Prose Poems of Tagore by Dr. Bina Biswas
POETIC DICTION AND STYLE
Tagore wrote over a thousand poems and two thousand songs. He was barely fifteen when his first work was published and he wrote his last poem almost on the eve of his death.
“My poems had now reached the doors of men’s minds,” wrote Tagore in his memoirs, My Reminiscences[1]. Sudhin Datta, a Bengali critic and poet admired by Tagore, said of his seminal collection of poems:
No poet before Tagore knew how to extract music out of Bengali consonants; and if at times our lyrical needs made us rebel against the tyranny of the fourteen-lettered line called payar, we either resorted to forms borrowed from Sanskrit, and thus unreadable by the rules of Bengali pronunciation, or, like Biharilal Chakravarti [Tagore’s idol as a teenager] reduced the use of closed syllables to a minimum, imparting to our verse a sort of spineless elasticity. Manashi/ “The Lady of the Mind” ruled such compromises out of existence, restored our measures to ordered autonomy, and broke with the past so sharply that ever since its appearance most of our previous poetry has seemed not only imperfect rhythmically but also metrically defective…Though the technical skill of its author never ceased to grow, his next basic contribution to the poet’s craft occurred when, at seventy, he set about bridging the gulf between verse and prose.[2]
Even to the non-Bengali readers unable to enjoy the poems in the original language, Tagore’s poems, particularly Manashi poems are startling in its range and power. Clearly Tagore had taken a note of criticism of poetry and “in his place had come a poet of many moods, from the tender to the fiercely satirical, and many subjects: nature and love, of course, but also ancient India and contemporary social and national problems.”[3] A few of the poems are in free verse while the majority is composed in various metrical patterns. Any metrical structure could not be retained or re-created in the translations. In the translations essential task is rendering the mood and the vision of the poems and the beauty of its phrases and images. But unfortunately though rendered reasonably well, it is felt; it fails to convey its significance to a Western reader and might even be unintelligible to him. Instead of the original image, there is substitute for the original image, a different image which, in spite of having a different constitution has been used as the chief poetic vehicle to convey the ideas or feelings represented by the original image. Tagore’s own translations in English are also not free from allegations.
The sources of Tagore’s poetry are eternal and elusive. In The Religion of Man Tagore defines human life as “the ceaseless adventure to the Endless Further.”[4] This seems to be true of his poetry also. The unique search for the infinite that his poetry records with honesty and pathos has been rare. If the defence of this poetry were needed, his later poems are the most mature in Tagore’s life and can claim an independent value of its own. Firstly, while revealing new tendencies it contains a summary of nearly all his earlier styles and attitudes. It is a miniature and more than recapitulation of the past and it is an anticipation of the future. Secondly, it is characterised by experiences and experiments that are unusual even for Tagore. These poems have experiences connected with the illness of 1937 and 1940 and are filled with crises. The crisis in an artist’s life may perhaps be a gain for his art. In his poems dealing with this phase of his awareness, of society, politics and war, the silent folks of the land, Tagore reaches a new level of insight and humility.
It seems the early poems are more popular with the readers since they are having the crises that act as a kind of ‘objective co-relative’ of his intense mental sufferings and agonies of loneliness and sense of dissolution and the love for Nature and love for Humanity.
The task of finding a right poetic form for an era of increasing chaos, the widening gulf between writer and reader and the decline of the middle class was not easy. The social purpose which he sometimes suggests or invokes ‘turns out to be little more than a polite fiction.’ The basic pattern of his imagination, the essential quality of his style, remains the same as before. He is disinclined to use metre in the later poems is the only difference. Perhaps, Tagore himself was quick to recognise that it was not enough to do away with metre; the very diction of poetry has “veil ornament which prose can do without and thus extend the scope of poetry.”(Tagore’s own words) [5] It is also not quite clear if the poet’s prose poems are an extension of prose or of poetry. Tagore wrote four books in the new style, prose poems: Punascha, Sesh Saptak, Shymali and Patraput. The experiment had a mixed reception. For some time neither the poet nor the reader knew if it was just fun, the by-product of time of leisure and failing powers of an ageing poet or a serious innovation. Imitators sprang up and these prodigal plagiarists gave the new form an overwhelming support and it has now come to stay as a minor form literature. Tagore can claim to have added this form to Bengali literature, even if he himself were to give it up later. Surely, it could not have all been waste of spirit. It answered a growing need, the need for a change in the form and content if poetry was to move forward. Like most innovators, Tagore was also the theorist of the cause, through this a role in which he is perhaps not at his happiest. The interest he shows in the formal aspect of the experiment, particularly the insistence on prose now appears excessive and unnatural. The whole new thing now looks more like a private fancy. It is undeniable that it has thrown up a few rare excellences that could not be achieved in any other manner. A change was in the offing, the poet must have moved his way obscurely towards it. The prose poems mark a point of transition. And where a genuine inspiration comes he disregards the theory, as in Prantik, and reverts to his old poetic style and confirmed that the poet is free to choose any form and diction to please his senses that gives aesthetic pleasure. The reason he puts forward is defensive rather than sufficient and runs the risk of violating his own theories. In any case, he has failed in his great hope of coming near the common man and makes his muse tread the hard ground and he really could not declass himself and be one with common man. The supposed simplified medium also fails him there. But in fact, the simplicity of prose poems is deceptive. It can be said definitely that common man and the common reader prefer the earlier Tagore to the later. The appeal of the sophisticated writer of prose poems is confined to an ever-shrinking clientele. Social stratification, the absence of generally shared cultural values or workaday themes contributed to this failure. It is not the poet who has to be blamed and not his ingenuity that is being questioned but the adequacy of the measure adopted. It is Tagore’s extraordinary modesty that he acknowledges this failure more than once. Tagore’s prose poems may not have achieved the great results that he had expected from them, but at their best, they have their own excellence and justification. Even if he himself were to give it up they have created a tendency which has become a tradition and has produced some of original masterpieces. It has been of special help to the younger poets who have taken it to fresh fields and pastures new. It is an irony of fate that some of them began their work by making fun of the Tagorean attitude to life and poetry.[6]
Later on, Tagore himself liked to think that this change in form was due to change in his point of view, what is called in art-history a change in the form of beholding. He also felt that, in the process, he might come closer to the spirit of the age and the people. In this sense, an attempt at greater intimacy and exploration of areas of self and society which had so far escaped his notice, a reaching towards the source, a closer contact between life and poetry. There is an obvious increase in the references to neglected aspects of life or the voiceless millions.
