Letters From a Young Poet 1887 1895

by Rabindranath Tagore

  Our own thoughts too are very ambiguous for us—we never come to know exactly what we are thinking, half of what we think only god can know. It is when I’ve tried to express my own thoughts that I’ve learnt from myself—most of my education has been of this sort; the moment I stop expressing myself, my school closes too. That’s why I sit down, impelled by my own need, to keep talking away every day with you.

  152

  Patishar

  10 September 1894

  I’ve been on the waterway since yesterday morning. There are only marshes on every side—the raised tips of rice stalks—the villages, with their few densely packed huts, float in the distance—a mildly fragrant green lichen extends, congealed, up to quite a distance, so that one suddenly mistakes it for land; on that itself, a variety of waterbirds gather. It’s a Bhādra day, there’s not much of a breeze, and the slack sails of the boat hang limply; the boat has moved sluggishly throughout the day, proceeding in the most indifferent manner. The bright sun of śarat falls on this lichen-diffused extensive water-world, and I sit on a chair near the window with my feet up on another chair humming to myself the whole day. All the morning melodies such as Rāmkeli, which seem so absolutely routine and lifeless in Calcutta, come completely alive in their wholeness over here the moment you evoke them even fractionally. Such an amazing truth and new beauty appear in them, such a universal deep tenderness melts into the air all around, making everything misty, that it seems as if this rāginī is the song of the entire sky and the entire earth. It’s like a web of magic, like a māẏā mantra. There’s no end to the numberless fragments of words that I conjoin to my tunes—so many one-line songs accumulate and are then discarded throughout the day. I don’t feel like sitting down to systematically turn them into complete songs. I sit on this chair drinking in the golden sunlight from the sky while my eyes fall like an affectionate touch upon the moist lichen’s new softness, allowing my mind to fill up easily and lazily with whatever comes spontaneously to it—I cannot try any harder at the moment than this. I can remember the two or three lines in the most simple of Bhairabī rāginīs that I spent the entire morning continuously reciting, so I’m attaching an extract as an example for you below —

  ogo tumi naba naba rupe eso prāe.

  (āmār nityanaba!)

  eso gandha barana gāne!

  āmi ye dike nirakhi tumi eso he

  āmār mugdha mudita naẏāne!*

  (Oh, come to my heart in new and newer forms

  [My constant newness!]

  Come as a fragrant song of welcome!

  Whichever direction I look, you come to me

  To my entranced, shut eyes!)

