Selected Poems

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.