Prose Poems of Tagore by Dr. Bina Biswas
Apart from sight and touch and hearing, Tagore’s sense of smell also can be asserted through some of his poems. J.C.Smith points out that, “Wordsworth’s sense of smell like Scott’s was very obtuse.”[1] To Tagore the smell of the rain-bathed earth, the smell of baked mud in the hearth of a village dweller or the smell of Rajanigandha/Tuberoses or the beautiful smell from the hair of his beloved, from Jasmine braid were all very distinct to boost up his senses. In Romantic/“The Romantic” the poet says:
I bring to your room
The scent of springtime woods
In the flowers of the tuberose
On the secluded breeze. (Romantic/“The Romantic”)
Perhaps, Coleridge was right in believing that whereas in his philosophy the mind informed the senses, Wordsworth sought to compound the senses into mind. Tagore’s organic sensibility, the capacity to receive impulses through senses is beyond any doubt. Tagore, like Keats and Shelley, has the senses of taste, space and sublime as well.
Tagore wrote a beautiful poem where he sensed the wonders of the earth in Vismaya/“Wonder”:
My heart sings at the wonder of my place in the world of life and light;
At the feel in my pulse of the rhythm of creation cadenced by the swing of endless time.
I feel the tenderness of the grass in my forest walk, the smell of wayside flowers startles me.
That the gifts of the infinite are strewn in the dust wakens my song in wonder.
I have seen, have heard, have lived in the depth of the known have felt the truth that exceeds all knowledge which fills my heart with wonder and I sing. (Vismaya/“Wonder”)
Sonar Tori/ The Golden Boat with its key poem with the same title marks another phase or peak. The magic of its rippling verse, the melting delicacy of its limited, but subtly repeated imagery, are unsurpassed. It creates the autonomous universe, a verbal icon before the readers’ eyes. But the critics of the poem have kept up the question: what does it mean? Even Tagore was persuaded to explain. Fortunately, Tagore’s deliberate explanation has left it inviolate. It seems to be a test for any translator. Here is the William Radice version, slightly modified:
In the sky rumbling clouds, it rains heavily.
Sad, forlorn, I sit on the river bank.
The harvest ended, the sheaves are gathered.
The river is swollen and fierce.
The rains arrived as I was harvesting.
A small paddy field, no one but me –
Flood-waters twisting and swirling everywhere.
Trees on the far bank smear shadows like ink
Over a village painted in deep morning grey.
On this side a paddy-field, and no one but me.
Who is this, steering close to the bank singing? I feel it is someone I know.
The sails are filled wide, he gazes ahead,
Waves break helpless on each side of the boat
I seem to know the face that I have spied.
Oh, to what foreign land do you sail?
Come to the bank, moor your boat for a while
Go where you want to, give where you care to,
But come to the bank a moment and smiling,
Take away my paddy as you sail.
Load as much as you can take.
Is there more? No, none, I have put it all abroad.
My intense labour here by the river
I have given all, layer upon layer:
Now please take me as well, take me abroad.
No room, no room, the boat is small,
My gold has filled it all.
Across the rainy sky clouds heave to and fro.
On the bare river-bank I am alone
The golden boat has taken everything, all I had is gone. (Sonar Tori/“Golden Boat”)
It reads like a parable. Though less complex than “Kubla Khan”, its evocativeness, however, seems inexhaustible. Tagore seems to have eternalised the moment. Tagore’s two most famous poems of the Shelidah period are Sonar Tori/ “The Golden Boat” and Jete Nahi Dibo/ “I Will Not Let You Go”. Both were published in Sonar Tori, the 1894 collection that was Tagore’s first popular success. In the first poem, which is relatively brief, the poet sits, ‘sad and alone’, on the riverbank, sheaves of cut paddy waiting beside him. A boat approaches, piloted by a mysterious figure – probably female, again the poem does not specify– who agrees to load the paddy. The person on the bank parts with it all and then asks to be taken on board too. But there is no room.
