THE GARDENER

Rabindranath Tagore – Biography

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was the youngest son of Debendranath Tagore, a leader of the Brahmo Samaj, which was a new religious sect in nineteenth-century Bengal and which attempted a revival of the ultimate monistic basis of Hinduism as laid down in the Upanishads. He was educated at home; and although at seventeen he was sent to England for formal schooling, he did not finish his studies there. In his mature years, in addition to his many-sided literary activities, he managed the family estates, a project which brought him into close touch with common humanity and increased his interest in social reforms. He also started an experimental school at Shantiniketan where he tried his Upanishadic ideals of education. From time to time he participated in the Indian nationalist movement, though in his own non-sentimental and visionary way; and Gandhi, the political father of modern India, was his devoted friend. Tagore was knighted by the ruling British Government in 1915, but within a few years he resigned the honour as a protest against British policies in India.

Tagore had early success as a writer in his native Bengal. With his translations of some of his poems he became rapidly known in the West. In fact his fame attained a luminous height, taking him across continents on lecture tours and tours of friendship. For the world he became the voice of India's spiritual heritage; and for India, especially for Bengal, he became a great living institution.

Although Tagore wrote successfully in all literary genres, he was first of all a poet. Among his fifty and odd volumes of poetry are Manasi (1890) [The Ideal One], Sonar Tari (1894) [The Golden Boat], Gitanjali (1910) [Song Offerings], Gitimalya (1914) [Wreath of Songs], and Balaka (1916) [The Flight of Cranes]. The English renderings of his poetry, which include The Gardener (1913), Fruit-Gathering (1916), and The Fugitive (1921), do not generally correspond to particular volumes in the original Bengali; and in spite of its title, Gitanjali: Song Offerings (1912), the most acclaimed of them, contains poems from other works besides its namesake. Tagore's major plays are Raja (1910) [The King of the Dark Chamber], Dakghar (1912) [The Post Office], Achalayatan (1912) [The Immovable], Muktadhara (1922) [The Waterfall], and Raktakaravi (1926) [Red Oleanders]. He is the author of several volumes of short stories and a number of novels, among them Gora (1910), Ghare-Baire (1916) [The Home and the World], and Yogayog (1929) [Crosscurrents]. Besides these, he wrote musical dramas, dance dramas, essays of all types, travel diaries, and two autobiographies, one in his middle years and the other shortly before his death in 1941. Tagore also left numerous drawings and paintings, and songs for which he wrote the music himself.

From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969

This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les Prix Nobel/Nobel Lectures. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted by the Laureate. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.

Rabindranath Tagore died on August 7, 1941.

Tagore--Quotations

Gitanjali (1912)

▪ My debts are large, my failures great, my shame secret and heavy; yet I come to ask for my good, I quake in fear lest my prayer be granted. ~ 28

▪ I thought that my invincible power would hold the world captive, leaving me in a freedom undisturbed. Thus night and day I worked at the chain with huge fires and cruel hard strokes. When at last the work was done and the links were complete and unbreakable, I found that it held me in its grip. ~ 31

▪ When old words die out on the tongue, new melodies break forth from the heart; and where the old tracks are lost, new country is revealed with its wonders. ~ 37

▪ * The smile that flickers on baby's lips when he sleeps— does anybody know where it was born? Yes, there is a rumor that a young pale beam of a crescent moon touched the edge of a vanishing autumn cloud, and there the smile was first born in the dream of a dew-washed morning. ~ 61

▪ In this playhouse of infinite forms I have had my play, and here have I caught sight of him that is formless. ~ 96

▪ Where the mind is without fear

▪ Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high

▪ Where knowledge is free

▪ Where the world has not been broken up into fragments

▪ By narrow domestic walls

▪ Where words come out from the depth of truth

▪ Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection

▪ Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way

▪ Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit

▪ Where the mind is led forward by thee

▪ Into ever-widening thought and action

▪ Into that heaven of freedom, my Father,
let my country awake


Stray Birds (1916)

Stray Birds online as translated from Bengali to English by the author

▪ If you shed tears when you miss the sun, you also miss the stars. ~ 6

▪ Your idol is shattered in the dust to prove that God's dust is greater than your idol. ~ 51

▪ The roots below the earth claim no rewards for making the branches fruitful. ~ 134

▪ Let this be my last word, that I trust in thy love. ~ 326
[edit]

The Gardener (1915)

▪ Ah me, why did they build my house by the road to the market town? ~ 4

▪ I am restless. I am athirst for faraway things. My soul goes out in a longing to touch the skirt of the dim distance. O Great Beyond, O the keen call of thy flute! I forget, I ever forget, that I have no wings to fly, that I am bound in this spot evermore. ~ 5

▪ We do not stray out of all words into the ever silent;
We do not raise our hands to the void for things beyond hope. ~ 16

▪ Please is frail like a dewdrop, while it laughs it dies. But sorrow is strong and abiding. Let sorrowful love wake in your eyes. ~ 27

▪ My heart, the bird of the wilderness, has found its sky in your eyes. ~ 31

▪ Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf. ~ 45

▪ To the guests that must go, bid God's speed and brush away all traces of their steps. ~ 45

▪ The wise man warns me that life is but a dewdrop on the lotus leaf. ~ 46

▪ O Woman, you are not merely the handiwork of God, but also of men; these are ever endowing you with beauty from their own hearts. . . You are one-half woman and one-half dream. ~ 59

▪ In the world's audience hall, the simple blade of grass sits on the same carpet with the sunbeams, and the stars of midnight. ~ 74
▪ Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence?
I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring, one single streak of gold from yonder clouds.
Open your doors and look abroad.
From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of an hundred years before.
In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning, sending its glad voice across a hundred years. ~ 85
[edit]

Attributed
▪ A dewdrop is a perfect integrity that has no filial memory of its parentage.

▪ A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it.

▪ According to the true Indian view, our consciousness of the world, merely as the sum total of things that exist, and as governed by laws, is imperfect. But it is perfect when our consciousness realizes all things as spiritually one with it, and therefore capable of giving us joy. For us the highest purpose of this world is not merely living in it, knowing it and making use of it, but realizing our own selves in it through expansion of sympathy; not alienating ourselves from it and dominating it, but comprehending and uniting it with ourselves in perfect union.

▪ Age considers; youth ventures.

▪ All men have poetry in their hearts, and it is necessary for them, as much as possible, to express their feelings. For this they must have a medium, moving and pliant, which can refreshingly become their own, age after age. All great languages undergo change. Those languages which resist the spirit of change are doomed and will never produce great harvests of thought and literature. When forms become fixed, the spirit either weakly accepts its imprisonment or rebels. All revolutions consists of the "within" fighting against invasion from "without"... All great human movements are related to some great idea.

▪ Asks the Possible of the Impossible, "Where is your dwelling-place?" "In the dreams of the Impotent," comes the answer.

▪ Beauty is in the ideal of perfect harmony which is in the universal being; truth the perfect comprehension of the universal mind. We individuals approach it through our own mistakes and blunders, through our accumulated experience, through our illumined consciousness— how, otherwise, can we know truth?

▪ Beauty is truth's smile when she beholds her own face in a perfect mirror.

▪ Children are living beings— more living than grown-up people who have built shells of habit around themselves. Therefore it is absolutely necessary for their mental health and development that they should not have mere schools for their lessons, but a world whose guiding spirit is personal love.

▪ Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.
▪ Death belongs to life as birth does. The walk is in the raising of the foot as in the laying of it down.

▪ Death is not extinguishing the light; it is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.

▪ Variants:
Death is not extinguishing the light; it is putting out the lamp because dawn has come.
Death is not extinguishing the light; it is putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.
Nirvana is not the blowing out of the candle. It is the extinguishing of the flame because day is come.

