The 134th birth-anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) falls on May 8, 1995. In order to mark his Jayanti, The Daily Star takes this modest opportunity to present the following article which seeks to reread Tagore's Last Poems, focusing particularly on the poet's active, energetic response to life and man even in the face of increasing sickness and threatening death. .IT is interesting to see Dial in his jioeins written during Die period between 1939 and 1941. Rabindranath Tagore seems to hew out energetically a language that accommodates his intense, unfailingly warm response to life. One may argue that this is the kind of a re sponse one happens to read in almost all the phases ol Tagore's poetic career, for he is a poet who Is consistently in love with life like any other great poet. That Is true. But what is actually meant by an intense response to life' here is a special capacity for closereading the depths and voids of life even in the face of sickness and death. Tagore at this point appears to be quite coh-scious of the fact that death would soon swallow him. but then he is equally — perhaps more acutely — conscious of. and convinced by. the fact that "Death cannot swallow life, which is immortal", as he ■says It in the second poem of Shesh Lekha (Last Poems). Of death, the poet further says in the same poem : "It only casts its shadow like Rahu / This I know for certain”. What the poet means by Rahu here is the demon who is supposed to devour the sun during an eclipse. In fact. Tagore’s Last Po^ms brings to the fore a great struggle with this Rahu. which. In the final analysis, turns out to be a struggle for nothing else, but for life itself. He goes on to say In the second poem : That death is not/ The ultimate expression of the changeless — / This I know for certain. / The self said : The world Is!" Here Is an attempt to put death under erasure, at leaM linguistically, and to notch up the world’s win In its unflagging, unshaklng isness. This very isness of the world — or of life itself — lit up with a certain amount of epistemological and epiphanic Illumination is what Tagore tends to celebrate in his Last Poems In his warm response to life itself. It also needs pointing out that this is ho monolithic pattern of response to life that one can possibly discern in Last Poems: indeed, various other ways of reacting to the tension between life and death

figure in this collection of poems. A few of these will be discussed only later.

Let me now turn to the opening poem of Last Poems to see what kind of response to life the poet exhibits. It was the poet’s wish that this poem, unmistakably song-like In quality, should be sung at the commemoration service after his death, and it was. This poem opens with a line charged with the lyrical elan of a familiar spatial image that captures a sense of sprawling onself uninhibitedly across the infinite as it were : "In front stretches the ocean of peace". The typical Tagorean penchant for oceanic expanse has been viewed from time to time as a mark of Tagore s romanticism: but. here, the ocean is more than something that can be merely denominated romantic’. One sees that the ocean here is the one that is naked, pure, immediately accessible to the poet's senseexperience: it is not an ocean that once overwhelmed him. awed him to the extent of involving the poet in Irtex-haustible imagistic and rhetorical pleasures. Here, however, the ocean is evoked without rhetoric: and whatever image is attributed to the ocean is tellingly minimal. This ocean, in fact, provides the desired space for the intended voyage of the poet who. as we know, right from the beginning of his poetic career, has almost consistently kept up the voyage-motif animated by his inordinate zeal and zest for life. But. what is interesting to observe here is the rhythm of the voyage proposed. The poem does not explicitly refer to death anywhere: no reference to sickness do we find either. Yet, ’death’ seems to lurk like shadows in the world evoked by Tagore in the poem which has lines like "On my journey to the shores of eter-

nity./ May the bonds of earth dissolve". And the voyage the poet is keen to embark on appears to be a death-defying one. giving also the impression that death does not put an end to life, but that it is only an extension of life itself. In other words, death is once against put under erasure; it is. in a way. also defemiliarized. and what is quietly foregrounded, with a certain amount of epistemological certitude, is life Itself. as the poem ends with such Unes as : "And I come to know fearlessly/ The Great unknown."

For Tagore, the celebration oUUfe is certainly not without the celebration of man whose unremitting renewal is what he has unfailingly taken an interest in. As has been indicated. Tagore does not respond to life without responding to death which, for him. is part or an extension of life itself. In fact, Tagore defies death only through accepting and defamillarlzing it. and this is the kind of response to life (or to death) which is more apparent in Last Poems than it is elsewhere in his oeuvre. In order to defy — or for that matter, accept — death. Tagore constantly speaks of the renewal of life in the Shelleyesque fashion, as particularly exemplified in the sixth poem of Last Poems. where the poet says : "The sacred moment has come/ That brings the Great Birth!/... The hill of sunrise rings with the call 'Fear not'/ And ushers in the dawn of a new life". But. who is born? Whose life is renewed against death? The poet answers unequivocally : 'The heavens thunder the song of Victory : / "Man has come!”

