Letters From a Young Poet 1887 1895

by Rabindranath Tagore

  101

  Shilaidaha

  Sunday, 2 July 1893

  If you want to properly enjoy something, you must build a fence of leisure on every side of it—and you will enjoy it to the full sixteen annas only when you can spread it out to dry, let it loose, stretch it out in all directions. One of the principal reasons that one likes to receive letters in the mofussils is because here one has the time to drink in every drop of every word to the dregs; the imagination can twine around, wind around, and get entangled in every word—one can feel a certain motion in one’s imagination for quite a while. If you become greedy and hurry, you are deprived of that joy. The desire for happiness hurries along at such a speed that there are times when it leapfrogs over happiness itself, and then it’s all over in the blink of an eye. No letter is quite enough in the midst of all this work to do with land records and landholdings and litigation and clerks—it’s as if one has not found food sufficient for one’s hunger. But the older I become, I see that what you get is often dependent on your own ability to receive. It’s wrong to file a complaint or a lawsuit about how much you are entitled to receive from others; the real thing is, how much can you take? To be able to possess entirely what comes to hand is accomplished only with a lot of education, practice and self-discipline. Almost three quarters of one’s life is spent in acquiring that education, and there’s not much time left after that to enjoy the fruits of that education. Thus goes the first chapter of the śāstra on how to live happily.

  102

  Shilaidaha

  Monday, 3 July 1893

  Yesterday the wind howled all night like a street dog—and the rain, too, was unending. The water on the field was flowing through it from every direction like small waterfalls and entering the river with a gurgling sound. The farmers were getting wet as they crossed over on the ferry to cut the rice on the sandbank on the other shore, some with togās [hats] and some holding a broad kacu leaf over their heads—the boatman sitting at the helm of these large, fully loaded boats, getting drenched, and the oarsmen towing the boat along from the shore, getting soaked as they walked. Such a calamity, yet the world’s business cannot come to a stop; the birds sit dejectedly in their nests, but the sons of men have left their homes and come out. Two cowherd boys have brought a herd of cows to graze in front of my boat; the cows wander around, chewing on the luscious, green, rain-freshened wet grass with a munching sound, their mouths full and their tails swishing to drive away the flies from their backs, their eyes calm and peaceful as they eat—the rain and the cowherd boys’ sticks come down ceaselessly upon their backs, both equally irrationally, unfairly and unnecessarily, and they’re putting up with both without comment, with the utmost patience, continuing to chew noisily on the grass. The look in the eyes of these cows is strangely melancholy, calm, deep and affectionate—why do these large animals have to be burdened with the load of man’s work in the middle of all this? The river’s water rises every day. One can see from the window of the boat today almost as much as could be seen day before yesterday from the top of the boat—every morning I wake up and see that the landscape is gradually getting extended. All these days I could see the heads of the trees of that distant village like so many clouds of green leaves; today, the entire forest presents itself in front of me from end to end—land and water approach each other slowly like two shy lovers—their timidity has almost overflowed, they are almost in an embrace now. It will be wonderful to travel on this full river during the full monsoons on this boat—I’m impatient to untie the boat’s mooring and take off.

  103

  Shilaidaha

  Tuesday, 4 July 1893

  This morning there is a hint of sun. The rain is on hold from last evening onward, but there are so many clouds stacked in so many layers by the sides of the sky that there’s not much hope—it’s exactly as if the dark carpet of clouds has been rolled up and kept piled in one corner of the sky. A busybody wind will come right now and scatter the clouds all over the sky again, and then there will be no sign of the blue sky and golden sunlight. The amount of water the sky had in it this time! The river water has entered our sandbank. The farmers are bringing back their unripe grain, cut and piled high on the boats—their boats pass by mine, and I can constantly hear the sounds of lament. You can quite understand how terribly cruel it is that they have had to cut down unripe grain when the grain would have ripened in another four days’ time. They can only hope that some ears of rice might hold a couple of grains that have hardened a little. Nature’s way of functioning must have mercy in it somewhere I’m sure, or else where did we get it from, but it’s difficult to know where to find it. The complaints of these hundreds and thousands of wretched innocents is not reaching anywhere—the rain continues to fall as it must, the river rises as it must, one cannot obtain an audience with anybody concerning all this in the whole universe. One has to make one’s self understand that nothing is understandable. But if man has been endowed with so much intelligence, he should have also been given the brains to realize that there is pity and justice in the world, because it is imperative that he understands that much at least. But all this is just unnecessary nitpicking—because creation can never be a happy experience. As long as there is incompleteness, there will be want and there will be sorrow. If the world had not been the world but had been God, then there would have been no imperfections anywhere—but one doesn’t have the courage to ask for that much. If you think about it, everything goes back to the fundamental problem—why was the world created? But if you don’t have any complaints on that score, then to raise the complaint that there is unhappiness in the world is quite bogus. That’s why the Buddhists deal with it by treating the fundamental issue—they say that as long as there is existence, there is sorrow, so they want nirvana. The Christians say that sorrow is a noble thing; that God himself was born as man in order to share in our suffering. One must obtain whatever consolation one can from that. But philosophical sorrow is one thing, and the sorrow of ripening grain getting submerged is quite another. I say that whatever happens is good; this fact that I have happened, that this amazing universe has happened, is a huge gift—such a thing should not be spoiled. Buddhadeb says in reply, if you want to keep this thing, then you must put up with sorrow. A wretched man like me replies, if it is necessary to suffer in order to protect whatever is good or dear to you, then I will suffer—let me live, and let my world exist. Occasionally, I will have to put up with a lack of food or clothing, with unhappiness, with despair; but if I love existence more than suffering, and if I put up with that suffering in order to exist, then it does not behove me to say anything further.