On the bare river-bank I am alone
The golden boat has taken everything, all I had is gone.
(Sonar Tori/ “Golden Boat”)
It is worthwhile to quote here; “As Bengali pronouns are not differentiated by gender, it is not clear whether the figure in the boat is male or female. Rabindranath’s own English version, “The Fugitive I.17” speaks of “a woman at the helm”, but this does not resolve the inherent ambiguity of the Bengali text. The above translation designedly avoids pronouns of gender.”[2] Thirteen years after the poem was published, acrimonious controversy broke out over its poetic merit. The famous Bengali dramatist Dwijendralal Ray (earlier the poet’s friend*) attacked the poem as vague, diffuse, and meaningless.
Rabindranath himself explained the significance of the poem more than once. Reacting to Dwijendralal Ray’s criticism, he wrote:
The world receives all the fruits of our labour, but does not receive us. When I load the world’s boat with the harvest of my entire life, I nurse the hope that I too might find a place there; but the world forgets us in a couple of days….Those who have built up man in many ways through the ages, have their work immortalized among us; but they themselves, with their names and addresses, their joys and sorrows, have been lost in oblivion. Yet each of them had said to the world: ‘Take all I have. I have laboured only for you; my happiness lies in giving to you. Take all I have. But do not cast me aside, do not forget me: preserve my impress in my work.’ But where is the room? The harvest of our lives stays on in some form or other; but we ourselves do not stay on.
However, he ends:
But fie on all such interpretations. If the poem’s rasa is reliant solely on such readings, then it has been written in vain. Why don’t you just imagine it has no special meaning? Only the rains, the riverine island, only the spirit of an overcast day – only a picture, only a song: if it be nothing more, where’s the harm? (Letter to Bireshwar Goswami, 24 November 1906)
When Tagore spoke of life as a perpetual wayfaring, he knew what he was talking about. He has seen as well as made his life an endless journey, Chirajatra/“Unending Journey”. Jete Nahi Dibo/“I Will Not Let You Go”, a much longer poem, is perhaps autobiographical. This time they are Tagore and his young daughter Bela at Shantiniketan in the summer of 1892; in the background, Mrinalini, his wife, tearfully hovers and is busy piling his luggage with indispensable pots and pans and saucers, bottles and bedding and boxes, until eventually the narrator (Tagore) protests, “Let me leave a little behind and just take a bit!”[3] The moment of parting has come: Tagore must return to the estate, ‘back to the grind-stone’. Instead of a boat he must board a train to Calcutta and then to Shelidah. But Bela will not budge:
Outside on the doorstep, preoccupied,
Sat my four-year old daughter…
On the doorstep she’d fallen quiet as a mouse.
‘Bye, sweetheart,’ I said finally. Her face was doleful.
‘I’m not letting you go,’ she replied. (Jete Nahi Dibo/“I Will Not Let You Go”,)
The poet recognises that a small child may sometimes grasp the innate truth of human nature when more sophisticated men and women fail. The poet sees at once the Mother earth in his small daughter who tries to hold her children back to her bosom forever but she is helpless. She has to let them go. The poet writes:
And so in the sighing trees today I hear
An anxious longing, even as an idle play
The indifferent noon breeze tosses the dead leaves.
The day wears on: the shadow longer falls
Beneath the peepal tree. To a country tune the infinite’s flute wails on creation’s plain;
The earth, transported by that music, sits with loosened hair among the laden fields
Besides the Ganga, drawing across her bosom
The golden veil of sunshine, her still eyes
Fixed on the far blue sky, lips without speech
.
