.  If that is so death will mean only the lifting of the curtain, and in the new morning his life will be awakened in its fresh surprise of love.  The whole of the life he has known becomes thus a vivid symbol of what is unknown.

With the age and time, it seems, the poet grew up.  The revelations grew starker, more mature than at any time before.  He lived to his last breath.  The two poems which he had dictated, since he could not hold a pen, cast a new light on his poetry.  Never before had Tagore come so close to life.  Here is the poem “Sorrow’s Dark Night”:

Sorrow’s dark night, again and again, has come to my door.  Its only weapon, I saw,                      was pain’s crooked pretence: fear’s hideous gestures preluding its deception in darkness.                         Whenever I have believed in its mask of dread, fruitless      defeat has followed. This game of defeat and victory is life’s delusion;   from childhood, at    each step clings this spectre,                        filled with sorrow’s mockery. A moving screen of varied fears – Death’s skilful handiwork wrought in scattered gloom.

(“Sorrow’s Dark Night”)

Finally the poet was ready for the voyage, the Bourne from which no traveller returns.  He had written his farewell and made his terms with the Helmsman. Was there eternal peace in the final journey?

                              

In the playhouse of the world, many a time and oft have I tasted immortality in sorrow and in joy.  Again and again have I seen the Infinite through the veil of the limited.  For me the final meaning of life lay there: In beauty’s forms, in harmonies divine.

Today, when the door of the playhouse opens I shall make my final bow, and leave behind in the temple of the earth my offerings of a life-time that no death can touch.  (“The Final Offering”)

           

                                           

CRITICISM AND APPROACH

During more than half a century of incessant creative activity, Tagore produced about a hundred short stories, a large number of plays and playlets, a dozen novels, and as regards his poems, their name is legion  It will not be possible to mention many writers who output is equally large.  Yet it has to be remembered that he conquered the Western world and wrested the Nobel Prize on the strength of a modest volume of prose-poems.  Readers whose appreciation was reflected in the judgment of the Swedish Academy had little idea of the enormous quantity of his work and must have been entranced by the extraordinary literary beauty of Gitanjali/Song Offerings presented to them.  These poems are not mere translations; they are recreations in an alien medium of thoughts and emotions that were first expressed in the poet’s native tongue.  There is something in his poetry which is so universal and so profound that it can easily transcend the barriers of distance, of difference in language and culture.  Most Western admirers trace this power to an elemental simplicity, an innocence or spontaneity which makes his poetry “appear as much the growth of the common soil as the grass and rushes.”[7]  But his Eastern admirers are struck chiefly by the intricate artistry and richness of his poems and the innocence, the spontaneity or the simplicity which has been so much admires seems itself to be an effect of something more fundamental.  Most Western critics find the root of this extraordinary beauty in a strange harmony between emotion and idea or between poetry and religion.  Reviewing Gitanjali, The Times Literary Supplement read on 07 November 1912:

The chief cause of decadence in any art is impoverishment of subject-matter; and poetry is always liable to this impoverishment when it has not enough intellectual power to pass from its primitive stage of dealing with the particular to the task of dealing with the general….Poetry must conquer the province of ideas if it is not to be subdued by them into prose.  It must learn to express the emotions stirred by ideas, as it has in the past expressed the emotions stirred by facts; and in doing so it must remain poetry with the old music, imagery and unhesitating sense of values.  That is the problem which troubles our poetry at present and seems to endanger its very existence; and it is no wonder that Mr. Yeats should hail with delight the work of an Indian poet who seems to solve it is as easily as it was solved in Chinese painting of a thousand years ago. 

Mr. Tagore has translated his poems into English prose, simple and often half-rhythmical, so that their sense is not obscured by an obvious inadequacy of language; and in reading them one feels not that they are curiosities of an alien mind, but they are prophetic of the poetry that might be written in England if our poets could attain the same harmony of emotion and idea…[8]

The above is typical of the West’s first reaction to this poetry, so abundant, so spontaneous and yet so daring.  To the readers who have lived in intimate contact with the culture Tagore has created, the secret of his greatness lies in a sense of completeness, in a peculiar combination of sensuousness and mysticism.

In this chapter Tagore’s poetry is evaluated in the light of modern critical theories and ethos.  It is exploratory, with full awareness that further exploration is possible. Comparisons are drawn to see its value in relation to the world’s poetry, with the English Romantic poets in particular.  A comparative study is aimed in this chapter with references to Blake, Shelley, Keats, Browning, Tennyson, Wordsworth and Coleridge and a temptation for a higher flight is resisted since it is difficult to have a detailed analysis in this limited research work.  It is going to be a comprehensive study; it is evaluated against the romantic theories and traditions.  It is kept in mind that for every generalisation there is an exception. The chaste and narrow way of convention is not for the poet.  To pin him down to any one theory or system does not help achieve a fresh insight into some fundamental distinctions between Tagore’s poetry and romantic approaches to poetry.

At an early age William Blake amused himself by writing verses, afterwards collected and published under the title of Poetical Sketches.  The merit of the verse is not considerable, but it has an import of its own which shows Blake’s early interest in the Elizabethans; a profoundly formative influence in shaping his genius.  As is already pointed out Tagore also wrote verses imitating the Classical masters like Kalidasa, Chandidas and Vidyapati in Sanskritised vocabulary when he took to writing.  Like Blake’s Tagore’s early work also was chiefly lyrical.  As a visionary Blake touched both Art and Letters; he is ever looking behind the visible frame of things, for the glories and terrors of the world of spirit with the eye of one who cannot help dreaming dreams and seeing visions.  Tagore falls in this category of visionary.  The visionary in Blake overpowers the artist and a wild confusion of imagery often blurs his work, “whether as a draughtsman or singer: but if at times it drowns his clarity and simplicity, it gives a phantom touch of extraordinary subtlety, and to much of his work an exquisite beauty…”[9]  Tagore seems to have loved the Victorians and Elizabethans and the classical heroes of Sanskrit literature for their naturalness and rhythmic music and imitated them creatively in his works that seemed original and less intense than theirs but his own lyric faculty was highly imaginative.  In “Songs of Innocence”, Blake entered an Eden to which man had long been alien.  “No poet, not even Wordsworth, drew from simpler sources than he; and none revelled with such gay and exquisite abandon of spirit in their life.”[10]  He probably had the naturalness and spontaneity of a child and had his wild lavish fancy; and a quaint, delicious fantasy binds by threads of shimmering gossamer all living things; uniting them in a spirit of joyous abandon and fond compassion.    Tagore’s poems for children can be termed his Songs of Innocence, but the divine Purusha/Male incarnates himself in every child of his Shishutirtha/The Pilgrim-Place of the Child poems. Shishutirtha presents a belief, fully dressed, with materials taken from many lands and cultures and is rich in symbols and suggestions, some of these non-Indian.  There is conflict between Good and Evil in these poems. 

