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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
The Complete Poetical Works of Rabindranath Tagore presents a profound compendium of poetry that encapsulates the essence of the human experience through a lens of spirituality, nature, and love. Spanning over five decades, Tagore's work reflects a diverse literary style that seamlessly blends lyrical beauty with philosophical depth. The themes and motifs are deeply rooted in the socio-cultural landscape of India, intermingled with Western influences, representing a cross-cultural dialogue that elevates his poetry beyond regional boundaries. Tagore's innovative use of language and form pushes the confines of traditional poetic structures, engaging readers with emotive imagery and rhythmic grace. Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was a luminary of Bengali literature and the first non-European Nobel laureate in Literature. His diverse interests in philosophy, art, and music, coupled with his upbringing in a culturally rich family, profoundly influenced his writing. Tagore's travels across Europe and his engagement with contemporary literary movements provided him with a unique perspective that is evident in his poetic works, enriching the literary tapestry of the early 20th century and contributing to debates on colonialism, identity, and self-expression. This anthology is an essential read for anyone seeking to delve into the spiritual and artistic journey of one of the greatest literary figures of all time. It invites readers to discover the intricate layers of emotion and thought woven throughout Tagore's poems, making it an indispensable addition to the library of both new and seasoned admirers of poetry. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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The Complete Poetical Works of Rabindranath Tagore
Table of Contents
Introduction
This collection assembles, in a single compass, the principal poetical works of Rabindranath Tagore available in English, from the civic and cultural touchstones My Golden Bengal (Amar Shonar Bangla) and The Morning Song of India (Jana Gana Mana) to landmark volumes such as Gitanjali, The Gardener, Fruit-Gathering, The Crescent Moon, Stray Birds, Lover’s Gift and Crossing, The Fugitive, The Child, Fireflies, and the translated Songs of Kabir. It also includes My Reminiscences, an autobiographical text that illuminates the creative life behind the poems. The aim is to present a coherent portrait of Tagore’s lyric imagination across devotion, love, nature, ethical inquiry, and inward freedom.
The contents span a range of text types within a poet’s domain. There are song-lyrics originally composed in Bengali and rendered into English; extended lyric sequences arranged as cycles of love or contemplation; brief epigrammatic verses; parables and aphoristic fragments; meditative and visionary poems written directly in English; and Tagore’s English translations from a devotional tradition not his own in Songs of Kabir. The inclusion of My Reminiscences adds prose memoir to this primarily poetic landscape, providing personal, historical, and artistic context that anchors the songs and poems without displacing their autonomy as works of art.
While Tagore wrote across decades, the arc gathered here can be felt from early twentieth-century song-lyrics through English volumes that reached an international audience. Gitanjali appeared in English in 1912 and was swiftly recognized with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. The Gardener and The Crescent Moon followed soon after, with Fruit-Gathering and Stray Birds reaching readers in the mid-1910s; Songs of Kabir appeared in 1915; My Reminiscences in 1917; Fireflies later in the 1920s. My Golden Bengal was composed in 1905; The Morning Song of India dates to 1911. Both songs were later adopted as national anthems.
Across this body of work, certain unifying preoccupations recur. Tagore charts the relationship between the self and the infinite, the individual and the community, and the human heart’s traffic with nature. Love—sensual, filial, and spiritual—moves alongside ethical feeling and a steadfast humanism. The poems seek simplicity without denial of complexity, favoring luminous images, musical cadences, and a diction that invites readers into meditative clarity. The voice is intimate yet open to the world, hospitable to doubt but oriented toward trust. These hallmarks help explain why the works, varied in mode, cohere as a singular and enduring poetic testament.
Music is inseparable from Tagore’s poetry. Many of his lyrics were conceived as songs, their rhythms shaped by performance and the pliancy of melody. This musical lineage undergirds the prayerful intensity of Gitanjali, the tender cadences of The Crescent Moon, and the chiseled brevity of Stray Birds and Fireflies. It also frames the cultural resonance of My Golden Bengal and The Morning Song of India, whose adoption as national anthems underscores how Tagore’s lyric idiom traveled from intimate devotion to public voice without forfeiting nuance. The poetry sings yet thinks; it meditates yet remains unmistakably songlike.
