Comment on 'On the Seashore'

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)
On the Seashore

On the seashore of endless worlds children meet.
The infinite sky is motionless overhead and the restless water is boisterous. On the seashore of endless worlds the children meet with shouts and dances.
They build their houses with sand, and they play with empty shells. With withered leaves they weave their boats and smilingly float them on the vast deep. Children have their play on the seashore of worlds.
They know not how to swim, they know not how to cast nets. Pearl-fishers dive for pearls, merchants sail in their ships, while children gather pebbles and scatter them again. They seek not for hidden treasures, they know not how to cast nets.
The sea surges up with laughter, and pale gleams the smile of the sea-beach. Death-dealing waves sing meaningless ballads to the children, even like a mother while rocking her baby's cradle. The sea plays with children, and pale gleams the smile of the sea-beach.
On the seashore of endless worlds children meet. Tempest roams in the pathless sky, ships are wrecked in the trackless water, death is abroad and children play. On the seashore of endless worlds is the great meeting of children.


Many religions emphasize the insignificance of humans compared with their creator and the world. This is common also in science, where the enormity of the galaxy and the universe are revealed through theories and mathematical calculations. The poem, “On the Seashore” written by Rabindranath Tagore, clearly shows humble human’s status through a metaphor.

The surface description of “On the Seashore” is not about human and the universe but about little children playing in seashore. Children first meet each other in the endless seashore. The first three lines show the readers how motionless, restless, and boisterous that environment is. It also explains playful nature of children. The second paragraph only focuses on what children do. The third stanza includes comparison between pearl-fishers, merchant, people who live for specific purpose, to the children in the seashore who play, gather and scatter pebbles for no purpose. After these series of stanzas that emphasize the playfulness of children, the focus turns to the shore. The forth one describes the generosity and enormity of palely smiling seashore and compares its harsh waves to children who know nothing but full of playfulness. The last stanza summarizes the situation in which weak children are dangerously playing in pathless, dark, and boisterous seashore.

I interpret that the whole story is a metaphor of the human world. The seashore represents the universe and children represent human beings. This implies that all the actions we do are just like plays of children such as “building their houses with sand” and “playing with empty shells”. Seen from the universe perspective children’s plays are insignificant to vast sea and seashore. Supports of my interpretation can be seen in the second stanza. Building one’s house with sand is a clearly meaningless and absurd action to do since one surge of the wave or tides can demolish the house in a second. Playing with empty shells does not give a positive impression because of the word ‘empty’. The word ‘shell’ originally means the hard outer structure of water creatures and thus the word empty is restating the emptiness. ‘The pale gleams of the smile of the sea-beach’ represents benevolent oversee of the universe or the creator on what human does. Wars, revolutions, and inventions can be considered as playing and ‘gathering and scattering pebbles’ in the universe perspective.

I first encountered this poem translated in Korean in the blog (http://my.dreamwiz.com/itrue/foreignmunhak/foreignmunhak/bdasga.htm) where the blogger interprets the children as pure minded person and the pearl-fishers and merchants as calculating person, concluding that we all should live like children to harmonize with the world. My interpretation, however, is that ‘clever’ pearl-fishers and merchants are indifferent from children viewed from the endless and unlimited scope of the universe. There is no difference between clever fishes and dumb fishes in a fish bowl lying on a desk.