Tagore's Patriotic Prayer

Where the Mind is Without Fear

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;

Where knowledge is free;

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;

Where words come out from the depth of truth;

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection:

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;

Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action—

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

—from Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore

Analysis

Consisting of one sentence, Tagore’s simple prayer for his country, India, prior to her gaining independence from Britain, has become one of the most quoted poem/prayers by political activists. The universality of this prayer allows it to transcend both time and space, as all great poetry does.

The first seven lines consist of adverb clauses that denote a condition portrayed by a metaphor of place, “where the mind is without fear, “where knowledge is free,” etc. Until we read the last line, we do not know the exact reference of this place, but we do realize that it is a place where many wonderful qualities exist: fearlessness, knowledge, unity, truth, useful work, reason, and progress.

Then after depicting all these useful qualities, in the main clause of the sentence the speaker names that condition, that metaphoric place as “that heaven of freedom” and asks the “Father,” i.e. God, to allow his country to arrive there or “awake” to the realization that she must strive to achieve the ability to demonstrate all these wonderful qualities.

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