Poem No. 10 from ārogya, 1941
This poem was written in February 1941. In ‘Injury’ the paradox of two antagonistic realities in the world – the dance of human life and the constant shocks and injuries to that dance – was presented without any attempt at resolution. In this poem, Tagore resolves the paradox by associating the former with ordinary people through the ages, and the latter with rulers, states and power. It is a distinction that one can feel particularly acutely in India, where the massive rural population carries on with their ancient way of life regardless of who may be in power over them and with very little sense of belonging to a nation, and where many empires have risen and fallen. An important word in the poem is jāl, net or web, which is used in 11.13 and 27: it is often in Tagore’s writing associated with what is illusory or transitory (cf. ‘Across the Sea’, 1.87, where the ‘ancient Brahmin’ draws a rekhār jāl, ‘a network of lines’), and here Pāhān, Moghul and British empires are seen, for all their cruelty and exploitation, as nothing more than jāl, māyā, compared to the reality and continuity of the life and work of the common people of India. The poem is convincing, as its plain phrases build up to the climax of ll.55–9, and Tagore’s feeling for the common people of India was genuine too, proved by years of effort at Santiniketan and Sriniketan and many short stories and poems. His hatred of nationalism had its roots in it, for anyone who knows India knows that there is indeed an ‘India devoid of all politics, the India of no nations’ (N7). But the poem is not propaganda against empires and states, rather a poignant profession of faith in their ultimate irrelevance. See the rhetoric of N46, a similar profession of faith, written during an earlier World War.
29–30 lit., ‘will not leave the slightest trace on the courses of the planets’.
36 mānuer nitya prayojane: ‘by man’s eternal necessities’.
57–9 lit., ‘Sorrow and joy, day and night, raise the sonorous sound of the great mantra of Life (jībaner mahā-mantra-dhvani).
Recovery – 14 (p. 123)
Poem No. 14 in árogya, 1941
For eight months Tagore lived an invalid existence in Uttarāya, his house at Santiniketan. A local pariah dog became a welcome visitor and inspired this poem, written in December 1940. It reconfirms the Religion of Man, and though definition or description of that religion remains difficult, the image of the ‘faithful dog’ helps to convey it to one’s feelings and imagination. In RM143 Tagore writes: ‘From the time when Man became truly conscious of his own self he also became conscious of a mysterious spirit of unity which found its manifestation through him in his society… Somehow Man has felt that this comprehensive spirit of unity has a divine character which could claim the sacrifice of all that is individual in him, that in it dwells his highest meaning transcending his limited self, representing his best freedom.’ Tagore goes on to refer to dharma, the Sanskrit word that sometimes has to be translated as ‘religion’, sometimes as ‘justice’, sometimes as ‘duty to one’s caste or station in life’, but which Tagore saw as above all ‘the virtue of a thing, the essential quality of it, for instance heat is the essential quality of fire, though in certain of its stages it may be absent’ (RM144). The essential quality or dharma of man is thus revealed in self-sacrifice, subordination of individual desires to the needs and ideals of humanity as a whole. The dog’s devotion directs the poet to that dharma, that sampūra mānu (l.10), that ‘truth of the Supreme Man’ (RM144). The poem does not explicitly go further, to Tagore’s identification of human personality with the supreme personality governing the universe; but the full range of Tagore’s religion is implicit in 11.14–15 (in P21 Tagore points to a translation difficulty here: ‘the English word “consciousness” has not yet outgrown the cocoon stage of its scholastic inertia, therefore it is seldom used in poetry; whereas its Indian synonym “cetana” is a vital word and is of constant poetical use’); and the last line cannot be understood without it. The word that I have translated as ‘meaning’, following Tagore’s phrase ‘highest meaning’ in the quotation from RM143 above, is paricay, which normally means ‘acquaintance’ or ‘particulars about one’s identity’ – name, address and so on. Tagore is saying that the dog directs us to what human personality makes us acquainted with in the universe: i.e. it is through human personality, consciousness, love, self-sacrifice, creativity that we become acquainted with the personality of God himself. Thus ‘the truth of the Universe is human truth’ (RM222: conversation with Einstein). Human dharma is the dharma of the universe as a whole.
