Prose Poems of Tagore by Dr. Bina Biswas
VERSES OF MATURITY
Yet the void is not void:
By fiery cloud
Replete with pain, that sky is filled.
Within that fire, alone
Through blazing song
A world of dreams I build.
(Purnata/ “The Fulfillment”)
This is to highlight the quintessence of life, the force of life, the sustenance of the unbound spirit that is illustrated through various tones and moods by the poet in his poems. Tagore recaptures the natural feelings of a mother, of a child, of a warrior, of a father, of a friend and finally of the citizen of the world in a compact manner in his poems. In some more, the poet has taken the local imagery as the basis to indicate the natural human phenomena of love and life.
The soft, gentle wonder has its counterpart in a corybantic release, very unusual in the Indian context. This is how Tagore begins his first real poem, Nirjharer Swapnabhango/“Awakening of the Waterfall”, with a rush and an energy born of an early vision as he later called it and it was composed when he was barely twenty. The poem is remarkable not only for its music and intensity but also for the boldness of its images. What is far more significant is the fusion of nature and man in an indissoluble unity. This identity of nature and man remained one of the most characteristic traits of Tagore’s poetry throughout his life. Even in translation one can feel something of the poem’s original impulse. Cosmic, oceanic, its élan is romantic and free in spirit and of self control and restraint. There is more of abandon than awareness in the songs of his life, in the awakening of his poetic genius. The poet thus awakes to a new morning:
How have the sun’s rays in my heart entered this morning! How have the songs
Of the morning birds into the dark cave broken!
Who knows why, after long, my soul has woken! (Nirjharer Swapnabhango/“Awakening of the Waterfall”)
Through this experience, he built up an all-pervasive relationship with Nature – a Nature mingled intimately with humanity. Engaging with this Nature made him have a very deep far-reaching association between them. When the earth was first born, he imagines, “I drank the first sunlight upon this earth with my entire form and being. Like a newborn child, I was stirred with a blind delight in life under the blue sky. Clinging to my clay-mother with all my roots, I drank the sap from her breasts. My flowers bloomed and new leaves sprouted with an insensate joy.”(Rabindranath wrote these letters to his niece Indira Debi describing his days on Padma). [1]
Hence the poet sees as one the force within him and the force of external nature. What is single in the individual consciousness spreads in many and various forms in the external world:
How various are you in the universe:
You are various formed.
Yet at the same time
Within the heart you are sole
and alone:
You are heart-pervading.
(Chitra/ “Chitra”)
The poet became fully conscious of a new emotional surge during his stay at Sadar Street (1882) in central Kolkata, in a rented house of his elder brother Jyotirindranath and expressed it in this memorable poem, there were formless stirrings before its full surfacing, and possibly the earliest pulsations had come to him even before he left for England.
Three things stand out as distinctive of the poet’s new vision of life. It is human soul which is the source of creation, but its creative effort leads away from itself and unites it with the inner life of Nature, which too, is full of human significance. To stress the hope that the human mind can be formatively infused with the life of nature. Secondly, this union between man’s expanding consciousness and the spirit of Nature is a source of joy, and it is in this sense of joy springing from a realization of the inner harmony of objects that Tagore finds the definition of beauty. Thirdly, this joy of beauty is identical with freedom, for it is by lifting the outer curtains of the routine and triviality, drape of the mundane, that life can explore its real meaning.
