Letters From a Young Poet 1887 1895

by Rabindranath Tagore

  You have asked me a question about the silent poet, about which what I have to say is that the silent poet and the poet who expresses himself may feel the same amount, but the really poetic is an independent thing. Not only because of the power of language but also the ability to put it all together. Feelings acquire many different forms in the hands of a poet by the power of an invisible, unconscious talent. That power to create is at the root of the poetic. Language, feeling and expression are merely its tools. Some have language, some have expression, somebody may have both language and expression, but there is somebody else who has language, expression and also the power to create—you can call this last person a poet. The first three types of people may be silent or vocal, but they are not poets. The correct word to describe some of these types might be thinkers. They too are very rare in this world and the poet’s thirsty heart is always yearning for them.

  After reading the preface I’ve provided above, it might be easier to understand my poem ‘Jāl phelā’ [Casting the Net]—you’ve asked me its meaning. If I had it in front of me, I might have been able to look at its meaning properly myself and then tried to explain it to you—still, I have a vague memory of it. Imagine a person standing by the sea at the start of his life and watching the sunrise—that sea is his own mind or the outside world or an ocean of feeling somewhere between the two—that has not been made very clear. Anyway, standing there looking at that amazingly beautiful fathomless sea, the person thinks, let me see what I might get if I throw my net into this sea of mystery. So saying, he throws his net into the sea with a circular motion. Many amazing things begin to come up—some white as a smile, some bright as tears, some coloured like shame. In his excitement, he continues with this work all day long—he keeps bringing up the beautiful mysteries from the depths of the sea until he has a pile on the shore. This is how he spends the entire day that was his life. In the evening, he thinks, I have enough, let me go and give these now. To whom has not been made perfectly clear—perhaps to his beloved, perhaps to his country. But she has never seen all these amazing things before. She might wonder, what are these things, what is the need for them, will they banish poverty, how much would they be worth if I take them to a shopkeeper for valuation? In other words, this is not science, philosophy, history, geography, economics, sociology, theology or data of any kind—these are merely many-coloured feelings, and we don’t even know their nomenclature or description very well. As a result, the person given all the gems collected by throwing your net into the endless ocean says: What on earth are these? The fisherman too then feels remorse, ‘True enough, this is nothing much, just something I dredged up by throwing my net into the water—I didn’t go to the market, and I haven’t spent any money, I didn’t have to pay a paisa in tax or duty on it!’ He then picks it all up with a dejected and shameful face and, sitting at the door of his house, throws it all on the road one by one. The next day in the morning, passers-by pick up these hugely valuable things and take them away to their own homes in this country and abroad. It seems that the person who has written this poem thinks that his country, busy with domestic duties in the inner quarters, and his contemporary readers cannot quite comprehend the meaning of his poems—they don’t understand their value—so for now, it is all being discarded on the road, ‘you neglect them and I too neglect them’, but when this night is over, then ‘posterity’ will pick them up and take them away to other parts of this country and abroad. But will that help mitigate that fisherman’s regret? Anyway, hopefully nobody will have any objection to the happy thoughts of the poet as he dreams of posterity coming slowly towards him through the long night like a lover on an assignation—perhaps she might just reach him by the time the night has come to an end.

  I can’t quite recall what the exact meaning of the poem about the temple is. Perhaps it’s about an actual temple. That is, when you sit in a corner and swathe your god in a lot of artificial ideas, thereby taking your mind too to an unnatural and very sharp level, and then a lightning bolt of doubt breaks down those artificial barriers of so many ages, so that suddenly your place of chanting and ritual and incense and smoke is exposed to nature’s beauty, sunlight, and the song of the world, and then you see that this is real worship and this is god’s satisfaction. Perhaps it was the temples of Orissa that put me in this sort of mood. Inside one of the temples at Bhubaneshwar, the place where the god was placed was terribly dark, closed, and with a suffocating smell of incense—the floor wet with water used to bathe the image of the god, bats flying around—the moment you came out of there into the beautiful light outside you knew exactly where god really was.

  108

  Patishar

  13 August 1893

  We had to travel through a number of large marshes on our way. These marshes are very strange—they have no shape or size, water and land everywhere—as the world was when it first woke from the womb of the ocean. There is no limit to anything—there’s water, some half-submerged fields of rice, some algae and some water-plants floating—cormorants swimming, large bamboo staffs planted in the water to secure fishing nets with a few large pale kites sitting on top—all together a very monotonous and analogous sort of scenery. In the distance, the outlines of villages can be seen like islands—as you go on, suddenly again a bit of river, villages on both sides, jute fields and bamboo groves, and then again there’s no way of telling when all of that disappears into the vast marshes….

  Exactly around sunset when we were crossing by a village, a number of boys rowing a longboat were singing in a dialect, in rhythm with the slapping of the oars—

  ‘yobatī, kyān bā kara man bhañ?

  pābnā thākye ānye deba

  tyākā dāmer motori’

  (Young girl, why do you feel sad?

