Letters From a Young Poet 1887 1895

by Rabindranath Tagore

  66

  Shahjadpur

  5 July 1892

  Today is an auspicious day here. There’s been music playing since last night. Yesterday in the evening suddenly a Brass Band arrived here from god knows where—they play Indian tunes in an English way, somewhat like at theatre concerts—bhyāňppo bhyāňppo they go, beating the drum with all their strength—one can’t stand it for very long. But this morning the raga Bhairabī was being played upon a śānāi—how can I tell you how extremely sweet the sound was—the empty sky and air in front of my eyes seemed to fill with the passion of locked-up tears—very sorrowful but very beautiful—I don’t understand why the same tone doesn’t appear in vocal renditions in the same way. Why does the brass pipe manage to convey so much more feeling than the human voice? Right now they are playing Multān—it’s made the mind so melancholy—it’s drawn a cover of vaporous tears over the entire green of the world—the entire world can be seen through a curtain of the Multān rāginī. Wouldn’t it be quite something to always be able to see the world through a particular rāginī? Nowadays I really feel like learning singing—quite a few tunes in Bhupali…. and the tender tunes of the rains—a few really good Hindustani songs—you could say that I hardly know any songs at all.

  67

  Shilaidaha

  20 July 1892

  We were just about to lose our lives a few moments ago. I’m not sure how exactly we managed to save ourselves. Anyway, I’m not unhappy to have been saved, certainly. We were travelling today from Panti to Shilaidaha—the sails were full and we were ripping along at a splendid pace—the monsoon river was full to the brim and the waves were coming up with a roaring sound—I was intermittently looking out and intermittently reading and writing. At about 10.30 in the morning we caught sight of the bridge on the river Gorui. While the boat continued towards the bridge, the boatmen began to argue about whether the boat’s mast would get stuck under it. The boatmen hoped that since we were travelling against the current, there was nothing to worry about, because we could lower the sails if we thought the mast might get caught in the bridge, even if we were quite close to it, and that would make the boat slow down. But upon nearing the bridge we found that the mast would indeed hit it and that there was a whirlpool there. As a result, because of the whirlpool, the current was moving in the opposite direction. That’s when we realized we were facing disaster. But there wasn’t much time to think—before we knew it, the boat crashed into the bridge. The mast began to slant sideways with a cracking sound—I kept saying to the stunned boatmen, ‘Move away from there, the mast will fall on your heads’—when suddenly another boat quickly rowed up to us and picked me up and began to pull our boat with a rope. Topshi and another boatman swam to the shore with the rope between their teeth and began to pull from there. Many more people were gathered upon the shore—they all pulled the boat up. But nobody had any hope. The more the mast bent to one side, the more the boat listed sideways—if the other boat had not come up in time, it wouldn’t have survived for long. Everybody crowding the shore then said, ‘Allah has saved you, or you didn’t have a chance.’ After all, we are inanimate objects, you see! However distressed we were, or however much we might have shouted, when the wood hit the iron, and the water began to push upward from below, whatever had to happen would happen—the water didn’t stop for a second, the mast didn’t lower its head by even a hair’s breadth, and the iron bridge too remained standing as before. When I reached the shore on the other boat, our boat was still on the verge of collapse—luckily we were so close to the shore that there was no possibility of anybody drowning. But the boat was a goner and, along with it, all my exercise books and other writing. The boatmen are saying this journey itself is not a good one—this is the third time this has happened. At the Kushtia ghat the rope snapped while the mast was being raised so that it fell, and Phulchand mājhi was lucky to escape with his life. Then again the mast got stuck in a banyan tree at the creek in Panti, and that too was quite a dangerous moment. The current there had been very strong. And then this bridge disaster. The only consolation I have is that even in the midst of utmost danger, I was warning the oarsmen of the danger to them, not howling or crying for my own safety; I kept a calm head. I was prepared at every moment for the terrible manner in which the mast would break—whatever I urged the oarsmen to do was quite in order—none of it was irrational. Ooh! How my heart quails to think of you all with me in this situation!