In many an analogy and simile he tries to press the point home. In this present mood the river Kopai seems to be a symbol for the workaday style which he has adopted (or imagines he has):
Her speech is the speech of the humble home,
not the language of the learned;
her rhythm has a common kinship with the land and the river…
The Kopai has mad the rhythm of the Poet’s verse its own…
To its broken cadence the Santal boy,
With his bows and arrows, tramps along;
and the cart loaded with straw;
the potter goes to the market,
a pair of pots tied to his pole;
and the village dog fondly following;
and the village schoolmaster, worth three rupees a month
a tattered umbrella over his head. (Kopai/ “Kopai”)
The explanatory tendency accounts for a number of statements or exercises of doubtful value. These give away the case rather than support it. For instance, in the poem, Nutan Juug/“The New Age”, still justifying the ways of prose to his readers, he gives a sentimental, but what for a moment he thinks to be the historical justification for the experiment. Probably he admits that his poetry has missed certain things. For, it now seems to him, prose is nearer to the spirit of the age than verse, and poetry’s survival depends on an alliance with prose. So he says, somewhat condescendingly:
I had to return once more
at the day’s I have begun a new game,
all for your sake,
for love’s expectation
I have dressed my muse
in your trappings,
on the roadside by the traveller’s shade I leave it,
O my pilgrim friend, thinking of you.
So that you too can say, when the time comes, and that you liked it.
(Nutan Juug/“The New Age”)
To this New Age the poet has sworn his fidelity and like all converts he also seems a little over-zealous. The poet confesses that he is left alone, pushed from side to side in the crowd of the new and the unfamiliar. The rapprochement which he had hoped for is not achieved. The apologetic strain continues in three more poems in Sesh Saptak. Here “there is a roadside meeting where the poet has been asked to read some of his verses. Opening his he is overcome with shyness. These poems, he feels, ‘are soft and pretty, they are not for the open, the rough and tumble of daily life’. Instead of reading them he rises to go. To the question, “Where are you off to?” he replies, “I am going to the difficult, the hard and the pitiless, to bring the song of the brave and stoic heart.”[7] There is nothing wrong in seeking for ‘songs of the brave hearts’ but the question remains: need these be in prose pomes, or prose, as Tagore seems to insist? Songs in prose, that brilliant impossibility was achieved not even by the great Tagore himself. In another poem he uses the imagery of the waterfall to make his meaning clear: his poems, he says, are like a wayward waterfall, now broad now thin. “In fact the poems are zigzag stream rather than waterfall”.[8] Again in another poem he discovers that “all his early writings have been aloof and aristocratic, they are like a garden inside the royal Zenana, shut off from public gaze. Outside the high palace walls stand the tall Eucalyptus and the Golden Showers, glad under sunlit sky.”[9]
From the technique Prantik’s/On the Margin’s grave sonnet-like form is an immense advance on the lolling prose poems. A slim volume of eighteen mostly short poems, its claim to attention is due to more than one reason. A direct outcome of the illness of 1937, most of the poems were written during three short, but strenuous months. Its immediate inspiration is sickness and death, its aim is towards life and wholeness. The diffuseness is gone at a stroke; instead there is a tension that never slackens. Concentrated in effect and detail, Prantik’s close interwoven texture reveals – because it is the result of – difficult and delicate adjustment between disparate impulses and attitudes. The unity and passion are due to its central experience.
The prose poems serve certain purposes as well. For instance, they enable him to make some excellent criticism of his own works, in a way he had never done before. At the lowest, they suggest a growing dissatisfaction with his earlier manner. The new style also gives us a few ‘still life’ descriptions which no other medium could render so well, with such intimacy and impersonality. Conscious, as never before, that his art did not belong to the people, Tagore seems now to voice their still, sad music into verses.
Sir Walter Scot’s description of the last metaphor is rare among the major critics of the time because, by characterising art as communication, “it brings the audience to parity with the stress of the artist’s own feelings as a cause of artistic production.” The painter, orator, and poet each has the motive
of exciting in the reader, hearer, or spectator, a tone of feeling similar to that which existed in his own bosom, ere it was bodied forth by his pencil, tongue, or pen. It is the artist’s object, in short…to continue, as well as colours and words can do the same sublime sensations which had dictated his own composition. (Idler No. 34)[10]
The poet can not be isolated from his heart. If Scot’s motive is to be considered then, the poet and the reader communicate on the same stage where they complement each other, one is the poet or the speaker and another is reader, hearer etc. The poet creates and the reader fulfills. Tagore like any other mortal poet looks for gratifications from his readers and no poet writes to keep the piece of art to himself, he needs the reader front. The poet, stung by the negative criticism of his poetry if asserts himself through his poems, there is nothing wide of the mark.
There is Wordsworth’s general contention that the standards of poetry are those of the natural language of feeling in ordinary speech and
Poetry is competent to express emotions chiefly by its resources of figures of speech and rhythm, by means of which words naturally embody and convey the feeling of the poet. In opposition to the earlier doctrine that figurative language and meter are primarily ornaments used to heighten the aesthetic pleasure, the typical romantic opinion was that expressed by Wordsworth. There is no need in poetry to deviate from ordinary language “for elevation of style, or any of its supposed ornaments: for, if the Poet’s subject be judiciously chosen, it will naturally, and upon fir occasion, lead him to passions the language of which, if selected truly and judiciously, must necessarily be dignified and variegated, and alive with metaphors and figures.”(Wordsworth’s Literary Criticism pp.21-2)[11]
Then it is essential to poetry that its language is spontaneous and genuine, not the contrived and pretentious, expression of the emotional state of the poet.
