Selected Poems (Tagore, Rabindranath)

by Rabindranath Tagore

  1 ‘Death, Death’ – in the original this recurrent phrase is literally ‘O Death, O my Death’ (ogo maran, he mor maran).

  32 babam-babam: slapping of the cheeks with the fingers is a feature of some of Hinduism’s more esoteric or cultic rituals.

  35–6 ‘was this not/A better way of wedding’ – I have interpolated these words.

  37 ‘deathly wedding-party’s din’ – śmaśān-bāsīr kal-kal: ‘the din of the dwellers in cremation-grounds’, i.e. those followers of Śiva that dwell in śmaśān, cremation grounds (see Śiva in the Glossary).

  63 ‘Death, Death’ – ‘O Lord’ (ogo nāth) precedes the refrain at this point.

  66 ‘infinity’ – akūl: ‘without shore’, a more spatial word than ‘infinity’, so I have inserted ‘sea’ in 1.65.

  Arrival (p. 71)

  āgaman from kheyā (The Ferry), 1906

  In this book we see the movement towards simple language, symbolism and preoccupation with religious themes that reaches its culmination in the poems and songs of gītānjali (1910) and gītimālya (1914). ‘Arrival’ was the first poem by Tagore that I tried to translate. The compelling rhythm of the original seemed to me such an important part of its power that I tried to copy it in English. To do this, I had to put in rather more prop-words than I would now favour. The original poem has great concision. In the first two verses, the following words and phrases are my own addition, metri causa: 1.4 ‘dark’, 1.5 ‘amongst us’, 1.5 ‘of Night’, 1.7 ‘outer’, 1.8 ‘they rattle when it blows’, 1.10 ‘peacefulness’, 1.11 ‘at the doors’. I have made finite verbs non-finite in 11.3-of each verse.

  The poem is about the discovery of soul, God (‘the King’) being identified with soul in Tagore and in Indian tradition generally. It contains the paradox that on the one hand our selves are free to accept or reject soul/God; but on the other hand it will reveal itself anyway. Compare two passages in S: on p. 41 Tagore writes of the freedom of the self: ‘There our God must will his entrance. There he comes as a guest, not as a king, and therefore he has to wait until he is invited’; but on p. 33 Tagore quotes a conversation with a rural ascetic: ‘ “Why don’t you preach your doctrine to all the people of the world?” I asked. “Whoever feels thirsty will of himself come to the river,” was his reply. “But then, do you find it so? Are they coming?” The man gave a gentle smile, and with an assurance which had not the least tinge of impatience or anxiety, he said, “They must come, one and all.” ’ The sudden, unexpected discovery that one must go to the river, whether one likes it or not, can be traumatic and humiliating – hence the terror and storminess of Tagore’s poem. One of its most remarkable coups is the way it moves to general statement in the last verse: here the speaker is not the ‘one or two’ of the previous verses, but the converted soul itself. Low-grade imperatives and pronouns are used, emphasizing the humbling of the self.

  16 kae kae cetan kari: ‘becoming spasmodically conscious’.

  30 ‘celebration’ – abhyarthan: ‘reception, greeting, welcome’.

  31 ‘lowly’ is my addition. The conch, for all its divine and epic associations, is used in ordinary, simple, domestic worship. See Conch in the Glossary.

  32 ‘King of Night’ – ādhār gharer rājā: ‘king of the dark house’.

  Highest Price (p. 72)

