Prose Poems of Tagore by Dr. Bina Biswas
Influence
and Inspiration
It is in the midst of a storm at night that the poet invokes Shiva, the “tremendous lover”, but a tryst in darkness and rain occurs more frequently in Vaishnava poetry than in Shaiva legend and literature. The rainy season is a recurrent theme with Tagore who, taking a hint from Kalidasa’s Meghdoot, endows it with a new significance. During the rains in Asadh (July) people cannot stir out of their homes. But it is on such days and such nights that a man feels lonely and longs to go out and meet the beloved, and in Vaishnava poetry there are frequent references to Radha making nothing of danger and going out under the shelter of darkness to have stolen interviews with Krishna. This loneliness and this desire for union Tagore looks upon as characteristics of universal life, human and terrestrial, and the errant clouds of the rainy season appear to him to be charged with message of the unknown which makes the heart wistful. The pang of separation which the stars feel as they gaze at one another becomes music among the rustling leaves in the rainy darkness of Asadh. In the busy moments of noontide work the poet is with the crowd, but on dark lonely days when clouds heap upon clouds it is only for the far-away lover that his soul pines in pensive loneliness for the beloved.
“The great subjects for poetry”, William Wordsworth says in The Preface to Lyrical Ballads “are the essential passions of the heart, elementary feelings, the great and simple affections, the great and universal passions of men and characters of which the elements are simple…such as exist now, and will probably always exist, as these human qualities interact with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature. And a man speaking to men, both affirm and effect the primal human values: the joy of life, the dignity of life and of its elemental moving force, the pleasure principle, and the primacy of the universal connective, love.”[1]
In his extraordinary Hymn to unitellectual Beauty, Urvashi/ “Urvashi”[2], Tagore begins by a portrayal of her utter unrelatedness to normal living. The Myth Maiden, incarnate Eros, is “neither mother, daughter nor wife.” The pathos evoked by her unavailability in the world as it is – ‘phiribe na phiribe na, she will not come back, not come back’ – is not to be found in the epics or the ancient texts. Urvashi is a much more fascinating and picturesque figure than Ahalya and has occurred more frequently in literature and legend. It is said that once upon a time in the dim past the gods and the Titans churned the ocean with the help of the great Serpent Vasuki[3] and the Mandar[4] hill in the hope of getting treasures hidden in the depth of water. Among the treasures thus achieved were Lakshmi, the Goddess of Plenty who came out of the deep sea with a goblet full of holy nectar that was to bring immortality to the gods, and also Urvashi, fairest of women, who has ever since been looked up the highest embodiment of the elusive, mysterious and irresistible fascination of beauty, especially of feminine beauty. After the first churning had been over and the gifts had been taken by gods, a second attempt was made, but this time the serpent Vasuki was tired, and instead of treasures the irate ocean spouted forth the deadly poison which might have burnt the universe into cinders. The Great God Shiva rescued the worlds, celestial and terrestrial, by drinking the poison which stuck in his throat, giving his neck a blue stain, and since then he has been called Nilakantha or the blue-necked God. Indra (The King of the Paradise) made Urvashi, whose youth is eternal, the Court Dancer of the Paradise, and whenever any sage would practice austerities that might make him a rival of Indra, the King of the Paradise sent Urvashi to seduce him, and the sage would invariably yield to her charm, thus losing the fruits of ages of penance. Once Urvashi fell under a curse and had to pass a period of sojourn on the earth where she became the queen of King Pururava[5], but at the end of term of exile, she fled to Paradise, leaving the disconsolate king to search for her in vain. Although Urvashi has been celebrated in Indian religion, legend and literature, she is nowhere so as great as in Tagore’s magnificent poem about her. It has already been pointed out that the poet from his earliest boyhood was passionately fond of Nature. Great as is his sensitiveness to the varied sights and sounds in nature, the more important thing is that he saw in these multifarious objects a unifying spirit. He imagines these aspects in “The Fugitive II” as the Lady of Manifold Magnificence (Urvashi) whose path is strewn with lights and music. It is the same lady who is found in the individual human soul where shedding all her variety, she blossoms as a lonely lotus of love. In the poem Urvashi, she is a truly Tagorean romantic image:
Dawn incarnate on eastern mount of heaven,
O world-bewitching Urvashi!
