The essay below by Rabindranath Tagore is entitled ‘On Death’ and its being typed up by Leonard Elmhirst was referred to in a letter from Elmhirst to Tagore dated March 4 1925. (Dartington Hall Trust Archive, Leonard Elmhirst Collection, LKE/TAG/3/A)

On Death

Rabindranath Tagore

On January 28, 1925, Il Duca Gallarati Scotti, who had assisted Leonard Elmhirst in preventing Mussolini’s emissaries from capturing the Poet as an exhibit on behalf of their master, and who was, and who still is, one of the leading literary figures in Milan, sat with the Poet and, after a discussion with him about meditation (1) put to him the following challenge.

Il Duca:- “I liked, very much, the translation I read of your play The Post Office. From it I received the impression that you felt about death as though it were a kind of revelation of the Divine.”

Poet:– “I have had so many experiences of loved ones who have died, that I think I have come to know something about death, something perhaps of its deeper meaning. Every moment that I have spent at the death bed of some dear friend, I have known this, yet it is very difficult to describe how for me that great ocean of truth, of existence, of life, from which life itself springs and to which all life returns, can never suffer diminution by death. It is this ocean of life that I feel it most difficult to describe in words. I see how the individual life comes back into the bosom of this ocean at the moment of death. I have felt too how great and fathomless this ocean is, yet how full it is of personality. For personality is ever flowing into it. Ever receiving into its bosom, it becomes instilled with personality. Yet this ocean seems as nothing, as neither light nor darkness, but as one great extension of the universe, an eternity of peace and life. It is very difficult to say how I have come to feel this, but I could see how easily and naturally life flowed back into this ocean, how our own personal self found entry, was received and accepted. I felt this, and now I know that nothing of personality can be lost.

Science recognises atoms, all of which can be weighed and measured, but never recognises personality, the one thing that lies at the basis of reality. All creation is that, for apart from personality, there is no meaning in creation. Water is water to me, because I am I. And so I have felt that in this great infinite; in this ocean of personality from which my own little personal self has sprung, lies the completion of the cycle, like those jets of water from a fountain which rise and fall and come back home again. It is thus that we are received into the heart and the bosom of the Infinite Personality. This is what I myself have felt. It has been an experience for me which cannot be described.

Every day we see a continuation of this process of death, like metre in a poem. At every point metre is a restriction. An indefinite flow of words can never become a poem, but must have this curtailing of liberty we call metre at every step to prevent indefiniteness and vagueness. So life is always being curtailed into its rhythm, its metre. Every day is a death, every moment even. If not there would be a vast desert of deathlessness. Life itself is demonstrated to us through death, for death gives to the world that rhythm which is creation. I have often felt this, and now science has shown us the fact that the difference between one element and another is only that of rhythm. The substance is the same, the rhythm is different. Rhythm in fact makes all the difference. So the whole of creation is nothing but the play of rhythm. We are each put into a different rhythm and all different individuals have their own rhythms. There is at the same time a fundamental unity, as in a poem in which each line possesses its own unity.

Possibly there is no such thing as substance. Science now says that matter is not matter, but electric force, and that substance does not exist. But there is rhythm, and the continual play of rhythm through which variety comes. I find that this is true of the poem. The words are the material. So long as they remain in their prose form they don’t give a feeling of the eternal. The moment they are taken and put into rhythmical form they find their own soul; they shatter the boundaries of rhythm. It is the same with the rose. In the pulp of its petals you may find everything of the material that went to make the rose, but the rose is lost, for the boundaries that gave the rose rhythm are lost and with them is also lost that finality which had in it the touch of the Infinite.

Again, the rose appears to me to be still. Yet, because of its particular form and shape and harmony, it has an eternity of movement within that stillness; it is ever going round and round and round; it is always active; it is possessed of a dynamic quality; it has the quality of a picture that possesses perfect harmony. You can go on looking at such a picture for ever, for it gives a swing to your own consciousness which makes your own mind active. If the picture was a mere patch of colour on the canvas, it would have no movement. It would be dead. But the moment that colour is placed within rhythmic boundaries, it always speaks. It is never still. It gets a dynamic quality which constantly speaks to our consciousness. Through such active movement eddies are formed. So long as the water spreads itself over the countryside you may have nothing but a swamp. The moment you set up a bank, the current is checked and goes round and round. So in perfect rhythm, form is always moving, as v1ith the stars, and like the planets which seem to us so still, but which are never still. A great picture is always speaking to our consciousness. It is never still, and for that reason you never grow tired of it. But news from a newspaper of some tragic happening is still-born. We read the paragraph whilst we take our tea and forget it. Put the facts for us in rhythmic form and they may speak, eternally; they may never cease to speak. The news may be mere commonplace from some journal and lack any dynamic quality, but give it rhythm and it can move for all time. That is Art.

You must know that the materials of the rose and the rose tree are everywhere, but they have to be brought together and confined in rhythmic form in order to live. So the rose is created out of the great vague vast. We don’t know how it has been collected and put into rhythmic form, how from the indeterminate it finds everlasting being and becomes an eternal fact. So long as it is all merged in the vague it is nothing to me, yet it must have been everywhere. Somehow from this vast everywhere, it has been put into perfect rhythmical form and has formed an eddy in our consciousness, so that, when we see it, it gives us a shock of delight. “Ah!”, we say, “I know you. You are, as I am a great fact. Because of this great fact in you, you are”.

Creative love imposes that rhythm, as a poet, who finds joy in his own creation, imposes a rhythm round his thoughts and words that gives them perfect shape. It is my joy that takes hope through Rhythm, and as in the Upanishads it is infinite joy, that takes varied shapes and expresses itself in an eternity of creation, so around my own thoughts in my poems this impulse of joy impresses its Rhythm. For the artist, lines are infinite in number and in shape, curved or rectangular. By gathering these lines into his own person and by imposing upon them his own Rhythm, he directly imprisons certain of them in the chain of his own love and joy. Thereby they become a creation. He has limited the unlimited.

The thoughts and the dreams of my mind are indefinite. Directly I define them, I become a creator. It is this limiting process which is the work of genius. When a man is possessed of this power of control, when he can gather together and put the indefinite under the law of his own genius, his work is a work of creation. He limits the unlimited; he defines the indefinite.

1 reported in Visva-Bharati Quarterly vol.28 No.2 1962-3

top