Rabindranath Tagore’s “The Last Bargain” focuses on what seems to be an quandary: how is it that a child’s offering of “nothing” to a seeker becomes the “last bargain” as well as the best bargain?
Introduction and Text of “The Last Bargain”
The human mind/hear/soul engages in the spiritual search in order to gain freedom and bliss. Much sorrow and pain afflict those who focus solely on the material level of existence.
As the speaker in Rabindranath Tagore’s “The Last Bargain” searches for a job, he is, in fact, demonstrating the difference between focusing on the material level of being and focusing on the spiritual level.
The Last Bargain
“Come and hire me,” I cried, while in the morning I was walking on the stone-paved road. Sword in hand, the King came in his chariot. He held my hand and said, “I will hire you with my power.” But his power counted for nought, and he went away in his chariot.
In the heat of the midday the houses stood with shut doors. I wandered along the crooked lane. An old man came out with his bag of gold. He pondered and said, “I will hire you with my money.” He weighed his coins one by one, but I turned away.
It was evening. The garden hedge was all aflower. The fair maid came out and said, “I will hire you with a smile.” Her smile paled and melted into tears, and she went back alone into the dark.
The sun glistened on the sand, and the sea waves broke waywardly. A child sat playing with shells. He raised his head and seemed to know me, and said, “I hire you with nothing.” From thenceforward that bargain struck in child’s play made me a free man.
Commentary on “The Last Bargain”
Rabindranath Tagore’s “The Last Bargain” presents an enigma: how can it be that a child offering nothing can be the bargain that makes a “free man” of the seeker?
First Movement: Seeking Employment
“Come and hire me,” I cried, while in the morning I was walking on the stone-paved road. Sword in hand, the King came in his chariot. He held my hand and said, “I will hire you with my power.” But his power counted for nought, and he went away in his chariot.
The opening movement taking place in the morning finds the speaker apparently seeking employment; thus he announces, “Come and hire me.” A king then comes on the scene, offering the individual employment through his “power.”
However, the job seeker determines that the king’s power held very little value. The king then moves away in his “chariot.” Then the speaker continues to search. Now, the reader is likely to suspect that this speaker is not seeking a job on the material, planet Earth, physical sense.
Second Movement: Continuing the Search
In the heat of the midday the houses stood with shut doors. I wandered along the crooked lane. An old man came out with his bag of gold. He pondered and said, “I will hire you with my money.” He weighed his coins one by one, but I turned away.
The speaker keeps up his search, and the time now is “midday.” He takes notice that the doors to all of the houses are closed. All of a sudden, an old man comes on the scene; he is carrying a “bag of gold.” The old man then inform the seeker that he will offer him a job “with [his] money.”
The old man counts out his coins piece by piece, which demonstrates his attachment to money—a physical level necessity and reality. However, that display of physical attachment annoys this spiritual seeker, who then turns away in disgust.
The speaker remains unimpressed by the power of a king, and he is not favorable to an old man’s “gold.” The reader can now be assured that the speaker is not seeking an earthly job and thus not seeking worldly goods; instead, he is searching for the spiritual love that comes only from God. Worldly wealth and power hold no importance for him.
Third Movement: Experiencing a Change
It was evening. The garden hedge was all aflower. The fair maid came out and said, “I will hire you with a smile.” Her smile paled and melted into tears, and she went back alone into the dark.
However, the seeker continues on well into evening, when he sees, a “garden hedge [ ] all aflower.” Then he encounters a “fair maid” who says, “I will hire you with a smile.” But he inevitably experiences the transformation that comes to the aged human being as the smile “paled and melted into tears.” Thus rejected, the maiden “went back alone into the dark.”
Fourth Movement: The Best Bargain
The sun glistened on the sand, and the sea waves broke waywardly. A child sat playing with shells. He raised his head and seemed to know me, and said, “I hire you with nothing.” From thenceforward that bargain struck in child’s play made me a free man.