Dharma and canine fidelity are linked in a famous passage near the end of the Mahābhārata, when Yudhisthira, eldest of the five Pándava brothers, refuses to enter heaven without his dog Dhruba. Eventually the dog is allowed in, and turns out to be the god Dharma.
17 ‘humility’ – dīnatā: the word means need, indigence, as well as humbleness.
19 lit., ‘I cannot think what worth’; but the phrase is elliptical: it means ‘having thought, I cannot see any limit to the worth’.
23 ‘in the universe’ – ssti-mājhe: ‘in Creation, the created universe’.
On My Birthday – 20 (p. 124)
Poem No. 20 from janma-dine, 1941
Tagore’s penultimate book includes some poems written before rog-śayyāy and ārogya. This remarkable poem dates from September 1940, just before Tagore fell ill. It is rhymed, but rhythm is free and lines varied in length. It is linked to the world of Tagore’s paintings and to his late books of nonsense verse (khāp-chāā, 1937; chaār chabi, 1937; se, 1937; galpasalpa, 1941), and his late book of childhood reminiscence chele-belā (Boyhood Days), 1940. But I hope I may be forgiven for ending my selection with a poem in which exuberant imaginative creativity rather than wisdom is to the fore (see Introduction, p. 34, for my reasons for not translating any poems from Tagore’s last book, śe lekhā (Last Writings), 1941).
There are paradoxes in Tagore’s thoughts about Law and about Mind, and they lie behind this poem. On the one hand, Law is an essential aspect of creation, of human artistic creation as much as Creation itself (cf. the central section of ‘Brahmā, Viu, Śiva’ in which Viu ‘binds with his mace/All things to Law’ – 11.40–41). Equally, Mind and Intellect are essential to the progress of man. But in both law and mind there are inherent dangers, of the abstract as opposed to the real, of a purely scientific view of the world rather than a moral or imaginative one, of the tyranny of scientific or political organization. In N34–46 Tagore writes of this, seeing the nation state (at the time of writing reaching its nemesis in the First World War) as the end-product of a process that does indeed start with the organization of reality in human language: ‘The grammarian walks straight through all poetry and goes to the root of words without obstruction, because he is seeking not reality but law. When he finds the law, he is able to teach people how to master words. This is a power, – the power which fulfils some special usefulness, some particular need of man… This satisfaction of man’s needs is a great thing. It gives him freedom in the material world… He can do things in a shorter time and occupies a larger space with more thoroughness of advantage… This progress of power attains more and more rapidity of pace. And, for the reason that it is a detached part of man, it soon outruns the complete humanity. The moral man remains behind, because it has to deal with the whole reality, not merely with the law of things, which is impersonal and therefore abstract.’ Ll.26–35 should be read in the light of this, and the attraction of nursery and nonsense poetry as a reflection of Nature and consciousness undistorted by law stems from Tagore’s doubts about language and the intellect. These doubts have a long history. In R222 Tagore writes of how the very meaning of words can interfere with poetry as an image of reality: ‘That words have meanings is just the difficulty. That is why the poet has to turn and twist them in metre and verse, so that the meaning may be held somewhat in check, and the feeling allowed a chance to express itself.’ Reality – especially the natural world – he tended to compare to music: see S142
when he writes in a vein very similar to 11.21–5 of ‘On My Birthday – 20’, and says that ‘the true poets… seek to express the universe in terms of music’.
