Letters From a Young Poet 1887 1895

by Rabindranath Tagore

  93

  Shilaidaha

  Tuesday, 2 May 1893

  I’m on the boat now. This seems like my own home. Here I alone am master—no one else has any authority over me or my time. This boat is like my old dressing gown—entering it one can enter a time of looseness and leisure—I think as I please, imagine what I please, read as much as I want, write as much as I want, and I can put both my legs up on the table and stare absent-mindedly out at the river and immerse myself as much as I wish in these days full of sky and light and laziness …

  The first few days now will be spent getting past the hesitant feeling of being reacquainted with someone you knew before. Then, as I routinely read and write and stroll on the riverbank, our old friendship will become quite easy once again. Really, I do love the Padma a great deal. Just as Indra had his Airabat [winged elephant] I have my Padma—my ideal mount—not too tame, somewhat wild—but I feel like stroking her back and shoulders and petting her. The waters of the Padma have receded quite a bit now—they’ve become quite transparent and thin—like a pale-complexioned, slender girl, her soft sari clinging to her body. She’s going along in a graceful way, and her sari bends with her movement as she goes. When I live on my boat in Shilaidaha, the Padma is like a real separate human being for me. So if I write about her a bit excessively, don’t think that what I say is unfit to be written in a letter. Over here, that’s like personal news.

  How differently one feels from Calcutta in the space of only one day! Last evening I was sitting there on the terrace—that was one thing, and this afternoon I’m sitting on the boat—this is another. What is sentimental or poetical in Calcutta—how real and true that is over here! One no longer feels like dancing upon a gas-lit stage called the public—one feels like hiding away in the transparent daylight and secluded leisure of this place and doing one’s work privately. The mind’s tiredness does not go away unless one can retire offstage and wash and wipe away all the make-up. Then it seems quite unnecessary to run Sādhanā, to help Sādhanā, and die huffing and puffing—there are many things in it that are not real gold but base metal—and, if I can continue working single-mindedly under this endless sky and within this vast peace, doing my own work immersed in my own deep joy, only then will any real work be done.

  94

  Shilaidaha

  8 May 1893

  Poetry is an old love of mine. She was engaged to me perhaps from the time I was Rathi’s age—from that time onward our pond’s banks, the space under the banyan tree, the garden within the house, the undiscovered ground-floor rooms inside our house, and the entire outside world and all the stories and rhymes heard from the maidservants were creating an intense wonderland within my mind—it’s very difficult to express the shadowy, wonderful state of mind of that time—but this much I can say quite clearly—that I had exchanged wedding garlands with kalpanā [the imagination] at that time itself. But one has to admit that that girl does not bring good luck—whatever else she brings, she does not bring good fortune. I wouldn’t say she doesn’t give happiness, but she has no relation with contentment. To those whom she welcomes, she gives intense pleasure, but at times her hard embrace wrings the heart and draws blood. The wretched man she chooses finds it completely impossible to be a householder and sit still and enjoy himself at leisure after establishing himself in the social world. But it is to her that I have pledged my true life. Whether I’m writing for Sādhanā or looking after the jamidāri estates, the moment I begin to write poetry, I immediately enter my own eternal, genuine self—and I can quite understand that this is my place. In life, one may consciously or unconsciously lie or dissimulate, but I have never lied in my poetry—that space is the only shelter of all the deepest truths of my life….

  The whole morning passed looking at Ravi Varma’s paintings. I really like them. Whatever else, we realize from looking at these pictures how much our indigenous subject matter and our indigenous forms and feelings mean to us. The proportions of the bodies and the hands and legs are a bit awry in some of the paintings, but taken altogether they do make an impression on you. The main reason for that is that our mind keeps cooperating with the painter all the time. We understand in advance what he is trying to say—when we see what he’s trying to do we can complete the rest of it ourselves. It’s easy to nitpick, one doesn’t need any special talent to do that, but when you think about it you realize how difficult it is to imagine any subject very clearly—the pictures that arise in our imagination are almost always half-baked, somewhat made-up—but once you embark upon painting a picture, every line counts, the important and the unimportant—everything has to be thought out carefully, you have to pour an ever-changing substance like the imagination into the hard, fixed mould of the tangible—that’s not a small thing!