I saw her darkened face: the mute, struck look
Of my four years’ girl, sitting beside the door. (Jete Nahi Dibo/ “I Will Not Let You Go” )
A flock of birds in the poem Balaka/“The Flying Geese”, flinging their flight like an arrow among stars is for the poet an emblem of the passion for speed which is in the heart of the universe, which makes darkness thrill into fire as the stars wing by. That the migrant world seeks a home of rest hidden in the far-away is one of the leading themes in Tagore’s poetry; it is no wonder, therefore, that here there are many other images suggestive of the ceaseless flow and elusiveness of life. The symbol which occurs most frequently is of a current of water, and Life is portrayed as the Eternal Escapist. The poet incorporated into Bengali literature the ideals and moods of Europe. The sense of power and speed in many of the poems of Balaka may well be derived from European sources. Everything is transient is an ancient human finding, but Tagore gave to it a new significance by making it the symbol of the motion that is latent in all things.
The poem was composed at Srinagar in Kashmir in October – November 1915 and published in the magazine Sabuj Patra/Green Leaf. The poet described the circumstances of composition:
I was then in Kashmir. One evening, I sat by the River Jhelum. There was stillness all around. I felt I was sitting beside the Padma. Of course, when I lived on the Padma I was a young man, and now I am old. Yet that difference seemed to have been wiped out by some link transcending time. A flock of geese flew over my head across Jhelum….I seemed to hear some ineffable call, and be led by its impulse to some far journey. (Kshitimohan Sen, Balaka-Kabya-Parikrama, p.55)
The poet sees everything in the universe expressing itself in the infinity. The stars are silent and peaceful and so is the immense sky which is their home. It is in the horizon that all things seem to meet, and that is why the blue sky which appears to be both far off and near is suggestive of infinity, majesty and tenderness of God, and the death may be looked upon as only passage of travel from known to the unknown. The clouds which float in the sky and the winds which move them represent the joyous vagrancy and the freedom in which lies the significance of life. The poet’s imagination is stirred specially by the movement of birds which fly away from the narrow sphere of the earth but which always seek a home. Their flight in the sky is indicative of the larger freedom man longs for but cannot attain, but the wings of a home-seeking bird in the dusk remind the poet of the sweeping energy of human love and God being the centre of the unattainable. In Balaka/ “The Flying Geese”, the birds seem to give the eternal message to the poet:
I heard the many voiced words of man wing along unheeded ways, from the faded past to far off future dim, I heard within myself the sound of this homeless bird winging with countless other birds from shore to shore through daylight and darkness. Space echoes with the song of all creation’s wings: ‘Not here! Elsewhere! Elsewhere! Somewhere else! (“The Flying Geese”)
The sense of largeness which inspires Tagore’s poetry is chiefly derived from his faith in the vastness of Nature. It is in this larger, unbound life of Nature that the poet wants to merge himself. In his attitude to Nature Tagore differs from other romantic poets like Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats who worship the spirit of Nature by freeing from dross. It is in this purified spirit of Nature that Wordsworth finds the lesson to convey a prophetic message, Shelley a message of love and Keats Beauty which is not for born for death and is identical with Truth. Tagore woos Nature as a whole and its appeal for him is derived as much from its purer beauties as from the odds and ends that are mixed up with them.
Poetry recaptures the feelings of wonder with which Adam may have had first looked at the universe around him. Expression in terms of art of sharpened sensibilities heightened imaginative feeling often synonymous with extravagances and sentimentality mixed with curiosity and love of beauty. Such a view of poetry cannot explain the significance of all the above mentioned Romanticists, but it is particularly apposite to the poetry of Wordsworth and Tagore. The latter lived in the sophisticated world of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and being sensuous to the fingertips, he loved the universe and the earth like an awed child who wonders at the fluttering of a butterfly on a nameless flower by the pond side or looks at the pale moon appearing on the palm tree top. What seems remarkable about Wordsworth and Tagore is that they viewed the simple, commonplace things of life with that artlessness and wonder which seems to have been the distinctive feature of Adam’s vision of the world. It seems Wordsworth’s Nature-conscious leads to self-conscious. The ordinary sights of boughs silhouetted against a bright evening sky gave him pleasure and similarly Tagore witnessing the dark echoing clouds silhouetted against the silver-grey sky felt ecstatic and wrote:
The sombre tumult of clashing clouds evoked at once, within a single day, all the tearful deep-dwelling millennial cry of the pang of separation. (Meghdoot/“The Cloud Messenger”)
The sense of hearing seems profound in the poet and he hears the moans and cry of pangs of separation.
