Selected Poems (Tagore, Rabindranath)

by Rabindranath Tagore

  All line references are to the translations, not the originals. But I have followed the Bengali lines closely enough for anyone to locate particular phrases without too much difficulty.

  Nearly all the poems are ascribed to the book in which they first appeared. Readers consulting the Visva-Bharati edition of Tagore’s complete works will sometimes find discrepancies, as poems sometimes appeared again in later books (‘Broken Song’, for example, was reprinted in the combined volume kathā skāhinī, 1903). The edition published by the West Bengal Government in the 1980s restores the poems to their chronological position.

  1882–1913

  Brahmā, Visnu, Śiva (p. 45)

  si sthiti pralay from prabhāt-sangit (Morning Songs), 1883

  The poems in this book followed the religious experience described in R217: as the sun rose, ‘all of a sudden a covering seemed to fall away from my eyes, and I found the world bathed in a wonderful radiance, with waves of beauty and joy swelling on every side’. The vision liberated Tagore from the adolescent egoism, ‘the contemplation of my own heart’ (R200), that had dominated his writing hitherto.

  The poem I have chosen was originally much longer: Tagore shortened it when he came to include it in sañcayitā, the selected poems that I have used for the first two-thirds of my book. The original title means ‘Creation, Preservation, Destruction’, the main attributes of the three deities featured in the poem (see Glossary for further information). Tagore’s most characteristic addition to the mythology is his image of Visu as Poet: in 1.34 he is called jagater mahā-bedabyās, ‘the great Vedavyāsa of the world’ (Vedavyāsa, often known simply as Vyāsa, was the legendary author of the Mahābhārata, the great primary epic of India); in 1.43 the Law that he imposes is called mahā-chanda mahā-anuprās (‘great metre, great alliteration’). The metaphor recurs in 1.78, where the dissolving world is described as chanda-mukta, ‘free of metre’. 11.44–54 emphasize that beauty can only emerge after the imposition of Law. See S98: ‘Law is the first step towards freedom, and beauty is the complete liberation which stands on the pedestal of law. Beauty harmonizes in itself the limit and the beyond, the law and the liberty.’ rūp (1.46,54) means ‘form’ and ‘beauty’ in Sanskrit and Bengali.

  The poem also shows the influence of science (especially in 11.56–60 and 81–5). Tagore did not believe that science described Reality as he understood it (see notes to ‘Deception’, ‘The Wakening of Śiva’, ‘The Sick-bed – 21’ and ‘On My Birthday – 20’), but he was always keenly interested in it and felt that India had to learn from the science of the West. Four years before his death he published bisva–paricay, an introduction to modern science for Bengali readers.

  9 ‘growing’ – prā–pūrna: ‘full of prān, life’ (and therefore growth).

  10 āśsā-pūra atptir prāy: ‘like dissatisfaction that is full of hope’.

  16 lit., ‘from the gangotrī-crest ofthe world’. The Himalayan source of the Ganges (Gangotri) is used here as a metaphor for a Primary Source

  27 ‘conch – mangal-sankha: ‘conch of welfare’. The Pāncajanya, conch of Visnu and his chief incarnation Krsna, is important in Indian mythology. See Conch in the Glossary.

  44–7 The writing is vague here. Vi§nu may be floating on the water, or looking into it from the edge of the lake. There is no traditional link between Visnu and the Mānasa lake, and the ālok-kamal-dal (‘light-lotuses’) of 1.47 comes from Tagore’s imagination, not mythology.

  70 ‘three eyes’ – tin-kāl-tri-nayan: ‘three-ages-triple-eye’, i.e. looking into past, present and future.

  Bride (p. 47)

  badhū from mānasī (The Lady of the Mind), 1890

  I have chosen three poems from what is regarded in Bengal as Tagore’s first book of genius. It was written over three years, an unusually long time for Tagore. Dissatisfaction with city life was growing in him, and his wife and two young children were subjected to many changes of abode during this period: Darjeeling, Sholapur and Poona in Bombay Presidency, Ghazipur in western U. P., Shelidah in north Bengal, and Santiniketan, where ‘Bride’ was written. Preference for the rural over the urban became one of Tagore’s dominant ideas, inspiring his experiment at Santiniketan. Modern man’s alienation from nature ‘is the product of the city-wall habit and training of mind’ (S5; see also CU116 and RM170 for Tagore’s dislike of Calcutta). Tagore’s feelings about cities have their roots in his own sense of constriction as a child (see R1 1,45); and this is perhaps why he is able to realize the Bride’s unhappiness with such intensity.