  95

  Shilaidaha

  10 May 1893

  Meanwhile, I can see that a number of big, swollen clouds have come crowding around from all sides and congealed—like a thick blotting pad they have soaked up the raw golden sunlight completely from the scenery all around me. After this if it begins to rain now, then shame on the god Indra! The clouds don’t have an empty or impoverished look about them any more … instead, like the babus they’re nicely luscious and dark, with a rotund, roly-poly-boy look. It’s going to rain any moment now—the breeze too seems to feel teary and wet. Sitting on your towering mountain top, you can’t quite imagine how important this business of sunshine and cloud is over here, or how many people sit and gape open-mouthed at the sky. I feel very sorry when I see my poor peasant subjects—they are like the children of the gods—helpless—unless He puts food into their mouth with His own hands, they have no way out. They can only cry when the earth’s breast milk runs dry; the moment they manage to satiate their hunger, they forget everything. I don’t know whether it is possible or impossible to divide up the earth’s wealth as the socialists do—but if it is completely impossible, then fate is very cruel and man is very wretched! There may be unhappiness in the world, and that’s all right, but there should be the smallest gap, the smallest possibility always, so that man’s higher instincts can work without rest to put an end to that sorrow, and he is able to nurture hope. Those who say that it is an absolutely impossible unfounded dream to think that in some future age all the people of the world will be provided with at least the basic necessities of life, that most of the world’s people will always remain malnourished, that there’s no way out—it is a very hard thing they say. But social issues such as these are so difficult! God has given us such a small, worn-out and poor garment to wear that when one part of the world is covered the other side is exposed—if you want to do away with poverty you lose your wealth and if you lose your wealth then so much of society’s loveliness and beauty and reasons for progress also disappear that there’s no end to it.

  But the sun is reappearing from time to time, while quite a few clouds are also amassed in the west. It will certainly rain if there are clouds in the west—that’s what the proverb says.

  96

  Shilaidaha

  11 May 1893

  The clouds amassed darkly last evening, and then it rained for a while, after which everything cleared up again. Today a few clouds, scattered and separated from the group and made white by the sunlight, are wandering around in the most innocent and harmless way on the margins of the sky, looking as if they have not the slightest intention of rain in them—but Chanakya, in his famous śloka where he warns us against trusting in a number of things, should have included the gods in that list. Yet the morning today has become quite beautiful—the sky is a clear blue, there are no lines on the water at all, and the drops from yesterday’s rain on the grass which has grown on the rolling slope near the shore are shining. Taken all together in the sunlight, nature today has taken on the appearance of the glorious goddess Mahevarī dressed completely in white. The morning is so completely quiet—I don’t know why there is not a single boat on the river; nobody has come to the ghat near o
ur boat to bathe or draw water; the nāẏeb has completed his work and left early—if you listen carefully for a while you can hear a sort of buzz, and this sunlight and sky slowly enter your head and absolutely fill it up, colouring all the thoughts and feelings there with a blue and golden hue. I’ve brought a curved couch up to one side of the boat; on mornings like these, one feels like spreading out one’s entire body on it and forgetting all about work to lie there quietly; one thinks—

  ‘I have no before or after

  As if I have blossomed forth in one day

  Like an orphaned flower of the forest.’

  It is as if I am of this sky, this river, this old, green earth. This is how my time passes on the boat. I lie here and keep looking at the countless changing moods of this familiar landscape. There’s another pleasure that I have here. Occasionally some simple, old, devoted subject will come to see me whose devotion is so genuine that my eyes fill with tears. Just a moment ago an old peasant and his son had come from Kaligram to see me—it was as if he wiped both my feet with all of his simple, brimming heart and left. In the Bhāgabat Krishna has said, ‘My devotee is greater than me’—one understands the meaning of that a little bit. Truly, this man is so much greater than me in his beautiful simplicity and sincere devotion! I am the one who seems unworthy of this devotion, but this devotion is no small thing, after all. Their peasant dialect, their affectionate greeting, all of it is so sweet! It is like the love one feels for small boys—the affection one feels for these old boys—but there are some differences. These men are even younger than the boys. Because small boys will grow up one day, but these men will never grow up—there is such a simple, soft and pure mind in their worn, emaciated, wrinkled, creased old bodies! Children have only simplicity, but they don’t have such a fixed, trustful and single-minded devotion. And am I worthy of being this old man’s raja! If there really is a spiritual connection between one man and another, then my inner good wishes for him may perhaps be useful to him one day—besides which, of course, I shall do everything I can as his landlord. But not all one’s subjects are this sort, and one shouldn’t expect them to be. The best is always the most rare—but in god’s world that shouldn’t have been the case.

