Arghya Jana Literature Guide

Tagore was a born singer and a poet endowed with an extraordinary imaginative faculty. He was at the same time a very well-read man and a most noble example of what is called culture. A knowledge, therefore, of the formative influences of his life and the part they played in his poetry will be of great interest to us. When the poet tells us that “The Master Workman, who made me, fashioned his first model from the Native clay of Bengal,” 1 the statement has a lot of meaning in it. In the first place he was deeply attached to his mother-tongue and all his works, except one, were originally composed in the Bengali language. In 1937, when he was invited by the Calcutta University to deliver the University Convocation Address, he spoke in Bengali, the language of his home and that of his hearers, though evince the inauguration of that great institution in 1857 English had occupied that lofty place on such distinguished occasions. Tagore's enthusia...

Shakespeare's sonnets are a collection of 154 sonnets , dealing with themes such as the passage of time, love, beauty and mortality, first published in a 1609 quarto entitled SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS.: Never before imprinted. (although sonnets 138 and 144 had previously been published in the 1599 miscellany The Passionate Pilgrim ). The quarto ends with " A Lover's Complaint ", a narrative poem of 47 seven-line stanzas written in rhyme royal . The first 17 poems, traditionally called the procreation sonnets , are addressed to a young man urging him to marry and have children in order to immortalise his beauty by passing it to the next generation. [1] Other sonnets express the speaker's love for a young man; brood upon loneliness, death, and the transience of life; seem to criticise the young man for preferring a rival poet; express ambiguous feelings for the speaker's mistress ; and pun on the poet's name. The final two sonnets are allegorical t...