Death is not extinguishing the light; it is putting out the lamp because dawn has come.

Tagore frames death not as annihilation but as a transition from a limited, provisional kind of illumination to a fuller reality. The “lamp” suggests the small, human light we rely on in darkness—individual consciousness, bodily life, and the partial knowledge available in time. “Dawn” implies a larger, natural light that makes the lamp unnecessary: a spiritual awakening, union with the infinite, or entry into a truer order of being. The image softens fear by recasting death as completion rather than loss, aligning with Tagore’s recurring themes of continuity between life and the eternal, and of the soul’s movement toward a wider freedom beyond the self.