Sunday, August 17, 2014

What is a summary of "The Flower-School" by Tagore?

"The Flower-School" is a poem by Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore. It is narrated in the third person, but includes elements of a child speaking to a mother.

The title of the poem is almost paradoxical in that flowers do not actually attend school. Thus the title makes readers contemplate this paradox of how flowers create spectacularly beautiful blossoms without the training given human children.


The child's voice in the poem hypothesizes that flowers perhaps go to school underground and that their beautiful eruption above ground is similar to children being let out of school into playgrounds and rainstorms are similar to school holidays. The child, looking at the flowers waving in the wind, surmises that their true home is in the sky which is their mother.


As Tagore himself was a Brahmin who founded an ashram, one might also wish to think of the parallel that the flowers' underground life is like the life of humans living in mortal bodies, and like the flowers bursting into bloom above ground, so the human soul eventually departs the body to its true home.

5 comments:

  1. The summary has brought up the intense meaning of the poem in a very efficient way...well done...hoping to read more of the summaries by #oflownotes.👌

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