In the final movement, the speaker, as he is walking along the ocean’s shore, watching the turbulent waves, and meeting a child who is playing on the shore, is afforded his final bargain: the child affirms, “I hire you with nothing.” This final bargain thus results in a situation that ultimately becomes the best bargain.
The best bargain is the one that liberates the seeker from searching for satisfaction from earthly things. He, then instead, may focus his attention on his own soul, where the real “job” of seeking freedom, liberation, and bliss exist.
It is the quiet Spirit—the seeming nothingness contrasting with materiality, the space transcending time and matter—that turns out to be the genuine, true employer. Working for the Celestial, Divine Employer (God) affords the laborer the true freedom, soul realization, and bliss—none of which can achieved by earthly power, gold, and physical affection.
In 1913, Rabindranath Tagore, Indian Nobel Laureate, won the literature prize for his prose translations of Gitanjali, Bengali for “song offerings.” A true Renaissance man, he served as a poet, social reformer, and founder of a school.
Early Life and Education
Rabindranath Tagore, (in Bengali, Rabīndranāth Ṭhākur), was born May 7, 1861, Calcutta, India, to the religious reformer Debendranath Tagore (1817–1905) and Sarada Devi (1830–1875). Sarada gave birth to fifteen children with Debendranath Tagore [1].
Rabindranath was the youngest of the children and was raised primarily by his oldest sister and servants. His mother fell ill after giving birth to her last child, and she died when Rabindranath was only fourteen years of age.
Tagore came to disdain formal education. He was first enrolled in public education at the Oriental Seminary School in Calcutta. At only seven years of age, he dropped out of school after attending for one month. Students at the school were punished by being beaten with sticks.
After enrolling in the school of Saint Xavier in 1876, he managed to attend for six months but then again left the institution. However, he did retain some pleasant memories of his attendance at Saint Xavier and in 1927, he gifted the school with a statue of Jesus Christ from his personal collection.
Saint Xavier values its relationship with Tagore, despite its brevity, and commemorates his birthday anniversary, even holding their ceremony during the pandemic in 2021:
The principal of the college, Father Dominic Savio, said: “We have decided to remember him on his birthday not only for paying tribute to a true Xaverian, who preached universal humanism but also to get inspiration from his writings, preaching and philosophy, particularly at this trying time”.[2]
Tagore was richly homeschooled by his many accomplished siblings; his brother Hemendranath trained his younger brother in physical culture, having “Rabi” swim in the Ganges and hike through the surrounding hills.
Rabindranath also practiced gymnastics, wresting, and judo, under the watchful eye of his older brother. With other siblings, Tagore studied history, geography, drawing, anatomy, mathematics. Most importantly for his future writing career, he studied Sanskrit and English literature.
Tagore’s contempt for formal schooling was on display when he enrolled in Presidency College but then spent only one day at the school. His philosophy of teaching held that appropriate teaching included fueling curiosity not merely explaining situations.
Founding His Own School
Ironically, Tagore’s later interest in education led him to the founding of his own school in 1901 at Santiniketan (“Peaceful Abode”) in the bucolic countryside in West Bengal. His school was established as an experimental educational institution, which would blend the best features of Eastern and Western traditions in education.
Tagore relocated from Calcutta to reside permanently at his school. In 1921, it became officially known as Visva-Bharati University, an important learning institution still flourishing today. The following is from the school’s mission statement:
The principal of the college, Father Dominic Savio, said: “We have decided to remember him on his birthday not only for paying tribute to a true Xaverian, who preached universal humanism but also to get inspiration from his writings, preaching and philosophy, particularly at this trying time”.[2]
To bring into more intimate relation with one another, through patient study and research, the different cultures of the East on the basis of their underlying unity.
To approach the West from the standpoint of such a unity of the life and thought of Asia.