Nirjharer Swapnabhango/“Awakening of the Waterfall” is the most important poem in a new book of poems called the Prabhat Sangeet/Morning Songs which was published in 1884. From there on there was a continual stream of poems, dramas, songs and essays from his pen, and he also gave editorial assistance to such journals as Bharathi and Balak, besides organizing an unproductive movement to found an Academy of Bengali literature. The publication of PrabhatSangeet/The Morning Songs was simultaneous with two important events in his life – his marriage and the death of Kadambari Debi. From the literary point of view the most important work of this period is the drama Prakritir Protishodh/“Nature’s Revenge”. Sandhya Sangeet/ Evening Songs had revealed the poet in a meditative mood in which he was engrossed in the contemplation of his own heart. “Nature’s Revenge”, which Tagore himself regards as the introduction to his subsequent literary works, completes the process started by the “Awakening of the Waterfall” in the Morning Songs. He would no longer waste away his powers in a quest of the Infinite or in the vague dreams of his own soul. Sanyasi is the story of a hermit who, striving to gain victory over all desires, retired from the world in pursuit of the true knowledge of self. He is brought back to the mother earth by his love for a little girl, and comes to realize the Infinite in the midst of finite, human love and affection. The defeat of the ascetic symbolizes the final emergence of the poet into the open world of rain and sunshine, of human joys and cares.
Tagore talks about the inspiration for his poetic expression in the making of the poem Nirjharer Swapnabhango/“Awakening of the Waterfall” in Jibansmriti/Memoir:
Where Sadar Street ended, I could see some trees belonging, I think, to the Free School Garden. One morning, I stood on the balcony and looked out in that direction. The Sun was rising behind the foliage of those trees. As I looked, suddenly, in a moment, a curtain seemed to be drawn away from before my eyes; I saw the universe bathed in an exquisite radiance, tremulous with joy and beauty. The mantle of depression that had overcast my heart, layer on layer, was pierced in an instant: the light of the universe spread through all my inner being. That very day, the poem ‘Awakening of the Waterfall’ seemed to burst forth and flows like the fountain itself.[2]
In his 1930 Hibbert lectures (in English) on The Religion of Man (Ch.6) the poet repeats this account and adds some notable comments which, it is felt, is very important to quote here:
The invisible screen of the commonplace was removed from all things and all men, and their ultimate significance was intensified in my mind; and this is the definition of beauty. That which was memorable in this experience was its human message, the sudden expansion of my consciousness in the superpersonal world of man….The waterfall, whose spirit lay dormant in its ice-bound isolation, was touched by the sun and, bursting in a cataract of freedom, it found its finality in an unending sacrifice, in a continual union with the sea.[3]
When Wordsworth was fourteen, perhaps such vivid an impression was left on him by the bright evening sky outlined against the ordinary bough marked the beginning of his poetic career and he writes in his seventies:
I recollect distinctly, the very spot where this first struck me. It was in the way between Hawkstead and Ambleside, and gave me extreme pleasure. The moment was important in my poetical history for I date from it my consciousness of the infinite variety of natural appearances which had been unnoticed by the poets of any age or country.[4]
It seems the poetic growth for Wordsworth and Tagore started looking at an ordinary commonplace scene in the Nature with their inner eye that left them spellbound and struck them with awe. The inspiration was so great that both the poets relived them vividly at a later day in their life.
Consider the statement of Wordsworth on the opinions of a poet where he says “…the statements of a poet, no doubt, not of a philosopher, but still evidently statements expressing, intimating, or symbolising, what for him was the most vital truth….the meanest flower that blows could give him thoughts that often lie too deep for tears…. in a poem not less solemn that Nature was the soul of moral being; and also that she can influence us that nothing will be able to disturb our faith that all that we behold is full of blessings.”[5]
Perhaps the thoughts that “lie deep for tears”(quoted above) become the food for thought for the poet and the “film of familiarity” or “the invisible screen of the commonplace”(quoted above) is raised and the workaday becomes a shrine of significance.
Wordsworth was pre-eminently the poet of Nature and some of his most characteristic similes are drawn from clouds. Tagore also did similarly draw imagery in many of his poems like Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud. That floats in high o’er vales and hills.” “Motionless as cloud the old man stood.” or “Poised, like a weary cloud in the middle air.”
