THEME: "Where the Mind is Without Fear" envisions a highly enlightened future India.
It
highlights the themes of striving for perfection, hard work, equality, unity, invention, education,
and the ability to speak freely, truthfully, and with reason. The entire poem is essentially a wish
to allow the country to accomplish these goals, which are listed out for the majority of the poem.
STRUCTURE: The poem is written in free verse - it has no rhyme scheme or meter pattern.
This free verse style is representative of what the poem suggests - that people should be able to
speak, educate, and perfect their country freely, with no constraints. The poem is a single stanza
of eleven lines. Enjambment is used extensively, as there is no punctuation at all, except for the
very last line. This is used to convey the idea that all the points that the lines of the poem try to
get across are all connected, and should all be regarded equally. Anaphora is also used
extensively - most of the lines start with “Where”, and those that don’t are just continuations of
the previous ones that do. Those that don’t also are separated from the previous lines to put
emphasis on their content. The first ten lines are all describing what the persona imagines what
the ideal India would look like in the future, and the final line, which has punctuation, closes off
the list, asking the divine to help this become a reality.
ART: Many of the slides in my photo essay are literal depictions of the metaphors that Tagore
writes about. In my opinion, having the drawings be literal would intensify the metaphor, as you
can visualize the metaphor, making the emotion stronger to connect to the deeper meaning. For
example, on the slide about the line “Where words come out from the depth of truth”, I
interpreted truth as an actual pit, with words sticking out of it. This shows how the vocabulary of
the people would ideally be all from this pit. For some lines where the metaphor doesn’t exist as
much or is more abstract, I instead went for a depiction of what the deeper meaning would
manifest itself as in real life. For example, on the last slide, I didn’t think that the literal, divine
heaven was really what Tagore was trying to convey, so instead I just drew what the persona
would have wanted India to look like, which is really more fitting to the purpose of this line. I
chose to go for two dimensional cartoon style images, as these kinds of images would be more
fitting for the theme of imagining a future that is not yet reality. On the first and last slides,
Tagore himself is portrayed in them. Even though the persona doesn’t necessarily have to be the
poet, I imagine that in this case, the persona’s views were very similar to that of Tagore’s, given
the context in which this poem was written.