  ‘Bride’ is also about the devaluation of women, caused by faults in Indian social traditions as well as by modern, urban, male-dominated civilization. In 11.49–50 the Bride is made to feel that she is up for sale, like a garland. But the poem reveals Tagore’s loyalty to the positive aspects of Hindu social life: the Bride is prevented by her situation from exercising the qualities of love and devotion that her mother shows (11.55–62).

  The Bride is young, in her teens probably, but not a child. Child-marriage, which Tagore had attacked in a paper on Hindu marriage in 1887, is satirized in another poem in mānasī.

  The word that I have translated as ‘gaiety’ in 1.54 and ‘playing’ in 1.77 is khelā: see notes to the next poem.

  3 ‘shade’ – chāyā sakhī: the shade that was also sakhī, a friend or companion. Some readers say there should be a comma after chāyā, making sakhī an imaginary confidante to whom the bride is addressing her monologue.

  5 ‘I sit alone with my thoughts’ – and also grha-kone: ‘in the corner of a room’ (cf. 1.46).

  19 ‘oleanders’ – karabī: see Glossary.

  35 ‘open path’ – udār path-ghāt: ‘the generous, open-hearted path and steps’.

  61 ‘temple’ – śib-ālay : ‘home of Śiva’, Śiva-temple.

  Unending Love (p. 49)

  ananta prem from mānasī, 1890

  This poem can be compared with ‘Love’s Question’, but here the lover’s hyperbole is presented without irony. It is a lyric poem, not a song, but it takes us into the world of Tagore’s songs, in which love between human beings is a manifestation of divine love, and the ‘play’ (khelā, 1.13) of lovers a counterpart to the khelā of the universe. khelā is the interplay between God and his creation; between infinite, eternal Being and finite, mortal Becoming; between Perfection and the desire to become one with that Perfection: ‘Brahma is Brahma, he is the infinite ideal of perfection. But we are not what we truly are; we are ever to become true, ever to become Brahma. There is the eternal play of love in the relation between this being and the becoming; and in the depth of this mystery is the source of all truth and beauty that sustains the endless march of creation’ (S155). khelā has a dark side to it, since it separates us from God; and sometimes it stands for the vanity of life (as in 1.77 of ‘Bride’). But more often it implies creativity: for God can only express his joy through creating finite forms, just as the poet expresses his love through creating poems and songs (see S104).

  Because khelā involves union and separation at the same time, these two feelings are much emphasized in Indian accounts of love. What I have translated as ‘meeting’ and ‘farewell’ in 1.14 are really the states of being together or apart, milan and biraha.

  2 ‘in life after life’ – janme janme: ‘in birth after birth’. Indian concepts of karma and re-birth are involved here.

  15 ‘in shapes’ – sāje: ‘in dress, garb’.

  18 ‘universal life’ – nikhil prāner prīti: ‘the delight or gladness (pritī). inherent in the universal principle of life (prān)’.

  The Meghadūta (p. 50)

  megh-dūt from mānasī, 1890

  This magnificent poem should be read in conjuction with ‘Yaksa’ and the essay on Kālidāsa’s Meghadūta that I have translated in Appendix A, as well as Kālidāsa’s masterpiece itself (see Glossary). Tagore’s poem is rhymed in couplets, but with shifting caesura and constant enjambement. The sonorous sinuosity of the
verse is what I have tried to capture in my translation. The language is highly Sanskritic: its compounds and mixed metaphors pose great difficulties to the translator. A literal translation of the second sentence of the poem would read: ‘Cloud-sonorous stanzas have kept the griefs of all the many separated lovers of the universe in their own dark layers having heaped (them) into cloudy-music.’

  In R73 Tagore describes the impression made on him by the sound and rhythm of Kālidāsa’s poem before he could understand ‘a word of Sanskrit’; and we also read of how rainy days had a ‘special importance’ for him as a child (R262). Love of Kālidāsa and love of rain have contributed equally to this poem. Its great theme is biraha or bicched: yearning, pining, separation: the Yaksa pining for his beloved; Kālidāsa expressing his own sense of exile (see RM166), and thus by extension expressing the byabadhān (‘gulf’, 1.116) in the heart of man. Kālidāsa’s poetry, in its beauty and artistry, was for Tagore an ideal of perfection somewhat different from the Upaniadic ideal he invoked elsewhere – extravagant not chaste, complex not simple. See the essay for the fascination that the names in the poetry had for him. But the ideal had an uneasiness about it, in the image of the Beloved doomed to an eternity of pining amidst the deathless but dead luxuriance of Alakā; and this idea is developed further in ‘Yaka’. More alive is the beauty of Bengal in the rains: a key-word is śyām, which can mean ‘black’ in Sanskrit, and is a name for Krsna, but which in Bengali usually evokes the dark green of wet, tropical vegetation. ‘In verdurous Bengal’ in 1.49 is śyām-baṅga-deśe; and ‘blue-green shadows’ in 1.51 are syām-chāyā. Tagore’s own mantra (‘spell’, 1.106, see Glossary) overlays Kālidāsa’s: his poem passes on to its readers the mukti, spiritual liberation that Tagore felt when he read Kālidāsa’s poem (11.106–10).

