Bard of Bengal in the Green
QUESTION What is the story of Rabindranath Tagore and why is there a bust of him located in Dublin’s St Stephen’s Green?
RABINDRANATH Tagore was a noted poet, known as the Bard of Bengal, who had a profound influence on the work of WB Yeats. The bust of him in St Stephen’s Green, Dublin, was presented by the government of India to Ireland, to mark the 150th anniversary, in 2011, of Tagore’s birth in what was then Calcutta, now Kolkata.
Tagore had become a published poet by the age of 16 and the national anthem of India is a Hindi version of a song he had composed in Bengali. But he was much more than a poet; he was an artist too – a true polymath, who made invaluable contributions to many fields of the arts.
He became the first non-European to be awarded the Nobel prize for literature, in 1913.
He was also a fierce opponent of imperialism and advocated widespread educational reform, two issues that were very important in the story of his influence in Ireland.
Tagore’s play, The Post Office, was performed at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1913, as a fundraiser for St Enda’s School in Rathfarnham, which had been set up by Patrick Pearse.
Both Pearse and Tagore held radical views on how children should be educated and Tagore long held that teaching shouldn’t just explain things but inspire children to curiosity. He strongly opposed rote learning.
Pearse and Tagore never met, but in July 1912, in England, Tagore did meet up with Yeats. The Irish poet was much impressed by Tagore’s poems and wrote the introduction to a collection of Tagore’s poems translated into English and published that same year, 1912. This book of poems was so widely acclaimed that it was reprinted 12 times in its first year of publication. Readers, stimulated by Yeats’s approval for Tagore’s work, found the perfect source of Eastern spiritual guidance in Tagore.
Yeats’s fascination with Tagore’s poetic works was intense, but didn’t last long; it was reminiscent of a teenage love affair. But Yeats’s interest in Tagore’s work fostered close cultural and political connections between Ireland and India. Rural Ireland was compared to Bengal and the work of the Gaelic bards of old was compared with Tagore’s writings. Yeats often spoke of a shared cultural memory that brought distant civilisations together and the literary links between Ireland, Bengal and India inspired by the friendship between Tagore and Yeats, extended into politics.
Many Irish political figures in Ireland supported India’s quest for independence, finally gained in 1947. In many ways, the friendship between Tagore and Yeats stimulated the close links between India and Ireland that exist right up to the present day, when we have an Irish-Indian Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar.
So in 2011, to mark 150 years since Tagore was born, the Indian government presented a bust of this Bengali poet, artist and educator, to the Irish people to mark the close ties between the two countries.
The bust is a very lifelike portrayal of Tagore, including his free-flowing beard. It was put up on the south side of St Stephen’s Green and it was the first memorial to a non-Irish person to be erected on the Green.
More recently, in June 2015, a bust of Tagore was erected in Sligo, again presented by India. This bust, on a limestone plinth, was put up directly opposite the former Polloxfen building on Wine Street, Sligo, a building that had so many connections with the Yeats family.
The Yeats influence was particularly pervasive in Sligo, so it was very appropriate that the towns should receive the second bust in Ireland of Rabindranath Tagore.
Fran Feeney, Carlow. QUESTION If a laser is fired vertically upwards, as it loses energy will it eventually disappear? LASER light does not obey the inverse square. This law is obeyed by electro-magnetic radiation spreading out from a ‘point’ source. Lasers provide nearly parallel beams of light that hardly spread out at all. They are not point sources.
The inverse square law is a result of the light spreading out and therefore reducing in intensity (the energy becomes more dilute). It is not due to energy conversion. If laser light is passing through space, its energy is not converted to heat – there is virtually no matter for it to interact with.
Light passing through matter loses energy to heat; this process is called attenuation and has nothing to do with the inverse square law. The fact that laser light hardly spreads out is used to accurately measure the distance to the moon. Reflectors have been left on the moon and directed laser light from Earth is reflected back. The time delay between sending and receiving the signal enables the distance to be accurately calculated.
The conclusion that the light can travel an infinite distance is correct, but the explanation is not. The light will become weaker and weaker, but much more slowly than if it obeyed the inverse square and never totally disappear. Eric Fogg, (head of physics, retd), Chessington, Surrey.