The “abyss of air”, “the chasm of sky” are phrases as characteristic to Wordsworth as to Tagore and of the poets whom boundlessness attracted irresistibility. It seems of all “skeyey influences”[6] none affected the likes of Wordsworth and Tagore so much as sunset, sunrise, and moonlight. Sunrise affected them more profoundly. There is no ecstasy in their poetry as Tagore felt in “Awakening of the Waterfall”:
How have the sun’s rays in my
heart entered this morning!
(“Awakening of the Waterfall”)
Is Tagore as rapturous as Wordsworth in Wanderer?
…When from the naked top
Of some bold headland, he beheld the sun
Rise up, and bathe the world in light! He looked –
Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth
And ocean’s liquid mass, in gladness lay
Beneath him: - Far and wide the clouds were touched,
And in their silent faces could he read
Unutterable love.
(“Wanderer”)
Perhaps he said that this same “Wanderer” could read in silent faces of the clouds’ unutterable love, and that among the mountains all things for him breathed immortality. Tagore also opens his heart to this unutterable love, to the human message the morning light filtering through the mist gives him. Then there is no looking back for the poet, the mouth of the fountain has been discovered open and forth flows the spirit of awakening. “Awakening of the Waterfall” is true to its being, since poetry is in fact the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings and arises from emotion recollected in tranquility. Before the emotions come the senses, the “organic” senses and then the film of familiarity is removed. “Organic Sensibility in the first place implies the capacity to receive impressions through the senses. Perhaps, it is correct that “In Wordsworth, as in most poets, the dominant sense was sight,”[7] and “The most despotic of the senses, Wordsworth calls it, and feared at one time that he might succumb to its despotism and become a mere epicure of visual sensations.”[8] To return to the idea of “Organic Sensibility” the reader can feel that Tagore’s hearing senses are also very sensitive. It is felt that Wordsworth and Tagore were very sensitive to a certain order of sounds, namely to natural sounds, especially the sounds of wind and water, in all volumes from the loudest to the faintest, from the stationary blasts of waterfalls or the roar of tempests down to the tinkling knell of the distant tomb or a temple or the whisper of the breeze in the in the grass.
Tagore writes in one of his most celebrated poems Jete Nahi Dibo/“I Will Not Let You Go” where the poet hears the monotonous wail and the melancholy note:
What sombre sadness broods
over the earth and sky.
For as I go, I hear one monotonous wail, one melancholy note: ‘I will not let you go.’
From the earth’s rim to the farthest horizon there echoes the endless cry:
‘I will not let you go.’(“I Will Not Let You Go”)
Or the poet hears the echoing thunder “On a Rainy Day”:
On a day like this one could tell her.
On day like this,
Enveloped in rain and sunless,
Dark and echoing with thunder.
…the noises and the voices of the world are unreal, distant and non-existent. (Barshadine/“On a Rainy Day”)
Similarly, the rocking of leafy trees in a high wind and the beating of the rain upon the roof was heard by the poet and thus Wordsworth’s one of the most characteristic poems begins:
There was a roaring in the wind all night;
The rain came heavily and fell in floods.
But now the sun is rising calm and bright;
The birds are singing in the distant woods;
Over his own sweet voice the Stock-dove broods;
The Jay makes answer as the magpie chatters;
And all the air is filled with pleasant noise of waters.
(“Resolution and Independence”)
The profound sense of hearing of Wordsworth is evident here in the above lines. The poet’s ears respond even to the sombre ‘broods’ of the Stock-dove in the distant woods and everything around the poet appears pleasant with its characteristic noise.
