রবিঠাকুরের 'শেষের কবিতা' / Tagore's 'The Last Poem' [BAN-ENG]

As a kid, I haven’t gotten around reading The Last Poem by Tagore. Like a lot of fellow youngsters, I thought it was a poetry book. See? The name has ‘poem’ in it! And poetry wasn’t exactly on top of my agreeable list of literary works. It is now but I still suck at it.

When I finally knew the book was a novel, I wasn’t reading anymore. Not a single book in a year. Like most other kids who grew up with the rise of the internet, I lost my appetite for almost anything meaningful.
Thankfully for the past two or three years I got myself together and have been reading pretty regularly.

So I picked up The Last Poem almost habitually. Rabindranath Tagore mostly wrote his novels in chaste bengali dialect (now obsolete), but this book wasn’t one of them. I don’t mind reading chaste dialects of Bengali but like middle English, it is kind of hard to follow. Considering the time it was written, The Last Poem is quite lucid and plain. I understand why it is still so popular among bengali readers. Those of you who are interested in reading tagore in English shouldn’t worry about this though.

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The story is about Amit and Labonno. Amit lived and studied abroad, adopted their cultural nuances. He has an aura of anti-establishment and tendency to break free of the status quo. He’s not mindful of anyone.
In the course of events, he survived a near car crash and met Labonno.

Labonno resembles an educated bengali female of then—in whom bengali ideologies, morals collided with knowledge and philosophy of outer worlds. Amit sees the poetry of Lord Byron and other books in her possession. These two fall in love eventually, almost like a prophecy.

All of these are in the initial development stage of the novel. The Last Poem is not a traditional romance book however, there is no cliche villain who bars their ways, no financial difficulties and also there is no family pressure (it is very common in bengali culture that the family of both bride and groom will play some big roles determining who will marry whom).

Both of them are adept in critical thinking and their relative, contradictory ideas on philosophy, human nature, relationships actually make the book. Think of natural conversations a couple might have but instead of who cheated on whom and how cool the neighbor’s dog is, they talk about poetry and the nature of a true companionship.

That doesn’t mean, one cannot enjoy The Last Poem as a romance only book. All journeys and ups and downs of a relationship are there.

However, I have some reservations. More like a complaint actually. The sort of realism Tagore seeks to incorporate seemed gimmicky to me. As if he’s tormenting the readers. I could be wrong, perhaps I got involved in the story way too much.

Having said that, the book left me in reverie for a couple of days. I couldn’t get the characters and their lives out of my head. I will hold the book in warm remembrance for a long time and I’m actually happy that I didn’t read it as a kid. Quite sure I wouldn’t enjoy it as much as I did now.

Thanks for reading.