Analysis of Threshold

Rabindranath Tagore 1861 (Kolkata) – 1941 (Kolkata)



I was not aware of the moment
when I first crossed the threshold of this life.

What was the power that made me open out into this vast mystery
like a bud in the forest at midnight!

When in the morning I looked upon the light
I felt in a moment that I was no stranger in this world,
that the inscrutable without name and form
had taken me in its arms in the form of my own mother.

Even so, in death the same unknown will appear as ever known to me.
And because I love this life,
I know I shall love death as well.

The child cries out
when from the right breast the mother takes it away,
in the very next moment to find in the left one its consolation.


Scheme XA BC CXXX BAX XXX
Poetic Form
Metre 111011010 111101111 110101111010111100 101001011 10010110101 110010111110011 10010001101 110101100111110 101010101101110111 0011111 11111111 0111 110110101101 00101101100111010
Closest metre Iambic hexameter
Characters 659
Words 136
Sentences 7
Stanzas 5
Stanza Lengths 2, 2, 4, 3, 3
Lines Amount 14
Letters per line (avg) 36
Words per line (avg) 10
Letters per stanza (avg) 101
Words per stanza (avg) 27
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

40 sec read
159

Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore FRAS was an Indian polymath—poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer and painter. He reshaped Bengali literature and music as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. more…

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