10–19 Strictly, all the tenses in these lines are past continuous, implying that Africa was doing all the things described at the time of the arrival of her European colonists.
11 lit., ‘you were gathering the secrets of the impenetrable’.
14 ‘worked spells’ – mantra jāgācchila: ‘was awaking mantras’.
14 ‘unconscious’ – cetanātīt: ‘beyond consciousness’. This compound may be a straight translation of Freudian ‘unconscious’; or it may carry the meaning: ‘mind that has not yet developed full consciousness; half-consciousness’.
19 The metaphor is of Śiva’s tāava dance of destruction, and the frenetic drumming that accompanies it.
Notes
1937–1941
The Borderland – 9 (p. 107)
Poem No. 9 from prāntik (The Borderland), 1938
In September 1937 Tagore suddenly fell seriously ill. Although he recovered, his years of touring were at an end. His last foreign tour had been in 1932 – to Iran and Iraq; but he had followed it with tours of India and Ceylon with a troupe from Visva-Bharati, staging his dance-dramas to raise funds for the university.
The untitled poems in ‘The Borderland’ were written as he convalesced from the illness. They are all in tightly controlled, unrhymed verse, with equality of line-length. Through symbolism, imagery and rhythm they communicate with uncanny power states of consciousness beyond or beneath the normal. The phrase in the first line of Poem No. 9 describes the atmosphere of the book as a whole: abasanna cetanār go-dhūli-belāy, ‘in the cow-dust-time (dusk) of exhausted consciousness’ – the borderland between life and death.
This poem is a kind of diminuendo and crescendo combined. On the one hand, the gradual ebbing of consciousness towards a state of fusion ‘with endless night’, antahīn tamisrāy, 1.15; on the other a steady mounting movement towards the climactic quotation from the āśā Upanisad: ‘O Sun, withdraw thy rays, reveal thy exceeding beauty to me and let me realize that the Person who is there is the One who I am’ (RM115; see also P72). Tagore always translated purus as Person, and I have followed him in 1.19. kalyāatama, the superlative adjective used in 1.18, conveys goodness, health, grace, as well as kindness and beauty.
4 lit., ‘its life-long store of memories under a painted cover’.
7–8 The sounds could include bells, chants, conches being blown.
14 ‘particles’ – bindu: ‘drops’.
16 ‘at the altar of the stars’ – nakatra-bedir tale: ‘at the bottom of the bedī of the stars’. A bedī is a low platform on which an image of a deity might be mounted.
The Borderland – 10 (p. 107)
Poem No. 10 from prāntik, 1938
This poem is certainly not easy to understand in Bengali, but some of its paradoxes are elucidated by the great abundance of synonyms that Indian languages have. In 1.3 Tagore uses one word for light, alo(k), and in 1.5 another, jyoti. L1.4–5 are literally ‘the light (ālok) that is the light (jyoti) of the universal light (jyoti)’. Tagore is distinguishing between light as the opposite of dark and light as a metaphor for the primary energy of the universe. There is the same contrast in 11.6–8: ‘hymn to light’ (ālok)/‘realm of light’ (jyoti). jyoti is indeed a more elevated word than ālo, an Upaniadic word, with radiance or halo in it.
The poem is about spiritual unreadiness for death. One can take it to imply that Tagore has not yet reached that state of total serenity described in S21 as having been achieved by ‘the Rishis of India’. He writes of them: ‘They did not recognize any essential opposition between life and death, and they said with absolute assurance, “It is life that is death”… They knew that mere appearance and disappearance are on the surface, like waves on the sea, but life which is permanent knows no decay or diminution.’ This is the ‘serene image of the terrible’ of 1.14 of the poem. But such complete ‘liberation of consciousness’ (S20) was in many ways alien to Tagore, alien to his humanism and his belief in realization through action and love. In S123 he writes of Man’s need constantly to defy death and transience by creating noble works: ‘This mahatī vinashih – this great destruction he cannot bear, and accordingly he toils and suffers in order that he may gain in stature by transcending his present, in order to become that which he is not.’ And in P64, after quoting again from the āśā Upaniad, he writes: ‘Only by living life fully can you outgrow it. When the fruit has served its full term, drawing its juice from the branch as it dances with the wind and matures in the sun, then it feels in its core the call of the beyond and becomes ready for its career of a wider life.’ This is the key to the meaning of 11.15–19. Meditation is not the only way to prepare for death: there is the way of work, creativity, the human counterpart to the creative ānanda, joy (1.17) of the universe itself (see S104).
