I Won't Let You Go (38 page)

85.
Breasts
No. 2 and
The Kiss
(
Kadi o Komal
, Sharps and Flats): These poems undoubtedly reflect the consummation of the young poet’s marriage and his delight in the sexual discovery of his adolescent wife. The period when he first got to know her intimately was probably in the post-rains of 1885 at Sholapur (Pal, vol. 3, pp. 19 & 64).

86-87.
Desire
(
Manasi
, She Who is in the Mind): Written on 20 Baishakh 1295, this poem undoubtedly remembers Kadambari who died in the month of Baishakh four years ago. I knew I had to translate the third person singular here as
she
.

87-89.
Death-dream
(
Manasi
): This poem, which may also be haunted by the memory of the dead Kadambari, was actually written on 17 Baishakh 1295, but was placed in
Manasi
after
‘Desire’, with two other poems, written on 13 and 15 Baishakh, in between. In the arrangement of poems in this part of
Manasi
there seems to have been a deliberate blurring of their chronological
sequence
. It does not serve any thematic purpose, but perhaps served a
psychological
need of the poet (Pal, vol. 3, p. 89). It is possible that Tagore was trying to blur the connection between some of the poems and Kadambari.

‘the cosmic collapse’ (stanza 12): I was very tempted to write ‘the big crunch’ or at least ‘the cosmic crunch’, but these proposals were firmly vetoed by
members
of my family, who thought that any introduction of the scientific jargon of our own times, and especially the use of the word
crunch
, would be inappropriate! Tagore’s scenario is, of course, derived from the Puranic lore of his heritage. In Hindu mythology both creation and destruction are cyclic: see
Zimmer
for an elucidation of the relevant myths. Even the swan on whose back the poet rides in his death-dream is likely to be derived from the Hindu
symbol
of the cosmic gander (Zimmer, pp. 35 & 47-50). But the similarity of
Tagore’s
language to what modern physicists tell us about the collapse of stars, black holes, the big crunch, etc. is striking.

Recently the critic Tapobrata Ghosh has taken me to task for not seeing that the image of the dying swan in this poem is likely to be derived ultimately from Plato’s
Phaedo
, mediated, perhaps, by Shelley’s
Epipsychidion
(
Rabindra-jijnasur
Diary
, Bharabi, Calcutta 2009, pp. 121-126). He directs me to an essay by his late mentor, the noted Tagore exegete Jagadish Bhattacharya, in which the issue is mooted (Bhattacharya,
Rabindrakabitashatak
, tritiya dashak,
Kabi o Kabita Prakashan, Calcutta, 1983, ‘Maranswapna’, pp. 32-49). It is not possible to deal with every detail in this discourse within the space of a note, but a few salient points need to be made.

In his essay Prof. Bhattacharya says that Tagore’s swan-image in this poem ‘reminds him’ of Shelley’s
Epipsychidion
, after which he quotes five relevant lines. Let me quote them from my personal copy of Shelley’s
Complete Poetical Works
(Oxford University Press, London, 1935): ‘I am not thine: I am a part of thee.// Sweet Lamp! my moth-like Muse has burned its wings/ Or, like a dying swan who soars and sings,/ Young Love should teach Time, in his own gray style,/ All that thou art.’ He also says that he has learnt from
The Platonism of Shelley
by James A. Notopoulos that Shelley got the image of the dying swan from Plato’s
Phaedo.

Shelley was of course very familiar with Plato’s writings, reading them in the original Greek, and was deeply influenced by them. His translation of
The Symposium
is still being discussed. Likewise Tagore, by virtue of when and where he was born, was immersed in Western literature, and he read widely. He was familiar with Shelley’s poetry right from his days as a teenager, and even translated a section
of Epipsychidion
while in his early twenties (Bhattacharya,
Kabimanasi
, Vol. 2, 2nd ed., Bharabi, Calcutta, 2000, pp. 263-5). It is also very likely that by the time he was writing ‘Death-dream’ he was reasonably familiar with some of the Platonic
Dialogues
in English translation. Some of his prose writings suggest that he had learnt something from the dialogic method. But I doubt if it makes much sense to claim that either Shelley or Tagore would be indebted
solely
to
Phaedo
for the image of the dying swan. The fact is that the myth of the swan that is mute in life but sings sweetly when dying was widespread throughout Europe from ancient times, and
references
to this myth are scattered throughout European literature. It can be found in Aesop and Ovid and Chaucer and Spenser. Tagore could have just as well picked it up from Shakespeare’s
The Merchant of Venice
or
Othello,
or indeed from Tennyson’s early poem ‘The Dying Swan’, which enjoyed a great vogue in the Victorian period. Indeed this poem was so popular even in the beginning of the twentieth century that it inspired the creation of the ballet
The Dying Swan
in 1905. Anna Pavlova knew Tennyson’s poem and it was at her request that Michel Fokine, who had also read the poem,
choreographed
this solo ballet for her.

