Selected Poems Read Online

In 1.11 the verb bāoyā is used, generally translated as ‘to row’; but the boat is big enough to have sails (1.13) and carry a cargo of grain, so it is probably being steered or paddled by a single oar. The river-bank is not precipitous, but a beach shelving down into the water.

Readers will always disagree about the meaning of this poem (and Tagore himself disliked such discussions: poems should be not mean: see R222); but the distinction between self and soul seems to me to lie behind it. Soul is liberated through self-surrender, disinterested love: but there is self-interest in the giving of the harvest by the speaker of the poem, a desire to be rewarded and praised for his efforts (11.23–4) and a wish for the self to be ‘taken aboard’ along with what it has given. The result is spiritual failure, a sense of loneliness and alienation. In this mood the khelā (1.7) of the swirling flood-waters takes on its negative aspect: the separateness of the created world from its Creator. The image of the village as a painting (1.9) can be compared with the pictorial imagery in ‘Railway Station’, where there is a similar sense of failure; compare also the story told in RM182 of the person who was barred from entering the Garden of Bliss after it was discovered that ‘inside his clothes he was secretly trying to smuggle into the garden the self, which only finds its fulfilment by its surrender’.

One can also relate ‘The Golden Boat’ to the jīban-debatā poems, particularly ‘Unyielding’, which also combines giving and rejection. See notes to ‘On the Edge of the Sea’.

2 ‘sad’ – nāhi bharasā: ‘with no confidence, faith, support, hope’.

4 lit., ‘the full river is razor-sharp (in its current) and sharp to the touch’.

13 ‘he gazes ahead’ – kono dike nāhi cāy: ‘he does not look in any direction’.

23 lit., ‘for so long, on the river-bank, that in which I was completely absorbed, forgetful of all other cares’.

28 ‘rain-sky’ – śrāba-gagan: ‘the Śrāba-sky’ (see Glossary).

Broken Song (p. 53)

gān-bhaga from sonar tari, 1894

This moving poem expresses some of Tagore’s deepest feelings about music, old age and friendship. Its setting is one of the many petty courts that dotted Bengal before the British period. Nineteenth-century Bengalis often felt nostalgia for the apparent indolence, hospitality and tolerance of the Persianized culture of those days, and Tagore was not immune to this (see R123), even though this poem shows heartlessness in the midst of that culture. I have translated rājā as ‘king’, though this is probably too elevated a term for Pratāp Rāy, who is no more than a big landowner. Baraj Lāl is shown by his name and his uī (‘turban’, 1.31) to be Hindusthani not Bengali, but the musical fare he has provided over the years seems to be thoroughly Bengali (see Glossary for all unfamiliar terms and names in the poem). Kāśīnāth, though a Bengali by name, may be offering the kind of North Indian vocal music that gives less emphasis to words than in the Bengali tradition and more to virtuoso exposition of a rāga (see R205 for the distinctive character of Bengali vocal music, as viewed by Tagore). But the real contrast is one of feeling. Important words in the poem are prā (life, vitality), hrday (heart), sneha (kindness, love), prem (love). Baraj’s singing, failing though it is now, had these qualities, appreciated by the king but not by the admirers of Kāśīnāth’s cleverer but less heartfelt singing style. True singing was for Tagore the most important of all human arts, taking man closest to the Divine: the unity of a song symbolizes Divine completeness, and the singing of it expresses the unfolding of that completeness through the works of creation (see S143 and P57). But the main ideal in this poem is the reciprocity of love – love between God and man and love between man and man – symbolized by the perfect sympathy that should be present between singer and audience, and by the images of reciprocity in nature in 11.73–4. Between Pratāp Rāy and Baraj Lāl there is ‘perfection of human relationship’ (RM188); the courtiers, in contrast, show human failure to love.

6 ‘give frequent gasps of praise’ – saghane bale ‘bāhā bāhā’: ‘they repeatedly say “bāh, bāh” ’ (an expression of praise or approval).

11 The two main types of song about Durgā prevalent in Bengal are mentioned in this line, āgamant and bijayā. See Durgā in the Glossary.

38 ‘Superb, bravo’ – āhāhā, bāhā bāhā: see above.

55 ‘as he prays to his teacher’s name’ – smara kare guru-debe: ‘as he remembers his guru-deb’. A musician’s guru is like a close personal deity (deb), to be prayed to in times of trouble.

61 ‘the old’ – sakhī: ‘friend’. His tānpurā is a friend or confidante to him.

64 ‘Come’ – āis: Pratāp Rāy uses the most intimate of imperative verb-forms here.

74 ‘the woods’ – ban-sabhā: ‘the court or assembly of the woods’. The woods are responsive in a way that the king’s court (sabhā) is not.

76 ‘where listeners are dumb’ – yekhāne… bobār sabhā: ‘where there is a court of the dumb (at heart)’.

A Half-acre of Land (p. 55)

dui bighā jami from citrā (The Multi-Coloured), 1896

Read at a straightforwardly realistic level, this poem needs little by way of explanation. The title means literally ‘two bighās of land’ (see Glossary). For sādhu, and the double meaning of the word that is exploited ironically at the end of the poem also see Glossary (‘the irony of life’, 1.71, is my own clarifying interpolation). But some of Tagore’s distinctive attitudes to nature, asceticism and human relations are implicit in the poem. The famous third stanza, often quoted for its patriotic feeling, can be compared with R208, where Tagore writes of his return to Bengal after his abortive voyage to England in 1881 (he set sail with a nephew who quickly began to feel sea-sick and to miss his new wife, so they turned back at Madras): ‘This Bengal sky full of light, this south breeze, this flow of the river, this right royal laziness, this broad leisure stretching from horizon to horizon and from green earth to blue sky, all these were to me as food and drink to the hungry and thirsty. Here it felt indeed like a home, and in these I recognized the ministrations of a Mother.’ The stanza should be read as a meditation: it begins with namonamo nama, the expression of obeisance used to begin the prayers to God and meditations on the harmony of nature which Tagore taught his pupils at Santiniketan (see S17 and P155). The fact that asceticism does not bring peace to Upen’s heart shows Tagore’s distrust of those forms of religion that seek to separate God from the world (see S129, and his exposition in P56 of the verses of the āśā Upaniad in which we are warned that ‘the sole pursuit of the infinite’ is even more dangerous than exclusive concentration on the finite).