Based on the above theories, Tagore’s prose poems are not only full with poetic truths and metaphors but there is a conscious restraint also. The unseen and unfelt hold-back on the poet’s part is felt by the reader of his later poetry and is enough to put checks on the ‘overflow’ of the music.
Tagore’s use of colloquialism is amazing, but it is colloquialism supported by long years of culture and cultivation. Its sensitive sophistication is beyond the reach of the poor folk whose mouthpiece, for the nonce, he wants to be. He has drawn freely from indigenous traditions, such as those of the ‘bauls’, for instance. In the phraseology of the Leftist criticism, he has not been able to ‘de-class’ himself. He could not be common, much less a revolutionary or a proletarian poet. He neither speaks nor feels like them; perhaps because he has never lived like them. Some of the subjects chosen may seem to belong to the everyday world, but the treatment is stamped with the poet’s individuality. Whatever else the prose poems may have done for him, they did not make him a people’s poet. There are limitations to accept than to fight against them. In many ways the prose poems turned out to be a blind alley. Later on he moves out of it. Perhaps, the beginning was on a note of hope but ended with a sigh. Marxist criticism made the great poet discard the “prose” form later but then the charge was graver than the above one that he could not be one of the common people he wrote for, he could not declass himself. Like most innovators, Tagore enthusiasm did not last and poems written in this form became curiosities of literature than anything else.
“Romantic predications about poetry and art turn on a metaphor, which like ‘overflow’, signify the internal made external.”[12] Poetry “is the music of language,” Hazlitt wrote, “expressing the music of the mind.” Shelley declared that “poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be the expression of the imagination,” and Byron complained to Tom Moore, “I can never get people to understand that poetry is the expression of excited passion…” and finally Leigh Hunt reconciled these differences by the simple device of a definition which, as David Masson has remarked, is “constructed on the principle of omitting nothing that anyone would like to see included.”[13]
In these central predications about the nature of poetry, the principle difference lies in the use of metaphor and activities of mind cannot be without metaphor. Perhaps, no human artifact can be judged apart from the intention of the maker who imposes a design on the primary stuff, thereby shaping something plain to create something rich and strange.
Art is for man. Poetry is no exception. Each poet has his own beliefs, his scheme of values, an outlook of life as inspired in a world seen refracted through imagination. In spite of his following a distinct style of expression, his world is altogether different from any other of his brethren, and this individuality is the principle of organization informing his universe of representation in works what is conceived non-verbally in moments of contemplation.
The tone of quiet acceptance with a latent awareness of century-old sufferings of the humankind perhaps indicates Tagore’s very Indian sensibility. But what gives an identity to the poetry of Tagore is the breadth of his understanding of the universe, Nature, his fellow men and depth of this vision in the never ending quest for the Infinite.
A FINAL APPRAISAL
Brutal night comes silently,
Breaks down the loosened
bolts of my spent body,
Enters my insides,
Starts stealing images of life’s dignity:
My heart succumbs to the assault of darkness.
The shame of defeat,
the insult of this fatigue,
Grow intense.
Suddenly on the horizon,
Dawn’s banner laced with rays of gold;
From a distant centre of the sky a shout:
‘It’s a lie, a lie!’
Against the tranquil light of morning
I can see myself as conqueror of sorrows
Standing on top of my fortress, my ruin, my body.
(Dekhlam Abasanna Chetanar Godhulibelaye/“I Saw in the Twilight”)
In January 1941, Tagore composed a poem, published shortly after in a collection with the hopeful title Arogya/Healing, that brilliantly captured the suffering and the faith underlying his final year of existence. He seems to have heard his own death summons. He begins to see his body as an entity distinct from himself:
I saw – in the twilight of tired
Consciousness,
My body drifting down black
Kalindi’s stream:
With its mass of feelings, its varied sorrows,
A lifetime’s memories stored in its figured shroud,
And with its flute. Farther and farther away…
(Dekhlam Abasanna Chetanar Godhulibelaye/“I Saw in the Twilight”)
If one examines the works of any great innovator in chronological order one may perhaps expect to find that the author has been driven on, step by step, by an inner necessity, by the inner call. The growth of the poet is followed in this thesis step by step’ from his first rhyme to the last song on the eve of his death.
In the last phase of his life, Tagore perceived the crisis of civilization looming large. He now sees evil as much more powerful and pervasive than before. Once the poet had imagined individual man and social man to be advancing ceaselessly towards unity and goodness and now one searing insight pierces to dissolve this vision. The war-torn world, the violence, the atrocity of a civilised nation on a weaker one, the hate war between the pale and the dark, the racial abuse – for a moment blurred the vision of poet but he looks on till the end for the advent of the Supreme Man in history.
“Crisis in Civilization was not Tagore’s final pronouncement of British rule. In June 1941, he received a letter from Foss Westcott, the bishop of Calcutta (and head of the Anglican Church in India) who had made his home, pleading for more sympathetic Congress understanding of Britain’s peril in the war. Tagore replied in measured words that may stand for his ultimate verdict on this deeply contentious subject:
I have neither the right nor the desire to judge the British people as such, but I cannot help being concerned at the conduct of the British Government in India, since it directly involves the life and well-being of millions of my countrymen. I am too painfully conscious of the extreme poverty, helplessness and misery of our people not to deplore the supineness of the Government that has tolerated this condition for so long…I had hoped that the leaders of the British nation, who had grown apathetic to our suffering and forgetful of their own sacred trust in India during heir days of prosperity and success, would at last, in time of their own great trial, awake to justice and humanity of our cause. It has been a most grievous disappointment to me to find that fondly cherished hope receding farther from realization each day. Believe me; nothing would give me greater happiness than to see the people of the West and East march in a common crusade against all that robs the human spirit of its significance.”[14]
The acerbic tenor of Tagore’s response to Rathbone[15] can be gathered from his statement that:
The British hate the Nazis for merely challenging their – world mastery… It is not so much because the British are foreigners that they are unwelcome to us and have found no place in our hearts, as because, while pretending to be trustees of our welfare, they have betrayed the great trust and have sacrificed the happiness of millions in India to bloat the pockets of a few capitalists at home.[16]
The aim of this research was to bring forth the multi-faceted persona of Tagore and to study his poetry that are not included in Gitanjali, thematically and to establish that he is not a poet but a ‘poet’s poet’, maker of not only modern Indian literature but also the modern mind. Myriad minded, he was a poet, short story writer, novelist, dramatist, essayist, painter and composer of songs. Perhaps more a poet than an Oriental Sage. Perhaps more a composer of songs than poems. Whatever might happen to the rest of the corpus, his songs he knew, would survive. He wrote letters as well. But the paintings speak the most vividly. As he had said in Germany in 1930: “My poetry is for my countrymen, my paintings are my gift to the West.”[17] Out of more than two thousand paintings and ‘twelve self portraits of Tagore’, it is still difficult to comprehend something of his mercurial complexity. “They are as far from the saintly, tedious image of him engendered by insipid translations of his own poetry as one can get. Here, one feels is a man who recognises the savage in himself and is grappling with it; here Rabindranath is as much Old Bluebeard as Wise Man from the East. Other paintings and drawings cover a huge gamut of moods, subjects and styles, with a correspondingly bold but harmonious palette.”[18] There are very few painters as reticent and stunning like Tagore and his paintings offer a whole world awaiting discovery.