Your slender limbs are bathed in tears of the world,
Your feet are red with blood of its heart.
Loose-haired and naked, on the centre
Of the blossomed lotus of the world’s desire
Lightly you rest your feet.
Infinite are the roles you dance in the mind’s infinite heaven,
O visitant in dreams!
Do you not hear the world crying for you?
O Urvashi, cruel and deaf!
Crying for the return of the ancient primal age… (Urvashi/“Urvashi”)
In another poem written several years after “Lover’s Gift”, Tagore imagines the beauty of the universe as divided into two separate forces – one represents by Urvashi and the other Lakshmi, the two fair women who rose in the beginning of time from the churning of God’s dream. Urvashi stands for that aspect of beauty which is seen in the flowering frenzy of Nature and which, in the shape of a woman haunts startles and waylays man. Lakshmi, on the other hand, is the spirit of Plenty in nature and of motherliness in humanity, leading men not to the bower of passionate tryst but to the temple of the divine love, wealth and prosperity. Excellent as these two poems are, they are incomplete symbols of the idea of beauty. The Lady of Manifold magnificence is lost in the multitude of forms in which she displays herself; she has no life of her own. The poem in “Lover’s Gift”, referred to above cannot give a complete portrayal of Beauty, because in it Beauty is seen not as a single figure; and the force of the poem consists in the emphasis on the contrast between two aspects of beauty rather than in the delineation of its uniqueness and complexity.
From all these defects the great poem Urvashi is free. It is felt that in condescension of idea and in splendour of imagery it has few parallels in Rabindranath’s work or outside it. In the said poem there is an attempt at the portraiture of the pure gem-like essence of beauty to which only noteworthy parallel is the painting of Mona Lisa by Leonardo Da Vinci. Although it is not incorrect to eulogise the delicacy with which the eyelids or the hands are drawn by the great artist, the most significant thing in the celebrated portrait is the strange smile on the lips of Mona Lisa, which symbolises the eternal mystery of beauty and or more correctly, feminine beauty, as the painting is less spiritual and more sensuous form of art than poetry, a portrait in canvas may not have the intricate and dynamic significance of a poem. In yet another respect Tagore had an advantage beyond the reach of Leonardo Da Vinci, that Mona Lisa was a real flesh-blood woman with none of the complex associations that gather round a mythical figure; a real woman may appeal more intensely to the artist than will a legendary feminine figure.
Many lands and ages have figured inward inspiration in the female form. As Tagore put it, “There is a woman within our inner nature. We bring to her all that we have gathered…”[6] and the poet seeks “to explore existence in terms of this feminised interior being – to engage through its means with life, with the relation of life to death, with that within the space and time which transcends space and time.”[7]
In Urvashi Tagore takes as his theme a woman celebrated in the Vedas, in the Mahabharata and by Kalidasa; here is a woman who is as old as the rocks and who is the mother of the line of Kings and the protagonists in the Mahabharata. Tagore accepts the main outlines of the traditional story which helps him to depict Urvashi as the symbol of his of own comprehensive vision of beauty; he makes one or two significant changes. He does not mention Urvashi’s connection with Pururava, because that would give a local habitation to what is only an idea and a name. He represents Urvashi as the bearer of the goblet of celestial nectar, leaving out Lakshmi altogether, but he also makes her the purveyor of poison thus completing the picture of beauty which, in all places and ages, gives man his richest experience but also has potentiality for destruction. On the whole, the legendary story with slight modifications referred to above helps the poet to make of Urvashi a marvellous creation of symbolist imagination; she is a beautiful woman who sprang out of the foam on a particular day and has been sending a thrill of rapture over the universe ever since, and yet in her unfading youthfulness and power of enchantment she is less an individual than the embodiment of the poet’s idea of beauty. Nowhere else does an ancient myth pass so inconspicuously into a contemporary symbol. Tagore stresses the freshness of the beauty, its inexhaustible charm and, in spite of its association with poison, its perpetual innocence. Urvashi carries death in her left hand and deathlessness in her right, because the opposition between mortality and immortality does not exist for a woman who came out of the sea in the full bloom of youth which she retains in imperishable grandeur through the ages. Urvashi might have passed her infancy, if she had any infancy at all, in the coral bed of the ocean, but when she rose out the waves, she was like the dawn, fresh and without veil. But there the parallelism[8] ends for the dawn intensifies into the noon and noon fades into evening. But Urvashi is not so, because although she is a woman, she has only a woman’s body and a woman’s charm without a woman’s heart. The poet says:
Not mother, not daughter,
nor comely bride –
Heaven-dwelling Urvashi.