Again Tagore tells solemnly after witnessing a stormy night in a
song:
The night my doors were shattered by storm,
I did not know you had come to my home. (Je Raate Mor Duar Guli Bhanglo Jhare)
Keats’ hearing also seems to be powerful enough in his “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, where the keen (sensual) ears listen to the silent melodies of the soft pipes of the centuries old musicians:
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song… (“Ode On A Grecian Urn”)
It is perhaps, rightly claimed by the critic J.C. Smith that “in Wordsworth’s day the term ‘touch’ covered three senses which psychology now distinguishes, namely the sense of touch, temperature, and what is known sense of pressure.”[9]
There is a remarkable passage in the Eighth Book of The Excursion, which illustrates Wordsworth’s use of the term pressure. Speaking of the effect of the factory life on children, he says:
And even the touch, so exquisitely poured
Through the whole body, with a languid will
Performs its function; rarely competent
To impress a vivid feeling on the mind
Of what there is delightful in the breeze,
The gentle visitations of the sun,
Or lapse of liquid element – by hand,
Or foot, or lip, in summer’s warmth–perceived. (The Excursion, Book-VIII)
Here it is clearly the sense of temperature and sense of touch that Wordsworth speaks of. Similarly Tagore, in his poem Vaishakh/ “Summer” says:
The hot winds surge with wild energy.
They pirouette with burning breath in bursts of frenzied speed,
grass and leaves whirl in the mad dance,
crushed particles are churned in empty space
in cyclonic rhythm
as the winds surge with wild energy. (Vaishakh/“Summer”) [1] Rabindranath Tagore: Chhinnapatra (Torn Leaves), (Calcutta, Viswa-Bharati, 1958), p.144,.
[2] Uma Das Gupta (ed.): Rabindranath Tagore, My Life In My Words (New Delhi, Penguin Viking, 2006) p.30
[3]S.K. Das (ed.) The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore ( New Delhi, OUP, 1996) p.121
[4] M.H. Abrams, (ed.):Geoffrey H. Hartman: Nature and the Humanization of the Self in Wordsworth, (New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1975), p.123
[5] M.H. Abrams, (ed.): A.C. Bradley: Wordsworth, (New Delhi, Prentice Hall of India Pvt. Ltd.,1979), p.14
[6] JC Smith: A Study of Wordsworth,(London, Oliver and Boyd,1946), p.4
[7] JC Smith: A Study of Wordsworth, (London, Oliver and Boyd,1946), p.1
[8] Ibid p.2
[9] Op. cit. p.9
Yet the void is not void:
By fiery cloud
Replete with pain, that sky is filled.
Within that fire, alone
Through blazing song
A world of dreams I build.
(Purnata/ “The Fulfillment”)
This is to highlight the quintessence of life, the force of life, the sustenance of the unbound spirit that is illustrated through various tones and moods by the poet in his poems. Tagore recaptures the natural feelings of a mother, of a child, of a warrior, of a father, of a friend and finally of the citizen of the world in a compact manner in his poems. In some more, the poet has taken the local imagery as the basis to indicate the natural human phenomena of love and life.
The soft, gentle wonder has its counterpart in a corybantic release, very unusual in the Indian context. This is how Tagore begins his first real poem, Nirjharer Swapnabhango/“Awakening of the Waterfall”, with a rush and an energy born of an early vision as he later called it and it was composed when he was barely twenty. The poem is remarkable not only for its music and intensity but also for the boldness of its images. What is far more significant is the fusion of nature and man in an indissoluble unity. This identity of nature and man remained one of the most characteristic traits of Tagore’s poetry throughout his life. Even in translation one can feel something of the poem’s original impulse. Cosmic, oceanic, its élan is romantic and free in spirit and of self control and restraint. There is more of abandon than awareness in the songs of his life, in the awakening of his poetic genius. The poet thus awakes to a new morning:
How have the sun’s rays in my heart entered this morning! How have the songs
Of the morning birds into the dark cave broken!
Who knows why, after long, my soul has woken! (Nirjharer Swapnabhango/“Awakening of the Waterfall”)
Through this experience, he built up an all-pervasive relationship with Nature – a Nature mingled intimately with humanity. Engaging with this Nature made him have a very deep far-reaching association between them. When the earth was first born, he imagines, “I drank the first sunlight upon this earth with my entire form and being. Like a newborn child, I was stirred with a blind delight in life under the blue sky. Clinging to my clay-mother with all my roots, I drank the sap from her breasts. My flowers bloomed and new leaves sprouted with an insensate joy.”(Rabindranath wrote these letters to his niece Indira Debi describing his days on Padma). [1]
Hence the poet sees as one the force within him and the force of external nature. What is single in the individual consciousness spreads in many and various forms in the external world:
How various are you in the universe:
You are various formed.