  21 ‘with clothes disordered’ – mlān-beśe: ‘with shabby clothes’.

  23 sagīt, the word for music here, means a union or harmony of songs.

  29 ‘mountains’ – himācal: the Himalayas.

  40–41 lit., ‘by swelling the stream of your verse like a rain-filled river’.

  66–7 The grammar here seems to suggest that there is only one ‘village of Daśārna’, but Daśārna was the name of a region and a people in Ancient India. See Glossary.

  70 ‘jasmine’ – yūthī: see Glossary.

  73 ‘desperate’ – bikal: the lotuses are ‘crippled’ for (want of) the shade of the cloud.

  75 ‘no coyness in their gaze’ – bhrū-bilās śekhe nāi: ‘they have not learnt bhrū-bilās, seductive eyebrow movements’.

  86–7 lit., ‘into darkness so thick it can be pierced by a needle (sūci-bhedya), into the main streets, by the light of occasional flashes of lightning’. I have transferred the untranslatable needle-metaphor from the darkness to the lightning.

  89–91 See Ganges in the Glossary for the legend alluded to in these lines. Lit., ‘There is Kanakhala, where Jāhnavī (Gagā), restless with youth, ignoring the jealous frown of Gaurī (Pārvatī), played with the moonlit matted locks of Dhūrjati (Śiva) with her teasing, surging foam.’

  94 kāmanār moka-dhām: ‘the abode of (spiritual) release from desire’.

  The Golden Boat (p. 53)

  sonar tarī from sonār tarī (The Golden Boat), 1894

  In 1890 Tagore’s father gave him charge of the family estates, which included land at Shelidah, by the river Padma in north Bengal. As a result, Tagore came into much closer contact with rural, riverine Bengal than he had known hitherto, and the experience inspired poems, short stories and letters. This famous and elusive poem captures much of the atmosphere of Bengal’s rivers during the monsoon. The sex of the person in the boat is indeterminate, as Bengali pronouns do not distinguish gender; but Tagore has ‘a woman at the helm’ in his own translation, so perhaps we should follow him. In 1.11 the verb bāoyā is used, generally translated as ‘to row’; but the boat is big enough to have sails (1.13) and carry a cargo of grain, so it is probably being steered or paddled by a single oar. The river-bank is not precipitous, but a beach shelving down into the water.

  Readers will always disagree about the meaning of this poem (and Tagore himself disliked such discussions: poems should be not mean: see R222); but the distinction between self and soul seems to me to lie behind it. Soul is liberated through self-surrender, disinterested love: but there is self-interest in the giving of the harvest by the speaker of the poem, a desire to be rewarded and praised for his efforts (11.23–4) and a wish for the self to be ‘taken aboard’ along with what it has given. The result is spiritual failure, a sense of loneliness and alienation. In this mood the khelā (1.7) of the swirling flood-waters takes on its negative aspect: the separateness of the created world from its Creator. The image of the village as a painting (1.9) can be compared with the pictorial imagery in ‘Railway Station’, where there is a similar sense of failure; compare also the story told in RM182 of the person who was barred from entering the Garden of Bliss after it was discovered that ‘inside his clothes he was secretly trying to smuggle into the garden the self, which only finds its fulfilment by its surrender’.

  One can also relate ‘The Golden Boat’ to the jīban-debatā poems, particularly ‘Unyielding’, which also combines giving and rejection. See notes to ‘On the Edge of the Sea’.

  2 ‘sad’ – nāhi bharasā: ‘with no confidence, faith, support, hope’.

  4 lit., ‘the full river is razor-sharp (in its current) and sharp to the touch’.

  13 ‘he gazes ahead’ – kono dike nāhi cāy: ‘he does not look in any direction’.

  23 lit., ‘for so long, on the river-bank, that in which I was completely absorbed, forgetful of all other cares’.

  28 ‘rain-sky’ – śrāba-gagan: ‘the Śrāba-sky’ (see Glossary).