The first chapter shows the growth of the poet and the milieu that he was born in. The family history is touched upon to show his great ancestors in the light of Indian Renaissance. The contribution of his elder siblings in the making of the genius, the puritan living of his father, the Zamindari, his own family, wife and children – all have been studied in the area of the research because the poet cannot grow up in isolation. The Indian Renaissance and the towering personalities of the era have also been given their due prominence so as to bring forth the culture and ethos of the period in which Tagore was born.
Comparisons have been drawn between the poet and English Romantics against the backdrop different critical theories with the aim to establish Tagore on the same stand as that of them.
Looking back one is struck by the variety, the abundance and the dynamism. At the centre of the ceaseless, copious, at times unequal creativity, stands a person. A life full of events, the shift from a regional milieu to the boundless sky does not escape notice. A seeker of the Surplus and the Shudur/Beyond, he also claimed to be Ami Prithivir Kobi/“A Poet of the Earth”. “To detach the individual idea from its confinement of everyday facts and gives its soaring wings the freedom of the universal; this is the function of poetry. The ambition of Macbeth, the jealousy of Othello, would be at best sensational in police court proceedings; but in Shakespeare’s dramas they are carried among the flaming constellations where creation throbs with Eternal passion, Eternal Pain.”[19]
The poet neither seems a Vyasa Muni nor a Buddha; he had his weaknesses both as man and artist. To admire or to be hypnotised, may not be the only alternative, most of Tagore’s has been an indulgence, not investigation. The image projected by the media, the cultists and the roundelay of functions is not the Tagore who is needed but the Tagore who matters. The secret of the creativity is hard to catch, harder to comprehend. Growing, changing, there is a sense of the “not yet” about him till the end. One of his prayers in Gitanjali/Song Offerings had been an enlightened awareness:
I dive into the depth of the ocean of forms, hoping to gain the perfect pearl of the formless.
No more sailing from harbour to harbour with this my weather-beaten boat. The days are long past when my sport was to be tossed on waves.
And now I am eager to die into the deathless.
(Gitanjali/Song Offerings)
Who will reveal the face of the poet’s truth? Ages hence people will wonder that such a man had walked on this earth, had been one of the ordinary human being.
[1] Krishna Dutta &Andrew Robinson: Rabindranath Tagore : The Myriad Minded Man (New Delhi, Rupa & Co.,2003) p.
[2] Uma Das Gupta (ed.): My Life in my Words (New Delhi, Viking Penguin, 2006), p.83
[3]Krishna Dutta &Andrew Robinson: Rabindranath Tagore : The Myriad Minded Man (New Delhi, Rupa & Co.,2003) p.101
[4] Rabindranath Tagore: The Religion of Man, (New Delhi, Rupa & Co.,2007), p.48
[5] Dr. Sisir Kumar Das: The Later Poems of Tagore (Shantiniketan, Visva-Bharathi,1964) p.59
[6] Dr. Sisir Kumar Das: The Later Poems of Tagore (Shantiniketan, Visva-Bharathi,1964) p.45
[7] Dr. Sisir Kumar Das: The Later Poems of Tagore (Shantiniketan, Visva-Bharathi,1964) p.79
[8] Ibid. p.35
[9] Dr. Sisir Kumar Das: The Later Poems of Tagore (Shantiniketan, Visva-Bharathi,1964) p.33
[10] MH Abrams (ed.): English Romantic Poets, (New Delhi, OUP, 1975), p.35
[11] MH Abrams (ed.) :The Mirror and the Lamp (New Delhi, OUP, 2006), p.102
[12]M.H.Abrams (ed.):The Mirror and The Lamp (New Delhi, OUP,2006) p.48
[13] Ibid pp.49-50
[14] 16 June 1941. Westcott was provoked to write by Tagore’s statement on 04 June 1941 in reply to an open letter to Indians sent by Eleanor Rathbone, MP, asking them to cooperate with the British in fighting Fascism. Krishna Dutta &Andrew Robinson: Rabindranath Tagore : The Myriad Minded Man (New Delhi, Rupa & Co.,2003) p.439
[15] Krishna Dutta &Andrew Robinson: Rabindranath Tagore : The Myriad Minded Man (New Delhi, Rupa & Co.,2003) p.345
[16] The entire statement is printed in Calcutta Municipal Gazette, p.107. Rathbone’s view is explained in Stocks, which also reproduces Jawaharlal Nehru’s pungent response to Rathbone’s letter as an appendix. Ibid. p.346
[17] Humayun Kabir (ed.): Poems of Rabindranath Tagore (Calcutta, UBSPD, 2005), p.1
[18] Krishna Dutta &Andrew Robinson: Rabindranath Tagore : The Myriad Minded Man (New Delhi, Rupa & Co.,2003) pp.355-56
[19] Rabindranath Tagore: Omnibus I (New Delhi, Rupa & Co.,2007) p.115
Tagore wrote over a thousand poems and two thousand songs. He was barely fifteen when his first work was published and he wrote his last poem almost on the eve of his death.
