Page 290 - DENG201_ENGLISH_II

English - II

Notes grace, Chitra is but a plain unselfconscious girl wearing a boy’s attire. When the obtained grace has
been shed, Chitra is still beautiful because she has known love, because she is now an expected
mother.
Beauty and youth, although they may be transient are yet parts of our experience. “Wisdom lies in
neither looking upon the body and its beauty as ends in themselves nor in imagining that our life
could be wholly separated from the physical base. Tagore rejected both the negations. The ascetic’s
denial of life as well as the sensualist’s denial of the spirit. The blinding maddening ecstasy of the
physical union is not denied in Chitra, but its transience is also recognized.
The poet’s wonderful art and his power of conveying an endless world of meaning in the narrow
span of a sentence are seen in the wonderful reply of Arjuna (“Beloved, my life is full”). The message
of the play is the idea so beautifully expressed in Carew’s poem on True Beauty:
He that loves a rosy cheek
Or a coral lip admires
Or from star-like love doth seek
Fuel to maintain his fires;
As old Time maketh these decay,
So his flames must waste away.
But a smooth and steadfast mind,
Gentle thoughts and calm desires,
Hearts with equal love combined
Kindle never dying fires:
Where these are not, I despise
Lovely cheeks or lips or eyes!
The poet teaches us that the love that is founded on beauty of body alone is built on insecure
foundations. Beauty in human face and form is glorious, fleeting and mysterious. To the man with
true vision, beauty, grace and charm that raptures the lover in his beloved’s face is but a dim reflection—
an imperfect revelation of the wondrous vision—of the light of the soul behind the veil of the mortal
flesh. The beauty of the soul is immortal, as the soul is immortal. Love built on the beauty of the soul
is built on a rock and endures forever.
Tagore is a true child of his great poetic ancestors. He has recognized and expressed the true glory of
love in his works. His insight into Indian ideals and conceptions of love is very well shown in the
essays that he has written interpreting the genius of Kalidasa. He says:
The poet has shown here, as in Kumarsambhava, that the Beauty that goes hand in hand with Moral
law is eternal, that the calm, controlled and beneficent form of Love, is its best form, that Beauty is
truly charming under restraint and decays quickly when it gets wild and unfettered. This ancient
poet of India refuses to recognise as its own highest glory; he proclaims that goodness is the final
goal of love. He teaches us that the love of man and woman is not beautiful, not lasting, not fruitful,—
so long as it is self-centred, so long as it does not beget goodness, so long as it does not defuse itself in
society over son and daughter, guests and neighbours [...]. But on the altar of devotion (tapasya) India
sits alone [...]. The Beauty that he adores is lit up by grace, modesty, and goodness; in its intensity it
is true to one forever; in its range it embraces the whole universe. It is fulfilled by renunciation,
ratified by sorrow and rendered eternal by religion [...]. Therefore is such love higher and more
wonderful than wild and unrestrained Passion.
The remarks that Tagore has made in respect to Kalidasa hold true for the poet himself. Moreover
Krishna Kriplani also opines that “the play is very characteristic of the author. It represents a basic
and permanent attitude of his mind and philosophy—his unification of man and nature, the latter
almost an active participant in the drama of life and his concern with the perennial question, what is
beauty; what is love; what is the true and enduring basis of man-woman relationship?”

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