This play in three acts was written in Bengal in 1911, not long after Tagore lost his son, daughter and wife to disease. In 1940, the evening before Paris fell to the Nazis, Andre Gide's French translation of this play was read over the radio. Two years after, in a Warsaw ghetto, a Polish version was the last play performed in the orphanage of Janusz Korczak who, when asked why he chose the play, said: "eventually one had to learn to accept serenely the angel of death." Within a month, he and his children were taken away and gassed. Mahatma Gandhi liked this play a lot, saying it has a soothing effect upon his nerves. W.B. Yeats praised it as "perfectly constructed and conveys to the right audience an emotion of gentleness and peace."

This is a death play. Something you can read, or remember reading, when you've stopped raging against the dying of the light and have accepted the inevitable. The ending is abrupt like all lives, like most deaths, like a lost position in a chess game which comes suddenly after a long series of moves made with much lively vigor, hope and great expectations. Frankly, I do not know where the gentleness and peace come from (must be from the potent combination of youth, hope, innocence, death and what goes beyond it) and why this play is a much acclaimed one, for its spiritual punch. Just like I do not know how some chess players--what W.B. Yeats may consider as the "right audience"--can calmly gaze at a lost position after a most searing battle over the board, topple his King after a long sigh, peacefully shake his opponent's hand, sign the scoresheet and serenely walk away.