The short story as quintessence: The art of Rabindranath Tagore (cont)

Rabindranath seems to follow the nineteenth century dictum upheld by Poe, of using a “beginning,” “middle” and “end” in his stories.   Although, his endings cannot always be termed definitive endings, they do bring the stories to some degree of closure or resolution. In Kabuliwala, the aesthetics of romance, that between a low class father figure trader from Afghanistan, and a little upper middle class Bengali girl child, provides an  ineffable and unforgettable dynamic which illuminates both the universal and specific  conditions of the child and the father in this case. Although, we associate with Rabindranath’s art qualities that have been celebrated in English Romanticism  such as the primacy of the child,  passionate reverence and continual evocation of Nature, celebration of both romantic and Divine love and their interchangeability through the mythic evocation of   the Radha-Krishna paradigm, Rabindranath can also be supremely classical not only in the symmetrical and chiseled finish of  most of his poems and short stories, but as in  Classical Tragedy  he often evokes  the eternal and universal rhythms of experience.