To seek to realize in a common fellowship of study the meeting of the East and the West, and thus ultimately to strengthen the fundamental conditions of world peace through the establishment of free communication of ideas between the two hemispheres. [3]
Tagore’s keen perception and deep understanding of the areas in which public education had become hopelessly corrupt prompted him to create a learning environment in which his vision of holistic learning could become a reality while continuing to grow and flourish.
The English painter and art critic William Rothenstein [4] became deeply interested in the philosophy and writings of Rabindranath Tagore. The painter especially was attracted to Tagore’s prose poems from Gitanjali, Bengali for “song offerings.” The beauty and charm of these poems compelled Rothenstein to suggest to Tagore that he translate them into English so people in the West could appreciate them.
Tagore, following Rothenstein’s advice, translated his song offerings in Gitanjali into English prose renderings. In 1913, Rabindranath Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature primarily for this volume of poems. Also in 1913, the publishing house Macmillan brought out the hardcover copy of Tagore’s prose translations of Gitanjali.
William Butler Yeats, the greatest Irish poet, also a Nobel Laureate (1923), penned the introduction to Gitanjali. Yeats reports that this volume of poems “stirred [his] blood as nothing has for years.” About Indian culture in general, Yeats opines, “The work of a supreme culture, they yet appear as much the growth of the common soil as the grass and the rushes.”
Yeats’ interest and perusal of Eastern philosophy intensified, and he was particularly moved by Tagore’s spiritual writing. Yeats avers that Tagore’s tradition was one wherein
poetry and religion are the same thing and that it has passed through the centuries, gathering from learned and unlearned metaphor and emotion, and carried back again to the multitude the thought of the scholar and of the noble. [5]
Yeats later composed many poems based on Eastern concepts, although their subtleties at times evaded him [6]. Nevertheless, Yeats deserves credit for advancing the West’s attention and interest in the spiritual essence of those concepts. Yeats further asserts in his introductory piece to Gitanjali,
If our life was not a continual warfare, we would not have taste, we would not know what is good, we would not find hearers and readers. Four-fifths of our energy is spent in this quarrel with bad taste, whether in our own minds or in the minds of others.
Yeats’ decidedly severe appraisal of Western culture quite accurately reflects the mood of his era: the Irish poet’s birth and death dates (1861-1939) sandwiches his life between two bloody Western wars, the American Civil War (1861–1965) and World War II (1939–1945).
Yeats also accurately speaks to Tagore’s achievement as he reports that Tagore’s songs “are not only respected and admired by scholars, but also they are sung in the fields by peasants.” The Irish poet would have been astonished and delighted if his own poetic efforts had been accepted by such a wide spectrum of the populace.
In Yeats’ poem, “The Fisherman,” he creates a speaker who is asserting the need for such an organic, pastoral style of poetry. He is calling for a poetry that will be meaningful for the common folk.
Yeats reveals his contempt for charlatans, while encouraging an ideal that he feels must guide culture and art. Yeats encouraged a style of art that he felt most closely appealed to the culture of the Irish. Thus, the Irish poet comprehended the beauty and simplicity native to the concept of a poetry for the common folk.
The following prose-poem rendering #7 is representative of the Gitanjali’s form and content:
My song has put off her adornments. She has no pride of dress and decoration. Ornaments would mar our union. They would come between thee and me. Their jingling would drown thy whispers.
My poet’s vanity dies in shame before thy sight. O Master Poet, I have sat down at thy feet. Only let me make my life simple and straight like a flute of reed for thee to fill with music.
This poem unveils a charm that remains humble: it is, in fact, a prayer to soften the poet’s heart to his Belovèd Master Poet (God), without unnecessary words and gestures. A poet steeped in vanity produces only ego-centered poetry, but this guileless poet/devotee seeks only to be open to the simple humbleness of truth that only the Heavenly Father-Creator can bestow upon his soul.
As the Irish poet William Butler Yeats has averred, these songs emerge from a culture in which art and religion have become synonymous. Thus, it comes as no surprise that the offerer of these humble songs is speaking directly to the Divine Belovèd (God) in song after song, and song rendering #7 remains a perfect example.
