The Great War or First World War broke out on 28th July 1914. It took more than nine millions combatants and seven millions civilian’s lives. Many intellectuals of the time grieved over the catastrophe and expressed their views, trying to analyze the possible causes of such a great and unprecedented catastrophe. In Lenin’s words
The war is a product of half a century of development of world capital and of its billons of threads and connections. It is impossible to escape from the imperialistic war at anunprecedented bound; it is impossible to achieve a democratic, non-oppressive peace, without the overthrow of the power of capital and transfer of state power to another class, the proletariat (Kundu 2).
Interestingly, it was during the same …show more content…
To him the Great War was a wound in the breast of humanity and its pain and horror was to be shared by all its limbs. For Tagore it did not matter whosoever might have been responsible for the war; its guilt and its punishment was to be shared by all humanity. This notion of Tagore is best manifested in his poem which Tagore composed in the background of the Great War – The Oarsmen, published in his work Fruit Gathering as a poem number 84. It starts like – Do you hear tumult of death afar, The call midst the fire-floods and poisonous clouds. The captain’s call to the steersman to turn the ship to an unnamed shore… In this poem Tagore implicitly deals with the Great War and tries to show how men became diminutive in the trap of violence. The poem gives evidences of the poet’s horror-struck experience of the grim realities of life in the war. He had seen the destructive forces which were disturbing God’s peaceand blames himself and the entire human for the blasphemy. Tagore composed: … Whom do you blame, brothers? Bow your heads down! The sin has been yours and ours. The heat growing in the heart of God for ages
The war is a product of half a century of development of world capital and of its billons of threads and connections. It is impossible to escape from the imperialistic war at anunprecedented bound; it is impossible to achieve a democratic, non-oppressive peace, without the overthrow of the power of capital and transfer of state power to another class, the proletariat (Kundu 2).
Interestingly, it was during the same …show more content…
To him the Great War was a wound in the breast of humanity and its pain and horror was to be shared by all its limbs. For Tagore it did not matter whosoever might have been responsible for the war; its guilt and its punishment was to be shared by all humanity. This notion of Tagore is best manifested in his poem which Tagore composed in the background of the Great War – The Oarsmen, published in his work Fruit Gathering as a poem number 84. It starts like – Do you hear tumult of death afar, The call midst the fire-floods and poisonous clouds. The captain’s call to the steersman to turn the ship to an unnamed shore… In this poem Tagore implicitly deals with the Great War and tries to show how men became diminutive in the trap of violence. The poem gives evidences of the poet’s horror-struck experience of the grim realities of life in the war. He had seen the destructive forces which were disturbing God’s peaceand blames himself and the entire human for the blasphemy. Tagore composed: … Whom do you blame, brothers? Bow your heads down! The sin has been yours and ours. The heat growing in the heart of God for ages