(Urvashi/ “Urvashi”)
But she is different in this respect, from Leda, Helen, St. Anne, and Mona Lisa. She is the embodiment of pure beauty, disassociated from all conventional forms. One meaning of her is that she manifests herself in the expansive universe of space, and this leads Tagore to imagine that she is the creative spirit of life which makes the earth shower with flowers and fruits, gives light to the stars in the sky and causes the frenzy of desire in men’s hearts. But she remains for ever a denizen of Paradise and her principal business is to entertain the gods with her dancing and ever-lasting youth.
[1] M.H. Abrams (ed.): Wordsworth : A Collection of critical essays (New York, OUP,1975) p.1
[2] An angel of the paradise who has immortal youth and beauty and a celestial dancer in the Indian mythology
[3] The great serpent that lives in the oceans according to the Indian Mythology
[4] The great hill is named Mandar according to the Indian Mythology
[5] Forefather of Pandavas and Kaurava in the epic Mahabharata
[6] Prarthana/Prayerin Shantiniketan; Rabindra Rachanabali:13, p.475
[7] Sukanta Chaudhuri (ed.):The Oxford Tagore Translations, Selected Poems: Rabindranath Tagore,
(New Delhi, OUP, 2004), p.15
[8] So far as the earth is concerned, she has vanished and made her home on the Mt.Setting.
It is in the midst of a storm at night that the poet invokes Shiva, the “tremendous lover”, but a tryst in darkness and rain occurs more frequently in Vaishnava poetry than in Shaiva legend and literature. The rainy season is a recurrent theme with Tagore who, taking a hint from Kalidasa’s Meghdoot, endows it with a new significance. During the rains in Asadh (July) people cannot stir out of their homes. But it is on such days and such nights that a man feels lonely and longs to go out and meet the beloved, and in Vaishnava poetry there are frequent references to Radha making nothing of danger and going out under the shelter of darkness to have stolen interviews with Krishna. This loneliness and this desire for union Tagore looks upon as characteristics of universal life, human and terrestrial, and the errant clouds of the rainy season appear to him to be charged with message of the unknown which makes the heart wistful. The pang of separation which the stars feel as they gaze at one another becomes music among the rustling leaves in the rainy darkness of Asadh. In the busy moments of noontide work the poet is with the crowd, but on dark lonely days when clouds heap upon clouds it is only for the far-away lover that his soul pines in pensive loneliness for the beloved.