“My poems had now reached the doors of men’s minds,” wrote Tagore in his memoirs, My Reminiscences[1]. Sudhin Datta, a Bengali critic and poet admired by Tagore, said of his seminal collection of poems:
No poet before Tagore knew how to extract music out of Bengali consonants; and if at times our lyrical needs made us rebel against the tyranny of the fourteen-lettered line called payar, we either resorted to forms borrowed from Sanskrit, and thus unreadable by the rules of Bengali pronunciation, or, like Biharilal Chakravarti [Tagore’s idol as a teenager] reduced the use of closed syllables to a minimum, imparting to our verse a sort of spineless elasticity. Manashi/ “The Lady of the Mind” ruled such compromises out of existence, restored our measures to ordered autonomy, and broke with the past so sharply that ever since its appearance most of our previous poetry has seemed not only imperfect rhythmically but also metrically defective…Though the technical skill of its author never ceased to grow, his next basic contribution to the poet’s craft occurred when, at seventy, he set about bridging the gulf between verse and prose.[2]
Even to the non-Bengali readers unable to enjoy the poems in the original language, Tagore’s poems, particularly Manashi poems are startling in its range and power. Clearly Tagore had taken a note of criticism of poetry and “in his place had come a poet of many moods, from the tender to the fiercely satirical, and many subjects: nature and love, of course, but also ancient India and contemporary social and national problems.”[3] A few of the poems are in free verse while the majority is composed in various metrical patterns. Any metrical structure could not be retained or re-created in the translations. In the translations essential task is rendering the mood and the vision of the poems and the beauty of its phrases and images. But unfortunately though rendered reasonably well, it is felt; it fails to convey its significance to a Western reader and might even be unintelligible to him. Instead of the original image, there is substitute for the original image, a different image which, in spite of having a different constitution has been used as the chief poetic vehicle to convey the ideas or feelings represented by the original image. Tagore’s own translations in English are also not free from allegations.
The sources of Tagore’s poetry are eternal and elusive. In The Religion of Man Tagore defines human life as “the ceaseless adventure to the Endless Further.”[4] This seems to be true of his poetry also. The unique search for the infinite that his poetry records with honesty and pathos has been rare. If the defence of this poetry were needed, his later poems are the most mature in Tagore’s life and can claim an independent value of its own. Firstly, while revealing new tendencies it contains a summary of nearly all his earlier styles and attitudes. It is a miniature and more than recapitulation of the past and it is an anticipation of the future. Secondly, it is characterised by experiences and experiments that are unusual even for Tagore. These poems have experiences connected with the illness of 1937 and 1940 and are filled with crises. The crisis in an artist’s life may perhaps be a gain for his art. In his poems dealing with this phase of his awareness, of society, politics and war, the silent folks of the land, Tagore reaches a new level of insight and humility.
It seems the early poems are more popular with the readers since they are having the crises that act as a kind of ‘objective co-relative’ of his intense mental sufferings and agonies of loneliness and sense of dissolution and the love for Nature and love for Humanity.
The task of finding a right poetic form for an era of increasing chaos, the widening gulf between writer and reader and the decline of the middle class was not easy. The social purpose which he sometimes suggests or invokes ‘turns out to be little more than a polite fiction.’ The basic pattern of his imagination, the essential quality of his style, remains the same as before. He is disinclined to use metre in the later poems is the only difference. Perhaps, Tagore himself was quick to recognise that it was not enough to do away with metre; the very diction of poetry has “veil ornament which prose can do without and thus extend the scope of poetry.”(Tagore’s own words) [5] It is also not quite clear if the poet’s prose poems are an extension of prose or of poetry. Tagore wrote four books in the new style, prose poems: Punascha, Sesh Saptak, Shymali and Patraput. The experiment had a mixed reception. For some time neither the poet nor the reader knew if it was just fun, the by-product of time of leisure and failing powers of an ageing poet or a serious innovation. Imitators sprang up and these prodigal plagiarists gave the new form an overwhelming support and it has now come to stay as a minor form literature. Tagore can claim to have added this form to Bengali literature, even if he himself were to give it up later. Surely, it could not have all been waste of spirit. It answered a growing need, the need for a change in the form and content if poetry was to move forward. Like most innovators, Tagore was also the theorist of the cause, through this a role in which he is perhaps not at his happiest. The interest he shows in the formal aspect of the experiment, particularly the insistence on prose now appears excessive and unnatural. The whole new thing now looks more like a private fancy. It is undeniable that it has thrown up a few rare excellences that could not be achieved in any other manner. A change was in the offing, the poet must have moved his way obscurely towards it. The prose poems mark a point of transition. And where a genuine inspiration comes he disregards the theory, as in Prantik, and reverts to his old poetic style and confirmed that the poet is free to choose any form and diction to please his senses that gives aesthetic pleasure. The reason he puts forward is defensive rather than sufficient and runs the risk of violating his own theories. In any case, he has failed in his great hope of coming near the common man and makes his muse tread the hard ground and he really could not declass himself and be one with common man. The supposed simplified medium also fails him there. But in fact, the simplicity of prose poems is deceptive. It can be said definitely that common man and the common reader prefer the earlier Tagore to the later. The appeal of the sophisticated writer of prose poems is confined to an ever-shrinking clientele. Social stratification, the absence of generally shared cultural values or workaday themes contributed to this failure. It is not the poet who has to be blamed and not his ingenuity that is being questioned but the adequacy of the measure adopted. It is Tagore’s extraordinary modesty that he acknowledges this failure more than once. Tagore’s prose poems may not have achieved the great results that he had expected from them, but at their best, they have their own excellence and justification. Even if he himself were to give it up they have created a tendency which has become a tradition and has produced some of original masterpieces. It has been of special help to the younger poets who have taken it to fresh fields and pastures new. It is an irony of fate that some of them began their work by making fun of the Tagorean attitude to life and poetry.[6]
Later on, Tagore himself liked to think that this change in form was due to change in his point of view, what is called in art-history a change in the form of beholding. He also felt that, in the process, he might come closer to the spirit of the age and the people. In this sense, an attempt at greater intimacy and exploration of areas of self and society which had so far escaped his notice, a reaching towards the source, a closer contact between life and poetry. There is an obvious increase in the references to neglected aspects of life or the voiceless millions.
