I Won't Let You Go: Selected Poems

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I Won't Let You Go: Selected Poems Page 17

by Rabindranath Tagore


  covering it quite. Each minute, second going by

  leaves its souvenir-script upon the mind,

  like the deformed doodlings of a heedless boy,

  each obscuring the other, weaving amnesia’s net.

  If this Phalgun I have perchance forgotten

  the message of that earlier Phalgun, if the flame

  has silently died on grief’s lamp, forgive me then.

  Yet I know, because you had once appeared,

  harvests of song had ripened in my life,

  which continue; once the light of your eyes

  had played its vina, wringing the innermost notes

  from sunlight itself. Gone is your touch,

  but what a touchstone you have left within my heart,

  which shows me still, at times, the undying

  panorama of this universe, makes me drink

  causeless joy’s full cup. Forgive my oblivion.

  I know you had once called me into your heart,

  which is why I myself forgive my own fate,

  forgetting all those miseries, those griefs

  which it has heaped on my days: how it has snatched

  thirst’s water-cup from my lips, conned me with smiles,

  betrayed my confidence, suddenly upset

  my laden ship within sight of shore: all I forgive.

  You are no more. You have hopelessly receded.

  Evenings are mournful, charged with your smothered vermilion.

  My mateless life in an empty house has no grace.

  All this I accept, and above all, that you were here once.

  [On board the Andes, 2 November 1924]

  The Apprehension

  The more you heap my hands

  with the coins of love,

  won’t it expose the more the deceit’s depth

  that’s within me?

  Better for me to pay my piling debts

  and sail away in an empty boat.

  Better that I should starve and you withdraw

  your heart filled with nectar

  and go away.

  To dull my pain

  I might wake it in you;

  to lighten my load

  I might press it on you;

  my anguished cry of loneliness well might

  keep you awake at night –

  such are my fears, why I don’t speak freely.

  If you can forget,

  please do.

  On a lonesome trail I was, when you came along,

  your eyes set on my face.

  I thought I’d say, ‘Why not come with me?

  Say something to me, please!’

  But all of a sudden, as I gazed at your face,

  I felt afraid.

  I saw a dormant fire’s secret smoulder

  in the obscure depths

  of your heart’s darkest night.

  Anchoress, should I suddenly fan

  the flames of your penance into a blazing fire,

  wouldn’t that stark light slash all veils asunder

  and lay my poverty bare?

  What have I got to offer as sacred fuel

  to your passion’s sacrificial fire?

  Therefore I say to you with humility:

  With the memory of our meeting

  let me return alone.

  [Miralrío, San Isidro, near Buenos Aires, 17 November 1924]

  The Skeleton

  There on the plain, on the way-side, an animal’s skeleton

  is lying on the grass,

  the same grass that had once given it strength

  and gentle rest.

  They lie, bleached bones in a heap,

  time’s loud dry laughter,

  like death pointing its finger, insinuating:

  Where the beast ends

  there you end as well; there’s no distinction;

  in your case too, when life’s wine’s been drained,

  the broken cup will be left like that in the dust.

  I said: Death, I don’t believe what you say

  mockingly of emptiness.

  My life’s not the sort that becomes a total pauper

  at its journey’s end,

  that at the end of the day

  pays with hollow bones its last bill of board and bed.

  All that I’ve thought and known, spoken, heard with my ears,

  all that has burst from me in sudden songs

  were not contained in a life hemmed by death.

  What I’ve received and what I’ve given back –

  on this earth of mortals where can that be measured?

  Many a time has my mind’s dance transcended

  life and death, and gone where beauty lives

  eternally. Can it then stop for ever

  at the boundary of bones?

  My true identity

  cannot be measured by flesh.

  The hours and minutes don’t wear it out by their kicks,

  nor does the wayside dust pauperise it.

  For in the lotus of manifest form I’ve drunk the honey of the formless,

  in the bosom of suffering found the dwelling of joy,

  heard within me the voice of eternal silence,

  seen the way of stars through the dark empty spaces.

  No, I’m not a big joke of the Creator,

  not a grand holocaust built with infinite riches.

  [Chapadmalal, near Mar del Plata, Argentina, 17 December 1924]

  The Exchange

  Flowers of laughter she brought, and I

  the fruits of suffering’s monsoon piled in a basket.

  And I said to her, ‘If we do an exchange,

  tell me who’ll be the loser!’

  The beauty laughed, mightily amused,

  and said, ‘Come, let’s do it!

  Have my flower-chain. Let me take your fruits

  filled with the juice of tears.’

  I looked at her face, and right enough

  a belle dame sans merci she was.

  She picked up my basket of fruits, laughed and clapped,

  mightily amused.