The three linked volumes Gitanjali/Songs Offerings, Gitamalya/ The Garland of Songs and Gitali/ Series of Songs contain three songs in a significant sequence. All three are present storm, rain and darkness as the setting for a journey, for comings and goings, but for a very different purpose. “This stormy night” (Aji jharer rate/“On this stormy night”), has the soul keeping vigil at the door while her heart’s companion journeys to her past rivers and forests down an unknown path. In Gitamalya/ The Garland of Songs,
The night my doors were shattered by the storm,
I did not know you had come to my home. (A Song from Gitamalya)
In Gitali, in the song, Jete jete aekla pathe nibhiche mor bati/ “My lamp blown out, on my lonely road I fare”, the soul itself sets out on a journey through the same dark, fearful stormscape.
Indeed, the most trivial and hackneyed experience of human life–the daily waking from sleep or a walk by the riverside–are endowed with meaning and significance by these Romantics. The pleasure, fear and love are the three distinct feelings the poets are gifted with and these are the essential elements in the growth of a poet’s mind. ‘With his gifts of observation Wordsworth might have made a name in Natural Science; indeed geologists have deplored the loss to their science of the observer who first called attention to the ‘perched’ boulders that are sometimes seen to lie “couched on the bald top of an eminence,”[4] as he writes:
As a huge Stone is sometimes seen to lie
Couch’d on the bald top of an eminence;
(“Resolution and Independence”)
But science seeks advancement of knowledge of the truth; poetry aims at communicating pleasure. Wordsworth, so as Tagore insists firmly that the poet’s business is to give pleasure, even when the subject is painful in itself or there is a sense of mystery pervading in it. The capacity to emote is needed to communicate pleasure. For this, the poet must feel it, and “feel it more intensely than other men; he must be possessed of ‘more than usual’ capacity not only for sense-impressions but for pleasure. Defending Burns, Wordsworth roundly maintains that the poet has a licence to sympathise with and to celebrate even the pleasures of love and wine and the joy of battle. He didn’t avail himself of that licence. Praise of woman, wine, and war was not his trade. He wrote no love-songs, no bottle-songs, and of battle-songs (ex. Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle) only enough to show what he could do in that line if chose.”[5] But here Tagore, like Chaucer, has Pandora of variety. The poet did only not choose simple lives of women living in the villages but the sophisticated, mythical and legendary women also made his subjects. In Shadharon Meye/“The Simple Lass”, where the girl urges the poet:
I urge you,
To write the tale of a simple lass.
That many miseries she has.
Deep her head if she has something extraordinary
To prove will be difficulty
No one can fathom it since.
(Shadharon Meye/“The Simple Lass” translation mine)
Along with his analysis of the Nature Tagore was constructing his own image of India in his life and work– an Indian ethos that could provide an alternative paradigm that the poet was looking out for. Towards this end, he projects a humanist ideal in a mythological character, as in the dramatic dialogue “The Meeting of Karna and Kunti” and other dialogue poems in the collection of Katha O Kahini/ Legends and Tales; later a historical figure, as in the tales and ballads, later, in an imagined ideal of ancient Indian life centred in the spiritual forest retreat (tapovana), upheld by the power of self (atmashakti), as in the sonnets of Naibedya/Offering of Worship.
