Prose Poems of Tagore by Dr. Bina Biswas
Introduction
In his introduction to Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore’s Nobel winning anthology of verses, Gitanjali/Song Offerings, W.B.Yeats wrote ecstatically:
These prose translations have stirred my blood as nothing has for years…These lyrics display in their thought a world I have dreamed of all my life long. The work of a supreme culture, they appear as much the growth of the common soil as the grass and rushes…Rabindranath like Chaucer’s forerunners writes music for his words and one understands in every moment that he is so abundant, so spontaneous, so daring in his passion, so full of surprise because he is doing something which has never seemed strange, unnatural or in need of defense.[1]
Tagore is one of the supreme lyric poets of the world. Honesty of feeling and radiance of imagery unite with the music of his verse give poems that haunt long after the actual words are forgotten.
The new Bengali poetry was only some twenty years old, if one dates its start from Rangalal Bandyopadhyay’s Padmini Upakhyan/“The Story of Padmini,” 1858, declaredly composed according to a pure English technique. This work was narrative in nature, like the major writings of Hemchandra Bandyopadhyay, Nabinchandra Sen, and above of all Michael Madhusudan Dutt. Tagore too adopted narrative as his chief poetic vehicle at an early stage; he did not draw his material from mythology or history. Tagore’s fable concerned a poet. The aim of this study is a modest attempt to critically examine the prose poems of Tagore, other than the songs of Gitanjali/ Song Offerings,in the light of his creative genius, his mastery over the story telling technique through the media of poems and songs. The English Gitanjali/Song Offerings, (1912) has set up a narrow stereotyped image of the poet, a kind of oriental sage, in the minds of the Western readers. The present research work aims to establish Rabindranath as a poet, a musician, a composer, a dramatist, a lyricist, a painter, a nationalist and a politician – all through the media of narrative poetry, poems and songs. This is a searching attempt to place literary criticism of Tagore’s prose poems within a definable context of living human beings, of classes and creeds, nations and races. He was a creative artist of incredibly abundant gifts, a prolific writer; his works include poems, novels, plays, short stories, essays and was a highly unorthodox painter, a musician and composer of songs that capture Bengali hearts even today..
The milieu in which Tagore wrote:
An insight
Raja Rammohun Roy wrote and spoke English with mastery years before Macaulay wrote his Minutes. As far as English education was concerned the Indo-Anglican writers of verse and prose–the Cavalry Brothers, Derozio, Kashiporsad Ghose, Hasan Ali, P. Rajagopaul, Mohan Lal– belonged to the pre-Macaulay period. This was an exciting time for literature in Bengal: English (and to some extent Continental) literature had at last penetrated the hearts and minds of Bengali writers and begun to transform the idealized images, simple poetic metres and Sanskrtitized diction of centuries. The period 1850-1880 saw the creation of the first blank-verse epic in Bengali by Michael Modhusudan Dutt, based on an episode in the epic Ramayana and much indebted to Milton and Homer. He was an extremely gifted writer and poet. In his initial years as an author he tried his hand at English prose, verse and even drama. His lyrical ballad, The Captive Ladie had strong influence of the English romantics. Some bold experiments were carried out with colloquial Bengali, such as a classic Bengali lampoon published in the early 1860s, Hutom Pyanchar Naksha/What the Screech-Owl Saw; and the triumphal arrival of the Bengali novel, with the work of Bankimchandra Chatterjee, the so-called “Scott of Bengal”, the most famous nineteenth-century Bengali writer and the first Bengali woman novelist was Rabindranath’s elder sister Swarnakumari. At the same time, essayists such as the scholar and reformer Iswarchandra Vidyasagar, revered by Rabindranath second only to Rammohun Roy, wrote on social matters in powerful and precise language that harmonized the classical and the vernacular.
Swami Vivekananda arrived on the scene after the death of the Messiah Ramakrishna Paramahansa, his spiritual Guru, and conquered the world. He spoke with knowledge and conviction. He wrote verses in English and his writings are spread over many volumes.
