Selected Poems (Tagore, Rabindranath)

by Rabindranath Tagore

  35–6 lit., ‘let that path-losing gift be yours’.

  41 lit., ‘touches a philosopher’s stone on your dreams’.

  42 ‘innocent’ – ajānā: ‘unknown, intangible’.

  44 ‘truest treasure’ – āmār yā śreha-dhan: ‘that which is my highest wealth’.

  46–7 ‘its tune stops us in our tracks’ – pathere sihari diyā sure: ‘having made the path tremble with its melody’.

  51 lit., ‘Friend, that which you get from there’ (the place where the ‘truest treasure’ is to be found).

  Deception (p. 83)

  phāki from palātakā (The Runaway), 1918

  The poems in palātakā develop the metrical freedom of balākā in the direction of greater closeness to spoken Bengali in both rhythm and diction. The subjects of the poems are also more down-to-earth, close to the world of Tagore’s short stories. ‘Deception’ is rhymed in couplets, but I have not used rhyme or half-rhyme in my translation, as the poem looks forward to the gadya-kabit (prose-poetry, vers libre) of Tagore’s late books.

  ‘Deception’ is a famous poem, not just because it tells a touching story so deftly and well, but because it brings together so many of Tagore’s deepest values, ranging from his distrust of orthodox medical treatment (11.2–5) to his intense admiration for woman’s ability to love, an ability so often betrayed and trampled on by men. Tagore felt that modern civilization created war between the sexes ‘because man is driven to professionalism, producing wealth for himself and others, continually turning the wheel of power for his own sake or for the sake of the universal officialdom, leaving woman alone to wither and to die or to fight her own battle unaided’ (N10). As in ‘Bride’, the traditional Indian joint-family system does not pass without criticism (11.9–12); but many telling details connect the speaker’s moral failure to his modernness. He passes the time at Bilāspur station by reading an English novel, which shows both his educational standing and his boredom with the rural scene that Binu finds so enchanting; 1.73 shows him to be an office-worker; his treatment of Rukminī implies not simple caste antagonism but a contempt for poverty and rural backwardness, a bourgeois tendency to judge people according to money. Binu, in contrast, displays human qualities that transcend time and place: her state of mind in 11.15–32 is that which is described in S42: her ‘spirit has been made one with God’; for her, ‘all the conflicts and contradictions of life are reconciled; knowledge, love and action harmonized; pleasure and pain become one in beauty, enjoyment and renunciation equal in goodness’. Her delight in the commonplace in 11.42–8 is that which is described in P175, a passage which makes it clear that Tagore felt such perception came more easily to women than to men. Her love and reverence for her husband in 11.109–14 is the ‘ultimate perfection of all womanly love’ that Tagore found in his English landlady Mrs Scott (R166). See P169 for the role that Tagore thought women should play in correcting the ‘one-sidedness’ of modern, industrial civilization.

  As so often in Tagore’s writings, moral values can be linked to artistic ideals. The ‘Real’ that Binu perceives (and which, in dying, she perhaps teaches her husband to perceive) is the Real that Tagore felt it was the duty of the artist to express: not the reality described by science, but the reality felt by man’s combined moral, spiritual and imaginative faculties. See P4,50 where Tagore dissociates science from Reality as he understood it, and RM139 where he defines art as ‘the response of man’s creative soul to the call of the Real’. Binu in her ānanda, joy (11.22, 40) on her first train journey feels that call.

  13,16 The allusions in these lines are to the bara (welcoming) ritual in which a mother-in-law lifts up an earthenware lamp on a plate and touches the forehead of bride and bridegroom with it, and the śubha-dti, the moment in Hindu marriage when the bride is unveiled.

  26–7 lit., ‘so it seemed that today through her gifts and her thoughts (meditation, dhyān) she would have to fill the journey with universal welfare (kalyān)’.

  48 ‘what a lovely place to live’ – orā keman sukhe āche: ‘in what happiness they (the stationmaster and his family) live’.