The swan in Tagore’s ‘Death-dream’ dies, but does not sing. Any
connection
between that swan and the dying swan ‘who soars and sings’ in the lines from
Epipsychidion
quoted above, seems at best peripheral to me. To me the two poems are very different in spirit. Shelley refers to the fable of the dying swan’s song
en passant
in a long, ebullient poem which is a highly
animated
discourse on love, especially in support of free love, and is directly addressed to Emilia Viviani. Tagore’s poem does not address or mention any particular woman at all (though it may be haunted by the ghost of one), and its focus is very much on the central episode of the dream-experience, the dissolution of the universe, of which the death of the swan the poet is riding in his dream is only a part. There is also an emphasis on the actual fall of the swan, and as many of us can attest, and as analysts of dreams will surely know, the sensation of falling is a pretty common component of nightmares. What I take away from Tagore’s poem is first the image of a cosmic flight, then the vision of cosmic annihilation, and at the end of the dream, the gentle restoration of what is simultaneously the earth’s familiar reality and Maya in
the cosmic perspective. That is how I read the poem, and have accordingly alerted Western readers (who will, in any case, be only too familiar with the myth of the dying swan who sings) to the Indian moorings that underpin the imagery of Tagore’s poem and which may not be so obvious to them. The idea that the universe is periodically dissolved and regenerated is central to Hinduism, and these myths have their curious resonances in modern science. The poem is really an experience of the cosmic cycle in miniature. I have referred readers to Heinrich Zimmer, as he offers to the lay reader the most lucid (and poetic) exegeses known to me of the relevant Hindu myths. He comments that the myths and symbols of India are of a more archaic type than those in Greek literature. The poet’s experience in ‘Death-dream’ has a remarkable affinity with the experience of the sage Markandeya in one of the Puranic stories, and readers are urged to read the story in Zimmer. Like Markandeya in the Puranic story, the poet literally falls out of existence as he knows it, into the waters of nothingness, and is brought back to the reality he knows. And that reality itself is dreamlike, like a dream inside the
sleeping
godhead, resting between his tasks of destruction and creation.

As for
Phaedo
, Tagore may well have read it by 1888 and been fascinated by it, especially as it is a discourse on death and the after-life, and the
immortality
of the soul (a concept with which Tagore would have been already very familiar from his Indian background and Upanishadic education); besides, it has a discussion on the lawfulness of suicide, and even shows us vividly how Socrates drank the poisoned drink and slowly succumbed to its effects. If it is true that Kadambari Devi had died from taking an overdose of opium, then such details might well have lingered in Tagore’s mind. To some extent one can read Kadambari’s death in the description of the swan’s plunge to death in Tagore’s poem. But I don’t really recognise in Tagore’s dying bird the dying swans of Socrates’s discourse, who sing more sweetly than ever before because they know they are going to meet their master Apollo.

On the other hand, I do think that readers of Tagore’s poem need to be aware of the archetype of the cosmic gander, to whose melody Markandeya listens in the Puranic story. This is the cosmic gander’s song, as Zimmer articulates it (pp. 47-48): ‘Many forms do I assume. And when the sun and moon have disappeared, I float and swim with slow movements on the
boundless
expanse of the waters. I am the Gander. I am the Lord. I bring forth the universe from my essence and I abide in the cycle of time that dissolves it.’ This is connected to the philosophical core of the poem as I understand it. The generic Sanskrit word for ‘gander’,
hamsa
, if repeated as
hamsa, hamsa,
can be interpreted as
sa-’ham, sa-’ham,
meaning ‘This is me’ or ‘I am He’. This is lore familiar to me from my childhood, but let Zimmer vocalise it (p. 50): ‘I, the human individual, of limited consciousness, steeped in delusion, spellbound by Maya, actually and fundamentally am This, or He, namely, the Atman, the Self, the Highest Being, of unlimited consciousness and existence.’

The
hamsa
is regarded as a wise bird, who proverbially knows the
distinction
between milk and water, and a yogi of the highest order is known as a
parama-hamsa
or supreme
hamsa
. Tagore does use the word
hamsa
in his poetry, often in the context of migratory birds. It occurs in that great poem, no. 36 of
Balaka
, which I have translated in this collection. Another pertinent
example
would be song no. 148 of the Bengali
Gitanjali
, where the
hamsa
returning
home to Lake Manas – near Mount Kailas in the Himalayas – becomes a metaphor for the poet’s self-surrendering salutation to his Lord and the flight
of his whole being ‘to the shore of great death’ (
maha-maran-paare
). The
vernal
flight of homing
raj-hamsas
(royal ganders, i.e., swans) to Kailas, where the snows have melted, is referred to in the poem ‘The Victorious Woman’, included in this collection. Another well-known use of the word
hamsa
occurs in the song
‘Mon mor megher sangi’
(My mind is a companion of the clouds): there the poet’s mind rides on (or flies with) the wings of a flock of
hamsas
. In all these examples we see the magical pull of the actual word
hamsa
dictating
poetic meaning; we also see the great admiration that this poet feels for a bird’s capacity for long-distance flight. It is this particular capacity that makes a bird’s journey an appropriate metaphor for a spiritual adventure that dares to unlock the mysteries of the universe. I would draw the reader’s attention to another great poem of Tagore’s, translated in this collection as ‘A Stressful Time’, in which the bird, though not identified as a
hamsa
, is nevertheless making a supremely difficult crossing over a roaring sea.

