Page 10 - DENG104_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_I

Unit 1: The Post Office by Rabindranath Tagore

This is a death play. Something you can read, or remember reading, when you’ve stopped Notes
raging against the dying of the light and have accepted the inevitable. The ending is abrupt
like all lives, like most deaths, like a lost position in a chess game which comes suddenly after
a long series of moves made with much lively vigour, hope and great expectations. Frankly,
I do not know where the gentleness and peace come from (must be from the potent combination
of youth, hope, innocence, death and what goes beyond it) and why this play is a much
acclaimed one, for its spiritual punch. Just like I do not know how some chess players—what
W.B. Yeats may consider as the “right audience”—can calmly gaze at a lost position after a
most searing battle over the board, topple his King after a long sigh, peacefully shake his
opponent’s hand, sign the scoresheet and serenely walk away.
The abrupt ending of the play, though surprising, is similar to the unwarranted arrival of
death. The innocence of children, and how the same innocence is kindlled in grown-ups when
in company of children are beautifully portrayed in words. The play picks up pace towards
the end, and ironically, only the herald of the anticipated arrives in time to show Amal a
glimpse of a gilted dream, before he slides into an eternal slumber and the play is curtained.
There is an Amal in all of us - there is an innate innocence that knows only truth, and that
longs for peace. Tagore mersmerises me and draws me deep into his works.

1.4 Central Metaphors of the Play

Though he can’t read, Amal is fascinated by the idea of letters, which are people’s thoughts
and feelings, flying about through time and space.

What kind of knowledge is important?
Imagine there is only one post office- the central source of information, sharing, and communication.
Life is like a post office, a central clearing house from which our words, thoughts, sentiments,
and deeds emanate out across the world.
Play is about emancipaton, spiritual freedom, expansion, new life, liberation.
Characters defined by function but become a person and not just a a function through their
meeting and interactions with Amal. As his physical state deteriorates, his spiritual state, and
ours expand.
Tagore’s insights into death seem to be the deepest with this play.
“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 to which all life returns, can never suffer
diminution by death... 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... 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...
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.”

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