Both the naturalism and mysticism of the Romantic Revival found expression in Blake.  On the naturalistic side he deals with the simplest phases of life; with the instinctive life of the child; with love of flowers, love of hills and streams, the blue sky, and the brooding clouds; and yet the mystical vision of the poet is always transforming these familiar things, touching obscure aspects, and spiritualising the commonplace, into something strange and wonderful.  Tagore’s naturalism and mysticism also compelled him, like all other romantics, look for his subjects from the commonplace and with the Midas’ touch turn them into songs of eternity.  Unlike Blake Tagore was a mystic with blend of joy and sorrow.  Whereas Blake’s mysticism was a blend of wistful melancholy and he was a joyful mystic.  There are no mournful regrets in his verse, no sighing for a day that is gone by.  He gets angered at the Evil but does not shed tears.  “He accepts sorrow cheerfully as a necessary twin to joy.”[11]

The animal poems of Blake’s are rare verses from a romantic. It seems to Blake every spot is holy ground; angels shelter the birds from harm, the good shepherd looks after his sheep, the divine spark burns even in the breasts of savage animals. Cruelty to animals infuriated Blake; he would give them the same freedom he wishes for humankind.  He sighs in “Auguries of Innocence”:

A Robin Redbreast in a cage

Puts all Heaven in a Rage!

A Dog starved at his Mater’s Gate

Predicts the ruin of the State.

A horse misused upon the Road

Calls to Heaven for Human Blood.

Each outcry of the hunted Hare

A fibre from the Brain does tear.

A Skylark wounded on the wing

A Cherub does cease to sing.

He who shall hurt the little Wren

Shall never be belov’d by men.

The wanton Boy that kills the Fly

Shall feel the Spider’s enmity.

He who torments the Chafer’s sprite

Weaves a Bower in endless Night.

The Caterpillar on the leaf

Repeats to thee thy Mother’s grief.

Kill not the Moth nor Butterfly,

For the Last Judgment draweth nigh. (“Auguries of Innocence”)

Tagore’s mind is well-equipped that the transition from the human world, to the world of the ant and the flower presents no difficulty.  He looks at a wild flower whose name he does not know, with its violet leaves, “like cups to drink the light,” as it drops to the ground.  It makes no sound – it falls gently.  But the inner ear records the fact and he sees a strange panorama unroll itself before the mind’s eye:

In the long sweep of that endless time

This small flower has retained and kept going

its elemental resolve,

across the conflicts of creation… (Pushpa/“Flower”)

From the flower to the ant and the spider: walking along a garden path he comes across some spider webs and ant heaps.  He has been searching for the last lines of a song.  Here he writes something very different.  The two worlds seem to have no link or connection, are totally apart:

The eye does not see them clearly,

Yet they are at creation’s centre,

So many thoughts have been there for ages,

many problems, many needs,

a long history…

A man am I,

I know that in my mind I have an entry

into all the worlds,

in the kingdom of the stars and nebulae,

my bonds snap and give way.

But the spider’s world remains closed to me forever,

I cannot look through. (“A Mere Person”)

Tagore has spoken of his failure to enter into the world of the ant, spider and the flower.  But there are still wider circles of the consciousness to which his poetry opens. “Art”, Tagore defines, “is man’s total reaction to Reality.”[12]

And elsewhere in the poem “That Kid”, he laments

‘Had there been a poet of his world,

the beetle would have lived on his pages

and then he could not have left it unread.

Have I ever been able to write the inside story of the frog,

or the tragedy of the pariah dog?’

                                (Shei Cheleta/“That Kid”)

“There is an elfin note in Shelley, there is an elfin orchestra in Blake”[13] and there is a touch of elfin magic about some of Tagore’s works.  In the poem Anusuya/“Anusuya” fancy flies free.  It moves towards the vision of the ideal heroine, the hymn to the image of aesthetic beauty that Tagore and re-wrote all his life:

Adown the path of the skylight comes the heroine,

No maid of the twentieth century is she,

the ironical mistress of rhyme less poets… (Anusuya/ “Anusuya”)

          She is the mystery of elf land, her name is Anasuya.  Idyllic, mediaeval strains mix and mingle and anachronism reigns supreme.

        As a prophet, and a liberator of the human spirit, Blake is of first importance amongst the English romantics and Tagore, the first amongst the modern Indian poets.  Repression he regarded as Evil (as is evident in the poem Africa), though freedom from repression he interpreted not psychologically, but like Blake, mystically.

         Among the Calcutta literati Tagore came to be known as the Bengal Shelley, Michael Modhushudan Dutt was the Milton of Bengal and Bankimchandra Chatterjee was the Scott.  “This was insulting to Shelley and only likely to get me laughed at,” wrote Tagore in his memoirs.[14] But he was a greater prophet than Blake and Tagore because in his life he suffered more.  Before he was a poet Shelley was a prophet, and his poetry is largely the medium for his prophetic message. It seems Tagore also refused to accept life as it is lived like Shelley and persuaded others to follow it. 

           Two notes dominate Shelley’s work, epic, narrative and lyric alike– his devotion to liberty and his whole-hearted belief in love as the prime factor in all human progress.  It is felt that Tagore’s call to freedom made him start his own school at Shantiniketan, freedom from external restraint.

           When dealing with human passions, the dreamlike quality of Shelley’s verse and that of Tagore, it seems, is a defect rather than a merit.  Yet the fantasy note on the verses compels reader’s imagination.  The spontaneity, the splendid abandonment, the musical rush of the lines makes the readers their “willing captives”[15].  Yet, all the visionary quality of their verses, for all that strange aloofness, there is no elusiveness of effect, or intellectual murkiness.  The outlines are faint but they are unmistakable and in the lyrics as “The Ode To The West Wind” and Tagore’s Barshadine/“On A Rainy Day” and “The End of the Year”; there is a logical development of idea that merges perfectly with the exquisite music, making the poems a “thing of beauty”.  On examining the work of Shelley’s poetry – his characteristic modes of expression in one of his best poems – is the sweeping movement of the verse;

Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky’s commotion,

Loose clouds like earth’s decaying leaves are shed,

Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,

Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread

On the blue surface of thin aery surge,

Like the bright hair uplifted from the head

Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge

Of the horizon to the zenith’s height,

The locks of the approaching storm. (“The Ode To The West Wind”)

And also Tagore is offering a sense of sublime bewilderment, similarly inspired:

  

On this day resounding with rain-showers I cannot set my mind to anything.

The clouds madly driven by the restless wind, send my mind off on the trail of those far-flying birds.

 Torrents of melodies pour down all through the day.  This is the day to forget oneself, to lose one’s way, to enmesh one’s heart in a bond of

Eternal debt to someone. 

(Barshadine/“On A Rainy Day”)

Shelley’s “The Cloud” is a nature myth of flawless beauty. It is felt that there is complete identification of the poet with his subject. The marvellous rush of music, the crystalline clearness of the picture, not for a moment marred by over-profusion of metaphor as it seems in “To A Skylark”:

…Waking or asleep

   Thou of death must deem

Things more true and deep

    Than we mortals dream,

Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?

We look before and after,

   And pine for what is not:

Our sincerest laughter

   With some pain is fraught;

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of the saddest thought.

Yet if we could scorn

   Hate, and pride, and fear;

If we were things born

   Not to shed a tear,

I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.

Better than all measures

   Of delightful sound,

Better than all treasures

   That in books are found,

Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!

Teach me half the gladness

   That thy brain must know,

Such harmonious madness

   From my lips would flow

The world should listen then, as I am listening now! (“To A Skylark”)[16]

Tagore’s Balaka/“The Flying Geese”, the title word usually means a heron; but the poet points out that it refers to a flock of flying geese.  The poet writes:

   O flying geese,

Your wings are maddened by the tempest’s wine:

   With the resounding laughter of piled-up joy,

Rising waves of wonder, they beat along sky.

