Selected Poems (Tagore, Rabindranath)

by Rabindranath Tagore

  4–5 The words for flow-tide (ujān) and ebb-tide (bhāā) – as in the big rivers of Bengal – are applied to the up and down trains.

  12–15 lit., ‘This image of pictures moving brings to (my) mind a language of perpetual coming together and perpetual forgetting, nothing but coming and going.’

  19–20 lit., ‘Behind this (phenomenon) lies the urgency of joys and sorrows, losses and gains agitating them violently.’ I have had to interpret these lines somewhat to make them fit with what precedes them.

  23 i.e., no one can bear to wait to let others on first.

  50–51 My translation is elliptical here. Lit., ‘Morning and evening I watch the moving pictures of life, with these I remain alone in the coming and going of the station.’

  Freedom-bound (p. 115)

  mukta-pathe from sānāi, 1940

  sānāi, named after the reed instrument that is particularly associated with weddings in India, is a quieter book than naba-jātak, with the poet more at ease with himself. Many of the poems were written in the hills – in Almora and Kalimpong, or at Mongpu, where Tagore enjoyed peace and happiness as the guest of Maitraye Devi and her family. (An English translation of her reminiscences, Tagore by Fireside, was published in Calcutta in 1961.) But we shall see in ‘Bombshell’ and ‘Last Tryst’ that dark notes were not absent completely.

  ‘Freedom-bound’, like ‘Railway Station’, has more to it than first appears. It is an unusual poem for Tagore, but at the same time very characteristic. The title means ‘on the path to mukti, freedom’. In CU201 Tagore defines mukti as ‘the one abiding ideal in the religious life of India… the deliverance of man’s soul through its union in ananda with the universe’. For Tagore this ideal was dualistic (see notes to ‘Unyielding’): utter extinction of the self was not attractive to him, because it was incompatible with Love. The mukti of ‘Freedom-bound’ is mukti through love, a liberation that is emphasized by the unconventionality of that love and by the gypsy-beloved’s free-roving nature. A friend of mine criticized my English title for its ‘Empsonian ambiguity’; but curiously enough its ambiguity, which had not occurred to me until he pointed it out, is in perfect keeping with Tagore’s conception of love. See S115 where Tagore writes: ‘Bondage and liberation are not antagonistic in love. For love is most free and at the same time most bound’; and in RM190, Tagore quotes a Baul song (see Glossary) which sings of the ultimacy of love, a state from which there can in fact be no mukti: ‘It goes on blossoming for ages, the soul-lotus, in which I am bound, as well as thou, without escape. There is no end to the opening of its petals, and the honey in it has so much sweetness that thou, like an enchanted bee, canst never desert it, and therefore thou art bound, and I am, and mukti is nowhere.’

  Might that honey-image lie behind the ‘lotus honey’ carried by the gypsy-woman in ‘Freedom-bound’? Certainly the Baul sect had a great influence on the heterodox, fetterless, itinerant characters that crop up frequently in Tagore’s writing. For further possible influences, see the description of the wandering mad woman in CU77, of ‘Peari, the old scullery-maid’ in R262, and a recollection of a childish escapade in R48.

  3–4 ‘scourge of all proprieties’ – bhadra-niyam-bhaga: ‘breaker of polite rules’ – not quite so strongly put as in my translation.

  9–10 Not easy lines to translate literally, but perhaps: ‘the respectable people of the village, who are always out for a hard bargain’. Buying and selling, ‘the noise of the markets’ (P107) is often an image of worldliness and materialism in Tagore.

  13 ‘form’ – the word rūp also means beauty.

  18 tumi pathik-badhū: ‘you traveller-bride’.

  22 bhāber sahaj khelā: ‘the simple play of feeling’. bhāb, feeling, also means ‘loving rapport’, a mutuality and equality of affection.

  39–40 lit., ‘I lose the way to the Brahmins’ houses when I see you’; but the lines have to be taken metaphorically.

  43 ‘hem’ – ācal: the loose end of the sari.

