Dhan Gopal Mukerji, the Bengali-born author who later became the first Indian writer to win the Newbery Medal, came to the United States as a young man in the early twentieth century. His six-line lyric “It Is But Coming and Going” belongs to that crossing of cultures: English lyric compression on one side, Indian spiritual insight on the other. The result reads less like a conventional poem than a small piece of wisdom held up to the light.
The poem seems at first to list life’s oscillations. It is “coming and going,” “laughing or weeping,” “dark or day.” The paired words reduce experience to basic rhythms. Yet Mukerji does not stop at describing change. He redefines it. “Life is but a lay,” he writes, and that old word for song or poem matters. If life is a song, its tone is not fixed by events. It “rings sad or gay / Depending on our singing.” The central idea is a quiet reversal: the outer world may be unpredictable, but the inner performance—the way a person meets that world—determines the quality of the music.
The form enacts the fluctuation it describes. The lines are uneven, swelling and shrinking from the longer opening line to the two strong beats of “Laughing or weeping” and the rising exclamation “In dark or day!” This rhythmic sway mimics the coming and going of breath or waves. The rhymes gather around “day,” “lay,” and “gay,” a bright chime at the center, while the softer “going,” “weeping,” and “singing” endings keep an ongoing motion alive. Punctuation works hard too: semicolons hold the opening clauses in balance, the colon after “lay” introduces a definition, and the final period lands with quiet certainty. The poem feels less like an argument than a bell struck once, still vibrating.
Mukerji’s word choices are deliberately narrow, and that narrowness is the point. “Coming and going” can describe ordinary arrivals and departures as well as the soul’s passage through birth and death. “Laughing or weeping” collapses all emotional possibilities into two extremes, and “dark or day” does the same for time. The word “rings” suggests resonance—a note that continues after the singer’s breath ends—while “singing” implies participation rather than passive endurance. Even the repetition of “but” works as a pivot. Life is but coming and going; life is also but a lay. Each “but” strips away a false sense of solidity and replaces it with a truer, more creative image.
The poem’s significance lies in this blend of acceptance and agency. Mukerji does not deny loss, darkness, or tears. Instead he places them inside a larger musical frame. For a school reader, these six lines are a reminder that a poem can be small enough to memorize and deep enough to live with. For literary history, the lyric is an early example of an Indian writer shaping English verse to carry Eastern philosophical insight without ornament or exoticism. In the plainest possible words, Mukerji offers a durable idea: we are always moving, but the song we sing along the way is ours.