Comparing The Poetry Of Rabindranath Tagore And Gerard Manley Hopkins

Both the poems of Rabindranath Tagore and Gerard Manley Hopkins are essentially religious and they have their similarities. As divine poems, the two pieces have a common goal  salvation and redemption–but man’s endeavours to attain it are different, according to the two writers. Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali is mainly a collection of devotional songs and in it the relationship between God and Man has been looked at from different angles – Master and Servant, Lover and Beloved, Boatman and Traveller, Musician and Listener, Seer and Seen, Father and Son. The world is God’s visible raiment; the stars and planets are his handiwork. He is the abode of peace and the source of bliss. The subject matter of Gitanjali is highly elevated and its form is most appropriate to it.

Hopkins is as great as the Nobel laureate, Tagore. Hopkins is, above all, a religious poet and The Wreck of the Deutschland is his most religious poem. It is significant that he broke his long silence as a poet through it, feeling compelled to write upon the tragedy in which five nuns belonging to the Franciscan order were drowned one wintry night at the very mouth of the Thames. It was a stirring story of abiding faith and consequent heroism and Hopkins wanted the world to know it and understand its true significance. According to Jibesh Bhattacharya, The Wreck of the Deutschland presents a powerful picture of the real and active sea, which has no parallel even in the description of the sea in Beowulf or The