In the last line of song #7 is a subtle allusion [7] to Bhagavan Krishna. The great yogi/poet Paramahansa Yogananda elucidates the meaning:
Krishna is shown in Hindu art with a flute; on it he plays the enrapturing song that recalls to their true home the human souls wandering in delusion.
Tagore’s employment of religious themes remains a subtle yet integral part of his works. He seldom engages in overtly polemical exposition, only a natural, organic art that inspires even as it educates and entertains.
Renaissance Man
Rabindranath Tagore became an accomplished writer of poetry, essays, plays, and novels. And despite his early disagreeable relationship with schooling, he is also noted for becoming an educator and founder of Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan, West Bengal, India.
Tagore’ many accomplishments renders him a perfect example of a Renaissance man, who is skilled in many fields of endeavor, including spiritual poetry. Despite being a world traveler, Rabindranath Tagore lived most of his life in the same house in which he was born. On August 7, 1941, he died in that same house, three months after his 80thbirthday.
Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali #48: “The morning sea of silence…” Rabindranath Tagore’s poem elucidating a metaphorical and metaphysical journey is number 48 in his most noted collection titledGitanjali. The poet received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, specifically for that collection.
Rabindranath Tagore’s “Light the Lamp of Thy Love” Rabindranath Tagore’s poem “Light the Lamp of Thy Love” is a devotional lyric that expresses the speaker’s longing for self-realization. Through colorful imagery, the poem explores themes of transformation, redemption, and the transcendence of human limitation through spiritual awakening.
Rabindranath Tagore’s “The Last Bargain” Rabindranath Tagore’s “The Last Bargain” focuses on what seems to be an quandary: how is it that a child’s offering of “nothing” to a seeker becomes the “last bargain” as well as the best bargain?
William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming” remains one of the most widely misunderstood poems of the 20th century. Many scholars and critics have failed to criticize the exaggeration in the first stanza and the absurd metaphor in the second stanza, which render a potentially fine poem a critical failure.
Introduction with Text of “The Second Coming”
Poems, in order to communicate, must be as logical as the purpose and content require. For example, if the poet wishes to comment on or criticize an issue, he must adhere to physical facts in his poetic drama. If the poet wishes to emote, equivocate, or demonstrate the chaotic nature of his cosmic thinking, he may legitimately do so without much seeming sense.
For example, Robert Bly’s lines—”Sometimes a man walks by a pond, and a hand / Reaches out and pulls him in” / / “The pond was lonely, or needed / Calcium, bones would do,”—are ludicrous [1] on every level. Even if one explicates the speaker’s personifying the pond, the lines remain absurd, at least in part because if a person needs calcium, grabbing the bones of another human being will not take care of that deficiency.
The absurdity of a lake needing “calcium” should be abundantly clear on its face. Nevertheless, the image of the lake grabbing a man may ultimately be accepted as the funny nonsense that it is. William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming” cannot be dismissed so easily; while the Yeats poem does not depict the universe as totally chaotic, it does bemoan that fact that events seem to be leading society to armageddon.
The absurdity surrounding the metaphor of the “rough beast” in the Yeats poem renders the musing on world events without practical substance.
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Commentary on “The Second Coming”
William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming” remains one of the most widely anthologized poems in world literature. Yet its hyperbole in the first stanza and ludicrous “rough beast” metaphor in the second stanza result in a blur of unworkable speculation.
First Stanza: Sorrowful over Chaos
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
The speaker is sorrowing over the chaos of world events that have left in their wake many dead people. Clashes of groups of ideologues have wreaked havoc, and much blood shed has smeared the tranquil lives of innocent people who wish to live quiet, productive lives.
The speaker likens the seemingly out of control situation of society to a falconer losing control of the falcon as he attempts to tame it. Everyday life has become chaotic as corrupt governments have spurred revolutions. Lack of respect for leadership has left a vacuum which is filled with force and violence.
