Rabindranath Tagore – Famous Poems for Contemporary Readers

Rabindranath Tagore, fondly referred to as Gurudev, was the composer of India’s national anthem – Jana Gana Mana; the founder of Visva-bharati at Shantiniketan (now a UNESCO World Heritage Site); the first non-European to win a Nobel Prize; a poet, writer, playwright and composer par excellence; and a nationalist, a humanist, a social reformer, a philosopher and  a painter. Born on 7 May 1861, in present day West Bengal in India, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his immortal book of poems – Gitanjali in 1913. Before he breathed his last on 7 August 1941, this brilliant polymath had woven together an ocean of words, images and thoughts that remain relevant even in the 21st century.

Team Cultural Samvaad has curated 5 of our favourite poems from Tagore’s vast repertoire  that the readers of our times will find particularly compelling. The include a masterpiece on the yearning of love, a brilliant exhortation to work, a captivating portrait of the unbridled joys of the Indian countryside and of course, 2 of his most famous poems – Freedom and Where the mind is without fear.

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Unending Love:  Tagore’s Timeless Masterpiece on True Love and Longing

I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times
In life after life, in age after age forever.
My spell-bound heart has made and re-made the necklace of songs
That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms
In life after life, in age after age forever.
Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, its age-old pain,
Its ancient tale of being apart or together,
As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge
Clad in the light of a pole-star piercing the darkness of time:
You become an image of what is remembered forever.
You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount
At the heart of time love of one for another.
We have played alongside millions of lovers,
shared in the same shy sweetness of meeting,
the same distressful tears of farewell –
Old love, but in shapes that renew and renew forever.
Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you,
The love of all man’s days both past and forever:
Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life,
The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours –
And the songs of every poet past and forever.

New Rain:  Tagore’s Mesmerising Ode to the Pleasures and Joys of the Indian Monsoon 

It dances today my heart, like a peacock it dances, it dances.
It sports a mosaic of passions, like a peacock’s tail,
It soars to the sky with delight, it quests,
O wildly it dances today, my heart, like a peacock it dances.
Storm-clouds roll through the sky, vaunting their thunder, their thunder.
Rice-plants bend and sway as the water rushes,
Frogs croak, doves huddle and tremble in their nests,
O proudly storm-clouds roll through the sky, vaunting their thunder.
Rain-clouds wet my eyes with their blue collyrium, collyrium.
I spread out my joy on the shaded new woodland grass,
My soul and kadamba-trees blossom together,
O coolly rain-clouds wet my eyes with their blue collyrium.
Who wanders high on the palace-tower, hair unravelled, unravelled –
Pulling her cloud-blue sari close to her breast?
Who gambols in the shock and flame of the lightning,
O who is it high on the tower today with hair unravelled?
Who sits in the reeds by the river in pure green garments, green garments?
Her water-pot drifts from the bank as she scans the horizon,
Longing, distractedly chewing fresh jasmine,
O who is it sitting in the reeds by the river in pure green garments?
Who swings on that bakul-tree branch today in the wilderness, wilderness –
Scattering clusters of blooms, sari-hem flying,
Hair unplaited and blown in her eyes?
O to and fro high and low swinging, who swings on that branch in the wilderness?
Who moors her boat where ketakī-trees are flowering, flowering?
She has gathered moss in the loose fold of her sari,
Her tearful rain-songs capture my heart,
O who is it moored to the bank where ketakī-trees are flowering?
It dances today, my heart, like a peacock it dances, it dances.
The woods vibrate with cicadas,
Rain soaks leaves,
The river roars nearer and nearer the village,
O wildly it dances today, my heart, like a peacock it dances.

Geetanjali – Poem No. 11:  Tagore’s Clarion Call for Karma – Work is Worship

Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads!
Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark comer of a temple with doors all shut?
Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee!
He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground
and where the pathmaker is breaking stones.
He is with them in sun and in shower,
and his garment is covered with dust.
Put off thy holy mantle and even like him come down on the dusty soil!
Deliverance? Where is this deliverance to be found?
Our master himself has joyfully taken upon him the bonds of creation;
he is bound with us all for ever.
Come out of thy meditations and leave aside thy flowers and incense!
What harm is there if thy clothes become tattered and stained?
Meet him and stand by him in toil and in sweat of thy brow.

Freedom:  Tagore’s Lofty Definition of What It Is To Be Free

Freedom from fear is the freedom I claim for you, my Motherland! – fear,
the phantom demon, shaped by your own distorted dreams;
Freedom from the burden of ages, bending your head, breaking your back,
blinding your eyes to the beckoning call of the future;
Freedom from shackles of slumber wherewith you fasten yourself to night’s stillness, mistrusting the star that speaks of truth’s adventurous path;
Freedom from the anarchy of a destiny, whose sails are weakly yielded to blind uncertain winds, and the helm to a hand ever rigid and cold as Death;
Freedom from the insult of dwelling in a puppet’s world,
where movements are started through brainless wires,
repeated through mindless habits;
where figures wait with patient obedience for a master of show to be stirred into a moment’s mimicry of life.

Where the mind is without fear:  Tagore’s Vision for India – His Motherland

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.