I Won't Let You Go: Selected Poems (2000) - Plot & Excerpts
My life can be split into before and after I read Tagore, and specifically before and after I read "I won't let you go". I can remember the room I was sitting in at university, the shadows across the page, the noises of students outside fading away as the poem pulled me in and held me fast, just like its importunate protagonist. This lyrical English translation by Ketaki Dyson comes the closest of any to reproducing the musicality and beauty of the original Bengali. I have read and reread this volume so many times, and while they are now familiar, the power of the words hasn't diminished.As his wife piles tangible symbols of her love for him on top of an already mountainous heap of baggage, the poet notices his little daughter sitting silently, almost forgotten, by the front door. “I won’t let you go,” she declares, and the narrator sees in her fierce determination the nature of life itself. “Foolish girl, my/daughter, who gave you the strength/to make such a statement, so bold, so self-assured ... such a proud assertion of love.” (Dyson, 84) The audacity of his young daughter reminds him that “a cry of the cosmos is quite as importunate/as a child’s. Since time began/all it gets it loses. Yet its grasp/of things hasn’t slackened, and in the pride/of undiminished love, like my daughter of four,/ceaselessly it sends out this cry: “I won’t let you go!” (Dyson, 85)The earth holds the smallest blade of grass close, the flame of the candle is held from oblivion by an unseen force, lovers, daughters, all claim “a charter of rights in perpetuity” from their creator. (Dyson, 86) Ultimately all of the treasures of the world are “blown away by a breath/like a trivial dry dust,” but “such is love, it never concedes defeat.” (Dyson, 85) Tagore wrote in “The World of Personality,” that “when I love ... when I feel I am truer in someone else than myself, then I am glad, for the One in me realizes its truth of unity by uniting with others.” (Currents in the Poetry of Rabindrananth Tagore, 1985, Peterson) Nature is cast, in the Vedic tradition, as a loving mother shielding her children with her own body. “I Won’t Let You Go” finds beauty in this bittersweet “holding fast,” a tenacity against all odds that, like water wearing at a stone, leaves the memory of its arrogance behind it. Tagore wrote “I Won’t Let You Go” in 1894, a year after he married Mrinalini Devi. Marjorie Sykes notes that between 1884 and 1899 he barely left Bengal, enjoying his growing family, publishing books and plays, and learning to understand, through the villages on his family’s estate, the basis of the oppression of India’s agrarian poor. It was a period of relative inactivity preceding years of constant work at Santiniketan, (the university he founded) travel around India and the world, literary conferences and speaking engagements. It reflects in part Tagore’s thinking on how human endeavors can make a difference, and on what kinds of work might have a lasting meaning. Tagore felt that he was often struggling against the current of Indian culture; indeed, this was a struggle he had undertaken since childhood, growing up in the Maharisi’s compound in Calcutta. “I Won’t Let You Go” reflects the despair of a man who knew that his best efforts could accomplish little, and yet who believed, with equal firmness, that those efforts would not be in vain. In small things, ordinary things, like a young girl’s expression of love, or jars upon jars of grains and sweets and provisions, is something that holds fast no matter how much it loses, no matter how much is lost. Chaos envelops all creation in the end, but that moment of protest, that itself is a moment of creation.
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