Yet at the same time
Within the heart you are sole
and alone:
You are heart-pervading.
(Chitra/ “Chitra”)
The poet became fully conscious of a new emotional surge during his stay at Sadar Street (1882) in central Kolkata, in a rented house of his elder brother Jyotirindranath and expressed it in this memorable poem, there were formless stirrings before its full surfacing, and possibly the earliest pulsations had come to him even before he left for England.
Three things stand out as distinctive of the poet’s new vision of life. It is human soul which is the source of creation, but its creative effort leads away from itself and unites it with the inner life of Nature, which too, is full of human significance. To stress the hope that the human mind can be formatively infused with the life of nature. Secondly, this union between man’s expanding consciousness and the spirit of Nature is a source of joy, and it is in this sense of joy springing from a realization of the inner harmony of objects that Tagore finds the definition of beauty. Thirdly, this joy of beauty is identical with freedom, for it is by lifting the outer curtains of the routine and triviality, drape of the mundane, that life can explore its real meaning.
Nirjharer Swapnabhango/“Awakening of the Waterfall” is the most important poem in a new book of poems called the Prabhat Sangeet/Morning Songs which was published in 1884. From there on there was a continual stream of poems, dramas, songs and essays from his pen, and he also gave editorial assistance to such journals as Bharathi and Balak, besides organizing an unproductive movement to found an Academy of Bengali literature. The publication of PrabhatSangeet/The Morning Songs was simultaneous with two important events in his life – his marriage and the death of Kadambari Debi. From the literary point of view the most important work of this period is the drama Prakritir Protishodh/“Nature’s Revenge”. Sandhya Sangeet/ Evening Songs had revealed the poet in a meditative mood in which he was engrossed in the contemplation of his own heart. “Nature’s Revenge”, which Tagore himself regards as the introduction to his subsequent literary works, completes the process started by the “Awakening of the Waterfall” in the Morning Songs. He would no longer waste away his powers in a quest of the Infinite or in the vague dreams of his own soul. Sanyasi is the story of a hermit who, striving to gain victory over all desires, retired from the world in pursuit of the true knowledge of self. He is brought back to the mother earth by his love for a little girl, and comes to realize the Infinite in the midst of finite, human love and affection. The defeat of the ascetic symbolizes the final emergence of the poet into the open world of rain and sunshine, of human joys and cares.
Tagore talks about the inspiration for his poetic expression in the making of the poem Nirjharer Swapnabhango/“Awakening of the Waterfall” in Jibansmriti/Memoir:
Where Sadar Street ended, I could see some trees belonging, I think, to the Free School Garden. One morning, I stood on the balcony and looked out in that direction. The Sun was rising behind the foliage of those trees. As I looked, suddenly, in a moment, a curtain seemed to be drawn away from before my eyes; I saw the universe bathed in an exquisite radiance, tremulous with joy and beauty. The mantle of depression that had overcast my heart, layer on layer, was pierced in an instant: the light of the universe spread through all my inner being. That very day, the poem ‘Awakening of the Waterfall’ seemed to burst forth and flows like the fountain itself.[2]
In his 1930 Hibbert lectures (in English) on The Religion of Man (Ch.6) the poet repeats this account and adds some notable comments which, it is felt, is very important to quote here:
The invisible screen of the commonplace was removed from all things and all men, and their ultimate significance was intensified in my mind; and this is the definition of beauty. That which was memorable in this experience was its human message, the sudden expansion of my consciousness in the superpersonal world of man….The waterfall, whose spirit lay dormant in its ice-bound isolation, was touched by the sun and, bursting in a cataract of freedom, it found its finality in an unending sacrifice, in a continual union with the sea.[3]
When Wordsworth was fourteen, perhaps such vivid an impression was left on him by the bright evening sky outlined against the ordinary bough marked the beginning of his poetic career and he writes in his seventies:
I recollect distinctly, the very spot where this first struck me. It was in the way between Hawkstead and Ambleside, and gave me extreme pleasure. The moment was important in my poetical history for I date from it my consciousness of the infinite variety of natural appearances which had been unnoticed by the poets of any age or country.[4]
It seems the poetic growth for Wordsworth and Tagore started looking at an ordinary commonplace scene in the Nature with their inner eye that left them spellbound and struck them with awe. The inspiration was so great that both the poets relived them vividly at a later day in their life.