▪ Do not say, "It is morning," and dismiss it with a name of yesterday. See it for the first time as a new-born child that has no name.

▪ Don't limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time.

▪ Emancipation from the bondage of the soil is no freedom for the tree.

▪ Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of humanity.

▪ Variants: Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.
Every child that is born, it brings with it the hope that God is not yet disappointed with man.
▪ Every difficulty slurred over will be a ghost to disturb your repose later on.
▪ Everything comes to us that belongs to us if we create the capacity to receive it.
▪ Facts are many, but the truth is one.
▪ Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark.
▪ Variant: Faith is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark.
▪ For the current of our spiritual life, creeds and rituals are channels that may thwart or help, according to their fixity or openness. When a symbol or spiritual idea becomes rigidly elaborate in its construction, it supplants the idea which it should support.

▪ God finds himself by creating.

▪ Gray hairs are signs of wisdom if you hold your tongue, speak and they are but hairs, as in the young.

▪ Gross utility kills beauty. We now have all over the world huge production of things, huge organizations, huge administrations of empire— all obstructing the path of life. Civilization is waiting for a great consummation, for an expression of its soul in beauty. This must be your contribution to the world.

▪ He is neither manifest nor hidden, He is neither revealed nor unrevealed: there are no words to tell that which He is. He is without form, without quality, without decay.

▪ He who wants to do good knocks at the gate; he who loves finds the gate open.

▪ I believe that there is an ideal hovering over the earth, an ideal of that Paradise which is not the mere outcome of imagination, but the ultimate reality towards which all things are moving. I believe that this vision of Paradise is to be seen in the sunlight, and the green of the earth, in the flowing streams, in the beauty of springtime and the repose of a winter morning. Everywhere in this earth the spirit of Paradise is awake and sending forth its voice.
▪ I have become my own version of an optimist. If I can't make it through one door, I'll go through another door— or I'll make a door. Something terrific will come no matter how dark the present.

▪ I have spent my days stringing and unstringing my instrument while the song I came to sing remains unsung.

▪ I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.

▪ If anger be the basis of our political activities, the excitement tends to become an end in itself, at the expense of the object to be achieved... side issues then assume an exaggerated importance, and all gravity of thought and action is lost; such excitement is not an exercise of strength, but a display of weakness.

▪ If I say that He is within me, the universe is ashamed; if I say that He is without me, it is falsehood.

▪ If life's journey be endless where is its goal? The answer is, it is everywhere. We are in a palace which has no end, but which we have reached. By exploring it and extending our relationship with it we are ever making it more and more our own. The infant is born in the same universe where lives the adult of ripe mind. But its position is not like a schoolboy who has yet to learn his alphabet, finding himself in a college class. The infant has it own joy of life because the world is not a mere road, but a home, of which it will have more and more as it grows up in wisdom. With our road that gain is at every step, for it is the road and the home in one; it leads us on yet gives us shelter.

▪ If you cry because the sun has gone out of your life, your tears will prevent you from seeing the stars
▪ If you shut the door to all errors, truth will be shut out.
Variant: If you shut your door to all errors truth will be shut out.
▪ In Art, man reveals himself and not his objects.
▪ In love all the contradiction of existence merge themselves and are lost. Only in love are unity and duality not at variance. Love must be one and two at the same time. Only love is motion and rest in one. Our heart ever changes its place till it finds love, and then it has its rest... Bondage and liberation are not antagonistic in love, for love is most free and at the same time most bound.

▪ In love, at one of its poles you find the personal, at the other the impersonal. At one you have the positive assertion— Here I am; at the other the equally strong denial— I am not. Without this ego what is love? And again, with only this ego how can love be possible?

▪ In our desire for eternal life we pray for an eternity of our habit and comfort, forgetting that immortality is in repeatedly transcending the definite forms of life in order to pursue the infinite truth of life.

▪ In the dualism of death and life there is a harmony. We know that the life of a soul, which is finite in its expression and infinite in its principle, must go through the portals of death in its journey to realise the infinite. It is death which is monistic, it has no life in it. But life is dualistic; it has an appearance as well as truth; and death is that appearance, that maya, which is an inseparable companion to life.

▪ In the night we stumble over things and become acutely conscious of their separateness, but the day reveals the unity which embraces them. And the man whose inner vision is bathed in consciousness at once realizes the spiritual unity which reigns over all racial differences, and his mind no longer stumbles over individual facts, accepting them as final. He realizes that peace is an inner harmony and not an outer adjustment, that beauty carries the assurance of our relationship to reality, which waits for its perfection in the response of our love.

▪ It is our desires that limit the scope of our self-realisation, hinder our extension of consciousness, and give rise to sin, which is the innermost barrier that keeps us apart from our God, setting up disunion and arrogance of exclusiveness. For sin is not one mere action, but it is an attitude of life which takes for granted that our goal is finite, that our self is the ultimate truth, and that we are not all essentially one but exist each for his own separate individual existence.

▪ Leave out my name from the gift if it be a burden, but keep my song.

▪ Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers but to be fearless in facing them. Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain, but for the heart to conquer it. Let me not look for allies in life's battlefield but to my own strength. Let me not crave in anxious fear to be saved but hope for the patience to win my freedom. Grant me that I may not be a coward, feeling your mercy in my success alone; But let me find the grasp of your hand in my failure.
Variant: Let us not pray to be sheltered from dangers but to be fearless when facing them...
▪ Let the dead have the immortality of fame, but the living the immortality of love.
▪ Life is given to us, we earn it by giving it.
▪ Life is perpetually creative because it contains in itself that surplus which ever overflows the boundaries of the immediate time and space, restlessly pursuing its adventure of expression in the varied forms of self-realization.

▪ Life's errors cry for the merciful beauty that can modulate their isolation into a harmony with the whole.

▪ Life, like a child, laughs, shaking its rattle of death as it runs.

▪ Love adorns itself; it seeks to prove inward joy by outward beauty.

▪ Love does not claim possession, but gives freedom.

▪ Love gives beauty to everything it touches. Not greed and utility; they produce offices, but not dwelling houses. To be able to love material things, to clothe them with tender grace, and yet not be attached to them, this is a great service. Providence expects that we should make this world our own, and not live in it as though it were a rented tenement. We can only make it our own through some service, and that service is to lend it love and beauty from our soul. Your own experience shows you the difference between the beautiful, the tender, the hospitable, and the mechanically neat and monotonously useful.

▪ Love is an endless mystery, for it has nothing else to explain it.

▪ Love is not a mere impulse, it must contain truth, which is law.

▪ Love is the only reality and it is not a mere sentiment. It is the ultimate truth that lies at the heart of creation.

▪ Love's gift cannot be given, it waits to be accepted.

▪ Love's overbrimming mystery joins death and life. It has filled my cup of pain with joy.

▪ Man goes into the noisy crowd to drown his own clamour of silence.

▪ Man has a fund of emotional energy which is not all occupied with his self-preservation. This surplus seeks its outlet in the creation of art, for man's civilization is built upon his surplus... In everyday life, when we are mostly moved by our habits, we are economical in our expression, for then our soul-consciousness is at its low level— it has just volume enough to guide on in accustomed grooves. But when our heart is fully awakened in love, or in other great emotions, our personality is in its flood-tide.

▪ Man is immortal; therefore he must die endlessly. For life is a creative idea; it can only find itself in changing forms.

▪ Man's abiding happiness is not in getting anything but in giving himself up to what is greater than himself, to ideas which are larger than his individual life, the idea of his country, of humanity, of God.

▪ Man's cry is to reach his fullest expression.

▪ Men are cruel, but Man is kind.

▪ Music fills the infinite between two souls. This has been muffled by the mist of our daily habits.