  Yaksa (p. 116)

  yaka from sānāi, 1940

  This poem should be read in conjunction with ‘The Meghadūta’, and Tagore’s essay on Kālidāsa’s masterpiece which I have included in Appendix A. It is peculiarly difficult to translate. I found myself defeated in any attempt to match the rhymes of the Bengali with English rhymes or half-rhymes. The poem is essentially and deliberately paradoxical. In 11.1–10 we have the paradoxical union of joy and longing, beauty and pain in the Yaksa’s yearning for his beloved, which Tagore tries to match in his imagery of rain that is ‘heart-rending’ and ‘shadow-cast’ but beautiful as well. In 11.15–16 there is a complex image involving a īkā, which is a commentary on another classic poem: the īkā is defined as being written in mandākrānta metre, the metre of Kālidāsa’s Meghadūta; so the Meghadūta, though a poem in its own right and not a īkā, in another sense is a īkā in which joy comments on sorrow (lit., ‘This world (universe) is its poem: in its mandākrānta metre a distant presage of joy writes a commentary on a vast backdrop of sorrow’). In 11.19–30 we have the paradox that though the Yaka’s Beloved, pining in Alakā, represents an ideal, it is a sterile ideal, its very perfection is inarticulate, its immortality (1.30) is a grief greater than any mortal grief. The poem thus has three main ideas: the combination of joy and sorrow in the Yaka’s yearning; the link made between that combination and the ‘fire of creation’ itself; and the view that the Yaka’s state of imperfect yearning for perfection is preferable to the perfection itself. These three main ideas take us into the very heart of Tagore’s religious and artistic thought. In CU35, in the chapter on the Creative Ideal, Tagore writes: ‘this world is a creation… in its centre there is a living idea which reveals itself in an eternal symphony, played on innumerable instruments, all keeping perfect time.’ This ‘living idea’ can be identified with the Yaka’s ideal, with the Beloved in Alakā, with the ‘joy’ of 11.6 and 16; but the revelation of the idea through time and space, the unrolling of the world-poem, involves separation from that ideal, the pain of yearning for it. Joy and pain are thus an inextricable reflection of the creative khelā of the universe (the word is not used in the poem, but the idea is there): ‘The sacrifice which is at the heart of creation is both joy and pain at the same moment’ (CU40). Each needs the other. Hence the paradox that the immortal Beloved/Alakā ideal, which ought to be unalloyed joy, would actually be more unbearable than mortality, since it lacks the power to express itself through pain and yearning (at the end of my Introduction, p. 38, I described the ideal as ‘equivocal’: here we see why). And hence Tagore’s dualism; for perfection unable to enter into a relationship with imperfection would be torment indeed (‘the terrible weight of an unopposed life-force’ of R259). Thus in 1.31 the Yaka beats at his Beloved’s door prabhu-bare, ‘by the boon or grace of God’. The Yaka is advantaged by his very mortality: his freedom to yearn is a gift from God.

  10 ‘accompanies’ – pade pade… mele: ‘matches its steps to, flies in harmony with’. The sentence also includes pathe pathe: ‘from one (flight) path to another’.

  14 lit., ‘to close the gap with perfection (between itself and perfection)’.

  23 she is worn out with waiting āgantuk pantha-lāgi: ‘for the coming traveller’.

  Last Tryst (p. 117)

  śe abhisār from sānāi, 1940

  Baffling though this poem is, I have no doubt that it is a jīban-debatā poem, and should be related to ‘On the Edge of the Sea’. The ‘coming storm’ of 1.2 could be associated with contemporary world events, or with the approach of death (‘a season new to me’, 1.36). But the purpose of the poem is to reveal the mysterious, potent workings of the jīban-debatā through all experience, including death. In youth (1.15) it prompted poems of joy; now its appearance and promptings are different – but it is still the same jīban-debatā, still the poet’s strange guide and bride.