10 ‘to the theatre of physical existence’ – jībaner raga-bhūme: ‘to the playground of life’, jīban being understood as material, physical existence, and raga-bhūmi being the familiar Indian concept of the world as an arena for the khelā or līlā of different forces.
11 ‘spirit’ – the word used is caram, the Ultimate, the reality described in 11.3–5.
13 ‘a rāga of silent wrath’ – nihśabda bhairab naba-rāge: bhairab means terrifying, awesome; is a name for Śiva in his awesome aspect; and is the name of a musical rāga. The phrase could mean ‘in a silent new Bhairav rāga’. See Glossary.
Leaving Home (p. 108)
ghar-chāā from sējuti (The Evening Lamp), 1938
Life’s approaching end dominates the poems in this volume, but in ‘Leaving Home’ the theme is not stated explicitly. Indeed I find this apparently straightforward poem remarkable for what it leaves unsaid, unresolved, indeterminate. Even its main character seems to exist outside the poem, though it describes his actions and feelings. Wider knowledge of Tagore would lead one to see in the poem certain characteristic antitheses: between an inhuman world of professional duty (1.6) and a human world of comfort and relationship (ll.7,55); between the callous alarm-clock and taxi, and the ‘play of life’, prā-līlā, recalled in 11.42–52; between darkness and light. Darkness itself is not attractive in the poem: it is associated with meaninglessness (1.21), uncertainty (1.35), suppression of samsār (1.42), which is human, social, domestic life. It is redeemed by the starlight of ll.61–3. This is the ‘poetry of the stars’ described in P59: ‘the silent meeting of soul with soul, at the confluence of the light and the dark, where the infinite prints its kiss on the forehead of the finite, where we can hear the music of the Great I AM pealing from the grand organ of creation through its countless reeds in endless harmony’. The image of the morning-star gives the poem connotations of spiritual as well as physical journeying – though again, nothing is explicit. Its realistic details, its combination of mystery and ordinariness, uncertainty and calm, show the inseparability of worldly and spiritual life. RM108 provides further insight into the poem: ‘In the night we stumble over things and become acutely conscious of their individual separateness. But the day reveals the great unity which embraces them. The man whose inner vision is bathed in an illumination of his consciousness at once realizes the spiritual unity reigning supreme over all differences.’ In 11.8–21 we have the ‘individual separateness’ of objects in the night; in 11.42–52 we have inner, daylight vision.
8 ‘all’ – gha-sajjā yata: ‘all the household effects, accoutrements’.
14 ‘spattered’ – dāg-dharā: ‘marked’, i.e. with the silvering worn away, ‘foxed’.
24 ‘aloof’ – udāsīn: see notes to ‘Unyielding’.
53 ‘weed’ – pānā: see Glossary.
60 ‘dark’ – nibi-ādhār-dhālā: ‘poured over with dense darkness’.
In the Eyes of a Peacock (p. 109)
mayūrer dsti from ākāś-pradīp (The Lamp in the Sky), 1939
This book consists mainly of poems of reminiscence or reflection on a life’s work. Although Tagore’s personal feelings are seldom absent from his poetry, it is
not often that he writes as directly and naturally about a real-life experience as in ‘In the Eyes of a Peacock’. It paints a vivid picture of the 78-year-old poet enjoying what leisure his fame and responsibilities allowed him, and enjoying the company of the girl called ‘Sunayanī’ in the poem. I have been given two suggestions as to her identity: either she is Maitraye Devi, author of a well-known book of reminiscences (see p. 168), who was about twenty-five when the poem was written; or she is Nandini, adopted daughter of Tagore’s son Rathindranath, and therefore likely to address Tagore as dādā-maśay (Grandfather, 1.49).