▪ Music is the purest form of art... therefore true poets, they who are seers, seek to express the universe in terms of music... The singer has everything within him. The notes come out from his very life. They are not materials gathered from outside. His idea and his expression are brother and sister; very often they are born as twins. In music the heart reveals itself immediately; it suffers not from any barrier of alien material. Therefore though music has to wait for its completeness like any other art, yet at every step it gives out the beauty of the whole. As the material of expression even words are barriers, for their meaning has to be construed by thought. But music never has to depend upon any obvious meaning; it expresses what no words can ever express. What is more, music and the musician are inseparable. When the singer departs, his singing dies with him; it is in eternal union with the life and joy of the master. This world song is never for a moment separated from its singer. It is not fashioned from any outward material. It is his joy itself taking never-ending form. It is the great heart sending the tremor of its thrill over the sky. There is a perfection in each individual strain of this music, which is the revelation of completion in the incomplete. No one of its notes is final, yet each reflects the infinite. What does it matter if we fail to derive the exact meaning of this great harmony? Is it not like the hand meeting the string and drawing out at once all its tones at the touch? It is the language of beauty, the caress, that comes from the heart of the world and straightway reaches our heart. Last night, in the silence which pervaded the darkness, I stood alone and heard the voice of the singer of eternal melodies. When I went to sleep I closed my eyes with this last thought in mind, that even when I remain unconscious in slumber the dance of life will still go on in the hushed arena of my sleeping body, keeping step wit the stars. The heart will throb, the blood will leap in the veins, and the millions of living atoms of my body will vibrate in tune with the note of the harp-string that thrills at the touch of the master.
▪ Nationality is respectable only when it is on the defence, when it is waging wars of liberation it is sacred; when those of domination it is accursed.

▪ Never be afraid of the moments— thus sings the voice of the ever-lasting.

▪ Night's darkness is the bag that bursts with the gold of the dawn.

▪ Objects of knowledge maintain an infinite distance from us who are the knowers. For knowledge is not union. Therefore the further world of freedom awaits us there where we reach truth, not through feeling it by senses or knowing it by reason, but through union of perfect sympathy.

▪ Obstacles are necessary companions to expression, and we know that the positive element in language is not in its obstructiveness. Exclusively viewed from the side of the obstacle, nature appears inimical to the idea of morality. But if that were absolutely true, moral life could never come to exists. Life, moral or physical, is not a completed fact, but a continual process, depending for its movement upon two contrary forces, the force of resistance and that of expression. Dividing these forces into two mutually opposing principles does not help us, for the truth dwells not in the opposition but in its continual reconciliation.

▪ Our creation is the modification of relationship.

▪ Our nature is obscured by work done by the compulsion of want or fear. The mother reveals herself in the service of her children, so our true freedom is not the freedom from action but freedom in action, which can only be attained in the work of love.

▪ Praise shames me, for I secretly beg for it.

▪ Religion is not a fractional thing that can be doled out in fixed weekly or daily measures as one among various subjects in the school syllabus. It is the truth of our complete being, the consciousness of our personal relationship with the infinite; it is the true center of gravity of our life. This we can attain during our childhood by daily living in a place where the truth of the spiritual world is not obscured by a crowd of necessities assuming artificial importance; where life is simple, surrounded by fullness of leisure, by ample space and pure air and profound peace of nature; and where men live with a perfect faith in the eternal life before them.

▪ Religion, like poetry, is not a mere idea, it is expression. The self-expression of God is in the endless variety of creation; and our attitude toward the Infinite Being must also in its expression have a variety of individuality ceaseless and unending. Those sects which jealously build their boundaries with too rigid creeds excluding all spontaneous movement of the living spirit may hoard their theology but they kill religion.

▪ Science urges us to occupy by our mind the immensity of the knowable world; our spiritual teacher enjoins us to comprehend by our soul the infinite spirit which is in the depth of the moving and changing facts of the world; the urging of our artistic nature is to realize the manifestation of personality in the world of appearance, the reality of existence which is in harmony with the real within us. Where this harmony is not deeply felt, there we are aliens and perpetually homesick. For man by nature is an artist; he never receives passively and accurately in his mind a physical representation of things around him.
▪ So our daily worship of God is not really the process of gradual acquisition of him, but the daily process of surrendering ourselves, removing all obstacles to union and extending our consciousness of him in devotion and service, in goodness and in love.... Thus to be conscious of being absolutely enveloped by Brahma is not an act of mere concentration of mind. It must be the aim of the whole of our life. In all our thoughts and deeds we must be conscious of the infinite.

▪ Taking shelter in the dead is death itself, and only taking all the risk of life to the fullest extent is living.

▪ That I exist is a perpetual surprise which is life.

▪ The best of us still have our aspirations for the supreme goals of life, which is so often mocked by prosperous people who now control the world. We still believe that the world has a deeper meaning than what is apparent, and that therein the human soul finds its ultimate harmony and peace. We still know that only in spiritual wealth does civilization attain its end, not in a prolific production of materials, and not in the competition of intemperate power with power.

▪ The burden of the self is lightened with I laugh at myself.

▪ The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.

▪ The child learns so easily because he has a natural gift, but adults, because they are tyrants, ignore natural gifts and say that children must learn through the same process that they learned by. We insist upon forced mental feeding and our lessons become a form of torture. This is one of man's most cruel and wasteful mistakes.
▪ The current of the world has its boundaries, otherwise it could have no existence, but its purpose is not shown in the boundaries which restrain it, but in its movement, which is toward perfection. The wonder is not that there should be obstacles and sufferings in this world, but that there should be law and order, beauty and joy, goodness and love.

▪ The emancipation of our physical nature is in attaining health, of our social being in attaining goodness, and of our self in attaining love.

▪ The fish in the water is silent, the animals on the earth is noisy, the bird in the air is singing. But man has in him the silence of the sea, the noise of the earth and the music of the air.

▪ The fountain of death makes the still waters of life play.

▪ The fundamental desire of life is the desire to exist.

▪ The greed of gain has no time or limit to its capaciousness. Its one object is to produce and consume. It has pity neither for beautiful nature nor for living human beings. It is ruthlessly ready without a moment's hesitation to crush beauty and life out of them, molding them into money.
▪ The higher nature in man always seeks for something which transcends itself and yet is its deepest truth; which claims all its sacrifice, yet makes this sacrifice its own recompense. This is man's dharma, man's religion, and man's self is the vessel which is to carry this sacrifice to the altar.

▪ The highest education is that which does not merely give us information but makes our life in harmony with all existence.

▪ The man who aims at his own aggrandisement underrates everything else.

▪ The man whose acquaintance with the world does not lead him deeper than science leads him, will never understand what it is that the man with the spiritual vision finds in these natural phenomena. The water does not merely cleanse his limbs, but it purifies his heart; for it touches his soul. The earth does not merely hold his body, but it gladdens his mind; for its contact is more than physical contact, it is a living presence. When a man does not realise his kinship with the world, he lives in a prison-house whose walls are alien to him When he meets the eternal spirit in all objects, then is he emancipated, for then he discovers the fullest significance of the world into which he is born; then he finds himself in perfect truth, and his harmony with the All is established.

▪ The meaning of our self is not to be found in its separateness from God and others, but in the ceaseless realisation of yoga, of union.

▪ The most important lesson that man can learn from his life is not that there is pain in this world, but that it depends upon him to turn it into good account, that it is possible for him to transmute it into joy... Man's freedom is never in being saved troubles, but it is the freedom to take trouble for his own good, to make the trouble an element in his joy... that in pain is symbolised the infinite possibility of perfection, the eternal unfolding of joy.

▪ The mountain remains unmoved at seeming defeat by the mist.

