Literature-Critique

31
found in very few writers of the world. He worked in approximately five genres of
literature – poetry, novel, short story, drama and essay. Besides, he was a class
musician, painter, actor, dance-director and architect.
He is definitely not aligned with the 19 th -century English Romantics because
he was not an escapist like Keats or Coleridge. But like Goethe, he is a Romantic in
the sense that he based his artistic work strongly on an optimistic aestheticism.
Tagore’s entire poetic works possess an elemental philosophy. It is that the
world is not eternal but perishable – it is bound to a cycle of life and death; the earth
and other planets, the stars, the solar system, the cosmos, life, love and reasonably
his own grand achievement will face extinction in course of time. But all natural
objects will come back into existence following the omnipresent rule of death and
rebirth. Admitting this truth, humans have to perform their duties in this world. His
other views of life and the world surround this fundamental doctrine. He has given
this single message again and again in various (and every time uniquely new) ways
in his poems.
Tagore showed the sign of his talent in Shandha-shangeet (The Evening
Song) and Pravat-shangeet (The Morning Song). But Manashi (The Woman of
Fancy) is his first major individualistic attempt. He contemplated on nature in this
book of poems. Especially notable is the poem “Ahalyar Prati” (“To Ahalya”) that
concerns with an imaginary soul of earthly matters and its profound relation with the
spirit of the universe. “Meghdut” (“The Cloud-Messenger”) is an ode addressed to
the great Sanskrit poet Kalidasa who wrote a poem of the same name.
Manashi was undermined by his later work Sonar Tori (The Golden Boat).
And his third original effort – Chitra surpassed those all. It includes such immortal
poems as “Joytsna-Ratrey” (“In a Moonlit Night”), “Shandha” (“Evening”), “Shwarga
Hoitey Biday” (“Departure from the Paradise”), “Urvashi”, “Jiban-Devata” (“The God
of Life”) etc that covey his crave for beauty and life. In the first mentioned poem, he
tries to give a spiritual essence to a moonlit night relating it to eternity. In “Shandha”,
the world sighs on a crimson evening for its indecisive journey. “Shwarga Hoitey
Biday” asserts his preference for the temporal world to a divine one. In his “Urvashi”,
he addresses a heavenly dancer who is not a woman of flesh and blood at all, but an
epitome of timeless beauty. And in “Jiban-Devata”, he tries to illustrate a conjugal
relationship between him and the deity whom he thinks to be the immanent soul.
Tagore turned from Romanticism to Mysticism in his middle age. His personal
disasters (especially wife’s death) made him melancholy that enthused him to
compose mystic songs. The messages of Upanishadas found their supreme artistic
form in the songs of this period. Gitanjali (The Song Offerings) is the highest
achievement of this phase that earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913.
Here he envisions limitlessness in limitation, sings the song of real beauty unfound in
the ocean of temporal splendor.
The First World War (1914-’18) inspired his romantic and mystic trend to be a
little diverted into deep concerns of the modern catastrophic era. But he was never a
pessimist; he strongly believed in human potentiality and good will. Balaka (The
Cranes) is the masterpiece of this time. Tagore dreams of survival of the civilization
tearing up a catastrophic gloom in the entitling poem of the book; he believes in the