  caram mūlya from gītimālya (String of Songs), 1914

  Ancient India, in which kings or rich men could keep slaves, lies behind the symbolism of this poem. The hawker who is speaking does not ask ‘Who will buy my wares?’ but quite clearly ‘Who will buy me?’, i.e. who will buy me into slavery, so that I no longer have to fend for myself. At the symbolic level the slavery that is being asked for is the complete self-surrender required for the liberation of the soul through love. In S115 Tagore writes: ‘It is not that we desire freedom alone, we want thraldom as well. It is the high function of love to welcome all limitations and to transcend them. For nothing is more independent than love, and where else, again, shall we find so much of dependence? In love, thraldom is as glorious as freedom.’ Love can only be bought by love: the king cannot buy it with power, the rich man cannot buy it with gold, the woman cannot buy it with seduction. Only the child, with his wholly disinterested ‘playful face’ (khelār mukhe, 1.30), secures it, releasing the speaker from the burden of self (I have interpolated ‘cares’ in 11.1 and 28, to bring out this meaning). The ability that children have to find joy in the simplest things is the ‘chief lesson’ that they have for us (R17). In 1.18 the speaker walks on anya-manā, ‘with his mind elsewhere’. This implies not just absent-mindedness but the ‘crying for the across’ (S162) that makes the self ever restless. But the child shows that release from the burden of the self can be found near, not far. Writing in R242 of the ‘closeness of attention even to trifling things’ in his youthful book chabi o gān (Pictures and Songs, 1884), Tagore says: ‘Whatever my eyes fell upon found a response within me. Like children who can play with sand or stones or shells or whatever they can get (for the spirit of play is within them), so also we, when filled with the song of youth, become aware that the harp of the universe has its variously tuned strings everywhere stretched, and the nearest may serve as well as any other for our accompaniment, there is no need to seek afar.’

  ‘Highest Price’ was written in Urbana, U.S.A. Tagore’s son Rathindranath, who had just graduated in agricultural science at the University of Illinois and was working on a doctorate, persuaded his father to join him there in October 1912. A month later the English Gitanjali was published, and a year later, soon after his return to India, Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize.

  3–5 lit., ‘Alas, my days pass in this way – the load on my head becomes an unbearable responsibility, encumbrance’.

  9–12 lit., ‘Grasping me by the hand he says, “I’ll buy you by force.”

  After struggling, the force he had comes to an end.’

  12 I have had to omit ‘crown on his head’ from this line.

  1914–1936

  The Conch (p. 77)

  śakha from balākā (Wild Geese), 1916

  The numbing series of bereavements, from his wife’s death in 1902 to the death of his youngest son Samindra of cholera in 1907, had left Tagore almost entirely alone, as his two surviving daughters were married and Rathindranath was in America. Loneliness and austerity mark the songs and poems of the gītānjali period. In balākā, Tagore’s creative energies revived, and the book is regarded by many as his finest. ‘The Conch’ sets the tone: a revived willpower, a determination not to be defeated either by personal suffering or the anguish that the outbreak of the First World War caused Tagore. A new avant-garde magazine, sabuj patra (Green Leaves), started in 1914 by Tagore’s friend Pramatha Chaudhuri, was also a stimulus: Tagore poured out poems, stories, essays and novels for it.

  The conch of Tagore’s poem can be identified with the Pāñcajanya, Krsna’s conch in the Mahābhārata, since the poem is full of the call to spiritual fight that we find in the Bhagavad Gītā, Krsna’s great song of encouragement to Arjuna inserted into Book VI of the epic. The poem is a call to a self, a people or even a world that have ignored K’s words, have let his conch – the symbol of the ‘ideal of fight’ (RM85), since heroes in Indian epic rally their troops by blowing conches – lie neglected in the dust. Longing for serenity and longing for action were equal impulses in Tagore, and in keeping with the teachings of the Gītā he aimed to reconcile the two. He saw heroic action as ‘the best ideal in the West, the great truth of fight’(RM65), whereas ‘the life of inner peace and perfection’ was associated with India. To combine these ‘two guiding spirits’, represented by the two sages Viśvāmitra and Vaśitha in the Rāmāyana (CU65), was part of his programme for bringing East and West together. ‘Disinterested action’ was the key to such a reconciliation: ‘According to the Gita, the deeds that are done solely for the sake of self fetter our soul; the disinterested action, performed for the sake of giving up self, is the true sacrifice.
For creation itself comes of the self-sacrifice of Brahma, which has no other purpose; and therefore, in our performance of the duty which is self-sacrificing, we realize the spirit of Brahma’ (RM83). In verse 2 of ‘The Conch’ the speaker makes the wrong approach to God: his flower-offering and his longing for śānti-svarga (‘heavenly quiet’, 1.8) are self-interested. The sudden discovery of moral conscience on seeing the conch has traumatic surprise in it, comparable with ‘Arrival’: it is the ‘second birth’, the discovery described in P80 that man’s ‘true life is in the region of what ought to be’. The poem has a wild, gestural quality, but its underlying ideas are perfectly cogent and representative of an important strain in Indian thought.