[1] JC Smith: A Study of Wordsworth, (London, Oliver and Boyd,1946),p.11
[2] Sukanta Chaudhuri (ed.):The Oxford Tagore Translations, Selected Poems: Rabindranath Tagore,
(New Delhi, OUP, 2004), p.382
*from Krishna Dutta & Andrew Robinson’s book “Rabindranath Tagore: The myriad- minded Man
[3] Krishna Dutta &Andrew Robinson: Rabindranath Tagore : The Myriad Minded Man (New Delhi, Rupa & Co.,2003) p.118
[4] JC Smith : A Study of Wordsworth (London, Oliver and Boyd,1946), p.21
[5] JC Smith : A Study of Wordsworth ((London, Oliver and Boyd,1946), p.21
I bring to your room
The scent of springtime woods
In the flowers of the tuberose
On the secluded breeze. (Romantic/“The Romantic”)
Perhaps, Coleridge was right in believing that whereas in his philosophy the mind informed the senses, Wordsworth sought to compound the senses into mind. Tagore’s organic sensibility, the capacity to receive impulses through senses is beyond any doubt. Tagore, like Keats and Shelley, has the senses of taste, space and sublime as well.
Tagore wrote a beautiful poem where he sensed the wonders of the earth in Vismaya/“Wonder”:
My heart sings at the wonder of my place in the world of life and light;
At the feel in my pulse of the rhythm of creation cadenced by the swing of endless time.
I feel the tenderness of the grass in my forest walk, the smell of wayside flowers startles me.
That the gifts of the infinite are strewn in the dust wakens my song in wonder.
I have seen, have heard, have lived in the depth of the known have felt the truth that exceeds all knowledge which fills my heart with wonder and I sing. (Vismaya/“Wonder”)
Sonar Tori/ The Golden Boat with its key poem with the same title marks another phase or peak. The magic of its rippling verse, the melting delicacy of its limited, but subtly repeated imagery, are unsurpassed. It creates the autonomous universe, a verbal icon before the readers’ eyes. But the critics of the poem have kept up the question: what does it mean? Even Tagore was persuaded to explain. Fortunately, Tagore’s deliberate explanation has left it inviolate. It seems to be a test for any translator. Here is the William Radice version, slightly modified:
In the sky rumbling clouds, it rains heavily.
Sad, forlorn, I sit on the river bank.
The harvest ended, the sheaves are gathered.
The river is swollen and fierce.
The rains arrived as I was harvesting.
A small paddy field, no one but me –
Flood-waters twisting and swirling everywhere.
Trees on the far bank smear shadows like ink
Over a village painted in deep morning grey.
On this side a paddy-field, and no one but me.
Who is this, steering close to the bank singing? I feel it is someone I know.
The sails are filled wide, he gazes ahead,
Waves break helpless on each side of the boat
I seem to know the face that I have spied.
Oh, to what foreign land do you sail?
Come to the bank, moor your boat for a while
Go where you want to, give where you care to,
But come to the bank a moment and smiling,
Take away my paddy as you sail.
Load as much as you can take.
Is there more? No, none, I have put it all abroad.
My intense labour here by the river
I have given all, layer upon layer:
Now please take me as well, take me abroad.
No room, no room, the boat is small,
My gold has filled it all.
Across the rainy sky clouds heave to and fro.
On the bare river-bank I am alone
The golden boat has taken everything, all I had is gone. (Sonar Tori/“Golden Boat”)
It reads like a parable. Though less complex than “Kubla Khan”, its evocativeness, however, seems inexhaustible. Tagore seems to have eternalised the moment. Tagore’s two most famous poems of the Shelidah period are Sonar Tori/ “The Golden Boat” and Jete Nahi Dibo/ “I Will Not Let You Go”. Both were published in Sonar Tori, the 1894 collection that was Tagore’s first popular success. In the first poem, which is relatively brief, the poet sits, ‘sad and alone’, on the riverbank, sheaves of cut paddy waiting beside him. A boat approaches, piloted by a mysterious figure – probably female, again the poem does not specify– who agrees to load the paddy. The person on the bank parts with it all and then asks to be taken on board too. But there is no room.
On the bare river-bank I am alone
The golden boat has taken everything, all I had is gone.