The rush of wings rose round,

A dancing nymph composed of sound,

   Breaking the meditation of the silence.

   The mountains sunk in gloom

Suddenly shuddered, and the deodar woods.

I felt the message of those beating wings

   For an instant bring

Impulse of motion to the enraptured depths

   Of all that’s immobile.

…Of mountains, and this forest, fly from strange

To strange realm, isle to isle

   The pulse of the stars’ flight

Starlets the dark with the sound of weeping light.

I heard the words of men flying in the flocks

   Along invisible tracks

From the dim past to some new unformed age.

Night and day in my heart have I heard

With countless other birds, this

Relinquishing its nest, through light and darkness go –

   From what shore to what shore?

The infinite’s wings send out their song through the space:

‘Not here but elsewhere, elsewhere– in some other place.’ (Balaka/“The Flying Geese”)[17]  

It seems Tagore has touched the philosophy of progress until it has become a vision, and from this vision comes life.

In the poem “To the Skylark”, Wordsworth cries out the same pristine message with his vision:

Ethereal minstrel! pilgrim of the sky!

Dost thou despise the earth where cares abound?

Or while the wings aspire, are heart and eye

Both with thy nest upon the dewy ground?

Thy nest which thou canst drop into at will,

Those quivering wings composed, that music still!

To the last point of vision, and beyond

Mount, daring warbler! – that love-prompted strain

–’Twixt thee and thine a never-failing bond –

Thrills not the less the bosom of the plan:

Yet might’st thou seem, proud privilege! to sing

All independent of the leafy Spring.

Leave to the nightingale her shady wood;

A privacy of glorious light is thine,

Whence thou dost pour upon the world a flood

Of harmony, with instinct more divine;

Type of the wise, who soar, but never roam –

True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home! (“To The Skylark”)   

Liberty for the marginalised, hope for the oppressed, peace for the storm-tossed, these are the elements that fire their songs and stir their imagination to its depths.  For this reason, Shelley’s “The Masque of Anarchy”, the “Prometheus Unbound”, “Hellas”, the “Ode to the West Wind” and Tagore’s later prose-poems “Alash Samaydhara Beye”/“They Work”, Tomar Sristhir Path/“The Right to Peace” and Aikyataan/“The Poet of Man” express the same sentiment.  Both the poets charm the readers with their magic music and when they become one with the universe stripping themselves of human emotions, losing their self-identities and fascinating the readers just the same way as might a stormy night, a crimson sunset, or the pale moon upon the waters.

Many lands and ages have figured inward inspiration in the female form.  As Tagore put it, “There is a woman within our inner nature.  We bring to her all that we have gathered…”*. The poet seeks to explore the existence in terms of this feminised interior being – to engage through it the meaning of life, with the relation of life to death, with that within space and time which transcends space time. A female figure keeps recurring in a ceaseless quest and takes on many guises: later leading the poet on a voyage, now uniting with him in a visionary cave by the sea, and then as some other woman from a far country.  Her presence causes a defamiliarising spell on the familiar world, opens poet’s eyes to novel contours of the world beyond the plane and beautiful. The readers no longer see earth as earth or water as water, but discern the underlying substance of both.  At such moments, the touch of interiority transforms customary beauty into alien guise –a rider on a black horse or the fair helmsman of a golden boat.

* Rabindranath Tagore: Rabindra Rachanabali (Prarthana/Prayer in Shantiniketan)

Such a boat, with such figure to steer it, may remind the readers of Shelley’s “Epipsychidion” or Tennyson’s “The Voyage” or Theophile Gautier’s “Barcarolle”.  In Gautier’s poem too the boat is of gold, with a golden rudder and Tagore’s boat in Sonar Tari/“The Golden Boat” is also of gold. 

John Keats, the last born of the romantics and was the first to die.  As a youth of nineteen he brought out “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer” and there is the glorious promise and immature fulfilment of “Endymion”.  Keats suggests the readers that “Poetry should please by fine excess”[18]; and no one could strike, it can be rightly claimed, the note more successfully than Tagore and the speaker himself.  Keats in his most perfect work, in the Ode “La Belle Dame sans Merci” and the fragment “The Eve of St. Mark” perhaps shows that the pleasure of poetry depends no less on the fine restraint.  In the Odes Keats spells out his inmost self, and when he does so, it appears he does with great artistry.  The “Ode to Indolence”, faithfully portrays the transient mood but the “Ode to Psyche” is reminiscent of his mythological loves and shows too clearly the tool of the craftsman.      Tagore in his Ode Jyotsna Raate/“On a Moonlit Night” wishes to reach a lonely temple in a paradisal wood, where a shining female figure sits on a flowery couch, the scene recalls Keats “Ode to Psyche”.  In “On a Moonlit Night” the poet writes typically in Keatsian spirit:

Here am I, waiting at the outer door

Of your house o revels – every now and then

I hear soft slow talk, hear the mellow peal

Of golden ankle-bells; a petal drops from someone’s coiffed hair on my breast, excites

My flow of sense: somewhere I hear you sing! 

Who are you gathered, crowned with garlands woven

Of full-blown parijat,[19] drinking from cups

Of radiant gold, fragrant ambrosia?

The flowers’ scent wafts on the soft breeze,

Maddening the heart with exquisite parting-pain!

Open the door, open the door! Admit me

For once into your court of beauty.  See: A lonely temple in the celestial woods,

A flowery couch within it laid. There sits alone, with sleepless eyes amid the light

Of jeweled lamps, Lakshmi, the world-beloved,

Effulgent woman-form.  I, poet, bring

Garlands to give her as my offering.[20] (Jyotsna Raate/“On a Moonlit Night”)  

 Or Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” has the maiden for whom:

I made a garland for her head,

   And bracelets too, fragrant zone;

She look’d at me as she did love,

  And made a sweet moan.

                               (“La Belle Dame Sans Merci”)                                              

            In his longing for divine love and grace Tagore seems to be sometimes thematically akin to John Donne, Alfred Tennyson, GM Hopkins and Francis Thompson, but not to the visionary other-worldliness and tortured pietism of Emily Bronte.  In his romantic and pantheistic intuitions he basically resembles Wordsworth and Shelley, though it can be claimed that the world of his visions is incomparably larger.  The finer vibrations of love portrayed by him sometimes remind one of some of the finest elements in Browning, particularly poems like “Two In Campagna”, “Love Among The Ruins” and the last stanzas of “One Word More”.  Here is the ending note of “Two In Campagna”:

Just when I seemed about to learn!

   Where is the thread now? Off again!

The old trick! Only I discern–

   Infinite passion, and the pain

Of finite hearts that yearn.

(“Two In Campagna”)

And Tagore in the poem Bichched/“Separation” almost sings the same tune as that of Browning above:

When the night is over

   And you had far to go,

   You stood at the door.

All the songs I had

    I gave to you.

    Smiling, you laid

In my hand your flute,

    In love-parting.

    Since then, in spring and fall,

Sky and wind sound in grief.

     The separation

Of flute and song wanders `

     Weeping through creation.