  Grandfather’s Holiday (p. 86)

  thākur-dādār chuti from palātakā, 1918

  In spirit this poem seems to belong more to Tagore’s next book, śiśu bholānāth (see next page). It is in many ways the very definition of an untranslatable poem, because it hinges on a word – chui, repeated in almost every line of the original – for which there is no real equivalent in English. In ordinary spoken Bengali it means ‘holiday’, anything from a school half-holiday to an extended vacation: but like khelā it has much wider, even metaphysical connotations. chuti is a state of mind – of delight, playfulness, freedom from restrictions – in which there is no difference between work and play. There is no such difference in the creative processes of Nature itself, nor is there in the activity of young children, who are closer to nature than adults. So chui is both a state of mind and a universal process going on all around us. Adults, by their inhibitions and their wrong attitude to work, all too often cut themselves off from it. In S133 Tagore writes: ‘Our day of work is not our day of joy – for that we require a holiday; for miserable that we are, we cannot find our holiday in our work. The river finds its holiday in its outward flow, the fire in its outburst of flame, the scent of the flower in its permeation of the atmosphere, but in our everyday work there is no such holiday for us. It is because we do not let ourselves go, because we do not give ourselves joyously and entirely up to it, that our work overpowers us.’

  I have had to translate this poem freely, using different English words for chui whenever it occurs. A literal translation of Verse 1 would read: ‘Your chui is in the blue sky, your chuti is in the fields,/Your chuti is in the steps of that bottomless pond/Your chui is at the bottom of tamarind-trees, in the corners of barns,/Your chui is in the bushes in the Pārul-āgā forest./Your chui’s hope trembles in the fields of unripe paddy/Your chui’s happiness dances in the waves of the river.’ I did not realize when I first translated the poem that Pārul-dāgā was a village near Santiniketan; but as it was perhaps named after its pārul-bushes, I have left my version alone. I have also not touched my free rendering of the last line of the poem (lit., ‘You awake my chui, in that is my jit, victory’), because the passage from S quoted above suggests that ‘letting oneself go’ was what Tagore had in mind: the ‘victory’ is the victory over adult inhibition.

  Palm-tree (p. 87)

  tāl-gāch from śiśu bholānāth (The Child Forgetful), 1922

  Like śiśu, 1903, this is another book in which children and their ‘inexpensive power to be happy’ (RM 173) feature largely. It seems to have given Tagore relief after his exhausting foreign tour of 1920–21, his efforts for Visva-Bharati, and his increasing misgivings about the direction that Gandhi’s Swaraj movement was taking. (At a meeting between Tagore and Gandhi in Calcutta in September 1921, Gandhi failed to persuade Tagore to give active support to the movement, and Tagore withdrew to Santiniketan.)

  Most Bengali schoolchildren know ‘Palm-tree’ by heart, and little needs to be said about it. It is both a perfect word-picture of a palm-tree tossing in the wind and a brilliant summary of what Nature meant to Tagore. Though there is restlessness in its content, it conveys balance and peace: the tree, drawn to both sky and earth equally, expresses the balancing of infinite and finite, transcendent and immanent that is the subject of the āśā Upanisad (expounded by Tagore in P ch. II) and the object of man’s sādhanā or spiritual endeavour. We can learn to achieve this balance by observing Nature. Trees were often objects of meditation for Tagore: cf. ‘In Praise of Trees’, or the passage in P133 describing how the view of the tree tops from the upper terrace of his house at Santiniketan brought peace to his heart after a period of stress and worry over his school.

  1 ‘single-legged giant’ – ek pāye dāiye: ‘standing on one leg’.

  10 ‘feathers’ – dānā: ‘wings’.

  13–14 the
original is full of onomatopoeia: sārādin jhar-jhar thatthar/kāpe pātā pattar.

  The Wakening of Śiva (p. 88)

  tapobhaga from pūrabī (Pūrvī – Indian musical rāga), 1925

  Most of the poems in this very fine book were written a year or so after ‘The Wakening of Śiva’, on the ship to South America or in Buenos Aires (see next poem). Though the rāga of the title is associated with evening, and its melancholy mood pervades much of the book’s content, ‘The Wakening of Śiva’ (the Bengali title means ‘Breaking of Penance’) is a passionate paean to the spirit of youthfulness, still exuberantly alive in the 61-year-old poet’s creative powers, and ever active in the processes of Nature. It is perhaps the most complex and challenging of all the poems I have translated, in its extravagantly Sanskritic language, its use of classical literature and myth, and its intricacy of thought, feeling and structure. The entries on Śiva, Kāma and Kālidāsa in the Glossary should help the non-Indian reader with its images and allusions: but the poem has many difficulties even for those who are familiar with its literary and mythological background.