  68

  Shilaidaha

  21 July 1892

  Last evening we reached Shilaidaha, and this morning we have set out for Pabna. These days the river doesn’t look as it did before—when all of you had come you had seen riverbanks as high as single-storey buildings, while now it has filled up entirely, leaving a margin of only a few feet. The spirit of the river! It’s like a wild young horse with its tail waving, mane flying and head bent. Pride of speed makes the waves swell up and rise—we’re riding this crazy river, swaying as we go. There’s a great joy in this. How do I tell you about the sound of this full river! It gurgles and chatters as if it cannot stop itself—it has an air of intoxicated youth about it. And this is just the Gorui River. After this we reach the Padma—it will probably be impossible to form an idea of the margins of its banks. That woman has perhaps become completely insane, dancing and skipping crazily, refusing any confinement. When I think of her, I think of the image of Kali—dancing, destroying and running along with her open hair. The boatmen were saying that the Padma had become very ‘sharp’ [dhārhaẏeche] with the new rains. ‘Sharp’ is the right word. The fast-moving current is like a shining scimitar, it cuts like a blade of thin steel. Like the hatchet that used to be tied to the wheels of the war chariots of ancient Britons, the Padma’s fast-moving victorious chariot too has the sharp, cutting current tied like sharpened hatchets to both its wheels, cutting through both banks on either side with utter abandon…. One doesn’t experience the joy of the river except at this time! We often come at the end of winter or the start of summer, when the emaciated river has become tame and placid—there’s nothing wild about it then at all. Your mother had been so fearful even then; if she saw it now, she would probably be afraid even if she were on land. Not that there is anything to be afraid of. Rather, it was what happened yesterday that was quite serious. Yesterday we managed to say how-do-you-do to the god of death, Yamaraj, and come away. Unless one undergoes an experience of this sort, one doesn’t really realize that death is our immediate next door neighbour. Even when it happens you don’t remember it afterwards. The image of him that flashed suddenly before our eyes yesterday is difficult to recall today. We don’t think about him very much unless he absolutely descends upon us unannounced like an unwanted, unneeded friend. But although he stays hidden, he’s always taking note of how we are and what we’re doing. Anyway, I bow low before him with a thousand salaams and inform him that I don’t care a whit about him at all—whether he raises waves in the water or whistles from the sky—I’ve filled my sails and I’m on my way—everybody in the world knows exactly how far he can go—so what more can he do! Whatever happens, I will not howl and cry.

  69

  Shilaidaha

  18 August 1892

  Such a beautiful śarat morning! How can I describe the nectar that rains down upon the eye! There’s a beautiful breeze and bird call. On the shore of this full river, looking at the śarat sunlight falling upon this new world made happy by the rain, it seems as if this young and beautiful earth goddess is having an affair with some god of light—that’s why this light and this air, this half-melancholy, half-happy feeling, this continuous trembling in the leaves of trees and fields of grain—such an unlimited fulfilment in the water, such green beauty on the land, such a transparent blue in the sky. A vast, deep, endless love affair is being enacted between heaven and earth. Just as love has the virtue of finding the biggest events of the world quite insignificant, so too the sky here has such a feeling spread across it that it makes
all the running around, the panting and the struggling, the rolling and the rumbling of Calcutta seem very small and extremely distant. The sky, the light, the air and song have come together from every direction and loosened me up and absorbed me within themselves—as if someone had picked my mind up on his brush and applied it like another coat of colour upon this vibrant śarat scene, so that there’s another layer of intoxicating colour over this entire blue, green and gold. I’m enjoying this. ‘Kī jani parān kī ye cāy.’ [‘I know not what the heart wants’] is something I feel shy saying, and if I were in the city, I wouldn’t be saying it—but although it’s a full sixteen annas of poeticism, there is no harm in saying it here. Many an old and withered poem that seems worthy of being burnt in the flames of ridicule in Calcutta comes into leaf and flower in no time at all the moment I come here….