Toru Dutt was the next poet to come onto the scene to write poems mainly of the ancient tales and carried forward the romantic tradition. Romesh Chander Dutt and Manmohan Ghose (the elder brother of Sri Aurobindo) were both Bengalis but their literary activities were not restricted to Bengal alone. One finds quintessence of Indian romantic poetry, expressed in the English language in their works.
The second half of the nineteenth century of the English literature made a great impact on the Indian writing. In English, prose works were attempted in newer forms like lyrics, novels and short stories and they began to appear in different Indian languages. By the end of the century short stories in English itself began to be written by the Indian writer. It is seen that though English prose was being developed by some writers, prose in lyric form was tried by Tagore and was taken to a new height. Here it is too tempting to define the meaning of prose poems and it is a prose work that has poetic characteristics such as vivid imagery and concentrated expressions. The definition in Britannica Encyclopedia goes like this:
Work in prose that has some of the technical or literary qualities like poetry, such as regular rhythm, definitely patterned structure or emotional and imaginative heightening but that is set on a page as prose. The form took its name from Charles Baudelaire’s “Little poems in Prose” (1869). Other writers of prose poems include in the 19th Century Stephane Mallarme, Arthur Rimbaud, Friedrich Holderlin, Novalis and Rainer Maria Rilke and in the 20th Century Amy Lowell in her “Polyphonic Prose” and such contemporary poets as John Ashbery.
(Britannica Encyclopedia)
The Literary Dictionary defines prose poems as:
A short composition employing the rhythmic cadences and other devices of free verse, such poetic imagery and figures and printed wholly or partly in the format of prose i.e. with a right hand margin instead of regular line breaks. The genre emerged in France in the 19th Century, notably in Charles Baudelaire’s “Spleen de Paris”(1869) and Arthur Rimbaud’s “Les Illuminations”(1886); a significant sequence of English prose poems is Geoffrey Hill’s “Merican Hymns” (1971) and a prose poem is self contained work usually similar to lyric, whereas poetic prose may occur intermittently within a longer prose work.( Literary Dictionary)
French Literature Companion defines prose poems as:
A prose piece whose brevity produces rhythmic poise and acoustic structuring, expressive elisions and condensed imagery normally associated with verse. Among the possible sources of prose poem might be mentioned poetic prose from Fenelon to Chateaubriand, prose renderings of foreign lyrics and biblical prose; as the site of contradictory forces, it relates to Romanticism’s melange des genres.( French Literature Companion)
It is noted that Tagore developed a peculiar liking towards this genre and took it forward more in his later poetry. In the early years the poet, it is seen, was almost in love with rhythmic lyrics and verses and has produced beautiful sonorous poetry that has no parallels in Bengali Poetry. It is difficult to translate the poems in same rhythmic structures in English and therefore, they are all rendered in prose.
This is one of the major limitations in the translated forms of poetry. Here, in this thesis Tagore’s poems are searched on the basis of their themes and not on their patterns since for the difficulty cited above. But Tagore used prose poems as the chief poetic medium in his later poems of life from Punascha/Post Script to Sesh Lekha/No Last Words and they opened a new genre for the next generation poets in Bengali Literature. As regards experiments in technique, the period begins with free verse and prose poems and ends with hieroglyphics of Sesh Lekha/No Last Words.
Tagore was deeply impressed by one of his elder siblings Dwijendranath Tagore who “was the most intellectual and the least worldly of the Tagore siblings. Deeply immersed in the study of Indian philosophy, mathematics and geometry, he also reveled in folding complex paper boxes and was responsible for inventing the first Bengali shorthand and musical notations.”[2]
Into this culturally charged atmosphere, both Eastern and Western, Rabindranath grew up in the Jorasanko house, which was always vibrant with noise of people who were busy singing songs, writing verses, enacting, designing outfits or discussing theological, philosophical and literary problems, where he passed his boyhood. And here the future Nobel laureate and his makers constantly worked together towards that goal.