  97

  Shilaidaha

  Saturday, 13 May 1893

  Today I received a telegram from you which said: Missing gown lying Post Office. This can mean two things. One: that a lost garment is lying down in the post office. Another—that the gown is missing and the post office is lying. Both meanings may be possible, but until I hear anyone protest, I’ll take it to be the first. But the fun is in the fact that the letter accompanying the telegram clearly states that there’s no doubt a gown could not be found….

  Poor letter! All it possesses are a few words that have been shoved into an envelope which it carries on its shoulders all the long way as it staggers along—in the meanwhile it has no knowledge of all the things that have happened in the world, and neither can it contradict the short and rude summary that its younger brother has presented by jumping over him in one big leap; it says, like a simple-hearted person, ‘I really don’t know anything, you know, I’ve only brought what I’ve been told to you.’ And really, that’s what it has brought. Not a single word has been displaced this way or that—walking the entire way, it has come at the correct time with so many signs of the road stamped upon its front and back. Well then, let its news be wrong, I still love it. And the telegraph arrives riding on the cable in the blink of an eye—no sign of the weariness of the road, the envelope absolutely fresh and red—saying the two things it had to say in a great hurry, with at least eight or ten words missing in between—it has no grammar, no manners, nothing—not a single word of greeting, nor the politeness of a leave-taking—as if it has not the slightest friendliness towards me, as if all it wants is to hurriedly deliver its message in any which way possible and leave as quickly as it can. Anyway, although it took a long time to know that the gown has spent so many winter days in the post office, it would have taken even longer if there were no telegraph, so thanks are due to it.

  98

  Shilaidaha

  16 May 1893

  In the evenings, after six-thirty, I have a bath, and then, neat and clean and cool, I walk by the riverside on the sandbank for about an hour, after which I drag our new jolly boat into the river, and, spreading out my bedding on it, lie down in the cool breeze in the dark of the evening in complete silence.

  Shai—— sits by me and chatters away. The sky above my eyes is inlaid with stars—I think to myself almost every day—will I ever be born again under this starry sky? If I am, then will I ever again be able to make my bed on the jolly boat and lie down upon it on the silent Gorai River in this beautiful corner of Bengal in such a peaceful, entranced state of mind on such a tranquil evening? I shall perhaps never find another evening like this one in another birth. One doesn’t know how the scenery will change, or even what sort of mind one will be born with! Perhaps I may be given many such evenings, but those evenings may not rest upon my breast with loosened hair and with such deep love. And will I remain exactly the same man I am now! Amazingly, my deepest fear is that I may be reborn in Europe. Because there’s no way one can expose one’s entire heart, bring it up so close to the surface and lie around in this way over there, besides which, it’s considered a great sin to just lie around like this. One has to work very hard in a factory or a bank or in Parliament, with all one’s body and soul—the mind and its habits are paved and made appropriate for running a business in the same way that the city’s roads are laid with bricks and made hard for business and commerce and carriages and horses to use—there are no cracks there for a soft blade of grass or an unnecessary tendril to grow. It is a very well-trimmed, beaten-and-moulded, tied-down-with-laws and sturdy sort of system. God knows, but I don’t think my imagination-loving, useless, self-absorbed, spread-out-like-the-sky manner of mind is in any way a thing of shame. Lying here on the jolly boat I don’t think I am the slightest bit smaller than those men of business in the world. Rather, if I too had tightened my belt and got down to work, I might have felt terribly diminished in comparison with those strong men capable of cutting down big oak trees. But, on the other hand, does that mean that this entranced youth lying flat upon a jolly boat is really a bigger man than Rammohun Roy?