  104

  Ichamoti

  Thursday, 6 July 1893

  Yesterday it was quite clear the entire day. After a long time, the clouds had gone and the new sunlight had brightened up each and everything; nature seemed to have had a bath and was sitting happily drying her wet hair in the desultory breeze with a pleased, contented air, wearing freshly washed clothes of yellow—but my mind was very anxious. Exactly as if it were in solitary confinement. But in the busyness of all the work that needed to be done today, I didn’t find the time to nurse that frame of mind. After finishing work at about four or five in the evening, when we set off on the boat, a very dark bank of clouds had risen in the east. Gradually we also had some wind and rain. The rain stopped when we entered this tributary. The sandbanks have been flooded—the boat had to be towed with a scraping sound through grass as tall as men between forests of jhāu. Further on, there was a favourable wind. I told them to raise the sails; the sails were raised. The boat went proudly on, cutting through the waves with a gurgling sound. I sat outside on a chair. I won’t even attempt to describe how beautiful the sunset was behind the dense blue clouds and the half-submerged, desolate sandbanks and the full river spread out up to the horizon. Particularly, at the far end of the sky, right above the Padma’s waterline where there was a break in the clouds, it had an appearance so excessi
vely fine and golden and distant, and upon that golden picture, rows of tall, dark trees had been etched with such soft blue lines—it seemed that nature had reached its ultimate apotheosis and turned into an imaginary land. The boatman asked, ‘Should I moor it on the sandbank of the kāchāri ghat?’ I said, ‘No, let us cross the Padma.’ The boatman set off—the breeze picked up, the Padma began to dance, the sails puffed up, the daylight began to fade, the clouds at the side of the sky gradually amassed themselves densely in the middle of it, the wildly restless waters of the Padma began to applaud from every side—in front of us we could see the blue line of the forests on the shore of the Padma under a pile of distant blue clouds—there were no other boats in the middle of the river but ours—near the shore, two or three fishermen’s boats have raised their small sails and are heading home—I’m sitting here as if I were the king of nature, carried along at a great speed in a dancing motion by its restless, foaming-at-the-mouth royal horses.

  105

  Shahjadpur

  7 July 1893

  Yesterday we reached Shahjadpur in the evening after winding our way continuously through small villages, broken-down ghats, tin-roofed bazaars, granaries fenced with wooden planking, bamboo groves, jungles full of mango, jackfruit, berry, date, cotton, banana and ākanda trees, castor oil, arum and kacu plants, an aggregation of creepers, shrubs and grass, a group of large boats with their masts raised tied to the ghat, and nearly submerged fields of rice and jute. Now we shall be stationary here for the next few days. After a long time on the boat I quite like the house at Shahjadpur—it’s as if one has found a new independence—one suddenly discovers what a vital element of man’s happiness is dependent on the ability to move about as much as he wants and to find space to stretch his body. This morning, quite a bit of sun has appeared intermittently, the wind is blowing briskly, the jhāu and licu trees are swaying with a creaking, scraping sound, many different kinds of birds have been calling in many voices and many tunes, making the morning concert in the woods hum with excitement—I’m sitting here in this large, empty, secluded, bright and open first-floor room, quite happily watching from my window the rows of boats on the water, the village amongst the trees on the other side, and the slow flow of work in the inhabited regions nearby on this side of the bank. The flow of work in a village is not too rapid, yet not entirely lifeless and comatose either. It’s as if work and leisure are both walking side by side in unison, holding hands. The ferries cross the river, travellers with umbrellas in hand walk by the road next to the canal, women immerse their wicker baskets and wash rice, the farmers come to market with bundles of tied jute on their heads—two men have flung a tree trunk on the ground and are splitting its wood with an axe, making a ṭhak-ṭhak sound, a carpenter works upon an upturned fisherman’s boat under an aśvattha tree, repairing it with a chisel in hand, the village dog roams around aimlessly by the canal, a few cows lie lazily on the ground in the sun, swishing away flies with a languid movement of their ears and tails before they feed upon excessive amounts of fresh grass, and when the crows sitting on their backs irritate them beyond endurance, they shake their heads at them and express their annoyance. The few monotonous ṭhak-ṭhak ṭhuk-ṭhāk sounds of this place, the cries of the naked children playing, the high-pitched tender songs of the cowherds, the jhup-jhāp noise of the oars, the sharp, sad sound of the oil mill hitting the nikhād note, all of these sounds of work come together and are in a sort of proportion to the bird call and the sound of the leaves—all of it seems to be some part of a long dreamlike sonata full of peace and enveloped in pity, somewhat in the mould of Chopin, but composed and bound to a very vast, spread-out, yet restrained metre. The sunlight and all these sounds seem to have filled my head to the brim, so let me stop writing this letter and just lie back for a while.