(Bichched/“Separation”)

Here in both the poems, love is an ideal as well as a present actuality, and being ideal their satisfaction is ever incomplete – hence the divine restlessness of the human heart.

          The poetry of the Romantic Revival “…had little influence on the poetic development of Tennyson.  Byron’s influence may be traced in the volume of “Poems by Two Brothers”.  Of Shelley, there is nothing; with Wordsworth he had a certain spiritual affinity, but as artists they have scarcely anything in common.  No doubt he owed a technical debt to the supreme skill of Coleridge as a metrist; Keats’ sensuousness and delicate sensitiveness to external beauty inspired the poet and this affected his poetic development.”[21]

Tagore also was nurtured on the English literature and he drew his inspirations almost all the poets of the classical and modern times.

The following poem of Tennyson is a song paying tributes to the year that is going by:

A spirit haunts the year’s last hours

Dwelling amid these yellowing bowers:

    To himself he talks;

For at eventide, listening earnestly,

At his work you may hear him sob and sigh

In the walks;

Earthward he boweth the heavy stalks

Of the mouldering flowers:

Heavily hangs the broad   sunflower

   Over its grave i’ the earth so chilly;

Heavily hangs the hollyhock,

   Heavily hangs the tiger-lily.

                       II

The air is damp, and hush’d and close,

As sick man’s room when he taketh repose

    An hour before death;

My very heart faints and my whole soul grieves

At the moist rich smell of the rotting leaves,

    And the breath

    Of the fading edges of box beneath,

And the year’s last rose.

Heavily hangs the broad   sunflower

   Over its grave i’ the earth so chilly;

Heavily hangs the hollyhock,

   Heavily hangs the tiger-lily.

(“Song”)

Tagore too pays a rich tribute to the year in his poem Barsho Shesh/ “The End of the Year”:

In the mingled joy and terror, tears and glee,

   With frenzied yells

Let the demented tempest launch her dance,

   The wind her ankle bells, and with her stamping beat and swirling veil

   Scatter and clear

Like dust, like blades of grass, the futile hoard

   Of the spent year.

(Barsho Shesh/“The End of the Year”)

The poem was written on the last day of the Bengali year, in the season of the nor’wester[22] storms.  Later Tagore wrote about the poem:

On the last day of 1305, I saw a tremendous storm at the end of the day.  This storm carried to me a summons from the Lord of Destruction [Rudra Shiva].  Blowing away the dead leaves, it bore the message that attachment to everything old and worn-out had to be cast away.  In this way, he who is ever-youthful sent a storm of destruction to blow away the curtain of illusory desire (moha).  He cast aside the veil of decayed and revealed himself…. The storm came and shook the foundations of my mind.  I realized had to come out of myself.[23]

The resemblance between this poem and Shelley “Ode to the West Wind” has often been noted.  Tagore himself wrote in his essay Shelley:

Shelley seemed to see this varied life of man, full of joys and sorrows, as a curtain.  Its coarse and fragmentary nature seemed to conceal the truth.  The poet was intensely eager to tear away this curtain of mist and see the pure unfragmented form of truth.  Hence many times, he tried to peep behind the veil of death.[24]

Though the poet acknowledges the inspiration of Shelley’s Odes but Tennyson’s song of the year-end too seems to have influenced the poet of significantly without doubt.

When Wordsworth was fourteen, the ordinary sight of boughs silhouetted against a bright evening sky left so vivid an impression on his mind that it marked the beginning of his career as a poet. “I recollect distinctly,” he writes as a man in his seventies, “the very spot where this first struck me.  It was in the way between Hawkstead and Ambleside, and gave me extreme pleasure.  The moment was important in my poetical history for I date from it my consciousness of the infinite variety of natural appearances which had been unnoticed by the poets of any age or country.”[25] Similarly when Tagore was living in a house on Sudder Street in Kolkata chanced upon a special and prolonged poetic experience in the rediscovery of a beautiful and happy world, resulting his famous poem Nirjharer Swapnabhango/“Awakening of the Waterfall”.  This became the key poem in the series of poems that followed his new poetic experience and the poet says, “It was morning, I was watching the sunrise from Free School lane.  A veil was suddenly withdrawn and everything became luminous.  The whole scene was one of perfect music – one marvellous rhythm.  The houses in the street, the men moving below, the little children playing, all seemed parts of one luminous whole – inexpressibly glorious.  The vision went on for seven or eight days… I was full of gladness, full of love, for every person and every tiniest thing.  Then I went to the Himalayas, and looked for it there and lost it…. That morning in Free School Lane was one of the first things that gave me inner vision, and I have tried to explain it in my poems.  I have felt, ever since, that this was my goal: to express the fullness of life, in its beauty, as perfection – if only the veil were withdrawn.[26](Tagore to C.F. Andrews, in Conversation, September 1912, Letters to a Friend)

Such nature-consciousness, enjoined by self-consciousness is the mystery from which not only Wordsworth’s but Tagore’s poetry also springs.  “Nature – for Wordsworth chiefly rural nature, the abiding presences of mountain, lake and field under the influence of the changing seasons – is a haunted house through which we must pass before our spirit can be independent.”[27] It was Wordsworth’s aim as a poet to seek for beauty in meadow, woodland and the mountain top, and to interpret this beauty in spiritual terms.  He is forever spiritualising the moods of Nature and winning from them moral comfort; and it was his special characteristic to concern himself, not with the strange and remote aspects of the earth and sky, but with Nature in her ordinary, familiar, everyday moods.  Like Wordsworth, Tagore too is concerned far less with the sensuous manifestations that delight most of Nature poets, than with the spiritual that he finds underlying these expressions.  The primrose and the daffodil are symbols to Wordsworth, as Shiuli, Champa or Tamarind Blossom to Tagore. The grandeur of the mountain or a riverine appeal to them because they can link their beauty in their mind for a greater significance. 

Wordsworth can actualise with fine clarity all the little graces and charms of April mornings in the poem “The Two April Mornings”:

 We walk’d along, while bright and red

Uprose the morning sun;

And Matthew stopp’d, he look’d, and said

‘The will of God be done!’

(“The Two April Mornings”)             

                    

and can throw the very spirit of a butterfly into a couplet:

I’ve watch’d you now a full half-hour,

Self-pois’d upon that yellow flower;

I know not if you sleep, or feed.

How motionless! and then

What joy awaits you, when the breeze

Hath found you out among the trees,

And calls you forth again,

(“To a Butterfly”)

Similarly, Tagore in his poem Duratto/“Gap” opens with the heat of summer felt thus:

     It is midday,

   The sky blazes hot,

     The fields looked dry and parched,

hot sand flies in the air,

      but I just don’t care.

Banamali[28] thinks it proper

       to close the windows –

I chide him when he tries to do that,

Across the glass pane on the western side,

        the rays of the sun enter and spread near my feet.

(Duratto/ “Gap”)

Or elsewhere the poet ends the poem Vaisakh/“Summer” in more concrete and strong images:

Sound thy call, O Vaisakh stern and terrible.

My midday slumber rudely shattered

I shall come out in the open.