▪ The newer people, of this modern age, are more eager to amass than to realize.

▪ The object of education is to give man the unity of truth. Formerly, when life was simple, all the different elements of man were in complete harmony. But when there came the separation of the intellect from the spiritual and the physical, the school education put entire emphasis on intellect and the physical side of man. We devote our sole attention to giving children information, not knowing that by this emphasis we are accentuating a break between the intellectual, physical, and the spiritual life... I believe in a spiritual world— not as anything separate from this world— but as its innermost truth. With the breath we draw we must always feel this truth, that we are living in God. Born in this great world, full of the mystery of the infinite, we cannot accept our existence as a momentary outburst of chance drifting on the current of matter toward an eternal nowhere. We cannot look upon our lives as dreams of a dreamer who has no awakening in all time. We have a personality to which matter and force are unmeaning unless related to something infinitely personal, whose nature we have discovered, in some measure, in human love, in the greatness of the good, in the martyrdom of heroic souls, in the ineffable beauty of nature which can never be a mere physical fact nor anything but an expression of personality.

▪ The picture of a flower in a botanical book is information; its mission ends with our knowledge. But in pure art it is a personal communication. And therefore until it finds its harmony in the depth of our personality it misses the mark. We can treat existence solely as a textbook furnishing us lessons, and we shall not be disappointed, but we know that there its mission does not end. For in our joy in it, which is an end in itself, we feel that it is a communication, the final response of our knowing but the response of our being.

▪ The pious sectarian is proud because he is confident of his right of possession in God. The man of devotion is meek because he is conscious of God's right of love over his life and soul. The object of our possession becomes smaller than ourselves, and without acknowledging it in so many words the bigoted sectarian has an implicit belief that God can be kept secured for certain individuals in a cage which is of their own make. In a similar manner the primitive races of men believe that their ceremonials have a magic influence upon their deities. Sectarianism is a perverse form of worldliness in the disguise of religion; it breeds a narrowness of heart in a greater measure than the cult of the world based upon material interest can ever do. For undisguised pursuit of self has its safety in openness, like filth exposed to the sun and air. But the self-magnification with its consequent lessening of God that goes on unchecked under the cover of sectarianism loses its chance of salvation because it defiles the very source of purity.

▪ The potentiality of perfection outweighs actual contradictions... Existence in itself is here to prove that it cannot be an evil.

▪ The progress of our soul is like a perfect poem. It has an infinite idea which once realised makes all movements full of meaning and joy. But if we detach its movements from that ultimate idea, if we do not see the infinite rest and only see the infinite motion, then existence appears to us a monstrous evil., impetuously rushing towards an unending aimlessness.

▪ The question why there is evil in existence is the same as why there is imperfection... But this is the real question we ought to ask: Is this imperfection the final truth, is evil absolute and ultimate?

▪ The revilement of the infinite in the finite, which is the motive of all creation, is not seen in its perfection in the starry heavens, in the beauty of the flowers. It is in the soul of man.

▪ The significance which is in unity is an eternal wonder.

▪ The tendency in modern civilization is to make the world uniform... Let the mind be universal. The individual should not be sacrificed.

▪ The touch of an infinite mystery passes over the trivial and the familiar, making it break out into ineffable music... The trees, the stars, and the blue hills ache with a meaning which can never be uttered in words.

▪ The tragedy of human life consists in our vain attempts to stretch the limits of things which can never become unlimited, to reach the infinite by absurdly adding to the rungs of the ladder of the finite.

▪ The traveler has to knock at every alien door to come to his own, and he has to wonder through all the outer worlds to reach the innermost shrine at the end.

▪ The water in a vessel is sparkling; the water in the sea is dark. The small truth has words which are clear; the great truth has great silence.

▪ There are men whose idea of life is tactic, who long for its continuation after death only because of their wish for permanence and not perfection; they love to imagine that the things to which they are accustomed will persist for ever. They completely identify themselves in their minds with their fixed surroundings and with whatever they have gathered, and to have to leave these is death for them. They forget that the true meaning of living is outliving, it is ever growing out of itself.
▪ There is a moral law in this world which has its application both to individuals and organised bodies of men. You cannot go on violating these laws in the name of your nation, yet enjoy their advantage as individuals. We may forget truth for our convenience, but truth does not forget us. Prosperity cannot save itself without moral foundation. Until man can see the gaping chasm between his full storehouse and his humanity, until he can feel the unity of mankind, the kind of barbarism which you call civilisation will exist.

▪ There is a point where in the mystery of existence contradictions meet; where movement is not all movement and stillness is not all stillness; where the idea and the form, the within and the without, are united; where infinite becomes finite, yet not losing its infinity. If this meeting is dissolved, then things become unreal.

▪ Things are distinct not in their essence but in their appearance; in other words, in their relation to one to whom they appear. This is art, the truth of which is not in substance or logic, but in expression. Abstract truth may belong to science and metaphysics, but the world of reality belongs to art.

▪ Things in which we do not take joy are either a burden upon our minds to be got rid of at any cost; or they are useful, and therefore in temporary and partial relation to us, becoming burdensome when their utility is lost; or they are like wandering vagabonds, loitering for a moment on the outskirts of our recognition, and then passing on. A thing is only completely our own when it is a thing of joy to us.

▪ This is the ultimate end of man, to find the One which is in him; which is his truth, which is his soul; the key with which he opens the gate of the spiritual life, the heavenly kingdom.

▪ Those institutions which are static in their nature raise walls of division; this is why, in the history of religions, priesthood has always maintained dissensions and hindered the freedom of man. But the principle of life unites, it deals with the varied, and seeks unity.

▪ Those who have everything but thee, my God, laugh at those who have nothing but thyself.

▪ Those who own much have much to fear.
▪ Time is a wealth of change, but the clock in its parody makes it mere change and no wealth.
▪ To be outspoken is easy when you do not wait to speak the complete truth.

▪ To understand anything is to find in it something which is our own, and it is the discovery of ourselves outside us which makes us glad. This relation of understanding is partial, but the relation of love is complete. In love the sense of difference is obliterated and the human soul fulfills its purpose in perfection, transcending the limits of itself and reaching across the threshold of the infinite. Therefore love is the highest bliss that man can attain to, for through it alone he truly knows that he is more than himself, and that he is at one with the All.

▪ Trees are Earth's endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.

▪ Variant: Trees are the earth's endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.

▪ True modernism is freedom of mind, not slavery of taste. It is independence of thought and action, not tutelage under European schoolmasters. It is science but not its wrong application to life.
▪ Truth cannot afford to be tolerant where it faces positive evil.

▪ Want of love is a degree of callousness; for love is the perfection of consciousness. We do not love because we do not comprehend, or rather we do not comprehend because we do not love. For love is the ultimate meaning of everything around us. It is not a mere sentiment; it is truth; it is the joy that is at the root of all creation.

▪ We believe that mere movement is life, and that the more velocity it has, the more it expresses vitality.

▪ We can look upon a road from two different points of view. One regards it as dividing us from the object of desire; in that case we count every step of our journey over it as something attained by force in the face of obstruction. The other sees it as the road which leads us to our destination; and as such is part of our goal. It is already the beginning of our attainment, and by journeying over it we can only gain that which in itself it offers to us.

▪ We can make truth ours by actively modulating its inter-relations. This is the work of art; for reality is not based in the substance of things but in the principle of relationship. Truth is the infinite pursued by metaphysics; fact is the infinite pursued by science, while reality is the definition of the infinite which relates truth to the person. Reality is human; it is what we are conscious of, by which we are affected, that which we express.

▪ We come nearest to the great when we are great in humility.

▪ We could have no communication whatever with our surroundings if they were absolutely foreign to us. Man is reaping success every day, and that shows there is a rational connection between him and nature, for we never can make anything our own except that which is truly related to us.

