Analysis of Lover's Gifts XLII: Are You a Mere Picture
Rabindranath Tagore 1861 (Kolkata) – 1941 (Kolkata)
Are you a mere picture, and not as true as those stars, true as
this dust? They throb with the pulse of things, but you are
immensely aloof in your stillness, painted form.
The day was when you walked with me, your breath warm, your
limbs singing of life. My world found its speech in your voice, and
touched my heart with your face. You suddenly stopped in your walk,
in the shadow-side of the Forever, and I went on alone.
Life, like a child, laughs, shaking its rattle of death as it
runs; it beckons me on, I follow the unseen; but you stand there,
where you stopped behind that dust and those stars; and you are a
mere picture.
No, it cannot be. Had the life-flood utterly stopped in you,
it would stop the river in its flow, and the foot-fall of dawn in
her cadence of colours. Had the glimmering dusk of your hair
vanished in the hopeless dark, the woodland shade of summer would
die with its dreams.
Can it be true that I forgot you? We haste on without heed,
forgetting the flowers on the roadside hedge. Yet they breathe
unaware into our forgetfulness, filling it with music. You have
moved from my world, to take seat at the root of my life, and
therefore is this forgetting-remembrance lost in its own depth.
You are no longer before my songs, but one with them. You came
to me with the first ray of dawn. I lost you with the last gold of
evening. Ever since I am always finding you through the dark. No,
you are no mere picture.
Scheme | ABCDEFGHIJKLMINOPQRESTUVK |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 110110011111111 111110111111 010010110101 011111111111 11011111110110 11111111001011 001110010011101 11011101101111 1110111100011111 11101110110110 110 111011011100101 1110100110011110 01011101001111 10001010111101 1111 111111011111011 0100101011111 010110110111011 11111111011110 11101001010111 111100111111111 1110111111110111 101011111011011 111110 |
Closest metre | Iambic heptameter |
Characters | 1,445 |
Words | 276 |
Sentences | 19 |
Stanzas | 1 |
Stanza Lengths | 25 |
Lines Amount | 25 |
Letters per line (avg) | 45 |
Words per line (avg) | 11 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 1,119 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 274 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on April 19, 2023
- 1:22 min read
- 64 Views
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