  From Pabna I will bring for you

  A rupee worth of motor.)

  The mode adopted by the local poet in composing his song is one that we too deploy, but there are some basic differences. When our young girl is depressed, we are immediately ready to give our lives or bring her the pārijāt flower from the mythical woods of nandankānan, but I must say the people of this region are very fortunate—a little sacrifice is enough for their young women. It’s not for me to speculate on what exactly this ‘motori’ thing is, but its price is mentioned in the very same breath—which makes it clear that it doesn’t cost the earth and need not be brought from too inaccessible a place. It was fun to hear the song. One was reminded again even at the margins of these marshes that the sadness of young women agitates the world. This song may be laughed at elsewhere, but in this particular context it has considerable beauty. The compositions of my rural brother poets are absolutely integral to the joys and sorrows of the village folk; my own songs would not be any less laughable to them.

  109

  Patishar

  13 August 1893

  This time, as I travelled through the marshes to Kaligram, one thought came to me with great clarity. It’s not a new thought, I’ve known it for many days now, but still, sometimes one can re-experience an old thought in a new way. The water is not beautiful until it is bound on both sides by the banks—uncertain, unregulated marshes are monotonous and unattractive. In language, the work of the banks is done by the ties of metre, which gives language a particular form and a particular beauty; a beautiful picture is created. Just as rivers that are bound by their shores have a particular character, so that they seem to have individual personalities like certain men, metre enables poetry to stand on its own like an individual existence. Prose does not have the same beautiful, well-thought-out independence; it is like a vast, characterless marsh. Again, the moment the river is closed off by the shoreline, it has a speed and a motion, but the marsh is without flow, it just lies there spread out, engulfing all sides. In language too, if you want to give it a passion, a motion, you have to tie it down within the narrowness of metre; otherwise it simply spreads itself out, it cannot flow with all its force in one direction. The water in
the marshes is called ‘dumb water’ by the village people—it has no language, it cannot express itself. In a river you can always hear a gurgling sound; words too, if you tie them in metre, clash and strike against one another and create a music of their own. That’s why language in rhyme is not dumb language; it is always speaking and singing. Staying tied up makes motion, sound and form beautiful. There is as much beauty in being bound as there is strength. Poetry reveals itself very slowly and naturally through the metre within which it is captured, not because it is catering to an artificial pleasure created by force of habit—it is a deep, natural happiness. There are many idiots who think that to enclose a poem in rhyme is merely done to show off, that it is only to evoke wonder in ordinary people, that it is merely an exercise in language. But that’s completely wrong. The rules that give birth to metre in poetry are the same rules that create all the beauty in the universe. Beauty has such an amazing strength only because it travels at speed through well-directed ties to strike the mind. And, the moment that you exceed those graceful bonds, everything spills out and it does not have the strength to strike any more. As I travelled from the marshes into rivers and crossed from the rivers into marshes, this thought woke in my mind like a bright flame.

  110

  Patishar

  18 August 1893

  Haven’t you understood the Diary for the month of Śrābaṇ, Bob? If I begin to explain I might have to write an entire book…. I’ve been thinking for a long time now that men are somewhat disjointed and women are quite nicely complete. There is a wholeness and proportion to women’s conversations, attire, behaviour and life’s duties. As if all of it is one organic whole. The main reason for that is that nature has given them their duties herself many aeons ago and has built them according to that intention from top to toe—no change, no national revolution, no creation or destruction of a civilization has so far split that accord; they have always looked after, loved, given affection and not done anything else. The skill they have developed at these tasks has merged and become one with their limbs and parts, their language and gestures. Their nature and their work have combined together like flowers and the fragrance of flowers, which is why they have no hesitation, no doubts at all within themselves. Men’s characters are very uneven; the different types of jobs they’ve done, their different strengths, the changes that they’ve come through in the process of their formation—their bodies and their habits seem to bear those marks. Quite unexpectedly, their foreheads may be terribly broad, or their nose might push outward suddenly in such a fashion that it would be impossible for anybody to keep it down, or their jaws might follow no rules of grace at all. If men had been driven by the same thoughts and learnt the same lessons from the beginning of time, then perhaps their faces and manners too might have been more in harmony with each other—a mould could have been created a long time ago—then there would have been no need for them to use their strength and think so much in order to do their work. All their work would have been accomplished easily and beautifully—then a simple law too would have established itself for them. That is, their minds would have become habituated to the work they had been doing without interruption for many ages, and no lesser force would have been able to remove them from that familiar duty. Nature, by making them mothers, has poured women’s natures into a mould. Man has no natural ancient bond of that sort, that’s why he has not been built in an all-round way in the shelter of a single lode star. He has always been wrenched apart in every direction, his wild and scattered inclinations have not allowed him to build up a beautiful completeness. Remember I wrote a lot to you in a letter that day about being bounded as a cause for the creation of beauty—well, women too are like that—they have been made complete and beautiful by the ties of a natural rhythm. And men are like prose—without ties or beauty, there is no particular mould within which they have been entirely formed. I’m not sure if I’ve managed to explain myself very well, but in my mind it’s very clear. That’s the reason why women have always been compared to music, poetry, flowers, tendrils and rivers—nobody ever dreams of applying these similes to men. Just as all the attractive things in nature are beautifully related, complete, organized and restrained, so too are women. No hesitation or doubt or thought enters their mind to interrupt their rhythm, no discord destroys the scansion—they are each of them like individual sweet and slender poems. They are as Chandra described them in Goṛāẏ galad.* I don’t think this letter is turning out to be any clearer than the Diary, but there’s no way I can use any clear and evident proof here.