Man comes again and again — that is the typical Tagorean experience, somewhat energized by the principle of continuum and flux bearing the textual traces of the Upanishads. Chinese Taoism. Heraclitean philosophy and Bergsonian elan vital. is what one can fairly easily detect throughout the whole oeuvre of Tagore. But. in Last Poems. the very coming-of-man. partly textually evoking the Yeatsian second coming' and partly capturing the Nietzschean declarative tone in which the arrival of the Ubermensch (Superman) Is announced. Is nut just .1 cy< Ileal existential pFriiomeiion but is indicative ol the reassenion ol ones inherent creative energy and strength whereby death and life, man and god. light and darkness — all such apparently irreconcilable binaries can be I used into a higher form of reality and that Is the Great Birth! as tfie poet says. It is this higher form of reality onto which death alone loses ns grip, and whereby death is also defeated or at least denied of Its sovereign identity

In conventional Tagore

criticisms, this poem has been described as merely anthropocentric. Anthropocentric doubtlessly It is. for in the poem only Man' with a tellingly upper-case 'M' occupies the centre-stage.- But. then, what is further emphasised. and what really accounts for Ilie upper-ease 'M' in man is his creative elan which can enable him to accept death, and also conquer death by subordinating it to life itself. In other words. It is the deathconquering creative man tjiat Tagore brings Io the fore. And we cannot but feel that Tagore himself exemplifies sugh Man'. For he is not dead; conquering death through creativity, he remains alive, singing continuously : "Man has come!"

Thus, we see that Tagore’s Last Poems represents the poet’s quiet but active response to man. death, life and creativity, ip the face of growing sickness Tagore was subject to during the period in which these poems were written. One of the characteristic aspects of Last Poems. however, is yet to be taken up. It is an aspect which has been mostly lost sight of in traditional Tagore-criticisms. This aspect once again relates itself io Tagore’s response to life. The kind of epistemological certitude and quietitude Tagore has exhibited in his response to life and man has already been indicated in some instances. But. the other side of Die epistemological reality is yet to lx- looked into. It is the anguished Tagorean agnoiology which now deseTves notice. In fact, one would begin to see that Tagore is not al)-certitude; but that his response to life, as in Last Poems. Is to a great extent characterized by a tormenting pull between epistemology and agnoiology. between knowledge and ignorance. This tension, however tormenting and anguished it might be. does not exhibit signs and symptoms of restlessness elsewhere. The poet's realization of this tension is so strong, sharp, pointed and real that it hardly needs rhetoric, or even metaphors: it only meds bare statements, naked words, or even whispering syl laities of silences, as Inevitable as breath.

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The eleventh poem ol Last Poems captures one of the high epiphanic moments ever oci urrlng in Tagore's life. The poem begins with a note of discovery : "On the shores of Rupnarayan / I awoke and realized/ That the world is not a dream./ In letters of blood I beheld my own forms". Tagore's metaphorical anfl imagistic minimalism, which is in fact one of the most predominant stylistic features,of Last Poems. is what unfailingly sharpens and heightens the unveiled but quiet intensity of the poet's realization that the

world is not a dream. His new love for life and the world manifested In a statement totally stripped of metaphors and images is now expressed undauntingly thus : "I have loved the hard Truth —- She never deceives! /That life is but a severe tapasya. /Till life's end/". One also notices here that Tagore tries to come to terms with the truth and with life through epiphanically defining them. The question, however, remains still : "Has then Tagore's epistemological struggle found a definitive spot whereon one can assuredly put one's finger?"

Tagore himself answers — and does not answer — the question dialectically in the 13th poem of Last Poems, yet another naked, 'minimalist, rather stylistically hermitic poem' beginning with a line like "The day s first sun had asked One can say that this is the kind of a poem which was never attempted by Tagore earlier. The tension between knowledge and ignorance is reflected subtly in the poem, and one is able to feel its intensity. particularly when one keeps the Rupnarayan poem in the background, and foregrounds the 13th poem for a reading.

As we enter the poem, we inevitably face an essential question effortlessly formulated : "who are you?" Given the style of the poem which invites comparisons partly with Blake's style and partly with Jinenez's — a style marked by a near-absence of metaphors and images, one cannot but feel that this 'easy' formulation is no easy task; one rather feels that this ease with which the question is asked is an outcome of a massive struggle, both at the epistemological and stylistic levels. One also feels that the very act of asking this question no doubt demands courage and i^ntal aplomb. Indeed. Tagore lias looked straight into the first day's sun. going back to time past, and has come up with the question, and also with the answer that follows : "It received no answer". One sees that the poet activates a kind of dialectic here — the dialectic of answer and no-an-swer. words and silences, evolving fairly mildly, a tension between epistemological certitude once so unblinkingly surfaced In the verbally austere pronouncement of ”1 came io know myself, and agnoiologl-cal anguish suggested as minimally as possible in "It received no answer". The ques tion. however, does not stop. The poem written mostly with silences represented by the 'twilight's silence" keeps the question alive so as to keep one’s search almost unending. Now, the day’s last sun utters the same question (it is. however. the last question) — who are you?" The same answer re-

turns : "It received no answer!” The poet's suggestion which one can hardly miss here is interestingly paradoxical :. the fact that there Is no answer itself eonstitutes an answer, howsoever tentative it might be. Like Czeslow Milosz, that famous Polish poet. Tagore could also say : "I saw absences". This poem Indeed captures, among other things, a play’ of presences and absences in a way hitherto absent in Tagore's earlier poetry.

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One can certainly say that Tagore's Last Poems mark a progression towards what has come to be known in the words of Jimenez, the Spanish poet, as naked poems — which can amply suggest bare truths characterized not only by their presences, but also by their absences. In Last Poems. Tagore’s response to life is not only a response to death defamiliarized in that the latter extends the former, but is also a response to man's neverending search for answers to those questions that perpetually exhaust and . increase one's Inner creative potentials.