▪ We could have no communication whatever with our surroundings if they were absolutely foreign to us. Man is reaping success every day, and that shows there is a rational connection between him and nature, for we never can make anything our own except that which is truly related to us.

▪ We do not want nowadays temples of worship and outward rites and ceremonies. What we really want is an Asram. We want a place where the beauty of nature and the noblest pursuits of man are in a sweet harmony. Our temple of worship is there where outward nature and human soul meet in union.

▪ We gain freedom when we have paid the full price for our right to live.

▪ We live in the world when we love it.

▪ We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.

▪ We set men free from their desires.

▪ Statement about poets

▪ We try to realise the essential unity of the world with the conscious soul of man; we learn to perceive the unity held together by the one Eternal Spirit, whose power creates the earth, the sky, and the stars, and at the same time irradiates our minds with the light of a consciousness that moves and exits in unbroken continuity with the outer world.

▪ What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.

▪ Whatever we treasure for ourselves separates us from others; our possessions are our limitations.

▪ When he has the power to see things detached from self-interest and from the insistent claims of the lust of the senses, then alone can he have the true vision of the beauty that is everywhere. Then only can he see that what is unpleasant to us is not necessarily unbeautiful, but has its beauty in truth.

▪ When I stand before thee at the day's end, thou shalt see my scars and know that I had my wounds and also my healing.

▪ When the heat and motion of blind impulses and passions distract it on all sides, we can neither give nor receive anything truly. But when we find our centre in our soul by the power of self-restraint, by the force that harmonises all warring elements and unifies those that are apart, then all our isolated impressions reduce themselves to wisdom, and all our momentary impulses of heart find their completion in love; then all the petty details of our life reveal an infinite purpose, and all our thoughts and deeds unite themselves inseparably in an internal harmony.
▪ When we accept any discipline for ourselves, we try to avoid everything except that which is necessary for our purpose; it is this purposefulness, which belongs to the adult mind, that we force upon school children. We say, "Never keep your mind alert, attend to what is before you, what has been given you." This tortures the child because it contradicts nature's purpose, and nature, the greatest of all teachers, is thwarted at every step by the human teacher who believes in machine-made lessons rather than life lessons, so that the growth of the child's mind is not only injured, but forcibly spoiled. Children should be surrounded with the things of nature which have their own educational value. Their minds should be allowed to stumble upon and be surprised at everything that happens in today's life; the new tomorrow will stimulate their attention with new facts of life.

▪ When we rejoice in our fullness, then we can part with our fruits with joy.

▪ Whenever our life is stirred by truth, it expresses energy and comes to be filled, as it were, with a creative ardor. This consciousness of the creative urge is evidence of the force of truth on our mind.

▪ Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; Where knowledge is free; Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls; Where words come out from the depth of truth; Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection; Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way in the dreary desert sand of dead habit; Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever widening thought and action.... into that heaven of freedom, my father, let my country awake.

▪ You are invited to the festival of this world and your life is blessed.

▪ You can't cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water. Don't let yourself indulge in vain wishes.

▪ Variant: We cannot cross the sea merely by staring at the water.

▪ Your mission is proving that a love for the earth, and for the things of the earth, is possible without materialism, a love without greed... I entreat you not to be turned by the call of vulgar strength, of stupendous size, by the spirit of storage, by the multiplication of millions, without meaning and without end. Cherish the ideal of perfection, and to that, relate all your work and all your movements. Though you love the material things of earth, they will not hurt you and you will bring heaven to earth and soul into things.

▪ Bigotry tries to keep truth safe in its hand
With a grip that kills it.


▪ "Fireflies" (1928)

▪ God, the Great Giver, can open the whole universe to our gaze in the narrow space of a single land.

Rabindinath Tagone, Stray Birds

1
STRAY birds of summer come to my window to sing and fly away.

And yellow leaves of autumn, which have no songs, flutter and fall there with a sigh.

2
O TROUPE of little vagrants of the world, leave your footprints in my words.

3
THE world puts off its mask of vastness to its lover.

It becomes small as one song, as one kiss of the eternal.

4
IT is the tears of the earth that keep her smiles in bloom.

5
THE mighty desert is burning for the love of a blade of grass who shakes her head and laughs and flies away.

6
IF you shed tears when you miss the sun, you also miss the stars.

7
THE sands in your way beg for your song and your movement, dancing water. Will you carry the burden of their lameness?

8
HER wistful face haunts my dreams like the rain at night.

9
ONCE we dreamt that we were strangers.

We wake up to find that we were dear to each other.

10
SORROW is hushed into peace in my heart like the evening among the silent trees.

11
SOME unseen fingers, like idle breeze, are playing upon my heart the music of the ripples.

12
"WHAT language is thine, O sea?"

"The language of eternal question."

"What language is thy answer, O sky?

"The language of eternal silence."

13
LISTEN, my heart, to the whispers of the world with which it makes love to you.

14
THE mystery of creation is like the darkness of night--it is great. Delusions of knowledge are like the fog of the morning.

15
DO not seat your love upon a precipice because it is high.

16
I SIT at my window this morning where the world like a passer-by stops for a moment, nods to me and goes.

17
THESE little thoughts are the rustle of leaves; they have their whisper of joy in my mind.

18
WHAT you are you do not see, what you see is your shadow.

19
MY wishes are fools, they shout across thy songs, my Master.

Let me but listen.

20
I CANNOT choose the best.

The best chooses me.

21
THEY throw their shadows before them who carry their lantern on their back.

22
THAT I exist is a perpetual surprise which is life.

23
"WE, the rustling leaves, have a voice that answers the storms, but who are you so silent?"

"I am a mere flower."

24
REST belongs to the work as the eyelids to the eyes.

25
MAN is a born child, his power is the power of growth.

26
GOD expects answers for the flowers he sends us, not for the sun and the earth.

27
THE light that plays, like a naked child, among the green leaves happily knows not that man can lie.

28
O BEAUTY, find thyself in love, not in the flattery of thy mirror.

29
MY heart beats her waves at the shore of the world and writes upon it her signature in tears with the words, "I love thee."

30
"MOON, for what do you wait?"

"To salute the sun for whom I must make way."

31
THE trees come up to my window like the yearning voice of the dumb earth.

32
HIS own mornings are new surprises to God.

33
LIFE finds its wealth by the claims of the world, and its worth by the claims of love.

34
THE dry river-bed finds no thanks for its past.

35
THE bird wishes it were a cloud. The cloud wishes it were a bird.

36
THE waterfall sings, "I find my song, when I find my freedom."

37
I CANNOT tell why this heart languishes in silence.

It is for small needs it never asks, or knows or remembers.

38
WOMAN, when you move about in your household service your limbs sing like a hill stream among its pebbles.

39
THE sun goes to cross the Western sea, leaving its last salutation to the East.

40
DO not blame your food because you have no appetite.

41
THE trees, like the longings of the earth, stand a-tiptoe to peep at the heaven.

42
YOU smiled and talked to me of nothing and I felt that for this I had been waiting long.

43
THE fish in the water is silent, the animal on the earth is noisy, the bird in the air is singing,

But Man has in him the silence of the sea, the noise of the earth and the music of the air.

44
THE world rushes on over the strings of the lingering heart making the music of sadness.

45
HE has made his weapons his gods. When his weapons win he is defeated himself.

46
GOD finds himself by creating.

47
SHADOW, with her veil drawn, follows Light in secret meekness, with her silent steps of love.

48
THE stars are not afraid to appear like fireflies.

49
I THANK thee that I am none of the wheels of power but I am one with the living creatures that are crushed by it.

50
THE mind, sharp but not broad, sticks at every point but does not move.

51
YOUR idol is shattered in the dust to prove that God's dust is greater than your idol.

52
MAN does not reveal himself in his history, he struggles up through it.

53
WHILE the glass lamp rebukes the earthen for calling it cousin, the moon rises, and the glass lamp, with a bland smile, calls her, "My dear, dear sister."