  111

  Calcutta

  21 August 1893

  Today I received some newspaper cuttings from you. Where’s the wild intoxication of the artist community in Paris and where my simple peasants of Kaligram who bring their sorrow and their poverty to me! Alas, I have never seen such peasants anywhere—their genuine love and their unbearable suffering bring tears to my eyes. To me these wretched peasants, full of an unwavering faith and adoration, have such a soft sweetness on their faces that my heart really does melt with affection when I look at them. Really, it’s as if they are a large family of mine whose members fill the countryside. There’s a great happiness in thinking of these helpless, powerless, completely dependent, simple farmers and peasants as my own people. I find listening to their language so sweet—it has such a mix of affection and tenderness within it! When they speak to me of some injustice, my eyes begin to fill up, and I have to maintain my composure by dissembling in various ways. They put up with so much sorrow with so much patience, but still their love never pales. Today someone came and said, ‘That year the crops failed so I went to my old father in Chunchura to come to a settlement with him. So he said, I’m giving you all a portion, in return you too should give me some food. The supervising land surveyor here got annoyed because I went to him for help and put me in jail for three months on a false charge. Then I salaamed the land you own and went off to a different region.’ But still, such was his devotion that when he discovered that the jamidār of that different region had stolen some of our land and was profiting from it, he told our serestā [office of the record-office superintendent] about it and as a result, the new jamidār in his anger took away all his land and crops. He said, ‘I can’t even look out for the welfare of those whose land I have been brought up on and grown old on and tell them anything!’ So saying, he wiped away tears from his eyes. If you could see him and hear what he was saying, how simply he put it without any cleverness of any sort, as if he was giving us a bit of news, then you would have understood the actual depth of it all. They don’t know how much I respect them, how much better than myself I think them to be. But still, what a difference from civilization in Paris! That is so much harder, brighter and better composed than this! But the people here have something that is not to be looked down on. Until this clear simplicity is established at the centre of civilization it will never be complete or beautiful. It is the absence of these qualities that seems to be making European civilization increasingly morbid. An unhealthiness, a worm seems to be gradually eating away at its insides, wearing it away. Simplicity is the only resource that will make man healthy—it is like the Ganga, one can rid one’s self of many of life’s afflictions by bathing in it. And Europe seems to be nurturing all afflictions, and on top of that, its nights and days are artificially heated with a thousand different intoxicants. Each and every piece of the newspaper cuttings you have sent proves this.

  112

  Karmathar

  Saturday, 9 September 1893

  The garden is overrun with roses. There’s a rain tree [śirśsh] that is full of flowers from top to bottom, its fragrance fills the air. The rain-tree flower is as beautiful to look at as it is fragrant…. There are a couple of them lying entangled on the table in front of me, like soft, sweet kisses, like sleepy eyes…. The rain-tree flower was a favourite of Kalidasa’s. In Kalidasa’s books, the rain-tree flower was a metaphor for youthful good looks….

&n
bsp; In an earlier letter you had asked me why I don’t like the company of others. One reason could be that if there is an interruption of any kind when you’re thinking or feeling something, then the frustration due to this obstacle and the thwarted, unsuccessful efforts within yourself bring about a great weariness—trying to pay attention to others and trying to think one’s own thoughts both at the same time seem to make the mind intensely irritated. But if the other person is the sort who can push away all your other thoughts and efforts and attract your entire mind towards himself, then it is very relaxing. The real thing is that unless I can completely immerse myself in something I cannot be still; those things that don’t absorb my entire attention are very wearying for me at this age—it is as if one cannot find the space to set down the weight of one’s thoughts anywhere, and so one keeps hanging in mid-air…. —— wrote me a letter—asking if I could be a close friend and write frequently. I’ve written back saying, in not so many words, that I have no time for friendship as a sort of luxury. At this age, one has to work, and protect and enjoy all that is old deeply in one’s heart. Nowadays one doesn’t feel like indulging whimsical hobbies any more.