Poets and Poems

Rabindranath Tagore

'No poet seems to me as famous in Europe as he is among us. He is as great in music as in poetry, and his songs are sung from the west of India into Burma wherever Bengali is spoken.'   Quoted by W.B. Yeats

The youngest surviving child of Debendranath Tagore and his wife Saradal Devi, Rabindranath Tagore was born in Calcutta in May 1861 into a wealthy and distinguished Bengali family. He was educated mainly at home in a stimulating literary and artistic environment, until being enrolled in 1878 at a public school in Brighton, England. The intention was for him to become a barrister, and for a short time he read law at University College London but, with his interest being in literature, he returned to Bengal in 1880 without trying for a degree.

He had started writing poetry when he was eight, and at sixteen had published a large poetry collection and written his first short story and dramas. Although best known as a poet, his prolific output over the coming years encompassed essays, non-fiction books, short stories, novels and dramas. He was an accomplished musician, composing a large number of songs that are still being sung, and late in life he also took up painting, exhibiting in England and France.

In 1883 he married a youthful Mrinalini Devi. Sadly, two of their five children died in childhood. In 1890 he assumed responsibility for managing the vast family estates, and his contact with the country folk* gave him a feeling for them and their way of life.

In 1901 he moved to Santiniketan in West Bengal to an Ashram that his father had founded**. Deeply disillusioned by traditional education, he started an experimental school there. He believed that learning could best be fostered in such natural surroundings, and much of the teaching was done in the open air. Under his guidance the school developed into a university, and later became one of India's major centres of learning.

In 1912 he travelled to England, taking with him translations*** he had made of a number of his poems, including Gitanjali (Song Offerings), which contained poems on a spiritual theme selected from several of his Bengali publications. In England he met a number of leading poets, who were impressed with what they read; not least W.B. Yeats who wrote the preface to an English edition of this work. It was largely on the basis of this hugely popular translation that Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature the following year. He was knighted in 1915, but renounced the title in 1919 in protest at the murderous response of the British Indian Army to a peaceful demonstration in Amritzar.

In 1921 he funded and co-founded an 'Institute for Rural Reconstruction' in Sural, a village a few miles from Santiniketan. Its purpose was to equip villagers with the skills they needed to solve their own problems.

He travelled widely over many years to raise funds for the institutes, having already donated his Nobel prize money. He lectured in Europe (including the Soviet Union), America, the Middle East, Asia, Japan and Latin America. The Peruvian and Mexican Governments each made a donation of $100,000 dollars for his educational work. His last visit was to Ceylon in 1933.

Although in declining health, Tagore continued writing up until his death in 1941 at his childhood home in Calcutta. By then he was revered not just in his native India but world-wide, and was a cult figure to many. Festivals are still held in his honour in various parts of the world. In 1940 Oxford University arranged a special ceremony at Shantiniketan to confer on him a Doctorate of Literature.

* Later, as a friend of Mahatma Gandhi, he championed the cause of the Dalits, the lowest caste in India, and featured them as heroes in his poems and dramas.
** His father, Debendranath Tagore, had bought the land at Santiniketan for a token sum in 1862 to found an Ashram, one to which people of all faiths were invited to come for meditation and prayer.
*** Up until 1922 the only translations in English were those the poet had made himself. Since then there has been a plethora of translations, not least in the present millennium. Many are of poor quality, and even the best are acknowledged to lack the beauty and nuance of the Bengali verse. The translations include 'Selected Poems' by Oxford University Press (2004) and the well reviewed 'The Essential Tagore' by Harvard University Press (2011), both in collaboration with the printing department of the poet's own Santiniketan University. There is a readily available Penquin Classics paperback, also entitled 'Selected Poems' (2005), with translations by the Bengali scholar, William Radice.

Lines from Gitanjali (Song Offerings)

Today the summer has come at my window
with its sighs and murmurs;
and the bees are plying their minstrelsy
at the court of the flowering grove.
.
When in the morning air the golden harp is tuned,
honour me, commanding my presence.
.
If thou speakest not
I will fill my heart with thy silence and endure it.
I will keep still and wait like the night with starry vigil
and its head bent low with patience.

The morning will surely come,
the darkness will vanish,
and thy voice pour down in golden streams
breaking through the sky.
.
You came down from your throne
and stood at my cottage door.

I was singing all alone in a corner,
and the melody caught your ear.

Masters are many in your hall,
and songs are sung there at all hours.
But the simple carol of this novice struck at your love.
One plaintive little strain
mingled with the great music of the world,
and with a flower for a prize
you came down and stopped at my cottage door.
.
Let all the strains of joy mingle in my last song---
the joy that makes the earth flow over
in the riotous excess of the grass,
the joy that sets the twin brothers,
life and death, dancing over the wide world,
the joy that sweeps in with the tempest,
shaking and waking all life with laughter,
the joy that sits still with its tears on the open red lotus of pain,
and the joy that throws everything it has upon the dust,
and knows not a word.
.
I feel my limbs are made glorious
by the touch of this world of life.
And my pride is from the life-throb of ages
dancing in my blood this moment.
.
In one salutation to thee, my God,
let all my senses spread out
and touch this world at thy feet.
.
Let all my songs gather together their diverse strains
into a single current and flow to a sea of silence
in one salutation to thee.