The fantasy that Tagore voices in the poem is of language breaking its own constraints and thus coming close to music – as the meaningless jingles of nursery rhymes approach music. In R5 (and in the piece I have translated in Appendix B), he refers to the first line of poetry that made an impression on him, the nursery jingle: bi pare āpur-upur, nadī ela bā, and implies that its appeal was essentially rhythmic and musical. ‘On My Birthday – 20’ ends with another nonsense ‘touchstone’, the opening line of another Bengali nursery rhyme: āgum bāgum ghoāum sāje. In his book lok-sāhitya (Folk Literature – see Appendix B), Tagore says that the first part of the poem seems to be a description of a wedding procession, but of the first line itself he says: ‘I do not know whether it has any clear meaning or not’. The meaninglessness is what is important (my own translation of the line was influenced by the resemblance of two of its words to the words for ‘horse’ and ‘bridle’). But is the reality that nursery rhymes capture and which is reflected in the unconscious really totally arbitrary, lawless? No, because it is the stuff of Nature, the harmonious ‘world-song’ (S143), the miraculous blend of law and freedom, being and becoming, unity and diversity, infinite and finite that is the khelā of the universe itself. ‘On My Birthday – 20’ is an attempt, not uncommon in twentieth-century art, to pierce through the order that our intellects impose on reality to some deeper order beyond, to ‘the eternal law of harmony which is everywhere’ (S141). Nothing is entirely free of it. Even nonsense rhymes have metre (1.39).
16 ‘mindless’ – manohīn: ‘without mind’, i.e. at a stage of human development prior to the emergence of mind and consciousness.
13–14 lit., ‘we who were born children of the earth’s breathed-out wind’s original music’.
22 sir dhvanir mantra: ‘the mantras of the sounds of Creation’.
24 ‘approaching’ – digante: ‘on the horizon’. The ‘sound’ is probably wind, rather than thunder.
25 lit., ‘that which awakes the huge delirium of dawn at the end of the night’.
27 ‘in complex webs of order’ – jatil niyam-sūtra-jāle: ‘in nets of threads of complex rule’, i.e. rules of semantics and grammar. See notes to ‘Recovery – 10’ for comment on jāl.
32 ‘material blocks’ – jarer acal bādhā: ‘unmoving barriers of matter’.
33 lit., ‘roamed through their hard-to-penetrate invisible mystery-worlds’.
34 ‘word-armies’ – the word for the epic armies of the Mahābhārata (akauhinī) is used here.
47 lit., ‘they set up with their terrible noise a storm or roaring’.
49 lit., ‘only their sound, only their postures have become maddened’. The word for ‘posture’ (bhagī) was used in 1.12.
Of the above poems, Tagore himself did translations of the following (with one exception, page references are to the standard Macmillan edition of his Collected Poems and Plays):
The Golden Boat
The Fugitive 1.17 (p. 412)
Day’s End
The Fugitive 1.3 (p. 406)
Love’s Question
The Gardener 32 (p. 112)
The Hero
The Crescent Moon (p. 78)
Death-wedding
The Gardener 81 (p. 144)
Arrival
Gitanjali 51 (p. 24)
Highest Price
The Crescent Moon (p. 86)
The Conch
Fruit-Gathering 35 (p. 191)
Shah–Jahan
Lover’s Gift 1 (p. 7 in the original edition; not included in the Collected Poems and Plays)
Gift
Lover’s Gift
2 (p. 255)
Grandfather’s Holiday
The Fugitive 111.12 (p. 433)
Guest
No. 72 in the 2nd edition of Poems, a collection published by Visva-Bharati in 1943
Question
The Fugitive (p. 450)
Africa
No. 98 in the 1st Edition of Poems, 1942
Appendix A
The following essay on Kālidāsa’s Meghadūta was written in 1890, some eighteen months after the poem in mānasī, and was published in sāhitya (Ancient Literature), 1907.
Not merely a temporal but an eternal gulf seems to separate us from the great slice of ancient India – stretching from the Rāmagiri to the Himalayas – through which life’s stream flowed in the form of the mandākrānta1 metre of the Meghadūta. That Daśārna in whose woods hedges of ketakī-flowers blossomed, whose house-crows busied themselves with nest-building in village-shrines on the eve of the new year, in whose bordering jambu-groves fruit ripened almost to the darkness of black clouds, where has it gone? And the old villagers of Avantī telling stories of Udayana and Vāsavadattā, where are they? And what of Ujjayinī on the banks of the Śiprā? Certainly it had immense beauty, immense wealth, but our memories are not loaded with detailed descriptions of it: we can get a whiff of the incense of the townswomen’s hairdressing wafting from the windows of its palaces; we can have a sense in our minds of the empty streets of the huge, deserted city and its great stillness when the doves were asleep on its pinnacles in the dark night; we can see faintly like a slim shadow the lonely Beloved2 pacing with anxious steps and quaking heart through the darkness of the empty corridors of that shuttered, sleeping palace; and we long to be able to place just a little light – like the thread of gold in a whetstone – near her feet.
