Letters From a Young Poet 1887 1895

by Rabindranath Tagore

  173

  Bolpur

  30 October 1894

  The sort of deep peace and quiet I get at Bolpur would not have been possible anywhere else. Darjeeling’s sanatoriums are paradoxically crowded, the districts too have work and people arriving all the time, while in Bolpur, there are no duties and there’s no disturbance—no sound except the unceasing song of the birds and no visitors on my first floor except for the squirrels. In the afternoons I can hear a drone like the buzzing of bees, and it seems to me as if all the happiest memories of my life have travelled to me from a great distance, borne upon a curious, mixed rustle of sound. The afternoons are so deep and silent and secluded and full that they overwhelm all my heart in whatever I do—writing, reading, thinking—this extensive, vast and piteous afternoon encircles me silently and affectionately. Nowadays, with winter here, the moment my hands and legs feel a little cold I go and sit in the south veranda and nature embraces me like the warm touch of a mother’s lap; the sun comes and falls near my feet, the green fields can be seen till the remote edge of the blue horizon, an unceasing humming sound keeps coming from the insects in the trees all around, and it seems as if everybody’s affection and care surround me from every side to infuse life into my body.

  174

  Bolpur

  Wednesday, 31 October 1894

  The north wind that blows the whole day when winter first starts has begun this morning—the wind comes whistling and the yellow leaves on the rows of āmlakī trees fall trembling to the ground, completely covering the ground beneath its feet—the wind dries the skin of your face and the skin on the palm of my hands is peeling. It is as if the jamidār’s bailiff is visiting the woods—everything trembles and falls and sighs anxiously. The afternoon sun feels good, it drowns one in a sort of restful melancholy, and the endless cooing of the pigeons from within the dense mango orchards turns the entire field and sky and wind and dreamlike long hours of the dappled afternoon into a song of separation’s sorrow—even the sound of the clock on my table seems to have merged with the tender melancholy of the afternoon’s rustle of sound. Inside my room, the squirrels run around all through the afternoon. It has become a part of my daily routine to sit lazily for a long time after lunch observing the various ways of these animals. Fluffy tails, a soft, furry body drawn with black and grey lines, two restless eyes like small little dots, and a completely harmless yet extremely busy air—one feels very affectionate towards them. There is a steel-meshed cupboard in the corner of this room in which dal and rice and bread and other eatables are hidden away from these sort of greedy, speedy creatures—they spend the entire day circling around it with their curious noses, searching for an opening. The few grains of dal and rice that remain scattered outside the cupboard are picked up and nibbled at with their small, sharp front teeth and eaten with the utmost satisfaction—sometimes they sit up straight on their haunches and, joining their two small hands together, arrange the tiny bits of grain tidily and conveniently in their mouths—if I move even the slightest bit they immediately raise their tails up on their backs and run off, quick as a flash—on the way out, they might suddenly stop halfway on the doormat and give their ear a quick scratch and then turn back again—in this way the entire afternoon passes with nibbling and racing and the clatter and tinkle of plates, forks and spoons….

  I don’t feel like leaving this place—when I return to Calcutta, these pleasant mornings and lonely afternoons will constantly come to mind—the peace and beauty of this place will seem so attractive! But what to do! Let’s go happily to the workplace, suppressing all selfish desires. The beauty of this place seems to grow even more appealing when it is time to leave; the day today has been flooded by just such a tender rāginī.

  175

  Calcutta

  19 November 1894

  I’ve observed from my childhood onward that those cries of the pheri-wallah [itinerant hawkers] have always affected me—the sharp call of the kite in the desolate, silent afternoons too had a great impact; I haven’t heard that call for a long time now. I don’t think that’s because the kite doesn’t call any more nowadays, but because I have a lot of work and a lot of thinking to do now—I don’t have that same intimate connection with nature any more. There was a time when I would spend entire afternoons alone on the second floor near the south entrance lying on a couch—I would drink in every sound, every shiver of the long afternoons and their inner tender essence to the dregs. Now it’s impossible to waste that much time; I think, let me read something or write. Even if I don’t feel like harnessing the mind to any particular work, still, one has to try and get some work done, so it becomes necessary then to at least try and read a book, however absent-mindedly. But this is in Calcutta. When you’re in the mofussil, just sitting quietly and looking fills your heart with satisfaction, you’re not a blind slave to work. There’s one sort of work which is tied to one’s duties, there’s nothing to be said against that, but when there’s no immediate work at hand or when for some reason one is unable to do one’s work properly, and then if one tries to root around looking for some work merely to pass the time out of sheer habit—and if one cannot be at peace with just oneself, draw companionship from one’s surroundings—then one must concede that the situation is quite bad. Work is merely a means to an end. Man is not just an instrument of work. The ability to be at rest in a fulfilled and satisfied way should not be lost—because there is much in it that belongs to a higher humanity. No doubt work is a very good thing, but work has a narrowness about it which conceals man. Day and night are the correct metaphors for work and leisure. During the day, there is nothing for us but the world; it is at night that we establish a connection with the endless universe through the planets and constellations of stars. When we work, we belong to this world, when we are at rest, we are of this universe. When we work we need to see the world clearly in the light of logic, argumentation and science; when we rest, the world’s grip must be loosened—then we must see the everlasting connection that we have with eternity as the most important one. Then we should keep all our effort at work at a great distance and feel the intimations of eternity in the ever-present beauty of all the smells, colours and sensations of the world with our bodies and minds. One shouldn’t leave out either of these two modes of being. In the morning when we wake up we should know that we are a person of the world, and when the day comes to a close, we must feel that we inhabit the universe. The vast universe remains forever hidden to those who are too busy with work.