Speechless and still I shall gaze

at the horizon across burnt and lifeless fields:

O Great destroyer, O Vaisakh stern and terrible. (Vaisakh/“Summer”)

Wordsworth’s attitude towards Nature is similar to his attitude towards humankind.  Just as in Nature he is always eager to pass from the concrete to the abstract, so in dealing with humanity he is less concerned with individuals than with certain qualities common to mankind.  “The mature love for Nature leads to love for men, hearing the still, sad music of humanity.”[29]  The reflection of the later stage, the time of mature imagination, brings vision and joy. Again by linking these with heart’s generosity toward the fellow men the poet gives meaning to his experiences. 

“The Old Cumberland Beggar” is Wordsworth’s one of the finest visions of the natural man. The “Cumberland” beggar reminds the readers of the beggars, solitaries, and wanderers throughout Wordsworth’s poetry and nothing could be simpler than the poem’s opening:

I saw an aged Beggar in my house.

In the sun,

Upon the second step of that small pile,

Surrounded by those wild unpeopled hills,

He sat, and ate his food in solitude:

And ever, scattered from his palsied hand,

That, still attempting to prevent the waste,

was baffled still, the crumbs in little showers

Fell on the ground; and the small mountains birds,

Not venturing yet to peck their destined meal,

Approached within the length of half his staff. (“The Old Cumberland Beggar”)

In “The Ancient Old Man” Tagore meets an ancient old man who becomes inseparable from the poet:

                               From the very beginning of time

he has joined my company,

that old fellow,

one with men and me,

today I have told him quite plainly –

we are going to part.(Shuru Hotei O Amar Sango Dhareche/“The Ancient Old Man”)

And again

Today I’ll part company with him.

Let him stay here outside the door –

That old, famished man.

Let him beg, let him partake;

Let him sit and sew patches on his torn wrap.

In the little field bounded by ridges

Right in the middle of life and death,

There let him scrounge off the stubble. (Shuru Hotei O Amar Sango Dhareche/“The Ancient Old Man”)

            It is presumed by the critics that “The old fellow is old Adam, what religious psychology calls the surface personality or the Kamapurusha and Freud His Majesty the Ego.”[30]           

          But at the end the poet laments and calls the old man “the eternal traveller” and tries to descend from the ivory tower:

I am free, I am illumined, I am independent,

I am the light of perpetual time,

I am the joy that wells from the spring of creation,

I am destitute,

I have nothing of my own

Walled up in vanity.

(Shuru Hotei O Amar Sango Dhareche/“The Ancient Old Man”)

The capacity for infinite love is brought out by suffering which in itself shares the nature of Infinity. The powers of which Wordsworth was in search of a deep reason  to place ‘man’ above himself and reach out towards that Infinitude which is his true vocation.  Tagore was in pursuit for powers deeper and more solid than reason which erect ‘man’ above himself and reach out towards the Infinitude – hope, effort, expectation, desire and above all love. Yet Wordsworth was not a love-poet in the ordinary sense and he denied himself the theme which in all ages has been the chief inspiration of lyric poetry.  Tagore was a “universal lover” and has written poems of passion and physical love following the classical masters of Vaishnava poetry, but his love for Nature and humankind reigned supreme.  “Wordsworth once said that if he had written poems and passion, they might have been more ardent than his principles allowed; and the claim, which caused the earlier generation of readers to smile, seems less extravagant now…”[31] The fact remains that he wrote no poems of passion.  Yet he has left us five poems, the famous “Lucy” poems, which, though not passionate, breathe affection so deep and tender that can be called love. “Four of them were written in Germany in the winter of 1798-1799, and the fifth soon after his return to England.  Coleridge believed that there was indeed no Lucy ever and she was Dorothy, and it is a fact that in the poem beginning ‘Among all lovely things my love hath been’ – a poem which he never reprinted – “Lucy” does stand for Dorothy.”[32] Tagore’s love poems have the central figure “Kadambari” (as has been seen in the preceding chapters) sometimes convey of eroticism, but the love that inspired Wordsworth’s poetry was not sexual love.  For both the poets it was love of Nature and Man, of country and freedom, family and friends.  Their love of Nature had three phases: in boyhood she was endeared merely as the scene of boyish sports; in youth it became love, love with passion and then came manhood when the love became universal and infinite with love for humankind.  Their humanism rose from the love of Nature and proceeded towards love of man and it is Tagore’s pantheism and Wordsworth’s Baptized faith.  Their belief in the grandeur and dignity of man, and the holiness of the heart’s affections becomes their fable.  This was the product of forces originating in the Renaissance; “it had arisen out of the ruins of the theological view of man.  As the “Fall” recorded further and further into the region of fable, man was increasingly regarded as a creature not only made in, but retaining, God’s image; and Wordsworth could acknowledge, without misgiving, a grandeur in the beatings of the heart, and speak in good faith of man and his noble nature. “In Wordsworth’s lifetime humanism had taken a colouring from Rousseau, and the special nobility of man was therefore only to be looked for in huts where poor men lie. The higher grades of the society, in which the culture of the Renaissance had been exclusively fostered, were now:

A light, a cruel, and vain world, cut off

From the natural inlets of just sentiment,

From lowly sympathy and chastening truth.

Where good and evil never have that name.[33]”(The Prelude, Book IX)[34]

The blend of these two closely-related beliefs resulted with Wordsworth in the Leech Gatherer, Michael, Margaret or Solitary Reaper and with Tagore his famous poems “The Golden Boat” and “A Mere Person” in which he confines himself strictly within the bounds of the real and objective – even the commonplace – it is yet an unusual and unforgettable piece.  It is like a mild shock:

An oldish upcountry man, tall and lean,

With shaven, shrunken cheeks like wilted fruits,

Jogging along the road to the market town

in his patched up pair of country shoes

and a short tunic made of printed chintz,

a frayed umbrella tilted over his head,

a bamboo stick under his armpit.

It is a sultry morning of August,

the light is vaguely filtering through thin white clouds.

The stranger passed by the hazy skyline of my mind,

A mere person,

with no definition, no care that may trouble him, no need for any the least thing,

and I appeared to him for moment

at the farthest end of the unclaimed end of his life, in the grey mist that separates one from all relation.

I imagine he has a cow in his stall,

A parrot in the cage, his wife with bangles round her arms,

grinding wheat,

the washerman for his neighbour,

the grocer’s shop across the lane,

a harassing debt to the man from Peshawar,

and somewhere my indistinct self

only as a passing person.  (“A Mere Person”)

 

Coleridge’s love of mystery has been a dominant feature of his poetry.  It seems he does not use spells of medievalism, he absorbs them into himself, and they reappear distilled and inextricably blended with poet’s exquisite perception of mysteries that surround the commonplace things of everyday life.  The content of “The Ancient Mariner”, its amazing comprehensiveness strikes its readers, no less than its imaginative power.  Every phase of landscape, seascape and cloudscape is touched upon, from the quiet scenery of the English woodland to the lurid scenery of the tropics.  The poet touches with equal power and beauty every phase of life at sea: the ship flying before the freshening gale, the torrid fierceness of the stagnant waters, the freezing cold of the Arctic region, the horrors of the becalmed passage, the welcome rain, the clear sky, the storm cloud, the great sea fog, the incarnate fury of the storm, the loneliness of the great ocean and the welcome sight of familiar landmarks of the peaceful English harbour; and over the whole poem there is that strangeness and remoteness even when describing simple ordinary things that marks the highest Romantic art.  The mysterious Mariner’s tale goes:

The sun came up upon the left,

Out of the sea came he!