  70

  Shilaidaha

  20 August 1892

  Every day when I open my eyes in the morning I can see water to my left and to my right the riverbank flooded in sunlight. Often when you look at a picture and think—oh, if only I could be there—that’s exactly the feeling that is satisfied over here. It seems as if I am living within a shining picture, as if the hardness of the real world is entirely absent here. When I was a child, the pictures of trees and oceans in books such as Robinson Crusoe or Paul-Virginie made me very melancholy—the sunlight here makes those childhood memories of gazing at pictures come alive.* I don’t quite catch what the meaning of it is, I don’t quite understand what the desire entwined in it is—it’s like a pulsating attachment with this vast earth—at a time when I was one with this world, when the green grass rose on top of me, the śarat sunlight fell over me, when every pore of my green body—spread across enormous distances—let off the fragrance and heat of youth, when I would lie silently under the bright sky, stretched over native and foreign lands, water, mountains, when in this śarat sunlight my immense body would gather up, in a very unsaid, half-aware and large way, a particular flavour of joy and a life force—it’s as if I can partly remember that time—this state of mind seems to be the feeling of that prehistoric world that was at every moment full of seed, flower, joy and the overlordship of sunlight. It’s as if the stream of my consciousness is moving slowly through the veins of every blade of grass and root of tree, as if all the fields of grain are thrilling to the touch, and every leaf on the coconut trees is trembling with the passion of life. I want to properly express the heartfelt affection and kinship I feel towards this world, but perhaps most people wouldn’t quite understand it correctly—they may think it very weird. That’s why I don’t feel like trying.

  71

  Boyalia

  18 November 1892

  Are you on a train right now? After the severe chill all night long, you have perhaps woken up and, having washed your face, sat down with a blanket over your legs. If you were travelling by the Jabalpur line I would have been well able to imagine the sort of scenery you’re travelling through by now. At this time in the morning the sun rises near Nowari on an undulating, hard-as-rock, treeless world. Possibly it might be the same on your Nagpur line too. Perhaps the new sun has made everything all around very bright, sometimes you can see a hint of blue mountains in the sky—not too many fields of grain around—suddenly at one or two places you see the churlish farmers of that region beginning to plough their fields with oxen—on either side, the cleft earth, black rocks, signs of dried-up waterfalls in gravel-strewn paths, small stunted śāl trees and, on the telegraph lines, black, long-tailed, restless phiṅge birds.* It’s as if a large, wild thing of nature has been tamed by the bright, soft touch of a young godchild of light to lie down quietly, very calm and still. Do you know why I picture it like that? In Kalidasa you have read of how the young son of Dushyanta, Bharat, used to play with a lion cub. It’s as if he were affectionately running his pale, soft fingers slowly through the lion cub’s long mane, and that large animal were lying quietly by his side and occasionally glancing sideways at his man friend with a look of affection and complete dependence. And you know what those dried-up waterfalls with their gravel-strewn paths remind me of? In English fairy tales we read about a stepmother who sends her stepchildren into an unknown forest, and then the brother and sister use their intelligence to mark the way home by dropping one pebble after another to show them the way. The small streams seem like those little children, who have wandered out into this unknown vast earth when they were very young, which is why they drop small pebbles on the way as they go—when they return they’ll find these paths to their way home once more. This morning from the moment I woke up I’ve been sitting with you next to the window of your train to try and watch with you the sunlit scenes on either side. I’m arranging my recollections of long-ago train journeys, the many memories and many fragmentary scenes, on either side of my mind, spacing them, ordering them, spreading them out in the winter morning sunlight and talking to you sometimes about them.

  72

  Natore

  1 December 1892

  So yesterday Loken and I managed to set out. You have to go a long way by horse-drawn carriage. Twenty-eight miles ahead of us, and only ‘us two travellers’. Loken began with a cigarette and a book, I started to hum ‘Sundarī rādhe āoẏe bani’; after we had travelled about ten miles or so thus and the sun began to grow fainter the closer it reached sunset, Loken suddenly began a quarrel with the Vaishnava poets in the context of my song. I don’t know if that argument would ever have reached a conclusion, but fortunately a lean and thin river suddenly appeared in the middle of it and drew a long full stop [dāňṛi] there. We had to get down from the carriage on that riverbank and cross a bridge over the river on foot—on the other side we suddenly discovered half a moon risen in the sky and beautiful moonlight. We both agreed that we should try and walk as far as we could. Then we stopped arguing and the two of us began to walk slowly and silently upon the hushed road engraved with the shadows of trees in the moonlight. Yesterday was Wednesday, so it was market day in the nearby village, from where at the end of the day a few villagers and village women were returning home, talking to each other. A single empty bullock cart pulled by two cows ambling slowly and absent-mindedly on, with a watchman huddled in a wrapper fast asleep upon it, went towards the rest house. Occasionally we came across a village hidden in dense woods—layer upon layer of smoke from fires lit with straw in the cowsheds hung low upon the bushes, heavy with dew, unable to rise up in the still winter’s night. After travelling for a mile or two in this manner we got into the carriage again…. It was almost one o’clock by the watch. After a lot of begging and pleading we managed to persuade the Maharaja to take us for a drive and drop us home. Everybody agreed: Such a night was not meant for sleep! Really, it was a beautiful night. There were no people on the roads and the moonlight upon the large lakes of the royal palace and the shadows of the dense trees beside them were looking splendid. We went to bed after reaching home at about one-thirty at night.