  I do not believe it is really possible in the last analysis to separate the jīban-debatā fr
om God or Brahman himself: what the concept stands for is the mystery of the way in which God reveals himself in human life and experience. In 1.19 the word which I have translated as ‘indescribably lovely’ is anirbacanīya, ‘inexpressible’. In RM186 Tagore uses the word to describe the Supreme Unity, or God, and translates it as ‘ineffable’. The strange destiny or unity guiding his life, the unity of a work of art or of Brahman himself – all these are essentially the same for Tagore, and are ‘ineffable’. In CU17 he writes that in Art ‘we forget the claims of necessity, the thrift of usefulness, – the spires of our temples try to kiss the stars and the notes of our music to fathom the depth of the ineffable’. The ineffable works through everything – pain, death, even a whole world ‘broken into chaos’. The moral problems that arise from such thinking did not escape Tagore (in RM107 he admitted: ‘Frankly, I acknowledge that I cannot satisfactorily answer any questions about evil’); but his deepest inner experience demanded it. His views on the problem of evil in S ch. III were true to his real feelings, and to the mainstream of Indian religious thought.

  13–14 ‘in the guise of a storm’ – duryoge bhūmikāy: the words could also mean ‘as presage or earnest of a bad or dangerous time’, or simply ‘with a storm (in the background)’.

  19 ‘jasmine’ – yūthikā: see Glossary.

  25–7 lit., ‘What signs (igit) the briefly shining flame of lightning reveals in your face! How novel its language!’

  41 ‘palace of silence’ – nīraber sabhāgan-tale: ‘in this (royal) courtyard of silence’.

  Injury (p. 118)

  apaghāt from sānāi, 1940

  The title of the poem is hard to translate precisely into English: it means a sudden blow that is accidental but also somehow fated. Though written at Kalimpong, the mention of Nadiyā in 1.4 places the poem in north Bengal. Modest and commonplace though it is, only Tagore could have written it, with the security of its rural scene deftly evoked by seemingly casual detail, and the intrusion of pain at the horrors of the world in the last two lines (the Russians attacked Finland in November 1939, seizing territory and setting up a puppet government). The poem is a comment on a world made smaller by modern communications; but it also presents a more perennial conflict. On the one hand we have the workings of a harmonious universe through the rhythms of human social life and the interplay of man and Nature (the prān-līlā described in ll.42–52 of ‘Leaving Home’); on the other we have human actions and sufferings at odds with that harmony (ll.28–9). In R219 Tagore’s maturing consciousness sees in the movements of passers-by ‘that amazingly beautiful greater dance which goes on at this very moment throughout the world of men’. The dance includes ‘two smiling youths nonchalantly going their way, the arm of one on the other’s shoulder’ that are like the ‘two friends’ in ‘Injury’. How is one to reconcile the coexistence of this dance of humanity with the constant interruptions and injuries suffered by it? The koel-bird in 1.27 seems to express the uneasiness of the paradox.

  16 There are grammatical indications that the friends are male.

  25 ‘balm’ – neśākhāni: ‘the intoxication’, but bhāi-flowers have medicinal qualities. See Glossary.

  The Sick-bed – 6 (p. 119)

  Poem No. 6 in rog-śayyāy, 1940

  The poems in Tagore’s last four books are nearly all unrhymed and free in rhythm, with a straight margin. All ostentatious artistry is stripped away: the language is unadorned – sometimes austere, sometimes conversational. The poet speaks in his own undisguised voice: there are no masks or disguises. Tagore went on writing almost to his last hour, dictating poems when he became too weak to write.

  The illness that resulted in the poems in rog-śayyāy and its sequel ārogya had struck Tagore at Kalimpong in September 1940. He was taken to Calcutta, where he was nursed for two months. ‘The Sick-Bed – 6’ was written in Calcutta, in Jorosanko, the Tagore family home. The ‘day-break sparrow’ is a symbol of many things: of the pure spirit of life, prān (used in 1.54); of freedom from restriction and convention; of the spirit of whimsy and playfulness that dominates Tagore’s late books of nonsense-rhymes for children and which clearly brought him relief from anxiety (see notes to ‘On My Birthday – 20’); of amateurism; of light. The last two are especially important. No one was more dedicated to work than Tagore, but professionalism, as defined in his prose writings, he disliked. See CU145 where he writes of the rigidity, specialization and power-hunger that goes with professionalism, or N10 where he writes of how women suffer ‘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’. Conventional education merely prepared people for professions: Tagore tried in his own educational theory and practice to correct this tendency. The sparrow is gloriously amateur. It is also associated with dawn, with light: the whole poem leads up to what is really a prayer for light (ll.53–8), an expression in the simplest possible terms of the Gāyatrī, the Vedic prayer for self-realization that Tagore, as a Brahmin, was taught at his sacred-thread ceremony (see R72 and RM92), and which he used as a mantra throughout his life. The sparrow brings the ‘assurance’ that comes each day with the dawn light (S89): it shows that it is available to all, for free – ‘We do not have to run to the grocer’s shop for our morning light; we open our eyes and there it is…’ (S148). You do not have to be Kālidāsa, or Rabindranath Tagore. We are all, potentially, ‘children of light’ (P31).