And he shone bright, and on the right

Went down into the sea. (“Rhyme of Ancient Mariner”)

And

The Wedding-Guest he beat his breast,

Yet he cannot choose but hear;

And thus spake on that ancient man,

The bright–eyed Mariner. (“Rhyme of Ancient Mariner”)

     And with masterly skill the reader is prepared for the spiritual horror:

Down dropt the breeze, the sail drops down

‘Twas sad as sad could be;

And we did speak only to break

The silence of the sea! (“Rhyme of Ancient Mariner”)

The nerves are overwrought by the dreadful silence: then comes the physical strain of the parched souls:

Water, water everywhere,

and all the boards did shrink;

Water, water everywhere,

Nor any drop to drink.

(“Rhyme of  Ancient Mariner”)

And the “moral” as a “kind of didactic epigram towards the end”[35]:

He prayeth well, who loveth well

Both man and bird and beast.

He prayeth best, who loveth best

All things both great and small;

For the dear God who loveth us,

He made and loveth all. (“Rhyme of  Ancient Mariner”)

           Tagore could not build such mystery but a horrific scene like this is encountered in the poem Debotar Grash/“Devoured by the God”:

The boat’s head veered round, tugged the mooring-line

With a soft moan; the sea’s triumphant chariot

Rode on the river to the wave’s music –

The tide came in.  The boatmen called upon the Lord,

And swiftly loosed the boats northwards.

Before sunset, when they had covered

About four miles, the wind from the north

Blew stronger. At the head of the Rupnarayan

Where the sandbanks narrowed the river, the tide

Fought fiercely against the north wind.  ‘Moor the boat by the shore,’ the pilgrims cried –

But what shore?  On every side the maddened water

With a million hands clasped at its own wild dance,

Reviling the sky in foaming rage.

On one side at the shore’s edge, the blue line

Of woods; on the other, greedy, cruel, angry water

Leapt towards the calm face of the sunset

In defiant rebellion.  Unmindful of the tiller,

The boats spun restlessly, as if drunk and witless.  On board, the men and women shivered;

The icy blast of fear mingled with the keen

Cold wind.

Some were speechless, some cried aloud…

(Debotar Grash/“Devoured by the God”)

          The poet here seems to have used to the full vividness of visual description which was one of Tagore’s great poetic strengths.  The whole poem is wrought with horror and the “spectral horrors” multiply in the poem when a small child is thrown in the hungry tide to save the boats from wreck or quench the thirst of the mad waves; but the owner of the boat, a Brahman* who was taking all for the pilgrimage follows the boy and jumps off the boat:

In the foaming water. ‘Aunt!’ he cried,

And was lost in the bottomless darkness. 

Only a thin fist, thrust desperately upwards,

Clutched at the sky for help, then went under,

Hope denied.  ‘I’ll bring you back!’ cried the Brahman, leaping immediately

In frantic haste, into the waves.

He did not rise.

The sun set.

(Debotar Grash/“Devoured by the God”)

 

          Tagore’s poetry, perhaps, cannot be judged entirely in the light of all classical and modern critical theories since he wrote mainly in Bengali.  But as a preliminary to the critical analysis, it is noticed that there are limitations in the theoretical frames and it is to evaluate Tagore’s poetical works and complex romantic ideas vis-à-vis these theories.  Wordsworth’s “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads” written to justify on universal grounds an experiment in poetic language, thought and form is like a romantic manifesto. The definition and propositions that Wordsworth put forward are unopposed and his own poetic ideas and the

*A member of the highest Hindu caste, that of the priesthood.

definition that Poetry is the expression or overflow of feeling, or emerges from a process of imagination in which feelings play the crucial part.  This statement is in conjunction with philosophical theories as incongruent as Wordsworth’s sensationalism and Shelley’s Platonism, the organic romanticism of Coleridge and Tagore’s positivism and idealism.

As the vehicle of an emotional state of mind, poetry is opposed not to prose, but to unemotional assertion of fact, or “science”.  Tagore’s prose poems in later phase of his life are sometimes more popular to the readers than his early poems and shows the poet as man of science and reason.  “Much confusion,” Wordsworth complained, “has been introduced into criticism by this contradistinction of Poetry and Prose, instead of the more philosophical one of poetry and Matter of fact, or science.”[36] To oppose poetry to history is common since ancient time and “to base this distinction on the ground that poetry imitates some form of the universal or ideal instead the actual event.”[37]    In the light of the most primitive aesthetic theory of mimetic orientation, Tagore’s poetical works continue to hold ground.  “The arts of painting, poetry, music, dancing and sculpture, Socrates says, are all imitations.”[38] [Republic (Jowett’s Tans) Laws ii. P.667-8]

 Tagore’s arts conform to the mimetic theories as well as Plato’s philosophy which propagates its effect on its auditors.  “The poor opinion of ordinary poetry to which we are committed on the basis of its mimetic character, is merely confirmed when Plato points out that its effects on its auditors are bad because it represents appearance rather than truth, and nourishes their feelings rather than their reason; or by demonstrating that the poet in composing cannot depend on his art and knowledge, but must wait upon the divine afflatus and the loss of right mind.”[39]  The usual practice of romantic critics was to substitute science for history as the opposite of poetry, and to view the distinction on the difference between expression and description, or between emotive language and cognitive language. Tagore’s poetry fetches its divine inspiration from the universe around it and imitates the art to attach permanence to “a thing of beauty” which to a great extent he seems to succeed.   

Poetry originated in primitive utterances of passion which, through organic causes, was naturally rhythmic, figurative and sounded sonorous on recitation.  In Wordsworth’s version, “The earliest poets of all nations generally wrote from passion excited by real events; they wrote naturally, and as men: feeling powerfully as they did, their language was daring, and figurative.”[40] Coleridge believed “that poetry, as the instinctive utterance of feeling, must have seemed to early men a more natural and less remarkable language than prose; it was the language of passion and emotion; it is what they themselves spoke and heard in moments of exultation, indignation, etc.”[41](Miscellaneous Criticism, “On Poesy or Art”, Biographia Literaria, II)  Tagore disagreed violently on the merits and quality of the primitive poetry as proposed by the romantic twosome, Wordsworth and Coleridge but accepted that it had its inception in passionate utterances and the poet himself was once mesmerized by the primitive poetry of the Sanskrit masters so much that he imitated them completely in his youth.  The imitation on the part of Tagore has undoubtedly produced immaculate Tagorean pieces that don’t fail its readers till now.

Poetry is competent to express emotions chiefly by its resources of figures of speech and rhythm, by means of which words naturally embody and convey the feelings of the poet.  Figurative language and meter, according to the classical masters are the primary ornaments used to heighten the aesthetic pleasure.  Wordsworth’s opinion that there is no need in poetry to deviate from ordinary language “for elevation of style, or any of its supposed ornaments: for, if the Poet’s subject be judiciously chosen, it will naturally, and upon fit occasion, lead him to passions the language of which, if selected truly and judiciously, must necessarily be dignified and variegated, and alive with metaphors and figures.”[42](Wordsworth’s “Literary Criticism”) Tagore initially used a variety of forms and languages for his poetry to finally settle down with the ordinary spontaneous and genuine and not the contrived and simulated, language.  Even the folklores of the wandering mendicants find place in his poetry and become so reachable to the ordinary men that his poems and songs continue to hum in the households, in the open fields in the temples of Bengal and Bangladesh by ordinary people and the elite alike.  In the poem Kabi/“The Poet”, Tagore puts his critical theories into verse:

You mustn’t judge a poet by the themes he writes his verse on.