“The great subjects for poetry”, William Wordsworth says in The Preface to Lyrical Ballads “are the essential passions of the heart, elementary feelings, the great and simple affections, the great and universal passions of men and characters of which the elements are simple…such as exist now, and will probably always exist, as these human qualities interact with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature. And a man speaking to men, both affirm and effect the primal human values: the joy of life, the dignity of life and of its elemental moving force, the pleasure principle, and the primacy of the universal connective, love.”[1]
In his extraordinary Hymn to unitellectual Beauty, Urvashi/ “Urvashi”[2], Tagore begins by a portrayal of her utter unrelatedness to normal living. The Myth Maiden, incarnate Eros, is “neither mother, daughter nor wife.” The pathos evoked by her unavailability in the world as it is – ‘phiribe na phiribe na, she will not come back, not come back’ – is not to be found in the epics or the ancient texts. Urvashi is a much more fascinating and picturesque figure than Ahalya and has occurred more frequently in literature and legend. It is said that once upon a time in the dim past the gods and the Titans churned the ocean with the help of the great Serpent Vasuki[3] and the Mandar[4] hill in the hope of getting treasures hidden in the depth of water. Among the treasures thus achieved were Lakshmi, the Goddess of Plenty who came out of the deep sea with a goblet full of holy nectar that was to bring immortality to the gods, and also Urvashi, fairest of women, who has ever since been looked up the highest embodiment of the elusive, mysterious and irresistible fascination of beauty, especially of feminine beauty. After the first churning had been over and the gifts had been taken by gods, a second attempt was made, but this time the serpent Vasuki was tired, and instead of treasures the irate ocean spouted forth the deadly poison which might have burnt the universe into cinders. The Great God Shiva rescued the worlds, celestial and terrestrial, by drinking the poison which stuck in his throat, giving his neck a blue stain, and since then he has been called Nilakantha or the blue-necked God. Indra (The King of the Paradise) made Urvashi, whose youth is eternal, the Court Dancer of the Paradise, and whenever any sage would practice austerities that might make him a rival of Indra, the King of the Paradise sent Urvashi to seduce him, and the sage would invariably yield to her charm, thus losing the fruits of ages of penance. Once Urvashi fell under a curse and had to pass a period of sojourn on the earth where she became the queen of King Pururava[5], but at the end of term of exile, she fled to Paradise, leaving the disconsolate king to search for her in vain. Although Urvashi has been celebrated in Indian religion, legend and literature, she is nowhere so as great as in Tagore’s magnificent poem about her. It has already been pointed out that the poet from his earliest boyhood was passionately fond of Nature. Great as is his sensitiveness to the varied sights and sounds in nature, the more important thing is that he saw in these multifarious objects a unifying spirit. He imagines these aspects in “The Fugitive II” as the Lady of Manifold Magnificence (Urvashi) whose path is strewn with lights and music. It is the same lady who is found in the individual human soul where shedding all her variety, she blossoms as a lonely lotus of love. In the poem Urvashi, she is a truly Tagorean romantic image:
Dawn incarnate on eastern mount of heaven,
O world-bewitching Urvashi!
Your slender limbs are bathed in tears of the world,
Your feet are red with blood of its heart.
Loose-haired and naked, on the centre
Of the blossomed lotus of the world’s desire
Lightly you rest your feet.
Infinite are the roles you dance in the mind’s infinite heaven,
O visitant in dreams!
Do you not hear the world crying for you?
O Urvashi, cruel and deaf!
Crying for the return of the ancient primal age… (Urvashi/“Urvashi”)
In another poem written several years after “Lover’s Gift”, Tagore imagines the beauty of the universe as divided into two separate forces – one represents by Urvashi and the other Lakshmi, the two fair women who rose in the beginning of time from the churning of God’s dream. Urvashi stands for that aspect of beauty which is seen in the flowering frenzy of Nature and which, in the shape of a woman haunts startles and waylays man. Lakshmi, on the other hand, is the spirit of Plenty in nature and of motherliness in humanity, leading men not to the bower of passionate tryst but to the temple of the divine love, wealth and prosperity. Excellent as these two poems are, they are incomplete symbols of the idea of beauty. The Lady of Manifold magnificence is lost in the multitude of forms in which she displays herself; she has no life of her own. The poem in “Lover’s Gift”, referred to above cannot give a complete portrayal of Beauty, because in it Beauty is seen not as a single figure; and the force of the poem consists in the emphasis on the contrast between two aspects of beauty rather than in the delineation of its uniqueness and complexity.