Early morning was always Tagore’s favourite time of day. In RM99 he describes how even as a child he would rush out at dawn into the garden of the Jorasanko house to ‘drink in at a draught the overflowing light and peace of those silent hours’. The key-word of the poem is once again udāsin, indifferent, 1.20, or audasīnya, indifference, 1.26; or associated words like bairāgya, apathy towards worldly interests, 1.42. Like ‘Earth’, the poem presents a vision of personal littleness and extinction in the face of the vast, impersonal forces of Nature. But it is transmuted into a much calmer, mellower form: the ruthless vastness of Earth is reduced to a peacock’s stare. This mellowness makes the poem less disturbing than ‘Earth’. But there is further reason: whereas the ‘true value’ that Tagore hoped to achieve in his life was left bafflingly undefined in that poem, here both his own poetic endeavours and the ‘poet of Mohenjodaro’ are given sudden value and meaning by the spark of love (1.67). How this happens is a mystery, but it is an experience common to most people at times in their lives. All Tagore’s religious ideas have their roots in simple, common human experience. The potential for the miracle was already there in 11.1–39, which evoke peace and beauty as well as audasīnya. In R216 Tagore writes that when he was able to put his own self in the background, he ‘could see the world in its own true aspect. And that aspect has nothing of triviality in it, it is full of beauty and joy.’ By seeing his own writings as nothing more than ‘autumnal flocks of insects’ (1.45), Tagore has already surrendered self: Sunayanī completes a circle he has already half-drawn for himself. ‘Love is what brings together and inseparably connects both the act of abandoning and that of receiving’ (S114).
19 lit., ‘with the meaningless restlessness of its vitality (prā)’.
45 lit., ‘like the flocks of insects at the dīpābalī of Śiva’. This is a reference to the insects that cluster round the lamps put out during the autumn festival of Diwali (see Glossary).
51,52 Sunayanī means ‘lovely-eyed’. Tagore puns on the verb śunā, to listen.
76–8 In Hindu mythology the sun sets behind a mountain called astācal and rises above a mountain called udayācal; these words are used in the normal Bengali expressions for sunset and sunrise, and are exploited in these lines. Lit., ‘Poet of Mohenjodaro, your evening star has crossed the astācal and has climbed to the crest of my life’s udayācal.’
New Birth (p. 111)
naba-jātak from naba-jātak (The Newly Born), 1940
Tagore wrote this book in horror and agony at a world plunging itself into war again, and this short opening poem sets the tone: deep gloom combined with hope against hope of a new dawn, a new civilization to come. Sometimes that hope and faith is defiant: here it is as vulnerable and yet as indestructible as the ‘message of reassurance’ that each new-born child seems to bring into the world. Many passages in Tagore’s English prose writings can be quoted in relation to this poem. See CU26, where he writes in hope of ‘a new age… the sudden guest who comes as the messenger of emancipation’; CU52 on Kālidāsa’s Kumāra-sambhava, relevant to the ‘birth of the hero’ hoped for in ll.11–13; CU129 on Christ; and P104: ‘Yes, the divine in man [cf. 1.9] is not afraid of success, or of organization; it does not believe in the precautions of prudence and dimensions of power. Its strength is not in the muscle or the machine, neither in cleverness of policy nor in callousness of conscience; it is in its spirit of perfection. The today scoffs at it, but it has the eternity of tomorrow on its side. In appearance it is helpless like a babe, but its tears of suffering in the night set in motion all the unseen powers of heaven, the Mother in all creation is awakened.’
1 nabīn āgantuk: lit., ‘New Comer, New Arrival’; unfortunately the first is awkward as two words in English, and the second is sentimental.
5–6 lit., ‘What seat (āsan) has the playground of life (jībaner raga-bhūmi) spread out for you?’
Flying Man (p.112)
paki-mānab from naba-jātak, 1940
Another poem of horror and frail hope. Its theme is likely to strike a chord in any sensitive observer of the modern world, and has no doubt inspired many unpublished poems by unknown poets. Tagore was never afraid to write poems on subjects that poets more worldly than he would leave to the naïve amateur.