  I took her garland of flowers,

  pressed it to my breast.

  ‘Mine’s the victory!’ she cried, and never stopped laughing

  as she scampered off.

  The sun, he meanwhile clambered to the zenith

  to burn the earth.

  The hot day ended. In the evening I discovered

  that all my flowers had perished.

  [On board the Giulio Cesare, going away from Argentina, 17 January 1925]

  FROM Mahua (1929)

  The Identity

  In rain-stopped afternoon clouds

  fear still lurked,

  as the wind blustered at times,

  mouthing sharp rebukes.

  Above, in the sun’s red, cloud-torn, Durvasa’s wrath

  flared in oblique glares of bloodshot eyes

  and dun matted locks.

  In that dismal weather I brought you an afternoon gift,

  kadambas in a basket.

  In the rain’s sombre shadow

  in a songless dawn

  those despair-dispelling flowers in a lampblack-hour

  had stocked, in their ecstatic pollen, visions of the sun.

  When sluggish clouds, hard pressed by easterly clouds,

  had rushed to the sky’s rim,

  and on a Srabon night

  the woods, hit by a cataclysm, had wept,

  even then the bold kadamba had shed its scent

  to birds’ nests, stalks unwearied, not yet felled.

  With such a flower, symbol of my confidence,

  I made you a present.

  In the dripping evening, friend, you brought me

  a single ketaki.

  I was by myself,

  my lamp unlit.

  In the tossed dense green of a row of areca-palms

  fireflies flitted, unflagging in their quest.

  You stood outside my d
oor,

  secretly smiled.

  ‘What have you brought?’

  I asked, curious.

  Raindrops fell pitter-patter on the leaves;

  I stretched my hand in the fragrance-laden dark.

  Abruptly did my limb reverberate

  to a staccato of thorns.

  How that barbed touch caught me unawares

  like a pleasure’s sharp twang!

  It wasn’t an offer of surrender, easily gained,

  but splendour within, sheathed in spiky pain.

  A homage hedged in by don’ts

  was what you gave me.

  [Calcutta, 20 August 1928]

  Disappearance

  On the canvas of disappearance I see your eternal form.

  You’ve finally arrived in my invisible inner domain.

  The jewel of everlasting touch have I obtained.

  You’ve yourself filled the gap made by your absence.

  When life darkened, I found

  you’d left within me evening’s chapel-lamp.

  Through separation’s sacrificial fire

  passion becomes worship, lit by suffering’s light.

  [Santiniketan, July 1928 (26 Ashadh 1335)]

  FROM Punashcha (1932)

  Kopai

  Padma meanders away under far skies:

  I see her in my mind.

  On one side sandbanks,

  fearless, for they’re destitute, without attachments;

  on the other side bamboo and mango groves,

  old banyans, derelict cottages,

  jack-trees of many years’ standing, with fat trunks,

  a field of mustard by a pond,

  wayside jungles of rattan,

  an indigo factory’s ruined foundations, a hundred and fifty years old,

  tall casuarinas murmuring in its garden night and day.

  There’s the neighbourhood of the Rajbangshis,

  where their goats graze on cracked fields,

  and a granary with a tin roof stands by the market-place.

  The whole village trembles with fear of the cruel river.

  Hallowed in legends is that river’s name.

  Mandakini flows in her pulse.

  She is free. She passes by human dwellings,

  endures them, but doesn’t acknowledge them.

  Her uncorrupted high-born metre holds

  the memory of desolate mountains and the call of lonely seas.

  On her sandbank-moorings it was once my lot to dwell,

  in solitude, far from crowds.

  Seeing the morning star, I would rise at dawn,

  and at night sleep on boat-deck

  under the Great Bear’s eyes.

  Her indifferent streams would flow

  past the margins of the multitudinous thoughts

  of my lonely days and nights,

  even as a traveller skirts

  a householder’s joys and sorrows, near yet far.

  Then at the end of my days of youth I came

  to this savannah’s edge

  where shaded Santhal villages make a fringe of massed green.

  River Kopai is my neighbour here.

  Not hers the glamour of an ancient line.

  Her name’s non-Aryan,

  linked to the laughter-rich

  sweet speech of generations of Santhal women.

  With the village she’s on intimate terms:

  between land and water there’s no conflict here

  and dialogue’s easy between her two banks.

  Fields of san-hemp are in flower, brushing right against her body;

  green rice seedlings have risen.

  Where the footpath stops, meeting her bank,

  she gives way to the farer,

  letting him walk across

  her murmuring crystal current.

  Not far, the fan-palm rises from the plain;

  mangoes, jaams, amlokis jostle on the banks.