He doesn’t shroud his face with blight

Or break his heart all day and night,

But bears his pangs, et cetera

Like a wholly cheerful person.

He’s fond of formal company,

And sits with them in formal dress;

He’s fond of holding merry talk

With people, with cheerful face.

He doesn’t probe a friendly jest

For meanings dark and recondite,

But sometimes even spots the point

Where he should laugh with all his might.

If you set food in front of him,

He’s never torn by any doubt; nor does he skulk inside the room

When cronies come to call him out.

His friends call him a witty man –

That surely can’t be quite untrue?

His foes call him a
scatterbrain –

No doubt they have their reasons too.

You mustn’t judge a poet by

The things he writes his verse on.

By the river-banks he doesn’t swoon

With his eyes fixed upon the moon,

But bears his pangs, et cetera,

Like a fairly happy person.

A poet mustn’t ever be

Like what he writes his verse on:

Let him not be entirely dense,

But ear and wash with honest sense,

And talk in simple prose, just like

A simple normal person.

(Kabi/“The Poet”)

           The above poem was composed at Selidah on 20 June 1900.  The poem was published in Kshanika/Brief Moments that mark a significant innovation in the poet’s style and diction, which he describes in the essay Bhashar Katha/Talking About Language:

It was Kshanika that I first used indigenous Bengali words and indigenous Bengali prosody in a sustained way.  That was when I first clearly realized the strength, pace and beauty of the language.  I saw…that its pace and communicative power were much greater than that of artificial bookish language. (Published in the magazine Sabuj Patra/Green Leaves, March-April 1917: Translated from Rabindra Rachanabali 28:490)

The born poet is distinguished from other men particularly by his inheritance of an intense sensibility and susceptibility to passion.  “A poet differs from other men because he is endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness…a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him…”[43] says Wordsworth.  Coleridge said that “sensibility both deep and quick and depth of emotion are essential components of genius, although he insisted that no essential are the opposing powers of impersonality and energy of thought.” (Biographia Literaria-I, p.30; II, pp.14-19)[44]  In view of the above definitions about the persona of poet, Tagore has a poem, Aikyatan/“The Poet of Man” to tell:

How little I knew of this great big world.

Of towns and cities and diverse lands, of man’s varied deeds, of rivers and seas, deserts and mountains, of strange animals and unfamiliar trees – so much has remained beyond my ken.

Amid the world’s immensity, my mind

occupies but a tiny corner.  Strung by this

awareness, I collect with ceaseless ardour words and images from tales of travel, and try to fill up the store of my meagre knowledge with riches I have begged from others.

I am a poet of the earth. I strive that all its

sounds shall seek expression in my flute, and

yet there are many gaps.  Many notes have failed find their way to this music making.

The earth’s great orchestra has often in silent moments filled my life through images and hints. (Aikyatan/“The Poet of Man”)

And again the poet says:

I wait for the message of the poet who is

close to the soil, who shares the peasant’s life

and becomes his kin through word and action.

For ever do I look for what I myself cannot give poetry’s joyful feast.

But let the gift be real and not tempt the eye by appearance.  It is not good to steal a literary badge, to acquire a name without paying the price.  False, false is such fashionable love for the labourer.  (Aikyatan/“The Poet of Man”)

 

The most important function of poetry is, by its pleasurable resources, to foster and subtilise the sensibility, emotions, and sympathies of the reader.  The poetry has a purpose and its aim becomes primarily to cultivate the affective elements of human nature.  Wordsworth says, “The end of poetry is to produce excitement in co-existence with over-balance of pleasure, and its effect is to rectify men’s feelings, to widen their sympathies, and to produce or enlarge the capability of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants.”[45]

The poet sums up all that what the Romantics postulated and the purpose of poetry in the following poem Kabi/“The Poet”:

I am quite happy–or at least

   For sorrow’s leanness none the worse;

And yet it seems a little strange

To own to this when I write verse.

That’s why I delve within my heart

Some deep distemper to express,

And come up with some deep defect

Of knowledge or forgetfulness.

And yet it is so very deep,

So inaccessibly remote.

The poet doesn’t really need

To warrant if it’s true or not.

He wears his smile upon his face….

(Kabi/ “The Poet”)

And again he defends the poet the following away:

You mustn’t judge a poet by

The themes he writes on.

He doesn’t shroud his face with blight

Or break his heart all day and night

But bears his pangs, et cetera

Like a wholly cheerful person.

(Kabi/ “The Poet”)

And finally he concludes about the role of a poet:

A poet mustn’t ever be

Like what he writes his verse on:

Let him not be entirely dense,

But eat and wash with honest sense,

And talk in simple prose, just like

A simple normal person.

(Kabi/ “The Poet”)

The orb of Tagorean poetry is a world in itself.  He opens us endless vista of diverse possibilities and speculations. The contemporary attitude to the later poems of the poet is not kind.  Psychologists describe this as the conflict of generations.  “Criticise we must,” said Goethe “of the Greek dramatists, we do it on bended knees.”[46]  To criticise Tagore’s later poems is Herculean task since no single theory covers the whole and there is a feeling that the poems represent ‘a complex of attitudes and shifting significances, of new forms which need to be pieced together for the sake of criticism. Whatever be the final verdict on the poetry of Tagore the later works remain an indispensable guide to it and that he himself suggests the standards by which he has to be judged.  He supplies his own order of ideas.  This order is a determining factor by which any work of art is approached not by personal bias or fads of the hour.  Tagore is an exceedingly self-conscious artist and some of the best criticism of his own works has been by him. 

There is in the later poems (Chapter-V, The Farewell Verses) a noticeable deepening of his sense of wonder and pathos and the bareness itself carries its own many-splendoured secret.  There is self awareness in the works of Tagore.  The self-awareness is not only unusual it is also unrelenting and does not spare himself.  It is felt that criticism brings out limitations, in this case, limitations not confined to any one single category.  From the transcendent to the mundane, at the end of his long career Tagore grows increasingly conscious of its incompleteness.   It is in the poem Aikyatan/“The Poet of Man” that he comes up sharp against some of his failures and he ends on a note of defeat: “And I know I have failed wherever my song has been left incomplete.” (Aikyatan/“The Poet of Man)  

There are less obdurate critics who believe that Tagore was on the verge of a new spiritual poetry and what the illness and psychological conflict or churning, are the cause as well as result of this pressure.  Tagore moves towards a significant change of sensibility in the last songs.  The movement seems tentative and does not move with the same gusto throughout and shows more promise than performance.  There are breaks, alternations of energy and despair, disparity of impulses. Perhaps, the entire later poetry may be looked upon as a busy period, an interregnum, before the revelation, or the reconciliation occurred for which he was eager and preparing.  There is a sense of something yet to come, a fullness to be, which is either left to be imagined or finds sudden embodiment in a few poems.  The excellence of these, the felt change of consciousness can be experienced rather than analysed and as Tagore aptly says, “The best criticism of the later poems will be found in the later poems themselves.”[47]

