The Last Bargain by Rabindranath Tagore
Quick answer: The Last Bargain by Rabindranath Tagore: summary, the symbolism of the king, the old man, the maid and the child, and NCERT Class 8 question answers.
Picture a man walking a stone-paved road at dawn, calling out: come and hire me. By sunset he has refused a king offering power, a rich old man offering gold, and a fair maid offering a smile, and accepted a child who offers nothing at all. That is the whole plot of Rabindranath Tagore's 'The Last Bargain', the closing poem of his 1913 English collection 'The Crescent Moon' and a fixture of the NCERT Class 8 Honeydew reader. It reads in two minutes; understanding why the worst-paying job makes the speaker a free man takes longer, and that is the design.
Tagore wrote the poem in Bengali and carried it into English himself, in the period when 'Gitanjali' won him the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first awarded to a non-European writer. Its power sits less in any single phrase than in the parable shape: four meetings, four offers, one strange acceptance. This guide walks through each encounter, unpacks the symbolism exams ask about, and notes what a working poet can learn.
What the poem says: four meetings in one day
Morning. The speaker walks the stone-paved road crying 'Come and hire me', and a king arrives in his chariot, sword in hand, offering to hire him with power. The offer sounds supreme and proves empty: a sword can compel service but cannot buy a self, and the king drives away alone. Midday: while houses stand shut against the heat, an old man appears with a bag of gold, weighing his coins one by one, the gesture of a man who measures everything. The speaker turns away; wages of gold are just a finer chain.
Evening softens the scene: beside a flowering garden hedge, a fair maid offers to hire the speaker with a smile. But her smile pales and melts into tears, and she returns alone into the dark; beauty is real but fades, and what fades cannot hold a life. The final movement opens in sunlight on the seashore, where a child playing with shells looks up, seems to recognise the man, and offers to hire him with nothing. That bargain, struck in play, is the one he accepts, and from then on he is a free man.
The symbolism: power, money, pleasure, play
Exams ask what each figure stands for, and the poem is built to answer: each employer embodies a prize people trade their lives for, and each offer fails for a reason the imagery supplies.
How it works: a parable with a clock inside
Formally this is a prose poem: Tagore's English versions abandon metre and rhyme for cadenced sentences, and architecture replaces the missing metre. The poem runs on a repeated formula, an employer stating a price, and on a clock: morning for the king, midday for the merchant, evening for the maid, open sunlight by the sea for the child. The day's arc carries the meaning: power struts in life's morning, money rules its working noon, pleasure fills its evening, and what remains is the question of what any of it was for.
The imagery works precisely inside that frame: the king armed and mounted, the coins weighed singly in miserly clicks, the maid beside a hedge in flower, the child playing with things the sea gives away free. Even the settings argue, stone pavement for power, shut houses for wealth, a garden for desire, the open shore for freedom. Repetition, escalation, then reversal at the final step is the oldest parable structure in the world, and Tagore trusts it completely; the poem needs no ornament because the skeleton does all the talking.
Tagore in 1913: where this poem comes from
'The Crescent Moon' gathers Tagore's poems of childhood, and it is no accident that the book ends with a child dissolving the bargains of adults. Across the collection children stand for a way of being that possesses nothing and therefore fears nothing; this poem compresses that idea into a single working day, alongside the spiritual argument familiar from 'Gitanjali': service given in love is freedom, service given for reward is bondage wearing wages.
Tagore ran a school at Santiniketan founded on the conviction that joy and play teach better than fear, and the poem's suspicion of power and accountancy reflects the same belief. It explains the poem's confidence: he is not wondering whether the child's offer is best. He knows, and the calm of the prose is the calm of a settled truth.
Why it lasts
The poem survives because its question never retires: what should a life be traded for? Every reader has stood on that stone-paved road, and the three rejected offers map onto ambitions that still run the world. The parable form keeps it portable across cultures, and the ending keeps it startling, because the winning bid is still, by every sensible standard, the worst offer on the table.
Tagore also refuses bitterness: the king, the merchant and the maid are not villains, only insufficient, and each departs with a small sadness the poem does not mock. That generosity is why it reads as wisdom rather than sermon. Students meet it at thirteen and remember it at forty, usually around the time a bag of gold is being weighed in front of them.
What today's poet can steal
Steal the parable clock: a repeated encounter and a moving sun, letting the time of day do your emotional shading without commentary. Steal the rule of three plus one as well, three offers failing in ascending intimacy, then a fourth that breaks the pattern. Readers know that shape from childhood stories, so the reversal arrives with the force of recognition.
The other lesson is stakes stated plainly. Each employer names a price in one sentence, and the speaker answers with an action, not an explanation: he watches, turns away, walks on. A poem that never argues, only chooses, persuades better than one that lectures; parables like this score heavily on emotion and theme, two of the criteria Writory's monthly judges mark, because structure carries the feeling. Try writing your own last bargain and see how little explaining it needs.
Question answers for quick revision
Short answers for the questions most often set in Class 8 exercises and tests.
What poets can take from this
- Structure a poem as three failed offers and one accepted one; the old shape still works.
- Let the time of day carry mood so you never have to name an emotion directly.
- Give each character one physical gesture, like coins weighed singly, instead of a description.
- Make your speaker choose through actions rather than explain through statements.
- Match each setting to its meaning: pavements for power, gardens for desire, open shores for freedom.
- End a parable poem one sentence after the reversal; resist the urge to interpret it.
Try it yourself
Write a prose poem in which your speaker spends one day receiving offers for something they carry, refusing every payment that can be counted, and accepting the one that cannot.
Questions
What is the theme of The Last Bargain by Rabindranath Tagore?
The poem argues that freedom cannot be bought by power, money or pleasure. The king, the old man and the maid all fail to hire the speaker, while the child offering nothing wins him, because service given in love and joy is the only work that leaves a person free.
Why did the child's bargain make the speaker a free man?
The child offered nothing, so the speaker was bound by no wage, no debt and no obligation. Work accepted purely out of delight carries no chains, which is why the poem calls this worthless-looking offer the last and best bargain.
What form is The Last Bargain written in?
It is a prose poem in cadenced paragraphs without metre or rhyme, translated into English by Tagore himself. Its structure is a parable: four encounters across one day, each built on a repeated offer of hire.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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