  6 ‘inspiring conch’ – abhay śakha: ‘the conch that dispels fear’. The phrase is used again in the last line of the poem. mahā-śakha (‘great conch’, 1.12) also carries the meaning ‘conch which inspires courage’.

  14 lit., ‘Shall I weave garlands of red jabā-flowers? Alas for my rajanī-gandhā-flowers’ (his ‘offering’ in 1.7). The former are associated with śakti (1.36) and with Kālī; the latter are a modern flower with romantic associations. See Glossary.

  19–20 lit., ‘O touch (me) with the philosopher’s stone of youth (yaubaner-i paraś-mani)./ Let music arise in the tune of rāg Dīpak, (let my) life’s delight (be) set ablaze.’ See Glossary for the significance of rāg Dīpak.

  26 ‘monsoon showers of arrows’ – śrāban-dhārā-sama bān: ‘arrows like a stream in the month of Śrāba (see Glossary).

  35 This line is not wholly clear, because of grammatical ambiguity. The most likely literal interpretation seems to me: ‘A victory-drum will sound in my breast in response to your sorrow’ (the sorrow or shame of your lying in the dust); but it could mean: ‘Your victory-drum will sound as a result of the sorrow in my breast’ (i.e. my sorrow that you should be lying in the dust will inspire me to action).

  36 lit., ‘I shall give all my power (śakti), I shall take (win back) your inspiring conch’.

  Shah-Jahan (p. 78)

  śā-jāhān from balākā, 1916

  This poem is in the most characteristic style of the poems in balākā. Their verse technique is an extraordinary combination of freedom and discipline: the varying line-lengths, restlessly shifting across the page to make the visual patterns that became one of Tagore’s main poetic trade-marks from now on, interact with an infinitely careful placing of words and rhymes. ‘Shah-Jahan’ is generally rhymed in couplets: I have used half-rhymes, but have let them be paired anywhere in the section in which they occur. The complexity of language, metaphor and thought in the poem poses a great challenge to the translator. The mixture of abstract and concrete (‘cheek of time’, 1.16; ‘whispers in the year of eternity’, 1.56) has ample Shakespearean precedent in English, but is not easy in the rigidified language of the present day. The poem contains many difficult lines, but after much work and thought I am convinced that there are no real obscurities or unclarities, if we apply our understanding fully. For a long time I was puzzled by ‘the seed’ of 1.132. But since the ‘deathless plant’ into which it grew is quite clearly the Taj Mahal itself, speaking in 11.139–49, and since it was ‘shed from the garland of your life’ and ‘blown by your heart’s feelings’, it must have originated in the Emperor’s love and grief – so I have translated it as ‘griefs seed’. L1.64–70 are very difficult, but as so often Tagore’s general ideas are of assistance. The beauty of the cāmelī-flower in the light of the full moon in 1.67 is deha-hīn, without body, disembodied, because for Tagore beauty was beyond facts: the cāmelī-flower is a fact, but its beauty is a reality beyond fact, just as the continuing presence of Shah–Jahan’s beloved beyond death is a reality beyond fact: ‘beauty is not a mere fact; it cannot be accounted for, it cannot be surveyed and mapped. It is an expression. Facts are like wine-cups that carry it, they are hidden by it, it overflows them’ (P34). The passage is evoking things that are perceived but which remain out of physical reach. L1.68–9 recall the sentence from the āśā Upanisad quoted by Tagore in P62: ‘Mind comes back baffled and words also.’

  The mixture of form and freedom in the verse of the poem is also the key to its meaning – indeed I can think of no other poem in which form is so completely wedded to content. Its most important underlying idea is of life as a force whose forward movement cannot be checked. Whatever evil and suffering there may be in mortal existence, ‘life itself is optimistic: it wants to go on’ (S52). Death does not deny life’s onward movement: it confirms it. The passage describing Tagore’s reaction to the death of his sister-in-law in R257 is relevant here: Tagore’s grief eventually gave way to the realization that ‘an unopposed life-force’ would be an intolerable burden: if there were no death, life would be ‘a stable permanent fixture’ – and stability and permanence are the opposite of life’s essential quality. In one sense, Shah-Jahan’s building of the Taj Mahal shows a failure to understand this: in attempting to immortalize the life of his beloved and his grief at her loss ‘in the beauty of serene stone’ (1.58) he achieves the opposite, he perpetuates death. But it would be wrong to think that Tagore is writing off the Taj, the Meghadūta with which it is compared (1.61) and thus all great art as spiritual failure, a denial of ‘life’s quick spate’ (1.23). For pervading the whole of life and death is Brahman, ‘the Infinite, the Perfect, the Eternal’ (P152). Great art expresses this. In fact great art expresses movement and stability at the same time: the Meghadūta does this; the Taj does this – because its architecture expresses movement (1.62) as well as stillness and because it conveys a message of immortality (11.139–49) as well as mortality; and Tagore’s poem does it through its combination of movement and form.

