Rabinadranath Tagore
A native of Calcutta, India, who wrote in Bengali and often translated his own work into English, Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 — the first Asian to receive the honor. He wrote poetry, fiction, drama, essays, and songs; promoted reforms in education, aesthetics and religion; and in his late sixties he even turned to the visual arts, producing 2,500 paintings and drawings before his death.
Where the Mind is Without Fear |
Analysis |
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free Where the world has not been broken up into fragments By narrow domestic walls (5)Where words come out from the depth of truth Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit (10)Where the mind is led forward by thee Into ever-widening thought and action Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake. |
In a world without fear, knowledge is free, and nobody is hard on themselves. (lines 1-2) This shows that fear clouds the mind and makes people act irrationally. Furthermore, the next few lines show that fear has broken up the world into broken pieces of a whole puzzle, and drives people to deception and motivation runs undeterred. (lines 5-7) The lines after that state that fear has made people lose their sense of reason and created bad habits as such. (lines 8-9) The next lines state that due to fear, people no longer have the willingness to lead themselves into the unknown, or rather, that which has not yet been done before. (lines 10-11) The poem ends with a call to action aimed at God to let the people open their eyes and see what fear has truly done to the human race.
In this poem, Tagore doesn't focus on fear. Rather, he focuses more on the effect of fear on the mind, and the probable world that would emerge if fear didn't exist. Some of these effects include being in-confident, making people go into shells, deception, lack of motivation, and losing reasoning. This poem serves as a poem to open the eyes of the people, as the ending statement pleads for people to realize that they are but slaves, and their master is fear. |