Compare and contrast "Tell Me, O Swan" by Kabir and "The Swan" by Rilke.
Both poems use the swan as a symbol. In the Kabir poem, the swan is seen as a kind of mystery. The poet questions the swan ("From what land do you come / O Swan? to what shore will you fly?") as a way of addressing certain mysteries of life itself. Like the swan, perhaps, each of us is on a journey to an unknown "shore."
Rilke, on the other hand, is a bit more explicit. The swan is the focus of a simile: the "laboring" of humans is like the "lumbering gait" of the swan on land. The image suggests that life is ungainly, awkward, difficult.
This difference suggests a difference in tone and in the relationship of the poet to the subject of the poem. For Kabir, the tone is expressive of a kind of ecstatic truth: the poet tells the swan to "awake, arise, follow me" because the poet can lead the swan to paradise ("where the terror of Death is no more"). In this sense, the Kabir poem is explicitly religious in a way the Rilke poem is not. Rilke seems to address a specific person who faces death
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