Questions for Toru Dutt and Rabindranath Tagore

Please read each poem aloud before discussing it, and first comment on the form—how do the poem’s diction, rhythm, and stanza form contribute to its tone and meaning?

For each author, please construct at least one further question of your own and send to me.

Toru Dutt

Sonnet—The Lotus

What values are attributed to each flower?

What is contributed by beginning the poem with Love’s request?

Dutt’s family had been Hindus but converted to Christianity. What symbolism is traditionally associated with the lotus (Hindu) and lily (Christian)? What meanings, secular or religious, may be associated with the blended flower?

Is the sonnet form appropriate for the poem’s sentiment, and if so, how? Since this is a Petrarchan sonnet (8 lines octave, 6 lines sestet), how does the author use these divisions to dramatize her point?

How do verbal echoes and repetitions enhance the poem’s meaning?

Our Casuarina Tree

Please look at a photo of the casuarina tree (native to India and Australia). Why do you think this particular tree may have remained in her memory?

What do you make of the initial image of the python surrounding the tree? What are the tree’s special characteristics?

What has been her relationship with the tree? (st. 2) What sound does the casuarina make, and how does the poet interpret this? What is the “unknown land”? Can this have more than one meaning?

What seem associations of the water, moon, and night? (st. 3) Why do these evoke memories of the casuarina?

What is the poet’s final wish? How does this poem differ from a simple elegy? What sense of time is evoked by her appeal to for the tree’s survival? Will her wish be granted?

What is the Casuarina’s relationship to fear, death, and love? What does it symbolize?

Are the eleven-line stanzas appropriate for the poem’s detailed unfolding? How would you characterize its pacing and development? Should it have been shorter? Longer?

 

Near Hastings

What do we surmise about the writer’s state of mind as she and her companion had loitered at the beach, and how do we know this?

Is the beachside setting significant? The anonymity of the encounter?

What is significant about the allusions to roses and lotuses?

What is the effect of the eight-line short stanzas? How many beats to a line? Are these patterns unusual?

Is the conclusion a happy one?

The Tree of Life

What is important about the poem’s title?

Why is it important that she be awake for her dream? What is the speaker’s initial situation at the opening of the poem?

What are the features of the dream? What symbolism is associated with the Angel’s binding of the wreath around her head? What is the effect of the wreath?

Why cannot the father’s head be likewise bound?

What imagery is associated with the fading of the angel?

What is the significance of the poem’s final scene? How are the poem’s themes bound together? (father, vision, tree, sickness, life)

What is the poem’s form? (line length, rhymes) How would this have been familiar to the poet’s readers? Is it an appropriate form for its subject?

Tagore, from Gitanjali

Gitanjali means “song offering.” Does it help to know that these songs are based on Indian (Hindu) devotional lyrics?

For each of the nine selections, please summarize its essential meaning. Who is addressed, and what if anything do we know about the speaker?

What images/scenes are used? Is there a meaning to their sequence? What climax or closure is provided by the last line?

What do you make of the parable in no. 64?

How effective is the use of prose-poetry? Of segments of different lengths?

How would you describe Tagore’s use of rhythms and sound throughout? Is it effective?

Tagore’s poems were especially admired by his early twentieth century audience. From what you know of modernism, do they exhibit some of the features of modernism?

Why might their views of time and divinity have appealed to a late nineteenth-century audience?

What literary antecedents in English may have influenced Tagore’s renditions?  

What seem to be his social views? Are they egalitarian?

What seem to be his desires for the future of India?

What are his responses to time? (82)

What emotions/sensations/intuitions/desires does Tagore evoke most successfully in his “Gitanjali”?

Do these prose/poetic songs seem to form a progression? Do they form a unified mental whole?