The overstated claim that “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity” should have alerted the poet that he needed to rinse out the generic hyperbole in favor of more accuracy on the world stage.
Such a blanket, unqualified statement, especially in a poem, lacks the ring of truth: it simply cannot be true that the “best lack all conviction.” Surely, some the best still retain some level of conviction, or else improvement could never be expected.
It also cannot be true that all the worst are passionate; some of the worst are likely not passionate at all but remain sycophantic, indifferent followers. Any reader should be wary of such all-inclusive, absolutist statements in both prose and poetry.
Anytime a writer subsumes an entirety with the terms “all,” “none,” “everything,” “everyone,” “always,” or “never,” the reader should question the statement for its accuracy. All too often such terms are signals for stereotypes, which produce the same inaccuracy as groupthink.
Second Stanza: What Revelation?
Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
The idea of “some revelation” leads the speaker to the mythological second coming of Christ. So he speculates on what a second coming might entail. However, instead of “Christ,” the speaker conjures the notion that an Egyptian-Sphinx-like character with ill-intent might arrive instead.
Therefore, in place of a second coming of godliness and virtue, as is the purpose of the original second coming, the speaker wonders: what if the actual second coming will be more like an Anti-Christ? What if all this chaos of bloodshed and disarray has been brought on by the opposite of Christian virtue?
Postmodern Absurdity and the “Rough Beast”
The “rough beast” in Yeats’ “The Second Coming” is an aberration of imagination, not a viable symbol for what Yeats’ speaker thought he was achieving in his critique of culture. If, as the postmodernists contend, there is no order [2] in the universe and nothing really makes any sense anyway, then it becomes perfectly fine to write nonsense.
Because this poet is a contemporary of modernism but not postmodernism [3], William Butler Yeats’ poetry and poetics do not quite devolve to the level of postmodern angst that blankets everything with the nonsensical. Yet, his manifesto titled A Vision is, undoubtedly, one of the contributing factors to that line of meretricious ideology.
Hazarding a Guess Can Be Hazardous
The first stanza of Yeats’ “The Second Coming” begins by metaphorically comparing a falconer losing control of the falcon to nations and governments losing control because of the current world disorder, in which “[t]hings fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”
Political factions employ these lines against their opposition during the time in which their opposition is in power, as they spew forth praise for their own order that somehow magically appears with their taking the seat of power.
The poem has been co-opted by the political class so often that Dorian Lynskey, overviewing the poem in his essay, “‘Things fall apart’: the Apocalyptic Appeal of WB Yeats’s The Second Coming,” writes, “There was apparently no geopolitical drama to which it could not be applied” [4].
The second stanza dramatizes the speaker’s musing about a revelation that has popped into his head, and he likens that revelation to the second coming of Christ; however, this time the coming, he speculates, may be something much different.
The speaker does not know what the second coming will herald, but he does not mind hazarding a dramatic guess about the possibility. Thus, he guesses that the entity of a new “second coming” would likely be something that resembles the Egyptian sphinx; it would not be the return of the Christ with the return of virtue but perhaps its opposite—vice.
The speaker concludes his guess with an allusion to the birth of such an entity as he likens the Blessed Virgin Mother to the “rough beast.” The Blessèd Virgin Mother, as a newfangled, postmodern creature, will be “slouching toward Bethlehem” because that is the location to which the first coming came.
The allusion to “Bethlehem” functions solely as a vague juxtaposition to the phrase “second coming” in hopes that the reader will make the connection that the first coming and the second coming may have something in common. The speaker speculates that at this very moment wherein the speaker is doing his speculation some “rough beast” might be pregnant with the creature of the “second coming.”
And as the time arrives for the creature to be born, the rough beast will go “slouching” towards its lair to give birth to this “second coming” creature: “its hour come round at last” refers to the rough beast being in labor.