In many an analogy and simile he tries to press the point home. In this present mood the river Kopai seems to be a symbol for the workaday style which he has adopted (or imagines he has):
Her speech is the speech of the humble home,
not the language of the learned;
her rhythm has a common kinship with the land and the river…
The Kopai has mad the rhythm of the Poet’s verse its own…
To its broken cadence the Santal boy,
With his bows and arrows, tramps along;
and the cart loaded with straw;
the potter goes to the market,
a pair of pots tied to his pole;
and the village dog fondly following;
and the village schoolmaster, worth three rupees a month
a tattered umbrella over his head. (Kopai/ “Kopai”)
The explanatory tendency accounts for a number of statements or exercises of doubtful value. These give away the case rather than support it. For instance, in the poem, Nutan Juug/“The New Age”, still justifying the ways of prose to his readers, he gives a sentimental, but what for a moment he thinks to be the historical justification for the experiment. Probably he admits that his poetry has missed certain things. For, it now seems to him, prose is nearer to the spirit of the age than verse, and poetry’s survival depends on an alliance with prose. So he says, somewhat condescendingly:
I had to return once more
at the day’s I have begun a new game,
all for your sake,
for love’s expectation
I have dressed my muse
in your trappings,
on the roadside by the traveller’s shade I leave it,
O my pilgrim friend, thinking of you.
So that you too can say, when the time comes, and that you liked it.
(Nutan Juug/“The New Age”)
To this New Age the poet has sworn his fidelity and like all converts he also seems a little over-zealous. The poet confesses that he is left alone, pushed from side to side in the crowd of the new and the unfamiliar. The rapprochement which he had hoped for is not achieved. The apologetic strain continues in three more poems in Sesh Saptak. Here “there is a roadside meeting where the poet has been asked to read some of his verses. Opening his he is overcome with shyness. These poems, he feels, ‘are soft and pretty, they are not for the open, the rough and tumble of daily life’. Instead of reading them he rises to go. To the question, “Where are you off to?” he replies, “I am going to the difficult, the hard and the pitiless, to bring the song of the brave and stoic heart.”[7] There is nothing wrong in seeking for ‘songs of the brave hearts’ but the question remains: need these be in prose pomes, or prose, as Tagore seems to insist? Songs in prose, that brilliant impossibility was achieved not even by the great Tagore himself. In another poem he uses the imagery of the waterfall to make his meaning clear: his poems, he says, are like a wayward waterfall, now broad now thin. “In fact the poems are zigzag stream rather than waterfall”.[8] Again in another poem he discovers that “all his early writings have been aloof and aristocratic, they are like a garden inside the royal Zenana, shut off from public gaze. Outside the high palace walls stand the tall Eucalyptus and the Golden Showers, glad under sunlit sky.”[9]
From the technique Prantik’s/On the Margin’s grave sonnet-like form is an immense advance on the lolling prose poems. A slim volume of eighteen mostly short poems, its claim to attention is due to more than one reason. A direct outcome of the illness of 1937, most of the poems were written during three short, but strenuous months. Its immediate inspiration is sickness and death, its aim is towards life and wholeness. The diffuseness is gone at a stroke; instead there is a tension that never slackens. Concentrated in effect and detail, Prantik’s close interwoven texture reveals – because it is the result of – difficult and delicate adjustment between disparate impulses and attitudes. The unity and passion are due to its central experience.
The prose poems serve certain purposes as well. For instance, they enable him to make some excellent criticism of his own works, in a way he had never done before. At the lowest, they suggest a growing dissatisfaction with his earlier manner. The new style also gives us a few ‘still life’ descriptions which no other medium could render so well, with such intimacy and impersonality. Conscious, as never before, that his art did not belong to the people, Tagore seems now to voice their still, sad music into verses.
Sir Walter Scot’s description of the last metaphor is rare among the major critics of the time because, by characterising art as communication, “it brings the audience to parity with the stress of the artist’s own feelings as a cause of artistic production.” The painter, orator, and poet each has the motive
of exciting in the reader, hearer, or spectator, a tone of feeling similar to that which existed in his own bosom, ere it was bodied forth by his pencil, tongue, or pen. It is the artist’s object, in short…to continue, as well as colours and words can do the same sublime sensations which had dictated his own composition. (Idler No. 34)[10]
The poet can not be isolated from his heart. If Scot’s motive is to be considered then, the poet and the reader communicate on the same stage where they complement each other, one is the poet or the speaker and another is reader, hearer etc. The poet creates and the reader fulfills. Tagore like any other mortal poet looks for gratifications from his readers and no poet writes to keep the piece of art to himself, he needs the reader front. The poet, stung by the negative criticism of his poetry if asserts himself through his poems, there is nothing wide of the mark.
There is Wordsworth’s general contention that the standards of poetry are those of the natural language of feeling in ordinary speech and
Poetry is competent to express emotions chiefly by its resources of figures of speech and rhythm, by means of which words naturally embody and convey the feeling of the poet. In opposition to the earlier doctrine that figurative language and meter are primarily ornaments used to heighten the aesthetic pleasure, the typical romantic opinion was that expressed by Wordsworth. There is no need in poetry to deviate from ordinary language “for elevation of style, or any of its supposed ornaments: for, if the Poet’s subject be judiciously chosen, it will naturally, and upon fir occasion, lead him to passions the language of which, if selected truly and judiciously, must necessarily be dignified and variegated, and alive with metaphors and figures.”(Wordsworth’s Literary Criticism pp.21-2)[11]
Then it is essential to poetry that its language is spontaneous and genuine, not the contrived and pretentious, expression of the emotional state of the poet.