Bilingual creation and translation are central to the collection’s scope. Many poems were first written in Bengali and then translated or reimagined in English by Tagore, sometimes with adjustments to imagery, modulation, or sequence to meet the new medium and readership. This transposition extends to his role as translator of Songs of Kabir, where he renders a distinct devotional tradition in an English idiom attuned to spiritual intensity and plainness. The result is a body of work that confronts the perils of translation—loss, shift, and gain—while demonstrating how lyric insight can cross linguistic boundaries without surrendering its core.
Gitanjali occupies a pivotal place: a sequence of “song offerings” whose contemplative addresses move between the finite and the eternal. The English volume’s spare, prayerful poise made it legible worldwide and helped introduce readers to a cosmopolitan Indian modernity rooted in vernacular song. Its reception in 1912–1913 transformed Tagore’s international standing without severing the poems from their devotional and musical sources. The collection’s meditative stance—neither doctrinal nor merely personal—exemplifies a mode of lyric that seeks ethical clarity through surrender and attention. Later books deepen, diversify, or contest this stance, yet Gitanjali’s tone continues to resonate throughout.
In The Gardener and Fruit-Gathering, the poetry turns to love in many guises: longing, companionship, renunciation, and ripening maturity. These sequences interleave the language of garden and road, labor and festivity, to dramatize how affection tests and refines the self. The beloved may appear human or become a figure for the divine, but the poems resist easy allegory, lingering instead on gesture, season, and the work of waiting. Fruit-Gathering extends this movement toward a later harvest, where desire and duty meet. Together, the books complement Gitanjali’s spiritual register with a grounded, sensuous, and dialogic lyric theater.
The Crescent Moon and The Child approach childhood as vision and vocation. The former gathers poems about children, parents, play, and the world as newly seen—tender and luminous without sentimentality. The Child, a later English poem, draws on visionary imagery to explore innocence, peril, and renewal, compressing a journey of spiritual ordeal into emblem and song. Read together, they present childhood not as mere subject matter but as a way of perceiving: receptivity, wonder, and moral candor become instruments of knowledge. The result is a poetics in which discovery and responsibility unfold in the same breath.
Stray Birds and Fireflies show Tagore at his most compressed. These brief entries—epigrams, fragments, and miniature parables—distill observation into a few lines, setting image and insight in electric counterpoise. Nature’s particulars, human foibles, and metaphysical hunches flash up, then subside, inviting rereading rather than elaboration. The economy is not austerity but precision: a way to carry lyric thought lightly while preserving resonance. Their brevity helped these books travel widely, and their form complements the longer sequences here by offering a portable lyric that readers can internalize, recite, and test against their own hours and landscapes.
Lover’s Gift and Crossing and The Fugitive intensify the motif of journey—toward another, away from a former self, across thresholds of time and conscience. The first pairs offerings of love with passages of transition, while the second gathers poems of inward motion and estrangement. Road, river, and crossing recur as images of risk and possibility, and the language modulates between tenderness and austerity. These volumes, poised between intimacy and departure, extend Tagore’s exploration of freedom: not an escape from duty or history, but a disciplined openness to change, a readiness to meet the unknown with responsibility and grace.
Songs of Kabir and My Reminiscences widen the collection’s horizon. By translating Kabir’s devotional lyrics into English, Tagore builds a bridge across centuries and languages, letting a bhakti voice speak in an idiom already shaped by his own lyric ethics. The memoir, composed in English as My Reminiscences, contextualizes the poetry’s emergence—family, education, travels, and the making of a literary life—without claiming to decode every song. Taken together, these works frame the poems historically and spiritually. The purpose of this collection, therefore, is not merely to gather texts but to let a life in lyric unfold as a whole.
Author Biography
Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) was a Bengali poet, novelist, composer, playwright, educator, and painter whose work reshaped modern Indian arts and letters. Active from the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth, he emerged as a leading voice of the Bengal Renaissance and a global humanist. Writing primarily in Bengali but also in English, he expanded the expressive range of lyric poetry, pioneered the modern short story in his language, and created a vast musical repertoire known as Rabindra Sangeet. His English collection Gitanjali (Song Offerings) led to the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, the first awarded to a writer from outside Europe, bringing unprecedented international attention to Indian literature.