(Sonar Tori/ “Golden Boat”)
It is worthwhile to quote here; “As Bengali pronouns are not differentiated by gender, it is not clear whether the figure in the boat is male or female. Rabindranath’s own English version, “The Fugitive I.17” speaks of “a woman at the helm”, but this does not resolve the inherent ambiguity of the Bengali text. The above translation designedly avoids pronouns of gender.”[2] Thirteen years after the poem was published, acrimonious controversy broke out over its poetic merit. The famous Bengali dramatist Dwijendralal Ray (earlier the poet’s friend*) attacked the poem as vague, diffuse, and meaningless.
Rabindranath himself explained the significance of the poem more than once. Reacting to Dwijendralal Ray’s criticism, he wrote:
The world receives all the fruits of our labour, but does not receive us. When I load the world’s boat with the harvest of my entire life, I nurse the hope that I too might find a place there; but the world forgets us in a couple of days….Those who have built up man in many ways through the ages, have their work immortalized among us; but they themselves, with their names and addresses, their joys and sorrows, have been lost in oblivion. Yet each of them had said to the world: ‘Take all I have. I have laboured only for you; my happiness lies in giving to you. Take all I have. But do not cast me aside, do not forget me: preserve my impress in my work.’ But where is the room? The harvest of our lives stays on in some form or other; but we ourselves do not stay on.
However, he ends:
But fie on all such interpretations. If the poem’s rasa is reliant solely on such readings, then it has been written in vain. Why don’t you just imagine it has no special meaning? Only the rains, the riverine island, only the spirit of an overcast day – only a picture, only a song: if it be nothing more, where’s the harm? (Letter to Bireshwar Goswami, 24 November 1906)
When Tagore spoke of life as a perpetual wayfaring, he knew what he was talking about. He has seen as well as made his life an endless journey, Chirajatra/“Unending Journey”. Jete Nahi Dibo/“I Will Not Let You Go”, a much longer poem, is perhaps autobiographical. This time they are Tagore and his young daughter Bela at Shantiniketan in the summer of 1892; in the background, Mrinalini, his wife, tearfully hovers and is busy piling his luggage with indispensable pots and pans and saucers, bottles and bedding and boxes, until eventually the narrator (Tagore) protests, “Let me leave a little behind and just take a bit!”[3] The moment of parting has come: Tagore must return to the estate, ‘back to the grind-stone’. Instead of a boat he must board a train to Calcutta and then to Shelidah. But Bela will not budge:
Outside on the doorstep, preoccupied,
Sat my four-year old daughter…
On the doorstep she’d fallen quiet as a mouse.
‘Bye, sweetheart,’ I said finally. Her face was doleful.
‘I’m not letting you go,’ she replied. (Jete Nahi Dibo/“I Will Not Let You Go”,)
The poet recognises that a small child may sometimes grasp the innate truth of human nature when more sophisticated men and women fail. The poet sees at once the Mother earth in his small daughter who tries to hold her children back to her bosom forever but she is helpless. She has to let them go. The poet writes:
And so in the sighing trees today I hear
An anxious longing, even as an idle play
The indifferent noon breeze tosses the dead leaves.
The day wears on: the shadow longer falls
Beneath the peepal tree. To a country tune the infinite’s flute wails on creation’s plain;
The earth, transported by that music, sits with loosened hair among the laden fields
Besides the Ganga, drawing across her bosom
The golden veil of sunshine, her still eyes
Fixed on the far blue sky, lips without speech
.
I saw her darkened face: the mute, struck look
Of my four years’ girl, sitting beside the door. (Jete Nahi Dibo/ “I Will Not Let You Go” )
A flock of birds in the poem Balaka/“The Flying Geese”, flinging their flight like an arrow among stars is for the poet an emblem of the passion for speed which is in the heart of the universe, which makes darkness thrill into fire as the stars wing by. That the migrant world seeks a home of rest hidden in the far-away is one of the leading themes in Tagore’s poetry; it is no wonder, therefore, that here there are many other images suggestive of the ceaseless flow and elusiveness of life. The symbol which occurs most frequently is of a current of water, and Life is portrayed as the Eternal Escapist. The poet incorporated into Bengali literature the ideals and moods of Europe. The sense of power and speed in many of the poems of Balaka may well be derived from European sources. Everything is transient is an ancient human finding, but Tagore gave to it a new significance by making it the symbol of the motion that is latent in all things.