  153

  On the way to Dighpatia

  20 September 1894

  The water on the other side of the Padma is receding, but it is time for the water to rise on this side. I can see this on every side. There’s no end to the different kinds of waterways we’re travelling through—marshes, canals, rivers. Large trees have submerged their entire base in the water and stand with all their branches bent over the water—there are boats tied within dark forests of mango and banyan trees, and the village people bathe there, hidden from sight. Occasionally, a village hut remains standing in the stream, the areas all around it completely immersed in water. There’s no way one can see any sign of a field, only the tips of rice stalks raise their heads over the water slightly. The boat slides through the rice fields with a scraping sound and suddenly enters a pond—there’s no grain there—white lotuses bloom in lotus groves and black kingfishers dive into the water to catch fish. Then again, as we go on, at one place we suddenly enter a small river—there’s a rice field on one shore and, on the other, a village surrounded by dense vegetation—in the middle, the full stream of water goes on its winding way. The water enters wherever it can—I don’t think you all have ever seen the land so defeated. The village people come and go from one place to another sitting on large, round clay tubs plying a plank of wood for an oar—there’s no trace of any roads on the land. If the water increases even slightly, it will enter the houses—and then they’ll have to use ladders and live on the upper floors, the cows standing day and night in knee-deep water will die, their edible grass become increasingly scarce, snakes will abandon their flooded holes and come and take shelter in the roofs of huts, and all the homeless insects and reptiles of the world will come to live by the side of men. As it is the villages are dark, enclosed on every side by forest cover—and then on top of that the water enters even there and all the leaves and creepers and shrubs begin to rot, with all the garbage from the cattle shed and people’s homes floating around on every side, the water made blue with the stink of rotting jute, and naked children with swollen stomachs and sticklike hands and legs keep splashing around here and there in the water and the mud while clouds of whining mosquitoes hover above the still, putrid water like a layer of fog—the villages in this region assume such an unhealthy, comfortless aspect in the rainy season that one feels nauseated just travelling past them. When I see the housewives getting drenched in rainwater, wet saris wrapped around their bodies in the cold, wet wind, the material pulled up above their knees so they can do their everyday domestic work, patiently pushing aside the water, it is impossible to like what you see. I can’t think how men put up with so much hardship and such lack of comfort—on top of this, in every house people suffer from arthritis, swollen feet, colds, fever; there’s the continuous whining and crying of boys suffering from an enlargement of the spleen, and they are simply beyond saving—they die one by one. One cannot accept the existence of such neglect, ill health, ugliness, poverty and barbarism in man’s places of habitation. We are defeated by every sort of power—we tolerate the depredations of nature, we tolerate the tyranny of kings, and against the intolerable oppressions of the śāstras through the ages we don’t have the courage to say a word. Such a race of men should run away from the world and become absolute deserters—they bring the world no happiness, beauty or convenience.

  154

  On the way to Boyalia

  Saturday, 22 September 1894

  Today it’s cleared up on every side and there’s a wonderful sun up, Bob. A small river, a fierce current which, as we pull against it, creates a constant kal-kal, chal-chal sound that comes to the ear. After getting wet in the rain all these days, the trees and villages on both sides of the river express such a feeling of leisurely joy in the new sunlight of śarat! Today the memories of bad days have all been completely wiped away from the sky and the earth. As if the world had never ceased to be joyful. This skyful of golden sunlight has spread itself completely over my mind as well—there the home of all my happiest memories has taken on an amazing and magical aspect in this śarat light. When I think that only thirty-two seasons of śarat have come and gone in my life, I find it very surprising—yet it seems as if my memory’s path becomes increasingly obscure and misty as it travels towards the beginning of time, and when this cloudless, beautiful morning sun comes and falls upon that large world of my mind, then I seem to be sitting at the window of my magical palace, looking out unblinkingly towards a magical mirage kingdom spread out as far as can be seen, and the breeze that comes and touches my forehead all the time seems to bring with it the entire unclear, mixed, mild fragrance of the past to me. How I love the light and the air! Perhaps because of the appropriateness of my name. Goethe had said before he died: More light!—if I had to express a wish at a time like that I would say: More light and more space! I’ve said in one of my poems—

  śūnya byom aparimāṇ,

  madyasama kariba pān

  mukta kari ruddha prāṇ

  ūrdhva nīlākāśe.

  (The empty sky without measure

  I shall drink like wine

  Freeing the imprisoned heart

  Into the blue sky on high.)

  I am not yet satiated with what I have drunk of this sky. Many people don’t like the fact that Bengal is on level ground, but t
hat’s exactly why I like the vista of its fields, its riverbanks, so very much. When the evening light and the evening peace begin to descend from above, the entire unfettered sky fills up like a sapphire cup; when the motionless, tired, silent afternoon spreads out its cloth of gold, there are no obstructions anywhere—there’s no other place like this to keep looking and looking, and to fill up one’s heart by looking. That’s why I love the seashore so much more than the mountains. The day I arrived at the seashore in Puri—with the white sands stretching desolately in one direction, and, on the other, the dark blue sea and the pale blue sky spread out till the limits of one’s vision—one can’t quite talk about how my entire inner soul had filled up on that day. That’s why I had really wanted to build a small house by the sea in Puri and just be there. Even now, that unhomely roar of the waves comes to my ears like a distant dream. If I could travel as sannyāsīs do so easily from one place to another, then I would give myself up into the hands of this unbounded earth and travel once to many other countries. But the sky calls out with both its arms extended and the home too pulls you back by both your hands. A lot of trouble comes from being an amphibian creature. I’m an amphibian in all respects—the world of the mind and the material world both tie me down equally.

