Question

Who are you, reader, reading my poems an
hundred years hence?

I cannot send you one single flower from this
wealth of the spring, one single streak of gold
from yonder clouds.

Open your doors and look abroad.

From your blossoming garden gather fragrant
memories of the vanished flowers of an
hundred years before.

In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy
that sang one spring morning, sending its
glad voice across an hundred years.

–“85,”
Rabindranath Tagore

Read Tagore’s poem and analyze the use of apostrophe. Draw a conclusion and write two or three sentences about the overall effect that apostrophe has on the reader.

Answer 1

Apostrophe is a rhetorical device in which the speaker directly addresses an absent person, a future or hypothetical reader, or an abstract idea as if it were present. In Tagore’s poem the apostrophe appears immediately: “Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence?” and continues with imperatives and direct addresses—“Open your doors and look abroad,” “From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories…,” and the wishful “may you feel the living joy….” These lines treat a reader a century away as an immediate interlocutor and invite that imagined person to act and to share feeling.

Functionally, the apostrophe (1) collapses time by bringing the distant future reader into the poem’s present, (2) creates intimacy and conversational tone by addressing the reader personally, and (3) turns the reader into a participant rather than a passive observer, asking them to gather memories and feel joy. The device also heightens the emotional mood—longing, generosity, and hope—because the speaker frames his inability to send physical gifts as a verbal, heartfelt offering across time.

Overall effect (two–three sentences): By addressing a future reader directly, Tagore makes the poem feel immediate and communal despite the century between poet and reader; the apostrophe transforms temporal distance into shared feeling. It invites empathy and participation, deepening the poem’s warmth and the sense of continuity between lives separated by time.