  Perhaps it is necessary to have seen the Taj Mahal to appreciate fully a poem which so uniquely captures its beauty and atmosphere. See P18 for the contrast Tagore often made between the Moghuls and the British: the Moghuls, though imperialists, ‘lived and died in India’ and left behind ‘their human personality’ in their buildings and other works of art. But the British government in India ‘is official and therefore an abstraction. It has nothing to express in the true language of art. For law, efficiency and exploitation cannot sing themselves into epic stones.’

  27–9 lit., ‘as a result of the magical murmur of the south wind, in your garden the buds of spring mādhabī-creepers at that moment fill the restless, fleeting añcal (sari-end) of the garden’.

  33 ‘jasmine’ – kunda: see Glossary.

  35 the ‘later season’ is hemanta, the season between autumn and winter in Bengal.

  39 I have interpolated this line.

  47 ‘formless’ – rūp-hīn: the word can also mean ‘without beauty’, making an antithesis with aparūp, ‘wonderful very beautiful’ in 1.45.

  49 ‘forever’ – bāro mās: ‘twelve months’, i.e. ‘you could not go on weeping for months on end’.

  64 ‘loverless beloved’ – birahinī priyā: ‘separated beloved’, and therefore full of biraha. See notes on ‘The Meghadūta’.

  82 ‘musicians’ – nahabat: an orchestra in which the sānāi, a reed instrument associated with wedding-festivities, predominates.

  89 ‘incorruptible’ – amalin: ‘spotless, pure white’, as is the Taj Mahal.

  147 ‘gate’ – simha-dvār: ‘lion-gate’.

  Gift (p. 81)

  dān from balākā, 1916

  This exquisitely delicate love-poem might at first sight seem, like ‘Unending Love’ or ‘Unyielding’, to take us into the world of Tagore’s songs; but in fact Tagore by a concentration of imagination and feeling is trying to touch realities that lie even beyond song. Normally song was an artistic ideal for him: ‘the true poets, they who are seers, seek to express the universe in terms of music’ (S142); and a flower, particularly a rose, was an image of perfection (cf. ‘The Sick-bed – 21’) and an ideal gift: ‘Somehow we feel that through a rose the language of love reaches our heart. Do we not carry a rose to our beloved beca
use in it is already embodied a message which, unlike our language of words, cannot be analysed? Through this gift of a rose we utilize a universal language of joy for our own purpose of expression’ (RM125). Yet neither songs nor roses are sufficient here. What the poet wants to do is present his beloved with the ‘perfect gift of joy’ (S108) that is at the heart of creation itself. Songs and flowers are mortal; but ‘the infinite is giving himself out through finitude’ (P69) perpetually. Because of māyā, ignorance, we only perceive this fleetingly – but the divine giving never ceases. At first sight the gifts that the poet wants to give seem more transient, more fleeting than a song or a flower: but somehow Tagore manages to tell us that it is the perception that is fleeting, not the gift itself. It is hard to say how this is achieved, without detailed recourse to the Bengali words and images. But the key may lie in the many expressions of suddenness and surprise in 11.30–50, and the moments of stasis, suspension that follow each gift (11.34, 40, 47). In life, surprise is often associated with a sudden discovery of something that was there already, there all the time perhaps, though we were unaware of it; and when we are surprised by joy we are indeed stopped in our tracks, momentarily removed from the temporal to the eternal.

  13–14 The original is more definite: ‘The evening light (that I have here)? This lamp’s light (that I have here) in this lonely, private corner of (my) still, silent house?’