  155

  Boyalia

  Monday, 24 September 1894

  You’ve written that those who have a greater power to feel are those who suffer more in this world—there’s no doubt about that at all—because the capacity to experience sorrow depends on the ability to feel. But I’ve frequently thought that whether I’m happy or unhappy is not the last word on the subject for me. Our innermost nature continues to feel and to grow through all our joys and sorrows. Our momentary life and our eternal life may be joined together, but they are not the same—this I can clearly comprehend at times. Our experiences of joy and sorrow in this transient life feed the sources of eternal life. You know perhaps that the green leaves of trees analyse the sun’s rays and help in the collection of a substance called carbon, and it is that carbon which results in fire when we burn trees. The leaves of the trees spread themselves out in the sun and dry up and fall, and then new leaves grow—the transient life of the tree is experiencing the sun and then drying up and falling in the same heat—the eternal life of the tree is gathering an unburnable eternal fire within it. Our leaves of every day, every moment, too spread themselves on every side to experience the joys and sorrows of the world as they flow, and then, burnt by the heat of those joys and sorrows, fall one by one, but our eternal life cannot be touched by those momentary flames—it continuously keeps collecting that energy within itself in an unnoticed and unconscious way. The tree whose leaves are not green is not a tree of the highest class, and its store of carbon too is negligible. The man whose ability to experience the everyday joys and sorrows of each moment is poor also does not burn, and his reserves for eternal life too are extremely insignificant. His transient life stays protected from the heat of life’s joys and sorrows and he lives for longer—that is, one often sees that the small social world of the day-to-day, the narrow limits of a narrow way of life are enough for him; this doesn’t dry up or fall off. They keep the transient relatively stable by covering it in insensitivity; they keep a small number of days so fresh that you would think them eternal; they turn the insignificant business of life into something extraordinary. But life has a rule of checks and balances everywhere which is called ‘the law of compensation’. If you try to protect your everyday to keep it alive, you turn your eternity into a dead thing. Those who are completely satisfied with themselves within the narrow boundaries of the material world, those worldly, materialistic men are healthy and happy in the transient world, but the deep joy of eternity is beyond their imagination, outside their conception—they think of it as the rhetoric of poetry; they don’t believe in it with all their hearts. That’s why they think it is their life’s mission to forsake the happiness that is not of this world and the unhappiness that is of it, and nobody can make them believe in a higher ideal than this, to make them understand that ‘Even those who are suffering from the greatest of sorrows are no more an object of pity than you are.’ I don’t know if I’ve made myself clear to you, Bob. The real thoughts of our minds live so far inside that to articulate them properly, to make someone else see them in their true form is very difficult—that’s why initially one hesitates to even try. That which is the deepest truth above all for me—that which lives in the innermost sanctum of our lives—that’s something we express unconsciously and fragmentarily in many forms, many words and many deeds. But to make it discernible to someone else all at the same time, in fact even to one’s self, is very difficult—one is afraid if perhaps the thing that is completely true for one’s innermost being may take on an imaginary aspect once it tries to emerge from within.

