Of death

 Death enters our life the day we are born. As certain as our birth is our death. The weird complexity of death is that it is so very known, and yet is completely unknown. 

No wonder, death has forever fascinated poets. The list is long. As it is the birth anniversary of Rabindra Nath Tagore, today I am going to talk of some of his images of death.

What is an image? Is that your question? Is it a symbol? Is that you next question? Well, an image is a sensory presentation of  experience. There need not be any similarity as in a simile. Nor there need be any  implication nor suggestivity as in a symbol. Rather it is an evocation of a feel, be it physical, mostly felt by the mind, the soul through the five senses.

Suppose I were to describe a morning not directly but as a blooming bud of the golden yellow champak, I am not comparing the flower with the dawn. Suppose if I were to write," It was 6.30ish. The blooming bud of the swarna champak..." , through the unstated, dormant yet clear associations, my reader can understand the break of a soft, fragrant day with a gentle dazzle of golden beams. 

In my opinion, Tagore's poems are abuzz with images. It could be the effect of imagism, dominant both in poetry (in the 1910's and 1920's of the Imagist Movement) and in paintings(of both the Impressionist and the Expressionist varieties). Anyways, that would be the spacious traverse of a proper research paper.

In this short little blog, let me present two images by Tagore of death that I find fascinating. In the first one, it is the soft gentle maternal love. A mother is breastfeeding the baby. She removes the right nipple from his lips. There is a murmur of a whimper before the eager lips find the left one. All is quiet gentle sleep yet again. That is the glide from life to death. 

This uncomplaining acceptance of death as an absolutely natural, normal transcendence is most beautifully captured by him in yet another image. The soul is the bedecked bride awaiting eagerly the arrival of the beloved, death. 

Those days, "Stree" and "Kirloskar" used to be published every month. For the May issue, I wrote a piece on Tagore. The article ended with my translation in to Marathi of that great Tagore poem, an intensely lyrical image of an eager awaiting for the complete total togetherness.

Aai loved it. The poem is great, and my translation was not exactly bad. She was in her mid-sixties, absolutely healthy. So the subtle edge of her appreciation of the image did not unsettle me a lot even when we discussed the poem. Now it does.

Death, said Donne, 'thou shalt die'. Yet Donne was the very same poet whose superb image in most sensitive terms reminds us,"no man is an island". Hence "never ask for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee." "Every death", as Donne stated, " diminishes me"!

Pratima@"Death smiles at us all," wrote Marcus Aurelius."All we can do is smile back at death "