Rabindranath Tagore's "Freedom" is a lyrical expression of his personal culture, emotions, and imagination.
A Modernist poem, "Freedom" moves away from mere personal expression--
Freedom from fear is the freedomI claim for you my motherland!--
to an intellectual and political statement:
Freedom from the insult of dwelling in a puppet's world,where movements are started through brainless wires...to be stirred into a mimicry of life.
The theme of this poem is that living under the colonial rule of England is a "mimicry of life," not truly living. The poet "claims" this freedom for his motherland of India, urging that his people not live as "puppets," but instead remove the "shackles of slumber" (a metaphor for the thought-deadening subjugation of colonial rule) from themselves by breaking with the past and joining in the non-violent movement initiated by Gandhi.
As is characteristic of his poetry, there is a metaphysical tone to this poem of Tagore. For, the positive implications of Hindu belief are developed in this verse as there is the emphasis that change is necessary for the renewal of the spirit. Since people all have divine souls, there should be tolerance, respect, and love for one another. Colonial rule does not allow these conditions, so the poet urges his people to strive for freedom from British rule in order to achieve the essential renewal of the spirit.
https://edsitement.neh.gov/lesson-plans/lesson-1-understanding-context-modernist-poetry
https://www.biographyonline.net/poets/tagore-rabindranath.html
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/rabindranath-tagore
Saturday, January 13, 2018
Read "Freedom" by Rabindranath Tagore. Provide an interpretation that explicates specific lines and present an overall theme and focus of the poem. Show understanding of the whole picture and how particular words and lines fit into the poem.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Summarize the major research findings of "Toward an experimental ecology of human development."
Based on findings of prior research, the author, Bronfenbrenner proposes that methods for natural observation research have been applied in ...
-
One way to support this thesis is to explain how these great men changed the world. Indeed, Alexander the Great (356–323 BC) was the quintes...
-
Polysyndeton refers to using several conjunctions in a row to achieve a dramatic effect. That can be seen in this sentence about the child: ...
-
Both boys are very charismatic and use their charisma to persuade others to follow them. The key difference of course is that Ralph uses his...
-
At the most basic level, thunderstorms and blizzards are specific weather phenomena that occur most frequently within particular seasonal cl...
-
Equation of a tangent line to the graph of function f at point (x_0,y_0) is given by y=y_0+f'(x_0)(x-x_0). The first step to finding eq...
-
Population policy is any kind of government policy that is designed to somehow regulate or control the rate of population growth. It include...
-
Gulliver cooperates with the Lilliputians because he is so interested in them. He could, obviously, squash them underfoot, but he seems to b...
No comments:
Post a Comment