54
LIKE the meeting of the seagulls and the waves we meet and come near. The seagulls fly off, the waves roll away and we depart.

55
MY day is done, and I am like a boat drawn on the beach, listening to the dance-music of the tide in the evening.

56
LIFE is given to us, we earn it by giving it.

57
WE come nearest to the great when we are great in humility.

58
THE sparrow is sorry for the peacock at the burden of its tail.

59
NEVER be afraid of the moments--thus sings the voice of the everlasting.

60
THE hurricane seeks the shortest road by the no-road, and suddenly ends its search in the Nowhere.

61
TAKE my wine in my own cup, friend.

It loses its wreath of foam when poured into that of others.

62
THE Perfect decks itself in beauty for the love of the Imperfect.

63
GOD says to man, "I heal you therefore I hurt, love you therefore punish."

64
THANK the flame for its light, but do not forget the lampholder standing in the shade with constancy of patience.

65
TINY grass, your steps are small, but you possess the earth under your tread.

66
THE infant flower opens its bud and cries, "Dear World, please do not fade."

67
GOD grows weary of great kingdoms, but never of little flowers.

68
WRONG cannot afford defeat but Right can.

69
"I GIVE my whole water in joy," sings the waterfall, "though little of it is enough for the thirsty."

70
WHERE is the fountain that throws up these flowers in a ceaseless outbreak of ecstasy?

71
THE woodcutter's axe begged for its handle from the tree.

The tree gave it.

72
IN my solitude of heart I feel the sigh of this widowed evening veiled with mist and rain.

73
CHASTITY is a wealth that comes from abundance of love.

74
THE mist, like love, plays upon the heart of the hills and brings out surprises of beauty.

75
WE read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.

76
THE poet wind is out over the sea and the forest to seek his own voice.

77
EVERY child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.

78
THE grass seeks her crowd in the earth.

The tree seeks his solitude of the sky.

79
MAN barricades against himself.

80
YOUR voice, my friend, wanders in my heart, like the muffled sound of the sea among these listening pines.

81
WHAT is this unseen flame of darkness whose sparks are the stars?

82
LET life be beautiful like summer flowers and death like autumn leaves.

88
HE who wants to do good knocks at the gate; he who loves finds the gate open.

84
IN death the many becomes one; in life the one becomes many.

Religion will be one when God is dead.

85
THE artist is the lover of Nature, therefore he is her slave and her master.

86
"HOW far are you from me, O Fruit?"

"I am hidden in your heart, O Flower."

87
THIS longing is for the one who is felt in the dark, but not seen in the day.

88
"YOU are the big drop of dew under the lotus leaf, I am the smaller one on its upper side," said the dewdrop to the lake.

89
THE scabbard is content to be dull when it protects the keenness of the sword.

90
IN darkness the One appears as uniform; in the light the One appears as manifold.

91
THE great earth makes herself hospitable with the help of the grass.

92
THE birth and death of the leaves are the rapid whirls of the eddy whose wider circles move slowly among stars.

93
POWER said to the world, "You are mine.

The world kept it prisoner on her throne.


Love said to the world, "I am thine."

The world gave it the freedom of her house.

94
THE mist is like the earth's desire. It hides the sun for whom she cries.


95
BE still, my heart, these great trees are prayers.

96
THE noise of the moment scoffs at the music of the Eternal.

97
I THINK of other ages that floated upon the stream of life and love and death and are forgotten, and I feel the freedom of passing away.

98
THE sadness of my soul is her bride's veil.

It waits to be lifted in the night.

99
DEATH'S stamp gives value to the coin of life; making it possible to buy with life what is truly precious.

100
THE cloud stood humbly in a corner of the sky.

The morning crowned it with splendour.

101
THE dust receives insult and in return offers her flowers.

102
DO not linger to gather flowers to keep them, but walk on, for flowers will keep themselves blooming all your way.

103
ROOTS are the branches down in the earth.

Branches are roots in the air.

104
THE music of the far-away summer flutters around the Autumn seeking its former nest.

105
DO not insult your friend by lending him merits from your own pocket.

106
THE touch of the nameless days clings to my heart like mosses round the old tree.

107
THE echo mocks her origin to prove she is the original.

108
GOD is ashamed when the prosperous boasts of His special favour.

109
I CAST my own shadow upon my path, because I have a lamp that has not been lighted.

110
MAN goes into the noisy crowd to drown his own clamour of silence.

111
THAT which ends in exhaustion is death, but the perfect ending is in the endless.

112
THE sun has his simple robe of light. The clouds are decked with gorgeousness.

113
THE hills are like shouts of children who raise their arms, trying to catch stars.

114
THE road is lonely in its crowd for it is not loved.

115
THE power that boasts of its mischiefs is laughed at by the yellow leaves that fall, and clouds that pass by.

116
THE earth hums to me to-day in the sun, like a woman at her spinng, some ballad of the ancient time in a forgotten tongue.

117
THE grass-blade is worth of the great world where it grows.

118
DREAM is a wife who must talk.

Sleep is a husband who silently suffers.

119
THE night kisses the fading day whispering to his ear, "I am death, your mother. I am to give you fresh birth."

120
I FEEL, thy beauty, dark night, like that of the loved woman when she has put out the lamp.

121
I CARRY in my world that flourishes the worlds that have failed.

122
DEAR friend, I feel the silence of your great thoughts of may a deepening eventide on this beach when I listen to these waves.

123
THE bird thinks it is an act of kindness to give the fish a lift in the air.

124
"IN the moon thou sendest thy love letters to me," said the night to the sun.

"I leave my answers in tears upon the grass."

125
THE Great is a born child; when he dies he gives his great childhood to the world.

126
NOT hammerstrokes, but dance of the water sings the pebbles into perfection.

127
BEES sip honey from flowers and hum their thanks when they leave.

The gaudy butterfly is sure that the flowers owe thanks to him.

128
TO be outspoken is easy when you do not wait to speak the complete truth.

129
ASKS the Possible to the Impossible, "Where is your dwelling place?"

"In the dreams of the impotent," comes the answer.

130
IF you shut your door to all errors truth will be shut out.

131
I HEAR some rustle of things behind my sadness of heart,--I cannot see them.

132
LEISURE in its activity is work.

The stillness of the sea stirs in waves.

133
THE leaf becomes flower when it loves.

The flower becomes fruit when it worships.

134
THE roots below the earth claim no rewards for making the branches fruitful.

135
THIS rainy evening the wind is restless.

I look at the swaying branches and ponder over the greatness of all things.

136
STORM of midnight, like a giant child awakened in the untimely dark, has begun to play and shout.

137
THOU raisest thy waves vainly to follow thy lover. O sea, thou lonely bride of the storm.

138
"I AM ashamed of my emptiness," said the Word to the Work.

"I know how poor I am when I see you," said the Work to the Word.

139
TIME is the wealth of change, but the clock in its parody makes it mere change and no wealth.

140
TRUTH in her dress finds facts too tight.

In fiction she moves with ease.

141
WHEN I travelled to here and to there, I was tired of thee, O Road, but now when thou leadest me to everywhere I am wedded to thee in love.

142
LET me think that there is one among those stars that guides my life through the dark unknown.

143
WOMAN, with the grace of your fingers you touched my things and order came out like music.

144
ONE sad voice has its nest among the ruins of the years.

It sings to me in the night,--"I loved you."