Raised in a cosmopolitan cultural milieu in Calcutta, Tagore received most of his early education at home, studying Sanskrit texts, Bengali classics, and European literature. In the late 1870s he went to England to study law, attending lectures in London before returning to India without completing a degree. Exposure to Romantic and Victorian writing mingled with bhakti poetry and the philosophical currents of the Upanishads and reformist thought then circulating in Bengal. He began publishing as a teenager, adopting the pen name Bhanusimha for early verse modeled on medieval Vaishnava lyrics, and soon developed a distinctive voice that balanced introspection with social observation.
In the 1890s Tagore spent extended periods in rural eastern Bengal while overseeing family estates, an experience that deepened his engagement with village life and nature. This period yielded important poetry collections such as Manasi and Sonar Tori, and it catalyzed his transformation of the Bengali short story. Works like The Postmaster and Kabuliwala combined lucid prose with empathetic portraits of ordinary people, setting a new standard for narrative economy and psychological nuance. His editorship and essays nurtured a broader literary public, while songs composed during river journeys knit together folk rhythms with classical and modern idioms, forming the foundation of his later musical oeuvre.
From the early 1910s Tagore translated selections of his poetry into English, culminating in Gitanjali, introduced to readers in Britain by admirers including W. B. Yeats. The book’s reception led to the Nobel Prize in 1913 and world renown. Alongside lyric poetry, he produced major novels—Chokher Bali, Gora, and Ghare-Baire—that probed personal desire, social reform, religious identity, and the tensions of emergent nationalism. His plays, notably Dak Ghar (The Post Office) and later Rakta Karabi (Red Oleanders), fused poetic language with allegory and critique. He also wrote reflective prose works that articulated his aesthetic and ethical commitments, making him a public intellectual of rare breadth.
An innovative educator, Tagore founded a school at Santiniketan in the early 1900s that evolved into Visva-Bharati University in 1921. He envisioned a learning community open to the world yet rooted in Indian culture, favoring the arts, study in nature, and dialogue across civilizations. Music was central to this vision. He composed thousands of songs—love lyrics, devotional hymns, seasonal cycles, and patriotic pieces—collectively known as Rabindra Sangeet. Two of his compositions were later adopted as the national anthems of India and Bangladesh. He devised dance-dramas that integrated song and movement, encouraging a modern performance tradition that was neither derivative of Europe nor confined to classicism.
Although engaged with public questions, Tagore distrusted narrow nationalism and argued for a humane internationalism in essays and lectures collected under the title Nationalism. He accepted a British knighthood during the First World War but renounced it in 1919 after the massacre at Amritsar, aligning his moral stance with anticolonial protest while remaining critical of fanaticism. He traveled widely across Europe, the Americas, and East Asia, meeting scientists and writers, and raising support for his educational project and rural reconstruction initiatives associated with Sriniketan. In his later decades he also painted prolifically, developing a modernist visual idiom that paralleled his continuing experiments in verse and song.
Tagore’s late poetry—volumes such as Fruit-Gathering, The Crescent Moon, Stray Birds, and Fireflies in English, alongside Bengali collections like Balaka and Purabi—meditated on time, mortality, and the cosmic play of creation, often in a condensed, aphoristic style. He continued writing fiction, including the novel Shesher Kobita, and staged new plays and dance-dramas at Santiniketan. His health declined in the late 1930s, and he died in 1941 in Calcutta. His legacy endures through literature, music, and institutions he founded. Rabindra Sangeet remains integral to Bengali culture, Visva-Bharati continues as a center of learning, and translations keep introducing readers worldwide to the scope of his imagination.
Historical Context
Rabindranath Tagore emerged from the Bengal Renaissance, a nineteenth- and early twentieth-century efflorescence of literature, music, reform, and science in colonial Calcutta. Born in 1861 at Jorasanko, he grew within a milieu shaped by Debendranath Tagore and the Brahmo Samaj’s monotheism, rationalism, and social reform. This atmosphere fostered a synthesis of Sanskritic learning, Persian and Urdu poetic currents, and Western philosophy that surfaces across his devotional lyrics, aphoristic epigrams, love cycles, and children’s verse. The era’s new print culture, literary societies, and salons enabled sustained experimentation and a broad readership, conditions vital for the later international circulation of his English renderings and translations.
The Jorasanko household functioned as a cultural laboratory. Classical training in raga combined with exposure to English, Bengali, and Sanskrit literatures, while theatre, painting, and recitation were routine. Such polymathic practice, integral to Rabindra Sangeet and to his lyricism at large, also shaped his prose meditations and autobiographical writing. His sister-in-law Kadambari Devi’s patronage of his youthful work, and her death in 1884, left a lasting imprint on his treatment of longing, memory, and mortality. The family press and journals such as Bharati permitted him to test forms later consolidated in love sequences, epigrammatic miniatures, and spiritual reflections that traverse the entire oeuvre.
