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 INTRODUCTION

the ‘ curse ’ itself. The poet’s explanation to me was that, since Kach had fairly won his knowledge with hard toil, its fruits could not be entirely taken from him; but that, since he took it without love, it must remain useless to himself. This explanation the poet has tilted into the text of his own English translation’ in Debjani’s words: “ For Jack of love may it ever remain as foreign to your life as the cold stars are to the unespoused darkness of virgin Night | ”"—a sentence which has no correspondence in the Bengali text. We may well feel that this explanation is an afterthought of his allegorizing mind of to-day. I, at any rate, have no doubt that when he wrote The Curse at Farewell it was the sheer dramatic intcrest of the situation that gripped him, and no didactic purpose. The ‘curse’ is a bad anticlimax to


 * The Fugitive and other Poems.

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