Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘The Golden Boat’: Loss, Time and the Limits of Possession
Rabindranath Tagore’s Bengali poem commonly known in English as “The Golden Boat” uses a river scene, a harvest and a boat that carries away what the speaker cannot keep. The poem’s symbolic openness has encouraged many readings: it may suggest loss, the passage of time, the limits of possession or the distance between human effort and what the world receives. This essay focuses on its central im…