  She speaks the tongue of common men;

  nobody would call it literary.

  Her rhythm binds land and water together;

  there’s no rivalry between the liquid and the green.

  Her slim body twists and turns

  through light and shade,

  dancing in simple steps to hand-clappings.

  In the rains her limbs are touched with ecstasy

  like a village girl drunk on mahua wine:

  she doesn’t break or cause to drown,

  just twirls and twirls the eddies of her skirts,

  gives little pushes to both her banks,

  and laughing loudly, races along.

  At the end of the post-rains her waters become limpid,

  her flow becomes thinner,

  showing the sand below,

  yet the pallor of that shrunken celebration

  cannot shame her,

  for her affluence isn’t arrogant, nor is her poverty a disgrace:

  she is lovely in both –

  like a dancer who dances, jingling her jewels,

  and sits quietly, tired,

  laziness in her eyes

  and the hint of a smile in the corner of her mouth.

  Kopai has made a poet’s rhythm her own companion today,

  a rhythm that reconciles an idiom’s land and water,

  what in speech is song and what is homely.

  Walking to that flawed measure, a Santhal boy will trip across,

  bow in hand;

  a bullock-cart will cross over

  with stacks of straw;

  the potter will trot to market,

  his pots slung from a pole,

  followed by the village dog

  and the three-rupees-a-month schoolmaster,

  a torn umbrella over his head.

  [August 1932 (1 Bhadra 1339)]

  By the Pond

  From the first-floor window eyes can see

  a corner of the pond

  brimful in the month of Bhadra.

  Trees, deeply reflected, tremble in the waters

  with the sheen of green silk.

  Clumps of kolmi and heloncho grow on the borders.

  On the sloping bank arecas face each other.

  On this side are oleanders, white rongons, one shiuli,

  two neglected tuberoses showing impoverished buds.

  A henna hedge with bamboo reinforcements;

  beyond it, orchards of banana, guava, coconut.

  Further off, among trees, a house’s roof-terrace

  with a sari hanging from it.

  A fat bare-chested man, a wet cloth round his head,

  sits on the ghat’s paved steps, his fishing-line cast.

  Hour after hour passes.

  The day wanes.

  Rain-rinsed sky.

  Abnegation’s pallor in the ageing light.

  A slow breeze stirs,

  rippling the waters of the pond;

  shaddock leaves quiver and glint.

  I look, and it seems to me

  that this is the pale reflection of another day,

  bringing me, through the gaps in the fence of modernity,

  the image of someone from a far-off age.

  Her touch is tender, her voice gentle,

  her black eyes are enchanted and naïve.

  The wide red border of her white sari

  falls circling her feet.

  She spreads a mat for her guest to sit on the yard;

  she wipes the dust off with her sari’s end;

  she fetches water in the shades of mangoes and jacks;

  then the magpie robin calls from the shajina branch

  and the black drongo swings its tail among date trees.

  When I say goodbye to her and come away,

  she can hardly say anything, –

  just leaves the door ajar

  and stands there, looking at the road,

  and her eyes dim.

  [August 1932 (25 Srabon 1339)]

  Dwelling

 
; By the River Mayurakshi.

  As my pet deer and calf are on friendly terms,

  so are the sal and mahua trees.

  They shed their leaves

  and these are blown to my window.

  In the east the fan-palm stands erect:

  morning’s oblique light

  casts its stolen shadow on my wall.

  A footpath skirts the river

  over red soil,

  its dust strewn with the kurchi’s fallen flowers.

  The aroma of shaddock blossoms

  hugs the wind;

  there’s rivalry between jarul and polash and madar;

  the shajina’s floral tassels swing in the air

  and the chameli winds all along the fence

  by the River Mayurakshi.

  Paved with red stones,

  the steps of a modest ghat descend to the river.

  By the ghat stands a champak of many years

  with a fat trunk.

  Over the river I’ve built a bamboo bridge

  and placed on either side in urns of glass

  jasmines, bels, tuberoses, white oleanders.

  The waters are deep in places,

  with pebbles below,

  where swans come floating,

  while on the sloping bank

  graze my russet milch-cow

  and brinded calf

  by the River Mayurakshi.

  A pale blue rug on the floor

  is embroidered with dark brown flowers.

  The walls are saffron

  with borders of black lines.

  A little veranda looks towards the east;

  there I sit even before the sun rises.

  And I’ve found a person

  from whose throat the notes splash

  like light from a dancer’s bracelets.

  She lives in the cottage next door,

  a passiflora trailing over her roof.

  It’s when she sings to herself

  that I hear her at all,

  for I never ask her to sing.

  Her husband’s a good chap:

  he likes my writings,

 

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