Selected Poems Read Online

The half-acre of land, personified as a mother when she belonged to Upen and as a fallen or kept woman (kulaā, 1.37) after the landlord has turned her into a garden, shows, as in ‘Broken Song’, two kinds of human relationship. One, based on love, brings heavenly perfection: in 1.47 the half-acre is called kalyā-mayī, full of the grace and prosperity that is associated with the goddess Lakmī, and is described as feeding Upen with sudhā, nectar. The other is an unequal relationship of the kind that is defined in CU158, in which woman tries to mitigate her state of bondage ‘by rendering herself and her home a luxury to man’.

7 ‘with my hands on my heart’ – bakse juriyā pāi: ‘with my hands folded on my breast’, i.e. palms touching in the familiar Indian gesture of supplication or greeting.

10 lit., ‘Am I so lakmī-chāā that I must sell my mother because of poverty?’ See Laksmī in the Glossary.

19 ‘I roamed the world sannyāsī-beśe’ – ‘dressed as an ascetic’.

20 ‘places’ – dhām: this word can connote a holy place, a place of pilgrimage.

21 ‘in desert’ – bijane: in places empty of people rather than deserts in the technical sense.

34 ‘the festival-carriage’ – rath-talā: the place where the rath, the chariot used in the annual Hindu chariot festival, is kept.

35 ‘granary’ – nandīr golā: ‘Nandī’s granary’ (the name of the owner).

53 ‘storm’ – jyaither jhae: a storm in the month of Jyaiha (see Glossary).

70 ‘pukka’ – pākā: the word really means ‘ripe’.

Day’s End (p. 57)

dina-śee from citrā, 1896

Many of the images and symbols in this poem obsessed Tagore throughout his career. ‘Buying and selling’ (1.32) often stands for worldly as opposed to spiritual endeavour: compare ‘Highest Price’ and ‘Freedom-bound’ 1.10, and the references to ‘the market’ in N64 and P107. Sunset, strangely beautiful girl, royal buildings, music combine to suggest an ideal world of beauty, drawing the speaker away from worldly concerns. But the mood is equivocal: the impulse to look beyond the world and the wish to stay within it were equal in Tagore. A key-word is udās, used in 1.25. The word means detached, the state of mind that is necessary for spiritual liberation; but in other contexts Tagore associates it with aloofness, an absence of human feeling (see notes to ‘Unyielding’, ‘Earth’, ‘In the Eyes of a Peacock’ for further mention of the word). The descending darkness in the poem, the stillness, the sleeping birds suggest a defeatist longing for oblivion, the same desire to escape from life that makes a sad conclusion to ‘Bride’. The static, luxuriant beauty of the royal city where the traveller wishes to moor can be compared to Alakā in ‘The Meghadūta’ and ‘Yaka’, where the ideal is similarly equivocal.

2,30 ār beye kāj nāi taraī: ‘there is no point in rowing (beye) the boat any more’; but ‘rowing’ suggests a smaller boat than Bengal’s river-craft, which do, in any case, often have sails. See notes on ‘The Golden Boat’.

15 lit., ‘the light of the clouds glitters on a golden trident’: presumably there is a Śiva-temple nearby, with its identifying trident; unless the phrase kanaker triśūle simply means ‘in the form of a golden trident’ and describes the shape of the sunlit clouds.

22 the breeze is atidūr, ‘far-off, rather than the palace.

24 lit., ‘The earth before me disappears somewhere, stretches out of sight’; but the meaning is linked to udās in the next line.

On the Edge of the Sea (p. 58)

sindhu–pāre from citrā, 1896

This strange, uneasy poem is an example of Tagore at his most inspirational: imagination is let loose, unrestrained by moral or religious preoccupations. Tagore’s concept of jīban-debatā (‘life-god’) was a flexible one, so that people argue about what he meant by it. In RM96 it simply seems to be God, realized in one’s own human consciousness: a universal Being ‘shaping the universe to its eternal idea’, but a personal God too, ‘seeking his best expression in all my experiences, uniting them into an ever-widening individuality which is a spiritual work of art’. But in this poem, where the jīban-debatā takes on female form, the emphasis is not on a controlling harmony, but a driving destiny forcing the self through experiences whose meaning or logic is by no means clear: the pieces of one’s life may be part of a design, but one cannot know the design, one is merely aware of a mysterious compulsion leading one on from one experience or activity to another. The poem can be compared with one I have not translated, niruddeś yātrā in sonār tarī, in which a beautiful woman guides the poet in a golden boat towards the sunset, but refuses to tell him where she is taking him.

The illusory or magical nature of the experience in the poem is emphasized by certain key-words in the Bengali. In 1.22 the speaker mounts the horse mantra-mugdha acetan-sama: ‘bewitched by a spell [mantra: see Glossary] and as if unconscious’; in 1.24 everything is miche, false, unreal; the things he passes as he rides may all be maner bhul (1.44: ‘mistakes of the mind’); in 1.94 he stands mohe, in a state of moha, illusion, ignorance, enchantment. All this suggests the māyā that in Indian tradition separates mortal existence from God. But the jīban-debatā reveals itself in this very māyā, and mocks the poet for being surprised. This is the paradox of khelā, the inseparable interplay of world and spirit: and khelā is used in 1.117. Compare ‘Last Tryst’, where the jīban-debatā also appears in a guise opposite to what one might expect.

1 ‘winter’ – pau: the month of Paus (see Glossary).

20 ‘with cold’ – not in the original, but the nakedness of the tree is emphasized: it is pallab-hīn, ‘leafless’, and has nagna-śākhā, ‘naked branches’.

70 ‘tune’ – tān: the word is usually applied to the elaborate figurations that decorate tunes in Indian music. The same word is used in 1.121.

82 ‘ritual grasses’ – dhānya-dūrbā: ‘paddy and grass’, used as symbols of auspiciousness.

83 ‘forest-women’ – kirāt-nārīr dal: ‘a group of kirāt women’ (see Glossary).

106,107 ‘bed’ – śayan: ‘bedding’ rather than a raised bed. I translated the word as ‘linen’ in 1.62.

Love’s Question (p. 61)

praay-praśna from kalpanā (Imagination), 1900

This poem has a double irony: the far-fetched praise the lover gives his beloved is both untrue and true. Love between people is love between God and man in microcosm. Divine joy manifest in the abundance of creation (S104) is answered by creative works that are an expression of man’s own ‘surplus’ (RM57): extravagant poetic conceits are the counterpart of extravagance in the created world. Beauty in nature and art cannot be accounted for rationally or scientifically, and is therefore ‘untrue’; but it is real, an expression of divine or human joy, and therefore ‘true’. In P34 Tagore writes: ‘The poet says of the beloved: “It seems to me that I have gazed at your beauty from the beginning of my existence, that I have kept you in my arms for countless ages, yet it has not been enough for me”… Judged from the standpoint of reason these are exaggerations, but from that of the heart, freed from limits of facts, they are true.’

2 ‘ever-loving friend’ – cira-bhakta: ‘eternal devotee’.

9 ‘tree of paradise’ – cira-mandār.