  Broken Song (p. 53)

  gān-bhaga from sonar tari, 1894

  This moving poem expresses some of Tagore’s deepest feelings about music, old age and friendship. Its setting is one of the many petty courts that dotted Bengal before the British period. Nineteenth-century Bengalis often felt nostalgia for the apparent indolence, hospitality and tolerance of the Persianized culture of those days, and Tagore was not immune to this (see R123), even though this poem shows heartlessness in the midst of that culture. I have translated rājā as ‘king’, though this is probably too elevated a term for Pratāp Rāy, who is no more than a big landowner. Baraj Lāl is shown by his name and his uī (‘turban’, 1.31) to be Hindusthani not Bengali, but the musical fare he has provided over the years seems to be thoroughly Bengali (see Glossary for all unfamiliar terms and names in the poem). Kāśīnāth, though a Bengali by name, may be offering the kind of North Indian vocal music that gives less emphasis to words than in the Bengali tradition and more to virtuoso exposition of a rāga (see R205 for the distinctive character of Bengali vocal music, as viewed by Tagore). But the real contrast is one of feeling. Important words in the poem are prā (life, vitality), hrday (heart), sneha (kindness, love), prem (love). Baraj’s singing, failing though it is now, had these qualities, appreciated by the king but not by the admirers of Kāśīnāth’s cleverer but less heartfelt singing style. True singing was for Tagore the most important of all human arts, taking man closest to the Divine: the unity of a song symbolizes Divine completeness, and the singing of it expresses the unfolding of that completeness through the works of creation (see S143 and P57). But the main ideal in this poem is the reciprocity of love – love between God and man and love between man and man – symbolized by the perfect sympathy that should be present between singer and audience, and by the images of reciprocity in nature in 11.73–4. Between Pratāp Rāy and Baraj Lāl there is ‘perfection of human relationship’ (RM188); the courtiers, in contrast, show human failure to love.

  6 ‘give frequent gasps of praise’ – saghane bale ‘bāhā bāhā’: ‘they repeatedly say “bāh, bāh” ’ (an expression of praise or approval).

  11 The two main types of song about Durgā prevalent i
n Bengal are mentioned in this line, āgamant and bijayā. See Durgā in the Glossary.

  38 ‘Superb, bravo’ – āhāhā, bāhā bāhā: see above.

  55 ‘as he prays to his teacher’s name’ – smara kare guru-debe: ‘as he remembers his guru-deb’. A musician’s guru is like a close personal deity (deb), to be prayed to in times of trouble.

  61 ‘the old’ – sakhī: ‘friend’. His tānpurā is a friend or confidante to him.

  64 ‘Come’ – āis: Pratāp Rāy uses the most intimate of imperative verb-forms here.

  74 ‘the woods’ – ban-sabhā: ‘the court or assembly of the woods’. The woods are responsive in a way that the king’s court (sabhā) is not.

  76 ‘where listeners are dumb’ – yekhāne… bobār sabhā: ‘where there is a court of the dumb (at heart)’.

  A Half-acre of Land (p. 55)

  dui bighā jami from citrā (The Multi-Coloured), 1896

  Read at a straightforwardly realistic level, this poem needs little by way of explanation. The title means literally ‘two bighās of land’ (see Glossary). For sādhu, and the double meaning of the word that is exploited ironically at the end of the poem also see Glossary (‘the irony of life’, 1.71, is my own clarifying interpolation). But some of Tagore’s distinctive attitudes to nature, asceticism and human relations are implicit in the poem. The famous third stanza, often quoted for its patriotic feeling, can be compared with R208, where Tagore writes of his return to Bengal after his abortive voyage to England in 1881 (he set sail with a nephew who quickly began to feel sea-sick and to miss his new wife, so they turned back at Madras): ‘This Bengal sky full of light, this south breeze, this flow of the river, this right royal laziness, this broad leisure stretching from horizon to horizon and from green earth to blue sky, all these were to me as food and drink to the hungry and thirsty. Here it felt indeed like a home, and in these I recognized the ministrations of a Mother.’ The stanza should be read as a meditation: it begins with namonamo nama, the expression of obeisance used to begin the prayers to God and meditations on the harmony of nature which Tagore taught his pupils at Santiniketan (see S17 and P155). The fact that asceticism does not bring peace to Upen’s heart shows Tagore’s distrust of those forms of religion that seek to separate God from the world (see S129, and his exposition in P56 of the verses of the āśā Upaniad in which we are warned that ‘the sole pursuit of the infinite’ is even more dangerous than exclusive concentration on the finite). The half-acre of land, personified as a mother when she belonged to Upen and as a fallen or kept woman (kulaā, 1.37) after the landlord has turned her into a garden, shows, as in ‘Broken Song’, two kinds of human relationship. One, based on love, brings heavenly perfection: in 1.47 the half-acre is called kalyā-mayī, full of the grace and prosperity that is associated with the goddess Lakmī, and is described as feeding Upen with sudhā, nectar. The other is an unequal relationship of the kind that is defined in CU158, in which woman tries to mitigate her state of bondage ‘by rendering herself and her home a luxury to man’.