Where the Mind Is Without Fear

Where the Mind is Without Fear

~Rabindranath Tagore

CRITICAL ANALYSIS:

Where the Mind is Without Fear was included in the volume called ‘Naibedya’, the original poem bears the title ‘Prarthana’ meaning prayer. The poem is a prayer to God. The poem was written by Rabindranath Tagore during the time when India was under the British Rule and people were eagerly waiting to get their freedom from the British Rule. This poem had given a lot of strength to the people who were struggling for India’s independence. It is a prayer to the Almighty for a hassle free nation free from any kind of manipulative or corrupted powers.

Where the Mind is without Fear consists of eleven lines and somewhat resembles the style of a sonnet. In a sonnet, the first eight lines usually present an idea, are argumentative, put a proposal or a problem. If we look at the first eight lines of Where the Mind is without Fear, we find that the lines are a form of a prayer and it does present an idea. The first few lines have the repetition of the word ‘where’ which denotes a particular place but it not revealed then and there. We get to know about the place in the last line of the poem. The place is described as a place full of positive qualities, such as, fearlessness, knowledge, unity, truth, reason, perfection etc. in the last line the poet reveals the place as ‘that heaven of freedom’ and asks God to allow his country to reach there.

FORM:

The verse form of the poem is free verse, having no metrical patterns or rhymes. He was credited for having discovered this new form of composing poems, called prose poems.

ALLITERATION:

Tagore has used alliteration in his poem, Where the Mind in without Fear. Alliteration is the repeated use of the same consonant sound at the beginning of each word in a line of verse. Here, in this poem, the examples of alliteration are as follows,-

‘head...