The message of a season new to me.
A deathly-dark suffusion
Obscures its coming revelation.
O honour me
40
With its garland, place it around my neck in this dimly
Starlit palace of silence. Let this our last
Tryst
Carry me into the infinite night
Beyond all earthly limit;
45
Let it make me one
With the not known.
Injury
The sinking sun extends its late afternoon glow.
The wind has dozed away.
An ox-cart laden with paddy-straw bound
For far-off Nadiyā market crawls across the empty open land,
5
Calf following, tied on behind.
Over towards the Rājbamśī quarter Banamālī Pandit’s
Eldest son sits
On the edge of a tank, fishing all day.
From overhead comes the cry
10
Of wild duck making their way
From the dried-up river’s
Sandbanks towards the Black Lake in search of snails.
Along the side of newly-cut sugar-cane
Fields, in the fresh air of trees washed by rain,
15
Through the wet grass,
Two friends pass
Slowly, serenely –
They came on a holiday,
Suddenly bumped into each other in the village.
20
One of them is newly married – the delight
Of their conversation seems to have no limit.
All around, in the maze
Of winding paths in the wood, bhāi-flowers
Have come into bloom,
25
Their scent dispensing the balm
Of Caitra. From the jārul-trees nearby
A koel-bird strains its voice in dull, demented melody.
A telegram comes:
‘Finland pounded by Soviet bombs.’
The Sick-bed – 6
O my day-break sparrow –
In my last moments of sleepiness,
While there is still some darkness,
Here you are tapping on the window-pane,
5
Asking for news
And then dancing and twittering
Just as your whim takes you.
Your pluckily bobbing tail
Cocks a snook at all restrictions.
10
When magpie-robins chirrup at dawn,
Poets tip them.
When a hidden koel-bird hoots all day
Its same unvarying fifth,
So high is its rating
15
It gets the applause of Kālidāsa
Ahead of all other birds.
You couldn’t care less –
You never keep to the scale –
To enter Kālidāsa’s room
20
And chatter
And mess up his metres
Amuses you greatly.
Whenever you perch on a pillar
At the court of King Vikramāditya
25
And bards spout,
What are their songs to you?
You are closer to the poet’s mistress:
You happily join in her round-the-clock prattle.
You do not dance
30
Under contract from the Spring –
You strut
Any old how, no discipline at all.
You do not turn up politely
At woodland singing-contests;
35
You gossip with the light in broad vernacular –
Its meaning
Is not in the dictionary –
Only your own throbbing little chest
Knows it.
40
Slanting your neck to right or left,
How you play about –
So busy all day for no apparent reason,
Scrabbling at the ground,
Bathing in the dust –
45
You are so unkempt
The dirt doesn’t show on you, worry you at all.
You build your nest in the corner of the ceiling
Of even a king’s chamber,
You are so utterly brazen.
50
Whenever I spend painful, sleepless nights,
I always look forward
To your first tap-tap at my door.
The brave, nimble, simple
Life’s message that you bring –
55
Give it to me,
That the sunlight by which all creatures dwell
May call me,
O my day-break sparrow.
The Sick-bed – 21
When I woke up this morning
There was a rose in my flower-vase:
The question came to me –
The power that brought you through cyclic time
5
To final beauty,
Dodging at every turn
The torment of ugly incompleteness,
Is it blind, is it abstracted,
Does it, like a world-denying sannyāsi,
10
Make no distinction between beauty and the opposite of beauty?
Is it merely rational,
Merely physical,
Lacking in sensibility?
There are some who argue
15
That grace and ugliness take equal seats
At the court of Creation,
That neither is refused entry
By the guards.
As a poet I cannot enter such arguments –
20
I can only gaze at the universe
In its full, true form,
At the millions of stars in the sky
Carrying their huge harmonious beauty –
Never breaking their rhythm
25
Or losing their tune,
Never deranged
And never stumbling –
I can only gaze and see, in the sky,
The spreading layers
30
Of a vast, radiant, petalled rose.
Recovery – 10
Lazily afloat on time’s stream,
My mind turns to the sky.
As I cross its empty expanses
Shadowy pictures form in my eyes
5
Of the many ages of the long past
And the many peoples
That have hurtled forward,
Confident of victory.
The Pāhāns came, greedy for empire;
10
And the Moghuls,
Brandishing victory-banners,
The wheels of their conquering chariots
Raising webs of dust.
I look at the sky –
15
No sign of them now today:
Through the ages
The light of sunrise and sunset
Continues to redden the sky’s pure blue
At dawn and dusk.
20
Then others came,
Along tracks of iron
In fire-breathing vehicles –
The mighty British,
Scattering their power
25
Beneath the same sky.
I know that time will flow along their road too
Float off somewhere the land-encircling web of their empire.
I know their merchandise-bearing soldiers
Will not make the slightest impression
30
On planetary paths.
But the earth when I look at it
Makes me aware
Of the hubbub of a huge concourse
Of ordinary people
35
Led along many paths and in various groups
By man’s common urges,
From age to age, through life and death.