145
THE flaming fire warns me off by its own glow.

Save me from the dying embers hidden under ashes.

146
I HAVE my stars in the sky,

But oh for my little lamp unlit in my house.

147
THE dust of the dead words clings to thee.

Wash thy soul with silence.

148
GAPS are left in life through which comes the sad music of death.

149
THE world has opened its heart of light in the morning.

Come out, my heart, with thy love to meet it.

150
MY thoughts shimmer with these shimmering leaves and my heart sings with the touch of this sunlight; my life is glad to be floating with all things into the blue of space, into the dark of time.

151
GOD'S great power is in the gentle breeze, not in the storm.

152
THIS is a dream in which things are all loose and they oppress. I shall find them gathered in thee when I awake and shall be free.

153
"WHO is there to take up my duties?" asked the setting sun.

"I shall do what I can, my Master," said the earthen lamp.

154
BY plucking her petals you do not gather the beauty of the flower.

155
SILENCE will carry your voice like the nest that holds the sleeping birds.

156
THE Great walks with the Small without fear.

The Middling keeps aloof.

157
THE night opens the flowers in secret and allows the day to get thanks.

158
POWER takes as ingratitude the writhings of its victims.

159
WHEN we rejoice in our fulness, then we can part with our fruits with joy.

160
THE raindrops kissed the earth and whispered,--"We are thy homesick children, mother, come back to thee from the heaven."

161
THE cobweb pretends to catch dew-drops and catches flies.

162
LOVE! when you come with the burning lamp of pain in your hand, I can see your face and know you as bliss.

163
"THE learned say that your lights will one day be no more." said the firefly to the stars.

The stars made no answer.

164
IN the dusk of the evening the bird of some early dawn comes to the nest of my silence.

165
THOUGHTS pass in my mind like flocks of ducks in the sky.

I hear the voice of their wings.

166
THE canal loves to think that rivers exist solely to supply it with water.

167
THE world has kissed my soul with its pain, asking for its return in songs.

168
THAT which oppresses me, is it my soul trying to come out in the open, or the soul of the world knocking at my heart for its entrance?

169
THOUGHT feeds itself with its own words and grows.

170
I HAVE dipped the vessel of my heart into this silent hour; it has filled with love.

171
EITHER you have work or you have not.

When you have to say, "Let us do something," then begins mischief.

172
THE sunflower blushed to own the nameless flower as her kin.

The sun rose and smiled on it, saying, "Are you well, my darling?"

173
"WHO drives me forward like fate?"

"The Myself striding on my back."

174
THE clouds fill the watercups of the river, hiding themselves in the distant hills.

175
I SPILL water from my water jar as I walk on my way,

Very little remains for my home.

176
THE water in a vessel is sparkling; the water in the sea is dark.

The small truth has words that are clear; the great truth has great silence.

177
YOUR smile was the flowers of your own fields, your talk was the rustle of your own mountain pines, but your heart was the woman that we all know.

178
IT is the little things that I leave behind for my loved ones,--great things are for everyone.

179
WOMAN, thou hast encircled the world's heart with the depth of thy tears as the sea has the earth.

180
THE sunshine greets me with a smile. The rain, his sad sister, talks to my heart.

181
MY flower of the day dropped its petals forgotten.

In the evening it ripens into a golden fruit of memory.

182
I AM like the road in the night listening to the footfalls of its memories in silence.

183
THE evening sky to me is like a window, and a lighted lamp, and a waiting behind it.

184
HE who is too busy doing good finds no time to be good.

185
I AM the autumn cloud, empty of rain, see my fulness in the field of ripened rice.

186
THEY hated and killed and men praised them.

But God in shame hastens to hide its memory under the green grass.

187
TOES are the fingers that have forsaken their past.

188
DARKNESS travels towards light, but blindness towards death.

189
THE pet dog suspects the universe for scheming to take its place.

190
SIT still my heart, do not raise your dust.

Let the world find its way to you.

191
THE bow whispers to the arrow before it speeds forth--"Your freedom is mine."

192
WOMAN, in your laughter you have the music of the fountain of life.

193
A MIND all logic is like a knife all blade.

It makes the hand bleed that uses it.

194
GOD loves man's lamp lights better than his own great stars.

195
THIS world is the world of wild storms kept tame with the music of beauty.

196
"MY heart is like the golden casket of thy kiss," said the sunset cloud to the sun.

197
BY touching you may kill, by keeping away you may possess.


198
THE cricket's chirp and the patter of rain come to me through the dark, like the rustle of dreams from my past youth.

199
"I HAVE lost my dewdrop," cries the flower to the morning sky that has lost all its stars.

200
THE burning log bursts in flame and cries,--"This is my flower, my death."

201
THE wasp thinks that the honey-hive of the neighbouring bees is too small.

His neighbours ask him to build one still smaller.

202
"I CANNOT keep your waves," says the bank to the river.

"Let me keep your footprints in my heart."

203
THE day, with the noise of this little earth, drowns the silence of all worlds.

204
THE song feels the infinite in the air, the picture in the earth, the poem in the air and the earth;

For its words have meaning that walks and music that soars.

205
WHEN the sun goes down to the West, the East of his morning stands before him in silence.

206
LET me not put myself wrongly to my world and set it against me.

207
PRAISE shames me, for I secretly beg for it.

208
LET my doing nothing when I have nothing to do become untroubled in its depth of peace like the evening in the seashore when the water is silent.

209
MAIDEN, your simplicity, like the blueness of the lake, reveals your depth of truth.

210
THE best does not come alone. It comes with the company of the all.

211
GOD's right hand is gentle, but terrible is his left hand.

212
MY evening came among the alien trees and spoke in a language which my morning stars did not know.

213
NIGHT'S darkness is a bag that bursts with the gold of the dawn.

214
OUR desire lends the colours of the rainbow to the mere mists and vapours of life.

215
GOD waits to win back his own flowers as gifts from man's hands.

216
MY sad thoughts tease me asking me their own names.

217
THE service of the fruit is precious, the service of the flower is sweet, but let my service be the service of the leaves in its shade of humble devotion.

218
MY heart has spread its sails to the idle winds for the shadowy island of Anywhere.

219
MEN are cruel, but Man is kind.

220
MAKE me thy cup and let my fulness be for thee and for thine.

221
THE storm is like the cry of some god in pain whose love the earth refuses.

222
THE world does not leak because death is not a crack.

223
LIFE has become richer by the love that has been lost.

224
MY friend, your great heart shone with the sunrise of the East like the snowy summit of a lonely hill in the dawn.

225
THE fountain of death makes the still water of life play.

226
THOSE who have everything but thee, my God, laugh at those who have nothing but thyself.

227
THE movement of life has its rest in its own music.

228
KICKS only raise dust and not crops from the earth.

229
OUR names are the light that glows on the sea waves at night and then dies without leaving its signature.

230
LET him only see the thorns who has eyes to see the rose.

231
SET bird's wings with gold and it will never again soar in the sky.

232
THE same lotus of our clime blooms here in the alien water with the same sweetness, under another name.

233
IN heart's perspective the distance looms large.

234
THE moon has her light all over the sky, her dark spots to herself.

235
DO not say, "It is morning," and dismiss it with a name of yesterday. See it for the first time as a new-born child that has no name.

236
SMOKE boasts to the sky, and Ashes to the earth, that they are brothers to the fire.

237
THE raindrop whispered to the jasmine, "Keep me in your heart for ever."

The jasmine sighed, "Alas," and dropped to the ground.

238
TIMID thoughts, do not be afraid of me.

I am a poet.

239
THE dim silence of my mind seems filled with crickets' chirp--the grey twilight of sound.

240
ROCKETS, your insult to the stars follows yourself back to the earth.

241
THOU hast led me through my crowded travels of the day to my evening's loneliness.

I wait for its meaning through the stillness of the night.