  176

  Calcutta

  Tuesday, 20 November 1894

  To continue with the thought I had brought up in yesterday’s letter to you, it seems to me that just as day and night have divided work and rest between themselves, so too have people divided prose and poetry in literature into two sections. Prose clearly belongs to work and poetry to an immense leisure. That’s why you do not need to say anything necessary in poetry. Our everyday relationships seem to have almost disappeared in the world that is created for us in poetry. If that wasn’t so then the ever-present beauty of the world, the world of feelings, would not have been visible to us. When both these things are true in man’s life, and both truths, like day and night, cannot be seen together, then there’s a necessity for both prose and poetry. That is why poetry, with its metre, scansion and language, has pushed all connection with the everyday world to a distance; in place of necessity, it has introduced beauty—it has tried to convey to us in many ways and through many gestures the news that completely outside of our field of necessity there is an endless ocean of joy extending boundlessly. I was discussing this division between prose and poetry and the need for that distinction with Thakurdas Mukherjee not so long ago. He thinks that in the future prose will become beautiful to the extent that the particular requirement for poetry will be gone. If what was being said had been pure argumentation, it would have been much easier, but because there was a great deal of feeling involved, it became very difficult to explain
in conversation. I only said briefly that while it’s true that level ground is extremely useful for all our work—nobody can deny that—but when you want to act, you need a separate stage; if you come down amidst the audience to perform then the illusion is not created in that way in their minds. The subject of performance must be separated from its surroundings and elevated a little and lit up with lights, scenery and music and held up for display, only then will it succeed in imprinting itself upon the mind in a complete and independent way. The language and metre of poetry is like that stage and that music—it is because the subject is separated by being encircled by all that beauty that it’s able to have such a powerful and complete impact upon our minds, that’s why it can take us out of the surrounding poverty to a land of beauty, and we realize we are no longer in our field of work at first glance itself—we make ourselves ready in an instant. But it’s very difficult to explain all this properly. Thakurdas-babu did not seem too convinced with what I said. He seemed to think that it is my prose rather than my poetry that’s a great deal more poetic in expression, and in his opinion that’s what is more natural. He’s asked for some of my most recent books of poetry—perhaps he’ll write an essay proving that my poetry is my prose and my prose, poetry.

  177

  Calcutta

  21 November 1894

  Aban is sitting in the ground-floor room in that house playing an ālāp on the esrāj in Bhairabī which I can clearly hear sitting in the corner room on the second floor of this house.* You too have written in your letter about Matang’s Bhairabī ālāp. Nowadays, before you know it, it’s ten or eleven in the morning and then noon—as the day grows warmer, the heart too grows equally detached and melancholy; over and above that, when your ear repeatedly picks up the extremely tender, plaintive tug of the Bhairabī, a tremendous feeling of renunciation spreads across the sky and the sunlight. The melting notes of the Bhairabī rāginī extract the eternal, deep sorrow of this work-laden, suspicion-prone world, made sorrowful by separation, and bring it to you. The raga Bhairabī unlocks from within our hearts the tearfulness of the daily grief, fear and supplication that is a part of man’s relation with man; it establishes a connection between our pain and the pain spread across the universe. It is completely true after all that nothing we have is permanent; but nature, by some strange magical power, makes us forget that fact all the time, which is why we are able to do the world’s work enthusiastically. That eternal truth, that pain of death, finds expression in the Bhairabī; what it tells us is that nothing will remain of what we know, and that we know nothing of what will remain eternally.