  11 lit., ‘they get bakśiś from the poets’.

  14 ostādi, ‘musical mastery’, is used in the original here: ‘he displays such ostādi that…’ Cf. ‘Broken Song’, where the old singer Baraj Lāl is addressed as ustād by Pratāp Rāy (see Glossary).

  15 ‘applause’ – bāhabā: the standard expression of appreciation and admiration (bāh!). Cf. notes to ‘Broken Song’.

  29–30 The word used in the original, bāynā, means advance money paid under a contract: the sparrow is not employed as a professional dancer by the Spring.

  The Sick-bed – 21 (p. 121)

  Poem No. 21 in rog-śayyāy, 1940

  Soon after writing the last poem, Tagore was allowed back to Santiniketan; this poem was written there at the end of November 1940.

  I have already referred in my notes to ‘The Wakening of Siva’, ‘Deception’ and ‘Earth’ to Tagore’s views on the limitations of a purely scientific picture of the world (not that he was opposed to science: he was always keenly interested in it); at first reading, this poem would seem to be on this theme. The scientific account of the universe (ll.8–13) excludes the beauty of the rose, and because of this breaks up the unity of reality into constituent elements. See P50 on the ‘fatal touch’ of science; and RM125 where he uses ‘that mystery-play, the rose’ as an example of the unity and beauty that science ignores. But usually in such passages Tagore speaks of the ‘impersonality’ of science, as opposed both to the individual human personality that perceives ‘the reality of the world’ and ‘that central personality, in relation to which the world is a world’ (P50). But is the vision of universe as rose in ll.20–30 a personal one? Human personality is strangely absent both from the seer and the seen – it is not at all like Binu’s vision of ‘universal grace’ in ‘Deception’, or ‘the harmony of the stars’, linked to human love, in ‘Guest’.

  It seems to me that there are two possible ways of reading this poem. One is to see its vision of the universe as personalized by the fact that the rose has been put by Tagore’s bedside by a loving hand. See my notes to ‘Gift’ and the passage from RM125 about ‘the language of love’ expressed in a rose. The other is to see the poem as closer to transcendentalism than to the dualism of the Religion of Man. In RM191 Tagore distinguishes his religion from ‘the tendency of the Indian mind… towards that transcendentalism which does not hold religion to be ultimate but rather to be a means to a further end. This end consists in the perfect liberation of the individual in the univer
sal spirit across the furthest limits of humanity itself. Such an extreme form of mysticism may be explained to my Western readers by its analogy in science. For science may truly be described as mysticism in the realm of material knowledge.’ Science, by going beyond the world of personality and appearances, brings a ‘freedom of spirit’ similar to that sought by Indian mystics through the ages: both science and mysticism can produce ‘the purest feeling of disinterested delight’. Such a feeling is not present in ‘The Sick-Bed – 21’, for Tagore is not a mystic: rather there is humble wonder at a universe which may indeed be as impersonal and amoral as scientists and mystics perceive it to be, but which is nevertheless sublimely beautiful in that very impersonality. The poem seems at first to be about the limitations of science; but by the end, if we follow this second interpretation, it is about the poetry of science.

  4 ‘through cyclic time’ – yug-yugānter ābartane: ‘through the whirl or revolution of age after age’. Hindu perception of the cyclic nature of time and world-history and Western evolutionary theory seem to be combined in this phrase.

  5 ‘final beauty’ – saundaryer pariāme: ‘to the end-state of beauty’.

  19 lit., ‘I, a poet, do not know debate, argument (tarka)’.