Consider the statement of Wordsworth on the opinions of a poet where he says “…the statements of a poet, no doubt, not of a philosopher, but still evidently statements expressing, intimating, or symbolising, what for him was the most vital truth….the meanest flower that blows could give him thoughts that often lie too deep for tears…. in a poem not less solemn that Nature was the soul of moral being; and also that she can influence us that nothing will be able to disturb our faith that all that we behold is full of blessings.”[5]
Perhaps the thoughts that “lie deep for tears”(quoted above) become the food for thought for the poet and the “film of familiarity” or “the invisible screen of the commonplace”(quoted above) is raised and the workaday becomes a shrine of significance.
Wordsworth was pre-eminently the poet of Nature and some of his most characteristic similes are drawn from clouds. Tagore also did similarly draw imagery in many of his poems like Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud. That floats in high o’er vales and hills.” “Motionless as cloud the old man stood.” or “Poised, like a weary cloud in the middle air.”
The “abyss of air”, “the chasm of sky” are phrases as characteristic to Wordsworth as to Tagore and of the poets whom boundlessness attracted irresistibility. It seems of all “skeyey influences”[6] none affected the likes of Wordsworth and Tagore so much as sunset, sunrise, and moonlight. Sunrise affected them more profoundly. There is no ecstasy in their poetry as Tagore felt in “Awakening of the Waterfall”:
How have the sun’s rays in my
heart entered this morning!
(“Awakening of the Waterfall”)
Is Tagore as rapturous as Wordsworth in Wanderer?
…When from the naked top
Of some bold headland, he beheld the sun
Rise up, and bathe the world in light! He looked –
Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth
And ocean’s liquid mass, in gladness lay
Beneath him: - Far and wide the clouds were touched,
And in their silent faces could he read
Unutterable love.
(“Wanderer”)
Perhaps he said that this same “Wanderer” could read in silent faces of the clouds’ unutterable love, and that among the mountains all things for him breathed immortality. Tagore also opens his heart to this unutterable love, to the human message the morning light filtering through the mist gives him. Then there is no looking back for the poet, the mouth of the fountain has been discovered open and forth flows the spirit of awakening. “Awakening of the Waterfall” is true to its being, since poetry is in fact the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings and arises from emotion recollected in tranquility. Before the emotions come the senses, the “organic” senses and then the film of familiarity is removed. “Organic Sensibility in the first place implies the capacity to receive impressions through the senses. Perhaps, it is correct that “In Wordsworth, as in most poets, the dominant sense was sight,”[7] and “The most despotic of the senses, Wordsworth calls it, and feared at one time that he might succumb to its despotism and become a mere epicure of visual sensations.”[8] To return to the idea of “Organic Sensibility” the reader can feel that Tagore’s hearing senses are also very sensitive. It is felt that Wordsworth and Tagore were very sensitive to a certain order of sounds, namely to natural sounds, especially the sounds of wind and water, in all volumes from the loudest to the faintest, from the stationary blasts of waterfalls or the roar of tempests down to the tinkling knell of the distant tomb or a temple or the whisper of the breeze in the in the grass.