  In a manner that is characteristic of Indian mythology and religion itself – in which deities can undergo constant metamorphosis and worshippers can identify themselves with or act out the divine – Tagore constantly changes the roles he plays in his own poem. The ‘past days’ that are the subject of many of the sentences in verses 1–3 are his own days of youthful poetic exuberance, and Śiva’s days in his active, creative phase; so Śiva is the poet himself when we get to verses 6–7, his ascetic phase being associated with advancing years and dormant creativity; in 11.71–2 Tagore is separate again, preparing to welcome the end of Śiva’s trance; in verses 10–11 he is Kāma, waking Śiva – but in 11.86–8 he is separate from Kāma, though supplying him with passion; in the last two verses he is the archetypal poet, a member of Śiva and Umā’s wedding procession, celebrating ‘the eternal wedding of love’(CU52: Tagore writes here of Kālidāsa’s Kumāra-sambhava, the poem which lies behind ‘The Wakening of Śiva’ and which we know from R75 and 110 had a formative influence on Tagore).

  These bewildering shifts are a vital part of the ‘extravagance’ that is at the heart of the poem’s purpose and meaning, just as constant changes of costume define extravagance in drama or life. Asceticism was not attractive to Tagore. He associated it with the kind of religion that separates God from the world (see S129) or which seeks ‘the utter extinction of the individual separateness’ (RM202) through mystical communion rather than realization through love, creativity and action. He also associated it with intellect divorced from feeling, with science as opposed to poetry. See N34, where he writes: ‘Our intellect is an ascetic who wears no clothes, takes no food, knows no sleep, has no wishes, feels no love or hatred or pity for human limitations, who only reasons, unmoved, through the vicissitudes of life. It burrows to the roots of things, because it has no personal concern with the thing itself.’ Poetry, on the other hand, expresses everything that cannot be described by intellect, cannot be reduced to law: extravagance of language and imagery matches the extravagance of colour, form, scent, sound in Nature itself. In RM155 Tagore writes of the flowers, leaves and fruits of a tree that ‘their exuberance is not a malady of exaggeration, but a blessing’. The poet’s exuberance is also a blessing, ‘heaven’s conspiracy’ (1.74) against all that is repressed, logical, rule-bound.

  But neither Nature nor poetry can do without Law (see notes to ‘Brahmā, Viu, Śiva’), and like ‘Palm-tree’, though on a larger scale, ‘The Wakening of Śiva’ achieves a remarkable balance: Siva’s periods of asceticism are part of the essential law or rhythm of life. In N51 Tagore writes: ‘In the rhythm of life, pauses there must be for the renewal of life. Life in its activity is ever spending itself, burning all its fuel. This extravagance cannot go on indefinitely, but is always followed by a passive stage, when all expenditure is stopped and all adventures abandoned in favour of rest and slow recuperation.’ Verses 7–8 show the necessity of Śiva’s quiescent phase and the latency of the active phase within it. The word līlā (11.37, 54) expresses this rhythm or law of alternating activity and passivity: it also expresses the interaction of law and freedom, intellect and feeling that such alternations imply. A further meaning is found in 11.38–40, perhaps the most difficult in the poem: literal translation is impossible, but the ‘world-poem’ of S99 is in them, Underlying Form and free, fluctuous Expression of that Form irreducibly combined. Like khelā, the basic meaning of līlā is play, sport: but it is a much more elevated word, even harder to define, and I have left it untranslated. Perhaps the very rhythm and structure of ‘The Wakening of Śiva’, even in translation, will best convey its meaning.

  6 ‘post-monsoon’ – āśviner. ‘of (the month of) Äśvin’ (see Glossary).

  8 ‘harsh’ – nirmam: the word can mean ‘heartless, cruel’, but also ‘selfless’, as befits Śiva in his ascetic phase.

  20–21 lit., ‘they (‘the days’ described in verse 2) brought the mantras of your meditation to the shore of the outside, to the scent of flowers in the fun of the aimless south wind’. Śiva’s creative energy, directed inwards during his ascetic phase, was thus redirected into the external beauties of Nature.

  22 ‘oleanders’ – karabikā: see Glossary.

  28 The word used is aiśvarya, ‘superhuman power’. In Indian philosophic tradition eight kinds of aiśvarya are distinguished, and Śiva possesses all of them.

  36–7 lit., ‘In the light of the moon on your (Śiva’s) forehead, with eyes dreaming of paradise,/ I saw the līlā of eternal newness filling my heart.’

  45 ‘lie forgotten’ – lunhita: ‘rolling about (in the dust)’. The mixture of metaphors becomes too rich for English.

  62 The original has cañcal muhūrta, ‘restless moments’, but I have tried to convey this with the word ‘energy’ in 1.63.

  71 ‘fossilized’ – the word used is sthabir, which means ‘decrepit’, but is also a term for a kind of Buddhist ascetic.

  95 ‘your consort’s rāga’ - bhairabī: rāg Bhairavī. See Glossary.

