Poems That Make Grown Men Cry
“Millions of Indian schoolchildren learn the poem at school. Even if I had not learned it at school, I suspect it would have come to my notice anyway.
Such prolonged and forced exposure might usually lead to a deep antipathy to any poem, however great. In this case, however, Tagore’s poem has meant more and more to me as I have read it and reread it over the years.
To be truthful, I rarely tear up when reading poetry. I admit that I reserve my tears for over-the-top Bollywood spectacular...s, where the chances of my leaving the cinema with dry eyes are embarrassingly low. This poem – translated from Bengali into English by Tagore himself – is, however, special to me in a different way, a powerful call to action and a declaration of belief in achievable change.
Its final line is a powerful culmination of the pent-up aspirations of the poem: ‘Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.’ The poem was published in 1910, in an India then still part of the British Raj, but the line seems to me more universal than that.MoreLess
Such prolonged and forced exposure might usually lead to a deep antipathy to any poem, however great. In this case, however, Tagore’s poem has meant more and more to me as I have read it and reread it over the years.
To be truthful, I rarely tear up when reading poetry. I admit that I reserve my tears for over-the-top Bollywood spectacular...s, where the chances of my leaving the cinema with dry eyes are embarrassingly low. This poem – translated from Bengali into English by Tagore himself – is, however, special to me in a different way, a powerful call to action and a declaration of belief in achievable change.
Its final line is a powerful culmination of the pent-up aspirations of the poem: ‘Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.’ The poem was published in 1910, in an India then still part of the British Raj, but the line seems to me more universal than that.MoreLess
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