Based on the above theories, Tagore’s prose poems are not only full with poetic truths and metaphors but there is a conscious restraint also. The unseen and unfelt hold-back on the poet’s part is felt by the reader of his later poetry and is enough to put checks on the ‘overflow’ of the music.
Tagore’s use of colloquialism is amazing, but it is colloquialism supported by long years of culture and cultivation. Its sensitive sophistication is beyond the reach of the poor folk whose mouthpiece, for the nonce, he wants to be. He has drawn freely from indigenous traditions, such as those of the ‘bauls’, for instance. In the phraseology of the Leftist criticism, he has not been able to ‘de-class’ himself. He could not be common, much less a revolutionary or a proletarian poet. He neither speaks nor feels like them; perhaps because he has never lived like them. Some of the subjects chosen may seem to belong to the everyday world, but the treatment is stamped with the poet’s individuality. Whatever else the prose poems may have done for him, they did not make him a people’s poet. There are limitations to accept than to fight against them. In many ways the prose poems turned out to be a blind alley. Later on he moves out of it. Perhaps, the beginning was on a note of hope but ended with a sigh. Marxist criticism made the great poet discard the “prose” form later but then the charge was graver than the above one that he could not be one of the common people he wrote for, he could not declass himself. Like most innovators, Tagore enthusiasm did not last and poems written in this form became curiosities of literature than anything else.
“Romantic predications about poetry and art turn on a metaphor, which like ‘overflow’, signify the internal made external.”[12] Poetry “is the music of language,” Hazlitt wrote, “expressing the music of the mind.” Shelley declared that “poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be the expression of the imagination,” and Byron complained to Tom Moore, “I can never get people to understand that poetry is the expression of excited passion…” and finally Leigh Hunt reconciled these differences by the simple device of a definition which, as David Masson has remarked, is “constructed on the principle of omitting nothing that anyone would like to see included.”[13]
In these central predications about the nature of poetry, the principle difference lies in the use of metaphor and activities of mind cannot be without metaphor. Perhaps, no human artifact can be judged apart from the intention of the maker who imposes a design on the primary stuff, thereby shaping something plain to create something rich and strange.
Art is for man. Poetry is no exception. Each poet has his own beliefs, his scheme of values, an outlook of life as inspired in a world seen refracted through imagination. In spite of his following a distinct style of expression, his world is altogether different from any other of his brethren, and this individuality is the principle of organization informing his universe of representation in works what is conceived non-verbally in moments of contemplation.
The tone of quiet acceptance with a latent awareness of century-old sufferings of the humankind perhaps indicates Tagore’s very Indian sensibility. But what gives an identity to the poetry of Tagore is the breadth of his understanding of the universe, Nature, his fellow men and depth of this vision in the never ending quest for the Infinite.
A FINAL APPRAISAL
Brutal night comes silently,
Breaks down the loosened
bolts of my spent body,
Enters my insides,
Starts stealing images of life’s dignity:
My heart succumbs to the assault of darkness.
The shame of defeat,
the insult of this fatigue,
Grow intense.
Suddenly on the horizon,
Dawn’s banner laced with rays of gold;
From a distant centre of the sky a shout:
‘It’s a lie, a lie!’
Against the tranquil light of morning
I can see myself as conqueror of sorrows
Standing on top of my fortress, my ruin, my body.
(Dekhlam Abasanna Chetanar Godhulibelaye/“I Saw in the Twilight”)
In January 1941, Tagore composed a poem, published shortly after in a collection with the hopeful title Arogya/Healing, that brilliantly captured the suffering and the faith underlying his final year of existence. He seems to have heard his own death summons. He begins to see his body as an entity distinct from himself:
I saw – in the twilight of tired
Consciousness,
My body drifting down black
Kalindi’s stream:
With its mass of feelings, its varied sorrows,
A lifetime’s memories stored in its figured shroud,
And with its flute. Farther and farther away…
(Dekhlam Abasanna Chetanar Godhulibelaye/“I Saw in the Twilight”)
If one examines the works of any great innovator in chronological order one may perhaps expect to find that the author has been driven on, step by step, by an inner necessity, by the inner call. The growth of the poet is followed in this thesis step by step’ from his first rhyme to the last song on the eve of his death.
In the last phase of his life, Tagore perceived the crisis of civilization looming large. He now sees evil as much more powerful and pervasive than before. Once the poet had imagined individual man and social man to be advancing ceaselessly towards unity and goodness and now one searing insight pierces to dissolve this vision. The war-torn world, the violence, the atrocity of a civilised nation on a weaker one, the hate war between the pale and the dark, the racial abuse – for a moment blurred the vision of poet but he looks on till the end for the advent of the Supreme Man in history.
“Crisis in Civilization was not Tagore’s final pronouncement of British rule. In June 1941, he received a letter from Foss Westcott, the bishop of Calcutta (and head of the Anglican Church in India) who had made his home, pleading for more sympathetic Congress understanding of Britain’s peril in the war. Tagore replied in measured words that may stand for his ultimate verdict on this deeply contentious subject:
I have neither the right nor the desire to judge the British people as such, but I cannot help being concerned at the conduct of the British Government in India, since it directly involves the life and well-being of millions of my countrymen. I am too painfully conscious of the extreme poverty, helplessness and misery of our people not to deplore the supineness of the Government that has tolerated this condition for so long…I had hoped that the leaders of the British nation, who had grown apathetic to our suffering and forgetful of their own sacred trust in India during heir days of prosperity and success, would at last, in time of their own great trial, awake to justice and humanity of our cause. It has been a most grievous disappointment to me to find that fondly cherished hope receding farther from realization each day. Believe me; nothing would give me greater happiness than to see the people of the West and East march in a common crusade against all that robs the human spirit of its significance.”[14]
The acerbic tenor of Tagore’s response to Rathbone[15] can be gathered from his statement that:
The British hate the Nazis for merely challenging their – world mastery… It is not so much because the British are foreigners that they are unwelcome to us and have found no place in our hearts, as because, while pretending to be trustees of our welfare, they have betrayed the great trust and have sacrificed the happiness of millions in India to bloat the pockets of a few capitalists at home.[16]
The aim of this research was to bring forth the multi-faceted persona of Tagore and to study his poetry that are not included in Gitanjali, thematically and to establish that he is not a poet but a ‘poet’s poet’, maker of not only modern Indian literature but also the modern mind. Myriad minded, he was a poet, short story writer, novelist, dramatist, essayist, painter and composer of songs. Perhaps more a poet than an Oriental Sage. Perhaps more a composer of songs than poems. Whatever might happen to the rest of the corpus, his songs he knew, would survive. He wrote letters as well. But the paintings speak the most vividly. As he had said in Germany in 1930: “My poetry is for my countrymen, my paintings are my gift to the West.”[17] Out of more than two thousand paintings and ‘twelve self portraits of Tagore’, it is still difficult to comprehend something of his mercurial complexity. “They are as far from the saintly, tedious image of him engendered by insipid translations of his own poetry as one can get. Here, one feels is a man who recognises the savage in himself and is grappling with it; here Rabindranath is as much Old Bluebeard as Wise Man from the East. Other paintings and drawings cover a huge gamut of moods, subjects and styles, with a correspondingly bold but harmonious palette.”[18] There are very few painters as reticent and stunning like Tagore and his paintings offer a whole world awaiting discovery.