The European archetype of the dying swan need not be excluded from the context of the poem ‘Death-dream’, for the imagery of a romantic poem operates, after all, like the aurora borealis, or a laser show, but then the Indian archetypes must surely not be excluded from the total picture either. Tapobrata Ghosh ridicules me for bringing in the gander of the Puranic story into my commentary, but the
hamsa
– ‘gander’, ‘swan’, call it what we will – is
definitely
a mighty Indian archetype; after all, Brahma, the god of creation, rides on one, and so does his consort, Saraswati, the goddess of learning and the arts. In some iconography she has twin
hamsas
by her. See the song ‘The moon’s laughter’s dam has burst’ in this collection, where I have translated a line as ‘and Saraswati’s swans have escaped’. A poet riding a swan in a
cosmic
flight is, at a certain level, almost an incarnation of Saraswati herself.

And we need not exclude from this laser display the image of the
swan-maiden
, the swan who can turn into a woman, and become a swan again. This legend is widespread and occurs in the
Arabian Nights
tale of Hasan of Basra. If we accept the swan-maiden as part of the laser display of images in
‘Death-dream
’, then how does that affect our interpretation of the poem? Is the poet riding on a swan to meet Kadambari Devi in the land of the dead? Is the swan an embodiment of Kadambari herself, the Muse who has betrayed him by dying too soon? There is certainly an erotic tinge in the description of the ride in the fifth stanza of the poem. Eroticism is bolder in the description, in ‘The Victorious Woman’, of how the woman is caressing the she-swan’s feathers. Readers are requested to compare the two passages.

After all such suggestions have been taken into account, the experience of a cataclysmic dissolution of the universe, and a gentle awakening from that nightmare, remain the philosophical core of the poem ‘Death-dream’. Tagore’s lifelong preoccupation with death, his perception of death and life as twins, were already well developed by 1888. In my opinion, ‘Death-dream’ is
organically
related to early poems such as ‘Mahaswapna’ (The Great Dream), ‘Srishti Sthiti Pralay’ (Creation, Preservation, Destruction, translated by William Radice in a shortened version), ‘Ananta Jiban’ (Endless Life) and ‘Ananta Maran’ (translated by me in the present collection as ‘Endless Death’). All these early poems are from
Prabhatsangit
(1883). Anybody who reads ‘
Mahaswapna
’ (The Great Dream) with its climactic image of a cosmic dissolution will instantly see the thematic connection between it and ‘Death-dream’. This connection, I believe, is more powerful than any tangential connection between ‘Death-dream’ on the one hand and Shelley’s
Epipsychidion
and Plato’s
Phaedo
on the other. I have a great admiration for Jagadish Bhattacharya’s exegesis of the role of Kadambari Devi as an internalised Muse in Tagore’s life, – he has installed, with appropriate ceremony, her statue where it rightfully belongs, – but with due respect, I think that any influence of those two texts of Shelley and Plato on the swan-image of this particular poem of Tagore’s has been overstated. An essay by Prof. Taraknath Sen, who was one of my teachers at Presidency College, Calcutta, in the fifties, offers an appropriate caveat in such matters. ‘Western influence on Tagore,’ he says, ‘is too often treated with Fluellen’s logic: “There is a river in Macedon, and there is also
moreover
a river at Monmouth…” Parallels are cited between him and this or that western poet, and conclusions sought to be drawn accordingly. It is a common fallacy in criticism to take parallels for signs of indebtedness or influence. All that parallels really prove is the community of the poetic mind all the world over. Too much stress on parallels might lead to absurd conclusions.’ (Sen, ‘Western Influence on the Poetry of Tagore’, in
A Centenary Volume:
Rabindranath
Tagore, 1861-1961,
Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, 1961.) This essay remains worth reading; though it has a regrettable bias against the post-Tagore generation of modernist writers, it might answer some of the queries regarding Tagore’s writings that might spring up in the minds of those who are reading the present discussion. Tagore was, of course, steeped in Western literature, but he was, at the same time, firmly embedded in the details of his country’s literary, linguistic, artistic, and philosophical heritage, in its myths and symbols, folk traditions, and rural ways, just as he drew some of his strengths from his environment’s tropical luxuriance. That quality of having deep roots in one’s soil and yet maintaining a serious, ongoing interest in knowing and interacting with the bigger world, being capable of travelling abroad and remaining open to all meaningful foreign influences, of synthesising such influences with the home-grown elements through one’s powers of imagination and creative energies:
that
precisely was what the Bengal Renaissance at its best was all about, a
phenomenon
from which some of us are still trying to draw inspiration to this day.