Tagore’s feeling for the sky is attested in numerous poems (cf. ‘Palm-tree’). In RM92 he associates it with freedom and human aspiration, and writes of how he has always been ‘inspired by the tropical sky with its suggestion of an uttermost Beyond’. ‘Flying Man’ is as much about the Bengal sky as about birds or aeroplanes: about the prā, life (1.10), expressed in its clouds and winds, and the peace of its vast expanses (1.16). The aeroplane is nothing less than a symbol of the entire nationalist, mechanical, self-seeking civilization that appeared to be meeting its nemesis at the time of writing and which Tagore felt was essentially at odds with the prān-deb, life-divinity (1.25). See N43,60 and above all the passionate rhetoric of N92, which I have quoted in the Introduction to this book (p. 29).
I wanted in my translation to equal the powerful, rhymed, three-lined verses of the original, and have therefore had to deal freely with its syntax in places; but the Bengali syntax is sometimes rather imprecise, guided as much by rhythmic effects as by meaning.
Tagore had flown to Iran in 1932, and had reported ill of the experience in his diary of the tour. He wrote prophetically of the appalling detachment from moral involvement that aeroplanes would bring to warfare.
1 ‘Satanic machine’ – yantra-dānab: ‘mechanical demon’.
10–12 lit., ‘Their līlā is bound to the rhythm of the wind; their life (prā) and their songs are tuned to the music of the sky.’
28–30 lit., ‘Proclaiming its incompatibility with the sky, it roars with a harsh voice, shattering the winds.’
35–6 lit, ‘Disturbance (like) impending thunder does not obey any barrier anywhere.’
37–9 lit., ‘Hatred and envy, lighting the flame of death, spread universal horror through great destruction in the skies.’
43 ‘at the end of this history’ – e itihāser śe adhyāy-tale: ‘at the bottom of the last chapter of this history’. The end of an era is implied, not the end of the world.
Railway Station (p. 113)
ieśsan from naba-jātak, 1940
It is easy to misjudge this poem, to see its insights as superficial or facile. But when we put it in the context of Tagore’s general ideas its purpose becomes clear: the dissatisfaction it may leave in its readers is an important part of its meaning.
The core of the poem lies in the vision of the coming and going of the station as nothing more than calacchabi (1.12) or calti chabi (1.49), ‘moving pictures’: i.e. an insubstantial, unreal, arbitrary sequence of painted images. We often find in Tagore’s writing that painting is associated with the unreal. In ‘The Golden Boat’ I noted that the image of the village as a painting helped to contribute to the mood of alienation – world and self separated from the reality of God and soul. In ‘Across the Sea’ the mysterious, unreal horse stands ‘motionless like an image in a picture’ (1.14). On the opening page of R, Tagore distinguishes between the ‘set of pictures’ that memory paints and Life itself. What we have in ‘Railway Station’ is a vision of life with its essential reality left out – hence its tone of alienation, pointlessness, ennui (the two opening lines convey not any real love or involvement but boredom: the speaker has
nothing better to do than come to the station morning and evening). We could call the absent reality God or Brahman and leave it at that. But some passages from Tagore’s prose shed further light. In RM154 he writes: ‘What is evident in this world is the endless procession of moving things; but what is to be realized is the supreme Truth by which the human world is permeated. We must never forget today that a mere movement is not valuable in itself, that it may be a sign of a dangerous form of inertia.’ Inertia is indeed the mood of ‘Railway Station’, though it appears to be about movement. In S99 Tagore compares the rhythm, expansion, contraction, movement and pause of ‘the world-poem’ to a railway station: ‘but the station platform is not our own home’ – and we will only feel at home if we are aware of the underlying unity or perfection that the rhythm expresses. In N147 he writes of the ‘suppression of higher humanity in crowd minds’: in ‘Railway Station’ we see people as crowds, individuality suppressed. Thus khelā in this poem (1.29) appears in its negative aspect, the meaningless play of the world when we separate it from God (see notes to ‘Unending Love’, ‘The Golden Boat’). The poem gives us an image and definition of spiritual failure.
Selected Poems (Tagore, Rabindranath) Page 22