[1]Dr. Salil Kumar Mandal: Selected Poems from Tagore(Calcutta: Chukervertty Chatterjee & Co. Ltd.,2006) pp.vii, xiii
[2] Krishna Dutta & Andrew Robinson : Rabindranath Tagore : The Myriad Minded Man (New Delhi, Rupa & Co.,2003), p.37
In his introduction to Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore’s Nobel winning anthology of verses, Gitanjali/Song Offerings, W.B.Yeats wrote ecstatically:
These prose translations have stirred my blood as nothing has for years…These lyrics display in their thought a world I have dreamed of all my life long. The work of a supreme culture, they appear as much the growth of the common soil as the grass and rushes…Rabindranath like Chaucer’s forerunners writes music for his words and one understands in every moment that he is so abundant, so spontaneous, so daring in his passion, so full of surprise because he is doing something which has never seemed strange, unnatural or in need of defense.[1]
Tagore is one of the supreme lyric poets of the world. Honesty of feeling and radiance of imagery unite with the music of his verse give poems that haunt long after the actual words are forgotten.
The new Bengali poetry was only some twenty years old, if one dates its start from Rangalal Bandyopadhyay’s Padmini Upakhyan/“The Story of Padmini,” 1858, declaredly composed according to a pure English technique. This work was narrative in nature, like the major writings of Hemchandra Bandyopadhyay, Nabinchandra Sen, and above of all Michael Madhusudan Dutt. Tagore too adopted narrative as his chief poetic vehicle at an early stage; he did not draw his material from mythology or history. Tagore’s fable concerned a poet. The aim of this study is a modest attempt to critically examine the prose poems of Tagore, other than the songs of Gitanjali/ Song Offerings,in the light of his creative genius, his mastery over the story telling technique through the media of poems and songs. The English Gitanjali/Song Offerings, (1912) has set up a narrow stereotyped image of the poet, a kind of oriental sage, in the minds of the Western readers. The present research work aims to establish Rabindranath as a poet, a musician, a composer, a dramatist, a lyricist, a painter, a nationalist and a politician – all through the media of narrative poetry, poems and songs. This is a searching attempt to place literary criticism of Tagore’s prose poems within a definable context of living human beings, of classes and creeds, nations and races. He was a creative artist of incredibly abundant gifts, a prolific writer; his works include poems, novels, plays, short stories, essays and was a highly unorthodox painter, a musician and composer of songs that capture Bengali hearts even today..
The milieu in which Tagore wrote:
An insight
Raja Rammohun Roy wrote and spoke English with mastery years before Macaulay wrote his Minutes. As far as English education was concerned the Indo-Anglican writers of verse and prose–the Cavalry Brothers, Derozio, Kashiporsad Ghose, Hasan Ali, P. Rajagopaul, Mohan Lal– belonged to the pre-Macaulay period. This was an exciting time for literature in Bengal: English (and to some extent Continental) literature had at last penetrated the hearts and minds of Bengali writers and begun to transform the idealized images, simple poetic metres and Sanskrtitized diction of centuries. The period 1850-1880 saw the creation of the first blank-verse epic in Bengali by Michael Modhusudan Dutt, based on an episode in the epic Ramayana and much indebted to Milton and Homer. He was an extremely gifted writer and poet. In his initial years as an author he tried his hand at English prose, verse and even drama. His lyrical ballad, The Captive Ladie had strong influence of the English romantics. Some bold experiments were carried out with colloquial Bengali, such as a classic Bengali lampoon published in the early 1860s, Hutom Pyanchar Naksha/What the Screech-Owl Saw; and the triumphal arrival of the Bengali novel, with the work of Bankimchandra Chatterjee, the so-called “Scott of Bengal”, the most famous nineteenth-century Bengali writer and the first Bengali woman novelist was Rabindranath’s elder sister Swarnakumari. At the same time, essayists such as the scholar and reformer Iswarchandra Vidyasagar, revered by Rabindranath second only to Rammohun Roy, wrote on social matters in powerful and precise language that harmonized the classical and the vernacular.
Swami Vivekananda arrived on the scene after the death of the Messiah Ramakrishna Paramahansa, his spiritual Guru, and conquered the world. He spoke with knowledge and conviction. He wrote verses in English and his writings are spread over many volumes.