  106

  Shahjadpur

  10 July 1893

  You’ve received my songs. The tune for the song ‘baṛa bedanār mata’ might not be quite appropriate for a performative drawing-room gathering…. This sort of song should be sung in seclusion. I don’t believe the tune is bad; in fact, it would not be too much of an exaggeration to say it’s good. I had composed that song over many days in the bathing room, little by little, along with its tune—there are a great number of advantages to composing a song in the bathing room. Firstly, the seclusion; secondly, no other duty may claim you—if you pour a tin of water over your head and spend the next five minutes humming, your sense of duty doesn’t suffer too much—and the greatest advantage is that since there’s no possibility of an audience one can freely contort one’s face as much as one wants. One really can’t attain the state of mind in which one composes songs without contorting the face. It’s not exactly something that requires logic or argumentation, you see, it’s pure excitability. I’m still constantly singing this song—I hummed it for quite some time this morning too, and as you keep singing it a certain intoxication comes over you. So I have no doubt at all about the fact that this song is quite a favourite of mine…. Here, I sing alone, with an entranced and liberated heart, my eyes half shut, and the world and this life appear to me touched by the sun’s bright hands, swathed in the finest layer of tears, coloured like a seven-layered rainbow—one can translate everyday truths into eternal beauty, and sorrow and suffering too become radiant. In no time at all, the khājāñci appears with the accounts for two eggs, one sliver of butter, a quarter litre of ghī and six paisa’s worth mustard oil. My history here is like this….

  107

  Shahjadpur

  13 July 1893

  Nowadays writing poetry seems to have become like a secret, forbidden pleasure for me—on the one hand, I still haven’t written a single line for next month’s Sādhanā, and on the other, I’ve been receiving reminders from the editor from time to time; not too far in the distance, the joint Āśvin–Kārtik issue of Sādhanā has been standing empty-handed in front of me and rebuking me, and I’ve been running away into the inner quarters of my poetry to seek refuge. Every day I think to myself—today is only one day, after all—so many days have gone by in this way. I really don’t quite know what my real work is. Sometimes I think I can write lots of short stories and not too badly at that—it’s also quite a pleasure to write them. At other times I think—there are certain thoughts that come to me that are not exactly appropriate for poetry, but which might work if published as a diary or in some other form and preserved, perhaps that will be both fruitful and pleasurable. Sometimes it’s very necessary to fight with our countrymen on social issues—when nobody else is doing so, then it behoves me to fulfil this unpleasant duty. And then again I think, what the hell, let the world take care of itself—I’m quite fluent at composing short rhyming poems set to metre—let me forget about everything else and sit in my own corner and write these. I’ve become something like the insanely proud young woman with many lovers who doesn’t want to let go of any one of them. I don’t want to disappoint any one of the Muses—but that multiplies the workload, and in the ‘long run’ I might not be doing full justice to any of them. A sense of duty is important even in literary matters, but there is a difference between it and doing your duty in other departments. When you fulfil your literary duties you don’t need to think about what will be the most useful for the world, what you need to judge is what you can accomplish the best. Perhaps all the departments of life function the same way. In my own evaluation, it is poetry that I have the most grasp over. But my hunger wants to spread its flame everywhere, over the kingdom of the world as well as the kingdom of the mind. When I begin to compose songs I think it wouldn’t be half-bad to continue with just this work alone. Again, when I get involved with some performance, I get so intoxicated with it that I think if one wants then one can spend one’s entire life on this too. But then, when one gets involved with issues such as ‘child marriage’ or ‘whither education’ then that seems to be the most valuable work in one’s life. What an impasse I’m at, Bob! And then again, if one s
wallows one’s pride and tells the absolute truth, then I have to admit that that thing called painting—I’m always looking towards it with the lustful glances of unrequited love—but there’s no hope of winning it, the age for wooing it is past me now. Unlike the other knowledges, one cannot hope to acquire it easily—to attain it is like breaking the mythical bow; you cannot win its favour until you exhaust yourself with repeated strokes of the paintbrush. The state I’m in is something like Draupadi’s—she thought to herself, well, if I am to have five husbands at one time in any case, then why not a sixth, including Karna—that would be great. I’m sure if she had got Karna, she wouldn’t have wanted to let Duryodhana or Duhshasana go either. Because you can have either one or an infinite number—there’s no natural resting place in between the two extremes. If you say five, then six comes forward on its own accord, and then after six, seven, eight, nine, ten, etc., are all standing in a line looking at you with unblinking eyes, waiting. So I think it’s most convenient if I confine myself to poetry alone—for she is perhaps the one who is under my spell the most—my childhood love, my beloved companion of such a long time….