The poem was composed at Srinagar in Kashmir in October – November 1915 and published in the magazine Sabuj Patra/Green Leaf. The poet described the circumstances of composition:
I was then in Kashmir. One evening, I sat by the River Jhelum. There was stillness all around. I felt I was sitting beside the Padma. Of course, when I lived on the Padma I was a young man, and now I am old. Yet that difference seemed to have been wiped out by some link transcending time. A flock of geese flew over my head across Jhelum….I seemed to hear some ineffable call, and be led by its impulse to some far journey. (Kshitimohan Sen, Balaka-Kabya-Parikrama, p.55)
The poet sees everything in the universe expressing itself in the infinity. The stars are silent and peaceful and so is the immense sky which is their home. It is in the horizon that all things seem to meet, and that is why the blue sky which appears to be both far off and near is suggestive of infinity, majesty and tenderness of God, and the death may be looked upon as only passage of travel from known to the unknown. The clouds which float in the sky and the winds which move them represent the joyous vagrancy and the freedom in which lies the significance of life. The poet’s imagination is stirred specially by the movement of birds which fly away from the narrow sphere of the earth but which always seek a home. Their flight in the sky is indicative of the larger freedom man longs for but cannot attain, but the wings of a home-seeking bird in the dusk remind the poet of the sweeping energy of human love and God being the centre of the unattainable. In Balaka/ “The Flying Geese”, the birds seem to give the eternal message to the poet:
I heard the many voiced words of man wing along unheeded ways, from the faded past to far off future dim, I heard within myself the sound of this homeless bird winging with countless other birds from shore to shore through daylight and darkness. Space echoes with the song of all creation’s wings: ‘Not here! Elsewhere! Elsewhere! Somewhere else! (“The Flying Geese”)
The sense of largeness which inspires Tagore’s poetry is chiefly derived from his faith in the vastness of Nature. It is in this larger, unbound life of Nature that the poet wants to merge himself. In his attitude to Nature Tagore differs from other romantic poets like Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats who worship the spirit of Nature by freeing from dross. It is in this purified spirit of Nature that Wordsworth finds the lesson to convey a prophetic message, Shelley a message of love and Keats Beauty which is not for born for death and is identical with Truth. Tagore woos Nature as a whole and its appeal for him is derived as much from its purer beauties as from the odds and ends that are mixed up with them.
Poetry recaptures the feelings of wonder with which Adam may have had first looked at the universe around him. Expression in terms of art of sharpened sensibilities heightened imaginative feeling often synonymous with extravagances and sentimentality mixed with curiosity and love of beauty. Such a view of poetry cannot explain the significance of all the above mentioned Romanticists, but it is particularly apposite to the poetry of Wordsworth and Tagore. The latter lived in the sophisticated world of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and being sensuous to the fingertips, he loved the universe and the earth like an awed child who wonders at the fluttering of a butterfly on a nameless flower by the pond side or looks at the pale moon appearing on the palm tree top. What seems remarkable about Wordsworth and Tagore is that they viewed the simple, commonplace things of life with that artlessness and wonder which seems to have been the distinctive feature of Adam’s vision of the world. It seems Wordsworth’s Nature-conscious leads to self-conscious. The ordinary sights of boughs silhouetted against a bright evening sky gave him pleasure and similarly Tagore witnessing the dark echoing clouds silhouetted against the silver-grey sky felt ecstatic and wrote:
The sombre tumult of clashing clouds evoked at once, within a single day, all the tearful deep-dwelling millennial cry of the pang of separation. (Meghdoot/“The Cloud Messenger”)
The sense of hearing seems profound in the poet and he hears the moans and cry of pangs of separation.