From all these defects the great poem Urvashi is free. It is felt that in condescension of idea and in splendour of imagery it has few parallels in Rabindranath’s work or outside it. In the said poem there is an attempt at the portraiture of the pure gem-like essence of beauty to which only noteworthy parallel is the painting of Mona Lisa by Leonardo Da Vinci. Although it is not incorrect to eulogise the delicacy with which the eyelids or the hands are drawn by the great artist, the most significant thing in the celebrated portrait is the strange smile on the lips of Mona Lisa, which symbolises the eternal mystery of beauty and or more correctly, feminine beauty, as the painting is less spiritual and more sensuous form of art than poetry, a portrait in canvas may not have the intricate and dynamic significance of a poem. In yet another respect Tagore had an advantage beyond the reach of Leonardo Da Vinci, that Mona Lisa was a real flesh-blood woman with none of the complex associations that gather round a mythical figure; a real woman may appeal more intensely to the artist than will a legendary feminine figure.
Many lands and ages have figured inward inspiration in the female form. As Tagore put it, “There is a woman within our inner nature. We bring to her all that we have gathered…”[6] and the poet seeks “to explore existence in terms of this feminised interior being – to engage through its means with life, with the relation of life to death, with that within the space and time which transcends space and time.”[7]
In Urvashi Tagore takes as his theme a woman celebrated in the Vedas, in the Mahabharata and by Kalidasa; here is a woman who is as old as the rocks and who is the mother of the line of Kings and the protagonists in the Mahabharata. Tagore accepts the main outlines of the traditional story which helps him to depict Urvashi as the symbol of his of own comprehensive vision of beauty; he makes one or two significant changes. He does not mention Urvashi’s connection with Pururava, because that would give a local habitation to what is only an idea and a name. He represents Urvashi as the bearer of the goblet of celestial nectar, leaving out Lakshmi altogether, but he also makes her the purveyor of poison thus completing the picture of beauty which, in all places and ages, gives man his richest experience but also has potentiality for destruction. On the whole, the legendary story with slight modifications referred to above helps the poet to make of Urvashi a marvellous creation of symbolist imagination; she is a beautiful woman who sprang out of the foam on a particular day and has been sending a thrill of rapture over the universe ever since, and yet in her unfading youthfulness and power of enchantment she is less an individual than the embodiment of the poet’s idea of beauty. Nowhere else does an ancient myth pass so inconspicuously into a contemporary symbol. Tagore stresses the freshness of the beauty, its inexhaustible charm and, in spite of its association with poison, its perpetual innocence. Urvashi carries death in her left hand and deathlessness in her right, because the opposition between mortality and immortality does not exist for a woman who came out of the sea in the full bloom of youth which she retains in imperishable grandeur through the ages. Urvashi might have passed her infancy, if she had any infancy at all, in the coral bed of the ocean, but when she rose out the waves, she was like the dawn, fresh and without veil. But there the parallelism[8] ends for the dawn intensifies into the noon and noon fades into evening. But Urvashi is not so, because although she is a woman, she has only a woman’s body and a woman’s charm without a woman’s heart. The poet says:
Not mother, not daughter,
nor comely bride –
Heaven-dwelling Urvashi.
(Urvashi/ “Urvashi”)
But she is different in this respect, from Leda, Helen, St. Anne, and Mona Lisa. She is the embodiment of pure beauty, disassociated from all conventional forms. One meaning of her is that she manifests herself in the expansive universe of space, and this leads Tagore to imagine that she is the creative spirit of life which makes the earth shower with flowers and fruits, gives light to the stars in the sky and causes the frenzy of desire in men’s hearts. But she remains for ever a denizen of Paradise and her principal business is to entertain the gods with her dancing and ever-lasting youth.
[1] M.H. Abrams (ed.): Wordsworth : A Collection of critical essays (New York, OUP,1975) p.1
[2] An angel of the paradise who has immortal youth and beauty and a celestial dancer in the Indian mythology
[3] The great serpent that lives in the oceans according to the Indian Mythology
[4] The great hill is named Mandar according to the Indian Mythology
[5] Forefather of Pandavas and Kaurava in the epic Mahabharata
[6] Prarthana/Prayerin Shantiniketan; Rabindra Rachanabali:13, p.475
[7] Sukanta Chaudhuri (ed.):The Oxford Tagore Translations, Selected Poems: Rabindranath Tagore,
(New Delhi, OUP, 2004), p.15
[8] So far as the earth is concerned, she has vanished and made her home on the Mt.Setting.