How beautiful are the names of the rivers and mountains and cities of that stretch of ancient India! Avantī, Vidiśā, Ujjayinī; Vindhya, Kailāsa, Devagiri; Revā, Śiprā, Vetravatī. There is such beauty and dignity and purity in the names. The times seem to have deteriorated since then: in their language, manners and mentality there seems to be an ageing, a corruption. The names we use have deteriorated accordingly. I feel that if only there were still some path by which we could return to Avantī and Vidiśā, or the banks of the Revā, Śiprā or Nirvindhyā rivers, then we would gain deliverance from the mean and ugly clamour all around us today.
Therefore the Yaksa’s cloud as it flies above mountains and rivers and cities is accompanied by the reader’s long sigh of distress at separation. We are cut off from the poet’s India, from its village women whose love-softened eyes were innocent of seductive eyebrow movements, and from its townswomen whose alluring glances darted up like swarms of bees from heavily-lashed dark eyes versed in such movements. We cannot send a messenger other than the poet’s cloud to anyone there now.
I remember that some English poet has written that men are like separate small islands, with a sea of innumerable salt-tears dividing them. When we look at each other from a long way off, then we feel that once we lived in a single great country; but now through somebody’s curse the grief of separation foams up between us. When we look from this sea-girdled petty present towards the shore of that past stretch of land described by the poet, then we feel as if a link ought to have stayed between us and the garland-making women who gathered flowers in the yūthī-groves on the banks of the Śiprā river, the old men in the courtyards of Avantī who told stories of Udayana, and the travelling exiles who pined for their own wives whenever they saw the first clouds of Áāh. There is a profound human unity connecting us, but a cruel temporal gulf. Through the grace of the poet, that past time has reached its fullest expression in the city of Alakā in all its immeasurable beauty; we send our own imaginary Meghadūta there from our present, alienated, mortal world.
But it is not just a matter of past and present: in each of us there is an unfathomable sense of separation. That Person with whom we long to be united dwells on the unreachable shore of her own Mānasa lake; only our Imagination can be dispatched there; there is no way in which we can arrive there corporeally. Here I am and there you are; there is an infinite gulf between us – who can cross it? Who can gain a sight of
that most beloved, indestructible Being dwelling at the centre of infinity? Today in our confusion of mind and body, light and dark, in the hurtling stream of life and death, we can catch a slender scent of her only through language, feeling, intimation. If a southern breeze comes to me from you, this is my good fortune, and the most that anyone can expect in this cut-off world.
3
Alluding to these words of eternal separation, a Vaisava poet sang: dūhu kole dūhu kāde biccheda bhābiyā.4
We are each of us standing alone on a deserted mountain-top looking northwards: before us, sky and cloud and the lovely natural sight of Revā and Śiprā and Avanti and Ujjayinī – a picture of extravagant joy, beauty and delight that reminds us that it will not allow us to approach: it excites us with yearning, unceasingly. Such is the distance between us two Beings.
But I feel as though at one time we were together in one mental realm5 from which we have been exiled. Thus the Vaiava poet writes: hiyāra bhitara haite ke kaila bāhira.6 Why did this happen? That Person who was part of my mind, why is she outside it now? I know that your place is not there! Balarām Dās says: tēi balarāmer pahu cita nahe sthira.7 Beings who were once united in one all-pervading single mind are all outside it today. So when we and that Person look at each other our hearts cannot be still: they are afflicted with viraha,8 anxious with longing. We try in our hearts to become one again, but the immensity of Earth intervenes.
O pining Yaka in your deserted mountain turret, who can reassure you that in a wonderfully beautiful world, on a night of full autumn moonlight, you will be united eternally with the Person you embrace in your dreams, to whom you send your message on a cloud. I know, I know that you would not find any difference between matter9 and consciousness, if only the distinction between truth and imagination could disappear.