The three linked volumes Gitanjali/Songs Offerings, Gitamalya/ The Garland of Songs and Gitali/ Series of Songs contain three songs in a significant sequence. All three are present storm, rain and darkness as the setting for a journey, for comings and goings, but for a very different purpose. “This stormy night” (Aji jharer rate/“On this stormy night”), has the soul keeping vigil at the door while her heart’s companion journeys to her past rivers and forests down an unknown path. In Gitamalya/ The Garland of Songs,
The night my doors were shattered by the storm,
I did not know you had come to my home. (A Song from Gitamalya)
In Gitali, in the song, Jete jete aekla pathe nibhiche mor bati/ “My lamp blown out, on my lonely road I fare”, the soul itself sets out on a journey through the same dark, fearful stormscape.
Indeed, the most trivial and hackneyed experience of human life–the daily waking from sleep or a walk by the riverside–are endowed with meaning and significance by these Romantics. The pleasure, fear and love are the three distinct feelings the poets are gifted with and these are the essential elements in the growth of a poet’s mind. ‘With his gifts of observation Wordsworth might have made a name in Natural Science; indeed geologists have deplored the loss to their science of the observer who first called attention to the ‘perched’ boulders that are sometimes seen to lie “couched on the bald top of an eminence,”[4] as he writes:
As a huge Stone is sometimes seen to lie
Couch’d on the bald top of an eminence;
(“Resolution and Independence”)
But science seeks advancement of knowledge of the truth; poetry aims at communicating pleasure. Wordsworth, so as Tagore insists firmly that the poet’s business is to give pleasure, even when the subject is painful in itself or there is a sense of mystery pervading in it. The capacity to emote is needed to communicate pleasure. For this, the poet must feel it, and “feel it more intensely than other men; he must be possessed of ‘more than usual’ capacity not only for sense-impressions but for pleasure. Defending Burns, Wordsworth roundly maintains that the poet has a licence to sympathise with and to celebrate even the pleasures of love and wine and the joy of battle. He didn’t avail himself of that licence. Praise of woman, wine, and war was not his trade. He wrote no love-songs, no bottle-songs, and of battle-songs (ex. Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle) only enough to show what he could do in that line if chose.”[5] But here Tagore, like Chaucer, has Pandora of variety. The poet did only not choose simple lives of women living in the villages but the sophisticated, mythical and legendary women also made his subjects. In Shadharon Meye/“The Simple Lass”, where the girl urges the poet:
I urge you,
To write the tale of a simple lass.
That many miseries she has.
Deep her head if she has something extraordinary
To prove will be difficulty
No one can fathom it since.
(Shadharon Meye/“The Simple Lass” translation mine)
Along with his analysis of the Nature Tagore was constructing his own image of India in his life and work– an Indian ethos that could provide an alternative paradigm that the poet was looking out for. Towards this end, he projects a humanist ideal in a mythological character, as in the dramatic dialogue “The Meeting of Karna and Kunti” and other dialogue poems in the collection of Katha O Kahini/ Legends and Tales; later a historical figure, as in the tales and ballads, later, in an imagined ideal of ancient Indian life centred in the spiritual forest retreat (tapovana), upheld by the power of self (atmashakti), as in the sonnets of Naibedya/Offering of Worship.
[1] JC Smith: A Study of Wordsworth, (London, Oliver and Boyd,1946),p.11
[2] Sukanta Chaudhuri (ed.):The Oxford Tagore Translations, Selected Poems: Rabindranath Tagore,
(New Delhi, OUP, 2004), p.382
*from Krishna Dutta & Andrew Robinson’s book “Rabindranath Tagore: The myriad- minded Man
[3] Krishna Dutta &Andrew Robinson: Rabindranath Tagore : The Myriad Minded Man (New Delhi, Rupa & Co.,2003) p.118
[4] JC Smith : A Study of Wordsworth (London, Oliver and Boyd,1946), p.21
[5] JC Smith : A Study of Wordsworth ((London, Oliver and Boyd,1946), p.21