Toru Dutt was the next poet to come onto the scene to write poems mainly of the ancient tales and carried forward the romantic tradition. Romesh Chander Dutt and Manmohan Ghose (the elder brother of Sri Aurobindo) were both Bengalis but their literary activities were not restricted to Bengal alone. One finds quintessence of Indian romantic poetry, expressed in the English language in their works.
The second half of the nineteenth century of the English literature made a great impact on the Indian writing. In English, prose works were attempted in newer forms like lyrics, novels and short stories and they began to appear in different Indian languages. By the end of the century short stories in English itself began to be written by the Indian writer. It is seen that though English prose was being developed by some writers, prose in lyric form was tried by Tagore and was taken to a new height. Here it is too tempting to define the meaning of prose poems and it is a prose work that has poetic characteristics such as vivid imagery and concentrated expressions. The definition in Britannica Encyclopedia goes like this:
Work in prose that has some of the technical or literary qualities like poetry, such as regular rhythm, definitely patterned structure or emotional and imaginative heightening but that is set on a page as prose. The form took its name from Charles Baudelaire’s “Little poems in Prose” (1869). Other writers of prose poems include in the 19th Century Stephane Mallarme, Arthur Rimbaud, Friedrich Holderlin, Novalis and Rainer Maria Rilke and in the 20th Century Amy Lowell in her “Polyphonic Prose” and such contemporary poets as John Ashbery.
(Britannica Encyclopedia)
The Literary Dictionary defines prose poems as:
A short composition employing the rhythmic cadences and other devices of free verse, such poetic imagery and figures and printed wholly or partly in the format of prose i.e. with a right hand margin instead of regular line breaks. The genre emerged in France in the 19th Century, notably in Charles Baudelaire’s “Spleen de Paris”(1869) and Arthur Rimbaud’s “Les Illuminations”(1886); a significant sequence of English prose poems is Geoffrey Hill’s “Merican Hymns” (1971) and a prose poem is self contained work usually similar to lyric, whereas poetic prose may occur intermittently within a longer prose work.( Literary Dictionary)
French Literature Companion defines prose poems as:
A prose piece whose brevity produces rhythmic poise and acoustic structuring, expressive elisions and condensed imagery normally associated with verse. Among the possible sources of prose poem might be mentioned poetic prose from Fenelon to Chateaubriand, prose renderings of foreign lyrics and biblical prose; as the site of contradictory forces, it relates to Romanticism’s melange des genres.( French Literature Companion)
It is noted that Tagore developed a peculiar liking towards this genre and took it forward more in his later poetry. In the early years the poet, it is seen, was almost in love with rhythmic lyrics and verses and has produced beautiful sonorous poetry that has no parallels in Bengali Poetry. It is difficult to translate the poems in same rhythmic structures in English and therefore, they are all rendered in prose.
This is one of the major limitations in the translated forms of poetry. Here, in this thesis Tagore’s poems are searched on the basis of their themes and not on their patterns since for the difficulty cited above. But Tagore used prose poems as the chief poetic medium in his later poems of life from Punascha/Post Script to Sesh Lekha/No Last Words and they opened a new genre for the next generation poets in Bengali Literature. As regards experiments in technique, the period begins with free verse and prose poems and ends with hieroglyphics of Sesh Lekha/No Last Words.
Tagore was deeply impressed by one of his elder siblings Dwijendranath Tagore who “was the most intellectual and the least worldly of the Tagore siblings. Deeply immersed in the study of Indian philosophy, mathematics and geometry, he also reveled in folding complex paper boxes and was responsible for inventing the first Bengali shorthand and musical notations.”[2]
Into this culturally charged atmosphere, both Eastern and Western, Rabindranath grew up in the Jorasanko house, which was always vibrant with noise of people who were busy singing songs, writing verses, enacting, designing outfits or discussing theological, philosophical and literary problems, where he passed his boyhood. And here the future Nobel laureate and his makers constantly worked together towards that goal.
[1]Dr. Salil Kumar Mandal: Selected Poems from Tagore(Calcutta: Chukervertty Chatterjee & Co. Ltd.,2006) pp.vii, xiii
[2] Krishna Dutta & Andrew Robinson : Rabindranath Tagore : The Myriad Minded Man (New Delhi, Rupa & Co.,2003), p.37