242
THIS life is the crossing of a sea, where we meet in the same narrow ship.

In death we reach the shore and go to our different worlds.

243
THE stream of truth flows through its channels of mistakes.

244
MY heart is homesick to-day for the one sweet hour across the sea of time.

245
THE bird-song is the echo of the morning light back from the earth.

246
"ARE you too proud to kiss me?" the morning light asks the buttercup.

247
"HOW may I sing to thee and worship, O Sun?" asked the little flower.

"By the simple silence of thy purity," answered the sun.

248
MAN is worse than an animal when he is an animal.

249
DARK clouds become heaven's flowers when kissed by light.

250
LET not the sword-blade mock its handle for being blunt.

251
THE night's silence, like a deep lamp, is burning with the light of its milky way.

252
AROUND the sunny island of Life swells day and night death's limitless song of the sea.

253
IS not this mountain like a flower, with its petals of hills, drinking the sunlight?

254
THE real with its meaning read wrong and emphasis misplaced is the unreal.

255
FIND your beauty, my heart, from the world's movement, like the boat that has the grace of the wind and the water.

256
THE eyes are not proud of their sight but of their eyeglasses.

257
I LIVE in this little world of mine and am afraid to make it the least less. Lift me into thy world and let me have the freedom gladly to lose my all.

258
THE false can never grow into truth by growing in power.

259
MY heart, with its lapping waves of song, longs to caress this green world of the sunny day.

260
WAYSIDE grass, love the star, then your dreams will come out in flowers.

261
LET your music, like a sword, pierce the noise of the market to its heart.

262
THE trembling leaves of this tree touch my heart like the fingers of an infant child.

263
THIS sadness of my soul is her bride's veil.

It waits to be lifted in the night.

264
THE little flower lies in the dust.

It sought the path of the butterfly.

265
I AM in the world of the roads. The night comes. Open thy gate, thou world of the home.

266
I HAVE sung the songs of thy day. In the evening let me carry thy lamp through the stormy path.

267
I DO not ask thee into the house.

Come into my infinite loneliness, my Lover.

268
DEATH belongs to life as birth does. The walk is in the raising of the foot as in the laying of it down.

269
I HAVE learnt the simple meaning of thy whispers in flowers and sunshine--teach me to know thy words in pain and death.

270
THE night's flower was late when the morning kissed her, she shivered and sighed and dropped to the ground.

271
THROUGH the sadness of all things I hear the crooning of the Eternal Mother.

272
I CAME to your shore as a stranger, I lived in your house as a guest, I leave your door as a friend, my earth.

273
LET my thoughts come to you, when I am gone, like the afterglow of sunset at the margin of starry silence.

274
LIGHT in my heart the evening star of rest and then let the night whisper to me of love.

275
I AM a child in the dark.

I stretch my hands through the coverlet of night for thee, Mother.

276
THE day of work is done. Hide my face in your arms, Mother.

Let me dream.

277
THE lamp of meeting burns long; it goes out in a moment at the parting.

278
ONE word keep for me in thy silence, O World, when I am dead, "I have loved."

279
WE live in this world when we love it.

280
LET the dead have the immortality of fame, but the living the immortality of love.

281
I HAVE seen thee as the half-awakened child sees his mother in the dusk of the dawn and then smiles and sleeps again.

282
I SHALL die again and again to know that life is inexhaustible.

283
WHILE I was passing with the crowd in the road I saw thy smile from the balcony and I sang and forgot all noise.

284
LOVE is life in its fulness like the cup with its wine.

285
THEY light their own lamps and sing their own words in their temples.

But the birds sing thy name in thine own morning light,--for thy name is joy.

286
LEAD me in the centre of thy silence to fill my heart with songs.

287
LET them live who choose in their own hissing world of fireworks.

My heart longs for thy stars, my God.

288
LOVE'S pain sang round my life like the unplumbed sea, and love's joy sang like birds in its flowering groves.

289
PUT out the lamp when thou wishest.

I shall know thy darkness and shall love it.

290
WHEN I stand before thee at the day's end thou shalt see my scars and know that I had my wounds and also my healing.

291
SOME day I shall sing to thee in the sunrise of some other world, "I have seen thee before in the light of the earth, in the love of man."

292
CLOUDS come floating into my life from other days no longer to shed rain or usher storm but to give colour to my sunset sky.

293
TRUTH raises against itself the storm that scatters its seeds broadcast.

294
THE storm of the last night has crowned this morning with golden peace.

295
TRUTH seems to come with its final word; and the final word gives birth to its next.

296
BLESSED is he whose fame does not outshine his truth.

297
SWEETNESS of thy name fills my heart when I forget mine--like thy morning sun when the mist is melted.

298
THE silent night has the beauty of the mother and the clamorous day of the child.

299
THE world loved man when he smiled. The world became afraid of him when he laughed.

300
GOD waits for man to regain his childhood in wisdom.

301
LET me feel this world as thy love taking form, then my love will help it.

302
THY sunshine smiles upon the winter days of my heart, never doubting of its spring flowers.

303
GOD kisses the finite in his love and man the infinite.

304
THOU crossest desert lands of barren years to reach the moment of fulfilment.

305
GOD's silence ripens man's thoughts into speech.

306
THOU wilt find, Eternal Traveller, marks of thy footsteps across my songs.

307
LET me not shame thee, Father, who displayest thy glory in thy children.

308
CHEERLESS is the day, the light under frowning clouds is like a punished child with traces of tears on its pale cheeks, and the cry of the wind is like the cry of a wounded world. But I know I am travelling to meet my Friend.

309
TO-NIGHT there is a stir among the palm leaves, a swell in the sea, Full Moon, like the heart throb of the world. From what unknown sky hast thou carried in thy silence the aching secret of love?

310
I DREAM of a star, an island of light, where I shall be born and in the depth of its quickening leisure my life will ripen its works like the ricefield in the autumn sun.


311
THE smell of the wet earth in the rain rises like a great chant of praise from the voiceless multitude of the insignificant.

312
THAT love can ever lose is a fact that we cannot accept as truth.

313
WE shall know some day that death can never rob us of that which our soul has gained, for her gains are one with herself.

314
GOD comes to me in the dusk of my evening with the flowers from my past kept fresh in his basket.

315
WHEN all the strings of my life will be tuned, my Master, then at every touch of thine will come out the music of love.

316
LET me live truly, my Lord, so that death to me become true.

317
MAN'S history is waiting in patience for the triumph of the insulted man.

318
I FEEL thy gaze upon my heart this moment like the sunny silence of the morning upon the lonely field whose harvest is over.

319
I LONG for the Island of Songs across this heaving Sea of Shouts.

320
THE prelude of the night is commenced in the music of the sunset, in its solemn hymn to the ineffable dark.

321
I HAVE scaled the peak and found no shelter in fame's bleak and barren height. Lead me, my Guide, before the light fades, into the valley of quiet where life's harvest mellows into golden wisdom.

322
THINGS look phantastic in this dimness of the dusk--the spires whose bases are lost in the dark and tree tops like blots of ink. I shall wait for the morning and wake up to see thy city in the light.

323
I HAVE suffered and despaired and known death and I am glad that I am in this great world.

324
THERE are tracts in my life that are bare and silent. They are the open spaces where my busy days had their light and air.

325
RELEASE me from my unfulfilled past clinging to me from behind making death difficult.

326
LET this be my last word, that I trust in thy love.

Stray Birds

By Rabindranath Tagore
[translated from Bengali to English by the author]


New York: The Macmillan Company, 1916
[Frontispiece in color by Willy Poga'ny]

To
T. HARA
of
Yokohama