&
nbsp; They go on pulling at oars,
Guiding the rudder,
40
Sowing seeds in the fields.
Cutting ripe paddy.
They work –
In cities and in fields.
Imperial canopies collapse,
45
Battle-drums stop,
Victory-pillars, like idiots, forget what their own words mean;
Battle-crazed eyes and blood-smeared weapons
Live on only in children’s stories,
Their menace veiled.
50
But people work –
Here and in other regions,
Bengal, Bihar, Orissa,
By rivers and shores,
Punjab, Bombay, Gujurat –
55
Filling the passage of their lives with a rumbling and thundering
Woven by day and by night –
The sonorous rhythm
Of Life’s liturgy in all its pain and elation,
Gloom and light.
60
Over the ruins of hundreds of empires,
The people work.
Recovery – 14
Every day in the early morning this faithful dog
Sits quietly beside my chair
For as long as I do not acknowledge his presence
By the touch of my hand.
5
The moment he receives this small recognition,
Waves of happiness leap through his body.
In the inarticulate animal world
Only this creature
Has pierced through good and bad and seen
10
Complete man,
Has seen him for whom
Life may be joyfully given,
That object of a free outpouring of love
Whose consciousness points the way
15
To the realm of infinite consciousness.
When I see that dumb heart
Revealing its own humility
Through total self-surrender,
I feel unequal to the worth
20
His simple perception has found in the nature of man.
The wistful anxiety in his mute gaze
Understands something he cannot explain:
It directs me to the true meaning of man in the universe.
On My Birthday - 20
Today I imagine the words of countless
Languages to be suddenly fetterless –
After long incarceration
In the fortress of grammar, suddenly up in rebellion,
5
Maddened by the stamp-stamping
Of unmitigated regimented drilling.
They have jumped the constraints of sentence
To seek free expression in a world rid of intelligence,
Snapping the chains of sense in sarcasm
10
And ridicule of literary decorum.
Liberated thus, their queer
Postures and cries appeal only to the ear.
They say, ‘We who were born of the gusty tuning
Of the earth’s first outbreathing
15
Came into our own as soon as the blood’s beat
Impelled man’s mindless vitality to break into dance in his throat.
We swelled his infant voice with the babble
Of the world’s first poem, the original prattle
Of existence. We are kin to the wild torrents
20
That pour from the mountains to announce
The month of Śrāban: we bring to human habitations
Nature’s incantations – ’
The festive sound of leaves rustling in forests,
The sound that measures the rhythm of approaching tempests,
25
The great night-ending sound of day-break –
From these sound-fields man has captured words, curbed them like a breakneck
Stallion in complex webs of order
To enable him to pass on his messages to the distant lands of the future.
By riding words that are bridled and reined
30
Man has quickened
The pace of time’s slow clocks:
The speed of his reason has cut through material blocks,
Explored recalcitrant mysteries;
With word-armies
35
Drawn into battle-lines he resists the perpetual assault of imbecility.
But sometimes they slip like robbers into realms of fantasy,
Float on ebbing waters
Of sleep, free of barriers,
Lashing any sort of flotsam and jetsam into metre.
40
From them, the free-roving mind fashions
Artistic creations
Of a kind that do not conform to an orderly
Universe – whose threads are tenuous, loose, arbitrary,
Like a dozen puppies brawling,
45
Scrambling at each other’s necks to no purpose or meaning:
Each bites another –
The squeal and yelp blue murder,
But their bites and yelps carry no true import of enmity,
Their violence is bombast, empty fury.
50
In my mind I imagine words thus shot of their meaning,
Hordes of them running amuck all day,
As if in the sky there were nonsense nursery syllables booming –
Horselum, bridelum, ridelum, into the fray.
Notes
In these notes to the poems, I have quoted extensively from Tagore’s five main books of English lectures, and from My Reminiscences, Surendranath Tagore’s translation of the Bengali autobiography that Tagore published in 1912. The following abbreviations are used:
S – Sādhanā, 1913
R – My Reminiscences, 1917
N – Nationalism, 1917
P – Personality, 1917
CU – Creative Unity, 1922
RM – The Religion of Man, 1931
All page references given for the above books are to the original Macmillan editions, except for The Religion of Man, which was published by Allen & Unwin.
In limiting my quotations to such a small number of texts, I admit I am making a virtue of necessity: I am not yet in a position to draw on the full range of Tagore’s Bengali writings. But since my book is aimed at English readers, and since these six books give a good and complete idea of Tagore’s central ideas, it seems sensible to use them.
My aim in these notes is to relate Tagore’s poetry to his thought; but I should not wish to suggest that the poems are nothing but vehicles for ideas. Their concrete qualities should speak for themselves.
The subsidiary notes that follow the explanatory comments are on fine points of translation. They are aimed partly at those with a knowledge of Bengali, or one of the other modern Indian languages, or Sanskrit. But to others they may indicate the extent to which I have honoured or betrayed the poems.