The child and nature: A study of select Crescent Moon poems

Abstract

While narrating his boyhood days the poet recollects the window in their servants’ quarter that provided him respite from the strict confines of his household. Just below the window of this room was a tank with a flight of masonry steps leading down into the water . . . Ringed round as I was near the window, I would spend the whole day . . . gazing and gazing on this scene as on a picture-book (My Reminiscences 10-11). Thus, in his juvenile days, the poet’s communion with Nature borders on his quest of freedom, where Nature synchronises with the child’s desire to be free. His cluster of poems in The Crescent Moon articulates a child’s longing to communicate with the vast tracts of fields [symbolised by “Tepantarer Math”], the sky, the birds, the trees. Quite often, the poet invests his extended self to facilitate his construction of the child figure in these poems. This paper intends to read a few of Tagore’s Crescent Moon poems to look at the inevitable presence of nature in a child’s fancied world which remains untainted and pristine.