  178

  Shilaidaha

  Sunday, 25 November 1894

  Go—— has survived this time. I didn’t sleep almost the entire night the day before yesterday. His boat was right behind mine—I could hear his groans from time to time and was distressed thinking that he might die. It was a silent night, and my room was completely dark. Lying there on my bed I kept thinking how the life and death of man was shrouded in a terrible mystery—at times the still, silent, everlasting time surrounding me on all sides seemed very cruel. In relation to it, our lives, our greatest joys and sorrows, our noblest hopes and desires are so insignificant—it matters little to it whether I die today or tomorrow. Whether I die alone or whether a million people die swept away in the floods is also of no consequence. The sun will die out completely one day with its entire solar world and everything will freeze up, but even that is nothing to it—so many such extinguished, dead worlds, concealing their millions of years of life and play, wander around the skies today. Every layer of the earth contains the fossils of so many lost life forms, not a single descendant of theirs is extant today. So I was lying on my bed and thinking to myself, to whom should I say, on behalf of this dying man, in this endless darkness, ‘Oh, this poor man is suffering so much’? Who shall understand the value of his life if not helpless people like us? For whom is his pain true? If death is an unavoidable, inevitable occurrence for every living thing, why should one suffer such terrible agony? Unless we think of our most personal and heartfelt joys and sorrows and desires as having an eternal recourse somewhere, a dwelling of eternal empathy, everything seems like the cruellest farce! A son’s death takes the form of an absolutely unbearable pain for a mother, but if that has no meaning at all to the eternal, then why this māẏā? My love may mean so much to me, but if it has no place at all in eternity, then it is merely a dream. We are doing our utmost for our country, giving our lives for human progress. But our country is a country only for us, that is, greater than the entire world—man is man only for us, that is, greater than all other living things in the world—if you look at it from the outside then these thoughts and, along with them, all our lifelong efforts are totally farcical. Go—’s impending death seemed terribly grave, terribly important to me; but that was only because I am a man, because I am acquainted with him and near him—was there any real depth or significance in it? Ants die, mosquitoes die all the time, why do we think those deaths to be so insignificant? When a leaf dries and falls, when a lamp is extinguished by the breeze, why aren’t those reasons for grief too? They are no less of a change. To eternity, a solar world dying out, a leaf falling, a man dying, are all the same—so all our grief and our joys and sorrows are only our own. I sometimes think that this world is a battlefield of two opposing forces—one of these is within us and trying to live all the time, and the other is attempting perpetually to kill it—if that were not so then death would have seemed entirely natural to us, it wouldn’t have seemed in the slightest bit terrible—we were one way at one time, and at another time we have become something else—there would be no sorrow or grief or wonder entangled there. But our nature says from within, ‘I want to live’, it says ‘Death is my opponent—I must conquer it’—yet nobody has ever been able to conquer it. But we go on trying. That’s why we feel the pain of death, the grief of death—when the eternal desire of staying alive is repeatedly defeated by death.

  179

  Shilaidaha

  Wednesday, 28 November 1894

  This year, the sandbanks are exactly as they were the first year I came to Shilaidaha by boat, when the limits of the sandbanks could not be seen from this shore. The white sands stretch desolately for miles right up to the farthest limit of the horizon; there is no grass, nor are there any trees, houses or anything at all—that time there were a few wild jhāu clumps, this time even those aren’t there. You’ll never be able to imagine such vast emptiness unless you see it with your own eyes. We are used to the emptiness of the skies and the seas, and don’t expect anything else there; but the emptiness of land seems the emptiest of all—no movement anywhere, no life, no variety of colour, not a hint of softness anywhere—not a blade of grass in a place that could have been full of the fluidity of grain and grass and birds and animals—just an indifferent, hard, endless bondage of widowhood—the Padma River flows by on one side, on the other side the ghat, tied boats, people bathing, coconut and mango groves—in the evenings the murmur from the bazaar next to the river can be heard and the rows of trees on the Pabna side appear like a dark blue line—deep blue in some places, pale blue in some, green in some, and in between is this bloodless, deathlike pale white—silent, inert, desolate. In the evenings, at sunset, when I walk upon this sandbank I feel a deep expansiveness and boundless freedom in my heart. Nothing anywhere, nobody around, just me, alone. Everything that I have to say, I can spread out upon this land without a mark or a boundary; I am my own companion, my own happiness, I can make everything on my own. Yesterday I was thinking that when our senses cannot feel anything then our minds feel everything for us, the senses are merely the gateway to the mind, so why should we not think that whatever presents itself to our minds even without the help of our senses is true as well? Or why should we not find an equal amount of happiness from it as from truth? I think that’s merely because of habit. From the beginning, we are used to experiencing everything through our sen
ses. Now, even if our minds can independently construct many things with the help of the imagination, unless we feel all our joys and sorrows through our senses we aren’t able to enjoy them completely. For instance, it is the mind that writes, not the pen, yet for those who are used to writing with a pen, it isn’t possible to organize their thoughts orally in the same way as they can when they sit down with a pen in hand. I definitely think that if we can just concentrate a little and prepare and practise, the materials of the imagination can be used in lieu of the materials of the senses to experience things in the closest, most intimately attainable way. Unfortunately, the powers of the imagination are not always as clear, as detailed or as definite as that all the time. In the mofussil, these powers of mine blossom fully, and I can fill the distance of time and place with my imagination; but in the filth of Calcutta god knows where these magical powers disappear, and my only recourse then is to beg and cry at the door of the senses.