  73

  Natore

  2 December 1892

  Yesterday we went to the Maharaja’s place after breakfast, and in the evening we all went out together. I liked the road through the middle with the fields on either side. The vast, empty, desolate fields of Bengal with trees at their farthest margins in the light of the setting sun—I just can’t describe how beautiful it is—such an enormous peace and soft pity—such a silent, wan embrace between this world of ours and that distant sky, modest with the weight of affection! The infinite has a sort of great un-fragmented sorrow of eternal separation that partially reveals itself in the evening light upon this abandoned earth—all the water, land and sky fill up with a particular spoken silence—if you gaze wide-eyed at it for a long time in silence, you think that if this complete silence stretched across everything cannot hold itself in any more and its self-born language bursts out into expression, then what a deep, serious, peaceful, beautiful, tender music would sound out from this earth to the starry skies! Act
ually that’s what is happening. Because the trembling of the earth that comes and hurts our eyes is light, and the trembling that hurts our ears, sound. If we try to sit still and meditate we get a rough idea in our minds of the vast melody created with the harmony of all the light and colour of the world. If we could just try and be still and attentive, we would be able to partly translate in our minds the vast harmony created by all the earth’s light and colour as it comes together into one enormous song. We only have to shut our eyes and listen with our inner hearing to the endless trembling sound of the flow of images over the world. But how many times will I write to you about this sunrise and this sunset! I experience it in a new way every day, but can I express it in a new way every time?

  74

  Shilaidaha

  9 December 1892

  Now I’m alone, settled by my boat’s window, at peace after a very long time. The boat is moving with a favourable current; on top of that its sails are full—the winter day has warmed up a little in the afternoon sun, there are no boats on the Padma—the empty sandbanks’ yellow colour is drawn like a line between the river’s blue on one side and the sky’s blue on the other—the water trembles and shimmers very slightly in the north wind; there are no waves. I’m sitting leaning by the open window; there’s a gentle breeze that touches my head—it’s very soothing. After a severe illness over many days, the body is in a slack, weak condition—at this time nature’s slow, affectionate care and attendance feel very sweet—like this narrow winter river, my entire being seems to lie lazily in the mild sun and shimmer while I almost absent-mindedly go on writing this letter to you. Every time before I come to the Padma I fear that perhaps my Padma has become old. But as soon as the boat pushes off, and the sound of water is heard on all sides—a trembling, pulsating murmur in the light and the sky in every direction, a very soft, spread-out blue space, a very new green line—a continuous celebration then begins of colour and dance and song and beauty, and once more my heart is completely overwhelmed. This world is constantly new to me, like someone I have loved for a very long time and over many lives; there is a very deep and far-reaching relationship between the two of us. I can remember quite well, many ages ago when the earth was young, how she had raised her head above the sea water to greet the new sun, and I, a tree in the first flush of life then on this earth’s new soil somewhere, had borne new leaves. There were no animals or living things in the world then, just the vast ocean swaying day and night, wildly embracing the earth from time to time like an ignorant mother, covering it completely. I had drunk the first sunlight on this earth with my entire body; like a newborn child stirred by the blind joy of life under the blue skies, I had embraced my mother earth with all my roots and drunk her breast milk. My flowers bloomed and new leaves grew with a dumb joy. When the dense monsoon clouds amassed, their deep blue shade would touch all my leaves like the palm of a familiar hand. Even after that have I been born on the soil of this earth in every new age. When the two of us sit alone, face-to-face, that old acquaintance comes back again to my memory little by little. My mother earth sits now by ‘one sunlit yellow region of gold’ by that riverbank’s fields of grain—I fall at her feet, into her lap—just as many a son’s mother remains absent-minded yet affectionate and calm, not paying much attention to their child’s coming and going, so too my earth looks towards the horizon this afternoon and thinks of many ancient things, not paying much attention to what I do while I keep on talking endlessly. Time passes in this way. It’s almost evening. It’s winter, you see, and the sun falls away very quickly.