  156

  Boyalia

  24 September 1894

  I’m ashamed to admit it and it makes me very unhappy to reflect on it, but human company usually makes me terribly uncomfortable, it keeps chafing away at me inside—I want to be like everyone else, to mix easily with everybody, to be happy with simple pastimes and amusements—I keep lecturing myself about this at great length every day, but there is such a barrier surrounding me on all sides that I am unable to cross it however much I try. I am a new creature among men, I never become completely familiar with them—I’m very distant from even those I have been friends with for a very long time! Since I’m a naturally distant person, I find the forced proximity of men for social reasons very tiring. Yet it’s not as if it’s natural for me to be completely removed from the company of men; I feel like dropping into the midst of gatherings from time to time—to see what sort of work goes on in which places, what revolutions are taking place—I too feel like participating and helping with those—the warmth of life that comes from human contact seems essential for the mind to stay alive. These two opposing impulses come together when you’re in the company of those who are like your very close relations, who don’t wear down your mind by rubbing it the wrong way; in fact, they give joy, and so help the mind to work enthusiastically and easily in all its natural activities.

  157

  Boyalia

  25 September 1894

  Think about it, when we undertake a very major kind of self-sacrifice, why do we do it? A noble passion then separates our insignificant transient life from ourselves, and its joys and sorrows cannot touch us any more. We suddenly see that we are greater than the sum of our joys and sorrows, that we are free from the insignificant bonds of our everyday lives. The principal rule of our everyday life is the effort we make to attain happiness and to avoid unhappiness; but, occasionally, a time comes when it’s possible that we discover a place within us where those rules don’t work—where sorrow is not sorrow and happiness is not even counted among the things we aspire towards—where we are beyond all the small rules, independent. Then we derive a certain pleasure from defeating our transient lives, we exult in making a garland of our sorrows to wear—we think that it is the strength of our inner independent manhood that allows us to attain, through the joy that resides within all our joys and sorrows, the accomplishment of our character. But then again society, the company of men and everyday conversations, hunger and thirst, grow strong all around us and hide that innermost independent field from our eyes—it becomes very difficult to release ourselves completely and self-interest appears more forcefully again. The principal difference between great men and lesser men is that great men manage to live in that field of independence within themselves, that inner sanctum of eternal life, for most of the time, while for lesser men that place remains inaccessible and unknown most of the time. Bob, when I stay alone in the mofussil, the inner beauty and joy of nature opens the door to my self’s concealed abode of joy, and unites the outer and inner worlds, and then the figure of the immediate world recedes into the far distance—just as the melody of a song confers immortality upon its insignificant word
s, so too the material manifestation of the everyday world attains an eternal splendour through the inner eternal rāginī of joy present in the world of my mind. All our relationships of love and affection then glow with the essence of a humble, self-forgetful dharma of meditation—it’s not as if the sorrowfulness of sorrow goes away, but it seems to cross the limits of my self-interest and spread out across such a vast sky that a beauty seems to emanate from therein—just as the light at sunset casts a melancholy shadow over the land, water and sky, but there is yet a cool, soft joy of beauty mixed in it. This time on the boat I wrote a poem called ‘Antaryāmī’ [The God Within] in which I have tried to express these thoughts about my inner life to some extent. I don’t know if I’ve been successful, because expression doesn’t always depend only on the writer’s abilities, but also upon the reader’s experiences. Sometime ago I received a letter from you where you expressed this inner life of yours and it made me very happy—I’m sure there are many occasions when you have experienced the true manifestation of your inner self, but you don’t want to express it because you don’t believe in yourself. You have doubts about whether these occasional feelings are true or if it is the insignificant everyday which is true. Don’t have such doubts, Bob. Because if you doubt the truth then often that is tantamount to destroying the truth. If we mark those auspicious moments of our lives when we feel ourselves to be much bigger than ourselves, then, with the help of our memory, they become resources for us, guiding us in the future in the right direction. It is because I have made my radiantly beautiful moments of joy figurative through language again and again that the path of my inner life is slowly becoming more accessible—if those moments had been spent in transient enjoyment then they would have always remained like obscure and distant mirages, they would not gradually have become clear as the expressions of a firm belief and definite feeling. For a long time now, consciously and unconsciously, the inner life of the world, the inner life within our lives, the celestial nature of love and affection have taken form for me by being marked in language—my own words have been of help to me—I would have never have got so much from the words of others.