The Flaw of Yeats’ “The Second Coming”
The speaker then poses the nonsensical question: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” In order to make the case that the speaker wishes to make, these last two lines should be restructured in one of two ways:
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to give birth?
or
And what rough beast’s babe, its time come at last, Is in transport to Bethlehem to be born?
An unborn being cannot “slouch” toward a destination. The pregnant mother of the unborn being can “slouch” toward a destination. But the speaker is not contemplating the nature of the rough beast’s mother; he is contemplating the nature of the rough beast itself.
The speaker does not suggest that the literal Sphinx will travel to Bethlehem. He is merely implying that a Sphinx-like creature might resemble the creature of the second coming. Once an individual has discounted the return of Jesus the Christ as a literal or even spiritual fact, one might offer personal speculation about just what a second coming would look like.
It is doubtful that anyone would argue that the poem is dramatizing a literal birth, rather than a spiritual or metaphorical one. It is also unreasonable to argue that the speaker of this poem—or Yeats for that matter—thought that the second coming actually referred to the Sphinx. A ridiculous image develops from the fabrication of the Sphinx moving toward Bethlehem. Yeats was more prudent than that.
Exaggerated Importance of Poem
William Butler Yeats composed a manifesto to display his worldview and poetics titled A Vision, in which he set down certain tenets of his thoughts on poetry, creativity, and world history. Although seemingly taken quite seriously by some Yeatsian scholars, A Vision is of little value in understanding either meaning in poetry or the meaning of the world, particularly in terms of historical events.
An important example of Yeats’ misunderstanding of world cycles is his explanation of the cyclical nature of history, exemplified with what he called “gyres” (pronounced with a hard “g.”) Two particular points in the Yeatsian explanation demonstrate the fallacy of his thinking:
In his diagram, Yeats set the position of the gyres inaccurately; they should not be intersecting but instead one should rest one on top of the other: cycles shrink and enlarge in scope; they do not overlap, as they would have to do if the Yeatsian model were accurate.
Image : Gyres – Inaccurate Configuration from A Vision
Image: Gyres – Accurate Configuration
2. In the traditional Second Coming, Christ is figured to come again but as an adult, not as in infant as is implied in Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming.”
Of great significance in Yeats’ poem is the “rough beast,” apparently the Anti-Christ, who has not been born yet. And most problematic is that the rough beast is “slouch[ing] towards Bethlehem to be born.” The question is, how can such a creature be slouching if it has not yet been born? There is no indication the speaker wishes to attribute this second coming fiasco to the mother of the rough beast.
This illogical event is never mentioned by critics who seem to accept the slouching as a possible occurrence. On this score, it seems critics and scholars have lent the poem an unusually wide and encompassing poetic license.
The Accurate Meaning of the Second Coming
Paramahansa Yogananda has explained in depth the original, spiritual meaning of the phrase “the second coming”[5] which does not signify the literal coming again of Jesus the Christ, but the spiritual awakening of each individual soul to its Divine Nature through the Christ Consciousness.
Paramahansa Yogananda summarizes his two volume work The Second Coming of Christ: The Resurrection of the Christ Within You:
In titling this work The Second Coming of Christ, I am not referring to a literal return of Jesus to earth . . .
A thousand Christs sent to earth would not redeem its people unless they themselves become Christlike by purifying and expanding their individual consciousness to receive therein the second coming of the Christ Consciousness, as was manifested in Jesus . . .
Contact with this Consciousness, experienced in the ever new joy of meditation, will be the real second coming of Christ—and it will take place right in the devotee’s own consciousness. (my emphasis added)
Interestingly, knowledge of the meaning of that phrase “the second coming” as explained by Paramahansa Yogananda renders unnecessary the musings of Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming”and most other speculation about the subject. Still, the poem as an artifact of 20th century thinking remains an important object for study.
This room in my literary home holds links to poems primarily written by others along with my personal commentaries on the poems. Some of these additions include commentaries that appear on HubPages.
Linda's Literary Home 