Tagore writes in one of his most celebrated poems Jete Nahi Dibo/“I Will Not Let You Go” where the poet hears the monotonous wail and the melancholy note:
What sombre sadness broods
over the earth and sky.
For as I go, I hear one monotonous wail, one melancholy note: ‘I will not let you go.’
From the earth’s rim to the farthest horizon there echoes the endless cry:
‘I will not let you go.’(“I Will Not Let You Go”)
Or the poet hears the echoing thunder “On a Rainy Day”:
On a day like this one could tell her.
On day like this,
Enveloped in rain and sunless,
Dark and echoing with thunder.
…the noises and the voices of the world are unreal, distant and non-existent. (Barshadine/“On a Rainy Day”)
Similarly, the rocking of leafy trees in a high wind and the beating of the rain upon the roof was heard by the poet and thus Wordsworth’s one of the most characteristic poems begins:
There was a roaring in the wind all night;
The rain came heavily and fell in floods.
But now the sun is rising calm and bright;
The birds are singing in the distant woods;
Over his own sweet voice the Stock-dove broods;
The Jay makes answer as the magpie chatters;
And all the air is filled with pleasant noise of waters.
(“Resolution and Independence”)
The profound sense of hearing of Wordsworth is evident here in the above lines. The poet’s ears respond even to the sombre ‘broods’ of the Stock-dove in the distant woods and everything around the poet appears pleasant with its characteristic noise.
Again Tagore tells solemnly after witnessing a stormy night in a
song:
The night my doors were shattered by storm,
I did not know you had come to my home. (Je Raate Mor Duar Guli Bhanglo Jhare)
Keats’ hearing also seems to be powerful enough in his “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, where the keen (sensual) ears listen to the silent melodies of the soft pipes of the centuries old musicians:
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song… (“Ode On A Grecian Urn”)
It is perhaps, rightly claimed by the critic J.C. Smith that “in Wordsworth’s day the term ‘touch’ covered three senses which psychology now distinguishes, namely the sense of touch, temperature, and what is known sense of pressure.”[9]
There is a remarkable passage in the Eighth Book of The Excursion, which illustrates Wordsworth’s use of the term pressure. Speaking of the effect of the factory life on children, he says:
And even the touch, so exquisitely poured
Through the whole body, with a languid will
Performs its function; rarely competent
To impress a vivid feeling on the mind
Of what there is delightful in the breeze,
The gentle visitations of the sun,
Or lapse of liquid element – by hand,
Or foot, or lip, in summer’s warmth–perceived. (The Excursion, Book-VIII)
Here it is clearly the sense of temperature and sense of touch that Wordsworth speaks of. Similarly Tagore, in his poem Vaishakh/ “Summer” says:
The hot winds surge with wild energy.
They pirouette with burning breath in bursts of frenzied speed,
grass and leaves whirl in the mad dance,
crushed particles are churned in empty space
in cyclonic rhythm
as the winds surge with wild energy. (Vaishakh/“Summer”) [1] Rabindranath Tagore: Chhinnapatra (Torn Leaves), (Calcutta, Viswa-Bharati, 1958), p.144,.
[2] Uma Das Gupta (ed.): Rabindranath Tagore, My Life In My Words (New Delhi, Penguin Viking, 2006) p.30
[3]S.K. Das (ed.) The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore ( New Delhi, OUP, 1996) p.121
[4] M.H. Abrams, (ed.):Geoffrey H. Hartman: Nature and the Humanization of the Self in Wordsworth, (New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1975), p.123
[5] M.H. Abrams, (ed.): A.C. Bradley: Wordsworth, (New Delhi, Prentice Hall of India Pvt. Ltd.,1979), p.14
[6] JC Smith: A Study of Wordsworth,(London, Oliver and Boyd,1946), p.4
[7] JC Smith: A Study of Wordsworth, (London, Oliver and Boyd,1946), p.1
[8] Ibid p.2
[9] Op. cit. p.9
