Selected Poems Read Online

‘the eternal mandāra-tree’ (see Glossary).

15 ‘the breeze’ – adhīr samīr. ‘the impatient breeze’.

30 hair (alak: a tress or fringe of hair) is also mentioned in the Bengali.

33 ‘infinite Truth’ – asīmer tattva: ‘knowledge of the infinite’.

Snatched by the Gods (p. 62)

debatār gras from kathā (Tales), 1900

Many of the poems in the two books of narrative poetry that Tagore wrote between 1897 and 1899 were on patriotic historical subjects, in keeping with the mood of the times. The Sedition Bill of 1898 shocked Tagore into making one of his most dramatic interventions into nationalist politics, reading a paper against the Government at a public meeting in Calcutta and raising funds for the defence of Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who had been arrested. But there is nothing revivalist about ‘Snatched by the Gods’. The title, and the word debatā wherever it occurs in the poem, poses a translation problem: really only one god is being referred to, probably Varuna, the sea-god, god of boatmen. But ‘the god’ is awkward in English unless it has been specified, and ‘God’ needs to be preserved for 1.47 and 1.157 where Mokadā is clearly addressing a different sort of god altogether, a supreme yet personal God such as Tagore tried to define in RM, representing a much higher morality than the boatmen’s god. In 1.47 she uses the name nārāya, an epithet meaning ‘son of man’ (the primeval man, Nara) that is sometimes applied to Visnu but which Tagore defines as ‘the supreme Reality of Man, which is divine’ (RM67); and in 1.157 she uses the term antaryāmī, which means ‘one who is able to know another’s antar, heart, mind’, i.e. the ‘Man of my Heart’ of CU78. To show the difference between the jealous god of the boatmen and the God manifest in Mokadā’s maternal love is one of the purposes of the poem, and the distinction has to be conveyed somehow in translation.

The language of the poem is highly varied, ranging from the colloquial dialogue of 11.27–69 to the intense rhetoric of 11.81–93. The lines are rhymed in couplets, but run on with tremendous pace. An important word is sneha, love, tenderness, used in ll.41 and 49; also in 1.87 where Earth is described as sneha-mayī, full of love, the counterpart in Nature to human maternal love. Other key-words are raka, used in 11.134, 148, 150 and 154 of both ‘saving’ or keeping a promise and of ‘saving’ or sparing Rākhāl; and satya, used both of the ‘truth’ that has to be kept with the sea-god in 1.155 and the truth of Mokadā’s feelings in 1.159. The conflict between two kinds of ‘saving’, two kinds of ‘truth’, parallels the two kinds of god.

8 ‘Dear Grandfather’ – dādā-thākur: not really her grandfather or dādā-maśay. The term is applied respectfully to a person of age and standing, or to a Brahmin by a non-Brahmin.

17 ‘with his aunt’ – māsīr kāche: ‘with his māsī (maternal aunt)’.

29 ‘pays respects to’ - praamiyā: ‘having done pranām to’ (see Glossary).

65 ‘Annadā’ – Maitra actually uses the affectionate term bhāi, not her name.

72 ‘womenfolk’ – kula-nārī: ‘married women, housewives’.

98 ‘with hope of departure’ – āśār sambāde: ‘with a message of hope’; an ironic phrase in view of what follows.

103 ‘says his prayers’ – debatāre smari: ‘remembering (the god’. See above.

107 ‘four miles’ – dui kroś: ‘two kroś’ (a kroś is a distance of 8,000 cubits or just over two miles).

New Rain (p. 66)

naba-barā from kaikā (The Flitting One), 1900

The poems in this book are marked by intense delight and energy, and an exuberant inventiveness of form. It was the first time that Tagore had used abbreviated, colloquial verb-forms in poetry: this opened up many new rhythmic and stylistic possibilities and was a revolution in Bengali poetry. The book also shows the influence of nursery-rhymes and folk poetry, a growing interest for Tagore: see Appendix B.

Tagore’s love of rain has already been noted in connection with ‘The Meghadūta’: here it is the vitality, prā (used in 11.4 and 14), of the rain rather than its poignancy that is captured. Newness is stressed throughout: words for ‘new’ are used more than I have been able to manage in my translation, in 11.7, 13, 17, 24, 38; in 1.31 the boat is called tarun, an untranslatable word meaning new, youthful, fresh, shining. The poem is full of remarkable sound effects: 1.6 reads guruguru megh gumari gumari garaje gagane gagane, garaje gagane; and 1.27 jharake jharake jhariche bakul. Many lines are impossible to translate literally: 1.28 is (approximately) ‘her ācal (loose end of the sari) becomes eager in the sky’.

Could the imagery of verses 4 and 6 owe something to ‘Moran’s Garden’, Tagore’s brother Jyotirindranath’s villa at Chandernagore, described in R210? Of the pictures in the sitting-room Tagore writes: ‘One of the pictures was of a swing hanging from a branch half hidden in dense foliage, and in the checkered light and shade of this bower two persons were swinging; and there was another of a broad flight of steps leading into some castle-like palace, up and down which men and women in festive garb were going and coming…’

8 the original suggests streaming rain rather than rushing flood-water here.

14 lit., ‘my life (prān) has awoken today, blooming in or with delighted nīp-groves’. kadam or kadamba is the more usual name for this flower. See Glossary.

14 ‘coolly’ – snigdha: ‘cool’, but the Sanskrit root snih-, from which the word is derived, also means ‘to love’: cf. Bengali sneha, love, mentioned in my notes to ‘Snatched by the Gods’. So ‘coolly and lovingly’ would be a fuller translation.

24 ‘jasmine’ – mālatī: see Glossary.

26 ‘in the wilderness’ – nirjane: ‘in solitude, in a place where there are no other people’.

29 ‘hair unplaited’ – the Bengali conveys a sense of hair becoming unplaited as the girl swings.

The Hero (p. 68)

bīr-purus from śiśu (The Child), 1903

Tagore’s wife died in 1902, and as a result he had to look after his three youngest children. Soon his daughter Rani fell ill, and Tagore took her to Almora in the hills to try to save her life. ‘The Hero’ was among the poems that he wrote there to comfort and amuse her and the two youngest children, Mira and Samindra. śiśu consists of these, and some earlier poems about children.

Tagore was never happier than when he was ‘giving his heart to children’ (R158), and felt that children have much to teach us.