  99

  Calcutta

  21 June 1893

  The diary this time is not exactly a eulogy to nature—it’s a discussion on the subject of the turmoil created by the wild, restless thing called the mind when it enters our body. Actually the deal was that we should eat, be clothed, live—there was absolutely no crying need to try to investigate the original reason for the existence of the world; to wilfully create a very difficult metre and then try and express a very difficult thought within it and then again want the rhyme to scan at every step; to be drowning in a sea of debts and yet spend money from our own coffers every month to publish Sādhanā—and, on the other hand, look at Narayan Singh, how he makes thick ruti with wheat and ghī and adds some curd and happily indulges in a pleasurable meal, and, having first had a smoke in advance, falls easily into an undisturbed sleep in the afternoon; he does a few odd jobs for Loken in the morning and evening, and rests comfortably all night; he never even dreams that his life is in vain, or that it has not mattered—he doesn’t think it is his responsibility to see that the world is progressing as rapidly as it should. The word ‘success’ does not mean anything in life—nature has ordained only one thing, and that is ‘keep living’. Narayan Singh obeys that commandment and is at peace—and the wretched man who has allowed a living thing called the mind to dig a hole and build a nest in his heart has no rest, no end to his duties, no peace; for him, nothing is enough—he has lost all sense of proportion vis-à-vis the situation surrounding him; when he is on water, he wants to be on land, when he is on land, he is full of an ‘endless desire’ to swim in the water. What I want to say is—it would be a great relief
to be able to take this dissatisfied, restless mind and drown it in the fathomless peace of nature so that one could sit and be still for a moment.

  100

  Calcutta

  22 June 1893

  You took a dig at me the other day in your letter, saying we look at things like marriage, etc., in an excessively theoretical way—and I’ve thought about what you said a great deal, after which I have no doubt in my mind that what you’ve said is true. Really, people like me do tend to look at most things from a distance—the tendency is to want to look at every single thing analytically. The mind is like a bull’s eye lantern. The light cast by its thoughts falls upon one thing at a time so that you cannot see the next thing—in fact, it tends to make the first object twice as dark and light up the adjacent thing with an excessive brightness. This way of looking has many faults. If you look at things in the context of everything that surrounds it, then the eye and the mind tolerate almost anything—if you see one part of this vast world as a constituent of the entire world, it will not seem so important to you any more. All my philosophising with regard to Sw——’s marriage is quite useless. Joy and sorrow exist in every situation, neither is present in absolute excess—on the whole a man and a woman who have pledged their lives to each other are meant to live in harmony and happiness—if you keep in mind the fact that the world is not greater than what it is and compare all its aspects, you’ll find that it all adds up. Just see how the Sw——s are quite happy—of course the force of this happiness will become lesser with time, and life, tied to the bonds of routine and affection, will flow slowly along on its course. Wretched, ‘thinking’ people like me don’t seem to understand this fully. Even with regard to ourselves, we have made ourselves unsuccessful and unproductive by constantly thinking and imagining things—every single section of a situation assumes far too much importance with us. So happiness becomes excessive happiness and sorrow turns intensely powerful, but the chief happiness and peace of life, a proportionate harmony and unity in our totality, are missing—that’s why, walking for such a long time with these fragmentary, scattered joys and sorrows, life becomes absolutely exhausting—one feels that one doesn’t want happiness or unhappiness or anything any more, but to just lie down forever, calmly and peacefully, in this generous, open, beautiful, tranquil countryside and bask in the sunlight—what a relief that would be. But those who are not in the least bit disturbed by the thing called the mind have no particular worries about anything at all in the world—they will be happy, they will make others happy, and it will be very easy for them to fulfil all of life’s obligations. It’s tremendously unfair of me to express these unhealthy thoughts of my worn heart and make you unduly anxious about the world. For you, the world will hold plentiful happiness, and life will unfold in many new scenes with many changes—and you will be able to enjoy all of it with a happy mind and full heart.