  99 ‘what I am’ – mor sāj: ‘my dress, guise, manner, appearance’.

  Guest (p. 91)

  atithi from pūrabī, 1925

  This poem was written in November 1924, in Buenos Aires, for the feminist and writer Victoria Ocampo. Tagore had originally accepted an invitation to attend the centenary celebrations of the independence of the Republic of Peru, but he fell ill en route and never got further than Buenos Aires. The seven weeks that Tagore spent in the villa that Victoria Ocampo found for him at San Isidro were, however, a time of great peace and happiness for him. Tagore’s father Debendranath used to point out the stars to the eleven-year-old Tagore on their trip to the Himalayas in 1873: ‘As dusk came on the stars blazed out wonderfully through the clear mountain atmosphere, and my father showed me the constellations or treated me to an astronomical discourse’ (R93). By linking the music of the stars to human love, Tagore manages to convey his sense of a Personality at the heart of the universe, his insistence that the universe can only be understood in human terms (see RM, especially chapters I and VII and the conversation with Einstein in Appendix II). The poem also conveys, in a way that is much harder to define, reciprocity of love: the stars’ love and the lady’s love are explicit: the poet’s answering love implicit but equally strong. The message in 11.8 and 12 in the Bengali is simply ‘We/I know you, know you’ (or perhaps ‘know that we/I know you’). My alteration was originally perhaps dictated by rhythm and half-rhyme. But on reflection I am content with it: ‘ours’ and ‘mine’ imply a return of love on the part of the poet, a return that the original communicates through its verbal music and the nuances of its words, but which perhaps needs to be made more explicit in translation. Without such a sense of love returned, the poem is incomplete. See CU80, where Tagore writes: ‘God’s will, in giving his love, finds its completeness in man’s will returning that love. Therefore Humanity is
a necessary factor in the perfecting of the divine truth. The Infinite, for its self-expression, comes down into the manifoldness of the Finite; and the Finite, for its self-realization, must rise into the unity of the Infinite. Then only is the Cycle of Truth complete.’

  6–7 lit., ‘a message of light came into my life (prān) harmoniously from on high’.

  9–10 lit., ‘the day that Earth took (you) into her lap from the lap of darkness’.

  In Praise of Trees (p. 91)

  brksa-bandanā from bana-bāī (The Message of the Forest), 1931

  This book brought together a number of poems and songs about trees, some of which were written in connection with the annual Tree-Planting Festival that Tagore instituted in 1928 at Santiniketan. ‘In Praise of Trees’ was written in 1926. It is a meditation rather than a description, and the word for meditation, dhyān, is used in 1.64 (lit., ‘By the power of meditation I have gone into your midst. I have known…’). Trees are often associated with meditation in Tagore’s writings and Indian tradition generally, for the sages who wrote the Upanisads and other great spiritual texts were forest-dwellers, and the forest āśram, in which a sage would train his disciples in meditation and self-realization, was the original idea behind the experiment at Santiniketan (see CU46 and P127). But the originality of the poem is that it is not an expression of ‘secluded communion’ (S129) with God revealed through Nature: it is as much concerned with humanity as with trees, with art and action as with Nature or mysticism. Its purpose is to show that humanity and Nature are inseparably linked. Its vision of the triumphant march of life is reminiscent of a passage in N65 in which Tagore hails the human defiance of limitations that he saw as Europe’s most positive contribution to the world; and even more of a passage in P29 on the triumphant march of art: ‘Thus art is signalling man’s conquest of the world by its symbols of beauty, springing up in spots which were barren of all voice and colours. It is supplying man with his banners, under which he marches against the inane and the inert… For the one effort of man’s personality is to transform everything with which he has any true concern into the human. And art is like the spread of vegetation, to show how far man has reclaimed the desert for his own.’ L1.53–67, on the other hand, are much more Indian, evocative of the serenity sought by the forest sages. What Tagore is after, as so often, is a balance between these two impulses – the European and the Indian, the active and the meditative: he is suggesting that trees can show us that the two can be reconciled, valour can be restrained with patience, creative power can be peaceful (ll.54–6). The key-words in the poem are prā, life, used in 11.1, 61, 76; śakti, power, in 1.73; and tej, power or fire, in 11.68 and 77: and its dominant ideal is that of Natural and Human prā, śakti or tej acting in harmony. Tagore has taken the view of the forest-sages that ‘the perfect relation with this world is the relation of union’ (CU46) and given it a much more active and dynamic form, allowing for activism, art, even science as expressions of that relation.