As a poet, Tagore broke more and more with convention over the years.  He was an unorthodox painter, a singer, a lyricist and above all an unconventional poet. This thesis would remain incomplete if a word or two is not included on Rabindrasangeet/Tagore songs. It is found that his “devotional hymns were universally appreciated by the Brahmos who were opposed to Tagore being admitted even as an honorary member to their fold, and even by Swami Vivekananda, who sang them to his spiritual guru Sri Ramakrishna.  To most Bengalis and to all non-Bengalis, these dirge-like compositions are the least appealing part of Rabindrasangeet/Tagore songs, with a few exceptions.”[48]  He went on to compose songs expressing almost every mood, including some verging on the erotic.  They are irresistible to Bengalis that even Brahmo sectarians who wanted to deny the composer honorary membership were pleased to sing his songs during their services.   He composed songs in a spirit of rebellion.  He wanted to break with convention, break new ground.  Though he did not abide by the prescribed forms, he did not consider them to be unnecessary either.  His aim was the perfect union of word, tune and rhythm, but because he was a fine writer as he was composer, he had difficulty in creating this union in a song without compromising either the words or the tune.  Sometimes his words are too dominant, enfeebling the tune.  The songs he composed later still contain snatches of ragas but they are no longer classically based like his earlier hymns.  His songs in which his poetic skills have come to the fore add beauty to the songs and have generated interplay between word, mood and beat.

Tagore is on par with the English romanticists and perhaps surpasses all of them because his is a multifaceted persona and there is not a genre of art that he has not turned into gold with his Midas touch and is the greatest Indian Renaissance figure of arts, literature, culture and ethos.   

[1]Uma Das Gupta: My Life In My Words: Rabindranath Tagore, (New Delhi, Penguin Viking, 2006), pp.94-95

[2] Uma Das Gupta(ed.): My Life In My Words: Rabindranath Tagore, (New Delhi, Penguin Viking, 2006), p.134

[3] Letter to his son Rathindranath, 24 April 1940, Chinnapatra/Torn leaves Vol. 2, p.116

[4] Sukanta Choudhary (ed.): The Oxford Tagore Translations: Rabindranath Tagore: Selected Poems (New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2004),  p.34

[5] Krishna Dutta &Andrew Robinson: Rabindranath Tagore : The Myriad Minded Man (New Delhi, Rupa & Co.,2003) p.283

[6] Krishna Dutta &Andrew Robinson: Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad Minded Man (New Delhi, Rupa & Co., 2003) p.127

[7] Dr. Salil Kumar Mandal: Selected Poems from Tagore(Calcutta: Chukervertty Chatterjee & Co. Ltd.,2006)  p.vii

[8] The Times Literary Supplement 07 November 1912

[9]Arthur Compton-Rickett:A History Of English Literature (New Delhi, Universal Book Stall,1969) p.304

[10] Ibid 308

[11] Arthur Compton-Rickett:A History Of English Literature (New Delhi, Universal Book Stall,1969) p.318

[12]Dr. Sisir Kumar Das: The Later Poems of Tagore (Shantiniketan, Visva-Bharathi,1964) p.63

[13] Ibid. p.69

‘

 [14]Uma Das Gupta(ed.):Rabindranath Tagore: My Life in my words, (New Delhi, Penguin Viking, 2006) p.32

[15] Dr. Sisir Kumar Das: The Later Poems of Tagore (Shantiniketan, Visvabharathi,1964) p.125

[16] Francis Turner Palgrave: The Golden Treasury (OUP, Calcutta, 1964), p.243

[17] Sukanta Choudhary (ed.): The Oxford Tagore Translations: Rabindranath Tagore: Selected Poems (OUP, New Delhi, 2004) p.229-31

[18] Arthur Compton-Rickett:A History Of English Literature (New Delhi, Universal Book Stall,1969) p.345

[19] A celestial flower

[20] Sukanta Choudhary(ed.):The Oxford Tagore Translations: Rabindranath Tagore: Selected Poems (OUP, New Delhi, 2004)  p.94

[21] Arthur Compton-Rickett:A History Of English Literature (New Delhi, Universal Book Stall,1969) p.409

[22] In Bengal, ‘nor’westers are usually seen as coming from the ishan kon or north-east quarter of the sky.  But Ishan is a name of Shiva: the God of Destrcution is linked with the storm.

[23] Published in the Magazine Shantiniketan, Vaishakh/April-May 1925

[24]  Published in Bharathi, September-October 1922

[25] MH Abrams (ed.): English Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in criticism, (New Delhi, OUP, 1975) p.123

[26] Uma Das Gupta(ed.):Rabindranath Tagore: My Life in my words, (New Delhi, Penguin Viking, 2006) p.43

 

 

[28] Means gardener in Bengali, but here could be the name of his domestic-help

[29] M.H. Abrams(ed.): Wordsworth :A Collection of Critical Essays (Prentice Hall of India Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi, 1979) p.100

[30]Dr. Sisir Kumar Das: The Later Poems of Tagore (Shantiniketan, Visva-Bharathi,1964) p.56

[31] JC Smith : A Study of Wordsworth ((London, Oliver and Boyd,1946), p.32

[32] Ibid p.30

[33] William Wordsworth: The Prelude, Book IX (Great Britain, Penguin Education, 1975), p.366

[34]  M.H. Abrams (ed.): English Romantic Poets: Basil Willey :On Wordsworth and Locke Tradition, (New Delhi, OUP, 1975) p.230

[35] MH Abrams (ed.): English Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in criticism, (New Delhi, OUP, 1975) p.220

[36]Nowell C. Smith (ed.): Wordsworth’s Literary Criticism, (London, OUP, 1925) p.21

[37]M.H.Abrams (ed.):The Mirror and The Lamp :Varieties of Romantic Theory: Wordsworth And Coleridge,(New Delhi, OUP, 2006) pp.100-103

[38] Ibid p.8

[39] M.H.Abrams (ed.): The Mirror and The Lamp: Orientation of Critical Theories: Mimetic Theories ((New Delhi, OUP, 2006) p.9 

[40] M.H.Abrams (ed.): The Mirror and The Lamp: Orientation of Critical Theories: Mimetic Theories ((New Delhi, OUP, 2006)p.101

[41] Ibid. p.115

[42]M.H.Abrams (ed.): The Mirror and The Lamps ((New Delhi, OUP, 2006) p.110 

[43]M.H.Abrams (ed.): The Mirror and The Lamp: Orientation of Critical Theories: Mimetic Theories ((New Delhi, OUP, 2006) p.106 

[44] Ibid.  pp.118-19

[45]  M.H.Abrams (ed.): The Mirror and The Lamp: Orientation of Critical Theories: Mimetic Theories ((New Delhi, OUP, 2006) p.103

[46] Dr. Sisir Kumar Das: The Later Poems of Tagore (Shantiniketan, Visva-Bharathi,1964) p.38

[47] Dr. Sisir Kumar Das: The Later Poems of Tagore (Shantiniketan, Visva-Bharathi,1964) p.42

[48]Krishna Dutta &Andrew Robinson: Rabindranath Tagore : The Myriad Minded Man (New Delhi, Rupa & Co.,2003) p.359