The first chapter shows the growth of the poet and the milieu that he was born in. The family history is touched upon to show his great ancestors in the light of Indian Renaissance. The contribution of his elder siblings in the making of the genius, the puritan living of his father, the Zamindari, his own family, wife and children – all have been studied in the area of the research because the poet cannot grow up in isolation. The Indian Renaissance and the towering personalities of the era have also been given their due prominence so as to bring forth the culture and ethos of the period in which Tagore was born.
Comparisons have been drawn between the poet and English Romantics against the backdrop different critical theories with the aim to establish Tagore on the same stand as that of them.
Looking back one is struck by the variety, the abundance and the dynamism. At the centre of the ceaseless, copious, at times unequal creativity, stands a person. A life full of events, the shift from a regional milieu to the boundless sky does not escape notice. A seeker of the Surplus and the Shudur/Beyond, he also claimed to be Ami Prithivir Kobi/“A Poet of the Earth”. “To detach the individual idea from its confinement of everyday facts and gives its soaring wings the freedom of the universal; this is the function of poetry. The ambition of Macbeth, the jealousy of Othello, would be at best sensational in police court proceedings; but in Shakespeare’s dramas they are carried among the flaming constellations where creation throbs with Eternal passion, Eternal Pain.”[19]
The poet neither seems a Vyasa Muni nor a Buddha; he had his weaknesses both as man and artist. To admire or to be hypnotised, may not be the only alternative, most of Tagore’s has been an indulgence, not investigation. The image projected by the media, the cultists and the roundelay of functions is not the Tagore who is needed but the Tagore who matters. The secret of the creativity is hard to catch, harder to comprehend. Growing, changing, there is a sense of the “not yet” about him till the end. One of his prayers in Gitanjali/Song Offerings had been an enlightened awareness:
I dive into the depth of the ocean of forms, hoping to gain the perfect pearl of the formless.
No more sailing from harbour to harbour with this my weather-beaten boat. The days are long past when my sport was to be tossed on waves.
And now I am eager to die into the deathless.
(Gitanjali/Song Offerings)
Who will reveal the face of the poet’s truth? Ages hence people will wonder that such a man had walked on this earth, had been one of the ordinary human being.
[1] Krishna Dutta &Andrew Robinson: Rabindranath Tagore : The Myriad Minded Man (New Delhi, Rupa & Co.,2003) p.
[2] Uma Das Gupta (ed.): My Life in my Words (New Delhi, Viking Penguin, 2006), p.83
[3]Krishna Dutta &Andrew Robinson: Rabindranath Tagore : The Myriad Minded Man (New Delhi, Rupa & Co.,2003) p.101
[4] Rabindranath Tagore: The Religion of Man, (New Delhi, Rupa & Co.,2007), p.48
[5] Dr. Sisir Kumar Das: The Later Poems of Tagore (Shantiniketan, Visva-Bharathi,1964) p.59
[6] Dr. Sisir Kumar Das: The Later Poems of Tagore (Shantiniketan, Visva-Bharathi,1964) p.45
[7] Dr. Sisir Kumar Das: The Later Poems of Tagore (Shantiniketan, Visva-Bharathi,1964) p.79
[8] Ibid. p.35
[9] Dr. Sisir Kumar Das: The Later Poems of Tagore (Shantiniketan, Visva-Bharathi,1964) p.33
[10] MH Abrams (ed.): English Romantic Poets, (New Delhi, OUP, 1975), p.35
[11] MH Abrams (ed.) :The Mirror and the Lamp (New Delhi, OUP, 2006), p.102
[12]M.H.Abrams (ed.):The Mirror and The Lamp (New Delhi, OUP,2006) p.48
[13] Ibid pp.49-50
[14] 16 June 1941. Westcott was provoked to write by Tagore’s statement on 04 June 1941 in reply to an open letter to Indians sent by Eleanor Rathbone, MP, asking them to cooperate with the British in fighting Fascism. Krishna Dutta &Andrew Robinson: Rabindranath Tagore : The Myriad Minded Man (New Delhi, Rupa & Co.,2003) p.439
[15] Krishna Dutta &Andrew Robinson: Rabindranath Tagore : The Myriad Minded Man (New Delhi, Rupa & Co.,2003) p.345
[16] The entire statement is printed in Calcutta Municipal Gazette, p.107. Rathbone’s view is explained in Stocks, which also reproduces Jawaharlal Nehru’s pungent response to Rathbone’s letter as an appendix. Ibid. p.346
[17] Humayun Kabir (ed.): Poems of Rabindranath Tagore (Calcutta, UBSPD, 2005), p.1
[18] Krishna Dutta &Andrew Robinson: Rabindranath Tagore : The Myriad Minded Man (New Delhi, Rupa & Co.,2003) pp.355-56
[19] Rabindranath Tagore: Omnibus I (New Delhi, Rupa & Co.,2007) p.115