The decisive apprenticeship occurred in rural East Bengal when Tagore managed family estates at Shelaidah and Shahzadpur during the 1890s. Living by the Padma River in present-day Bangladesh, he encountered agrarian rhythms, peasant hardship, and the syncretic spirituality of Baul minstrels, especially the legacy of Lalon. Boat journeys, seasonal cycles, and village festivals informed his images of river, field, and sky and his faith in direct, unmediated communion with the divine. These experiences nourish the devotional tone, the folk cadence of many songs, the intimate address of his love lyrics, and the child’s-eye wonder that recur across collections devoted to nature and innocence.
Colonial policy galvanized Tagore’s civic imagination. The Partition of Bengal in 1905 by Viceroy Curzon elicited the Swadeshi movement, a cultural and economic boycott aiming at unity across religious communities. Tagore led raksha bandhan ceremonies to symbolize Hindu-Muslim solidarity and composed songs that became mobilizing anthems. Amar Shonar Bangla dates to this moment of protest and regional pride, its imagery of fertile Bengal embodying a Bengaliness spanning linguistic and confessional lines. This nexus of political crisis, cultural assertion, and song-writing illuminates how his poetry, even when intimate or mystical, participates in history, and why later national movements found an idiom in his verse.
In 1911, at the Indian National Congress session in Calcutta, the song later known as Jana Gana Mana was first sung. Its Bengali lyrics invoke the lord of destiny guiding India’s diverse peoples, reflecting Tagore’s cautious embrace of a spiritualized nationalism that resisted personality cults. The song’s adoption as India’s national anthem in 1950, and Amar Shonar Bangla’s adoption by Bangladesh in 1971–72, retrospectively frames his bilingual, regionally rooted yet universal poetics as a shared civic inheritance. The two anthems, born of different historical conjunctures, crystallize themes—unity in diversity, reverence for land and people—that permeate his devotional, love, and children’s poetry.
Tagore’s self-fashioning as a global poet began in 1912 when he traveled to London with his English renderings of Bengali poems. William Rothenstein introduced him to W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound, leading to the India Society edition of Gitanjali in 1912 and Macmillan’s 1913 publication. The Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913 conferred unprecedented visibility on a modern Asian poet. Macmillan quickly issued further volumes, extending a transcontinental audience for his love lyrics, aphorisms, and spiritual meditations. This Anglo-Bengali circuit shaped reception and style alike, as Tagore refined a sparse English idiom for ideas he elaborated more musically in the original Bengali.
Translation, collaboration, and editorial mediation are central to the corpus. Tagore translated his own Bengali poems into English, often recomposing cadence and syntax to suit a different prosodic tradition. He also rendered into English the medieval saint Kabir, with the 1915 Songs of Kabir appearing with Evelyn Underhill’s introduction and drawing on Kshitimohan Sen’s scholarship in Santiniketan. The interplay of translator, editor, and performer forged a body of texts that exist in multiple authoritative forms. This fluidity, rather than diluting authenticity, inscribes a method: poems as living utterances adaptable to occasion and audience, whether love song, epigram, children’s lyric, or mystical prayer.
Philosophically, the oeuvre draws on the Upanishads’ interiority, Vaishnava bhakti’s passionate devotion, Sufi metaphors of union, and Baul antinomian freedom. These lineages, braided with Brahmo monotheism, yield a devotional voice wary of dogma yet saturated with awe. Nature is not mere backdrop but a sacramental field, the human beloved a gateway to the divine, the child a figure of uncorrupted perception. Such commitments infuse both expansive prayer-lyrics and compressed epigrams, love sequences and pedagogical poems. The cosmology privileges relation over creed, making the work adaptable to plural publics in Bengal, pan-India, and abroad during an age of competing nationalisms and creeds.
Santiniketan, the school Tagore founded in 1901 on family land in Birbhum, became the institutional heart of his practice. Classes under trees, seasonal festivals, and the arts integrated into daily life embodied an educational ideal later formalized as Visva-Bharati in 1921. The campus offered a living audience for songs, children’s poems, pageants, and performances, and a cosmopolitan residency for scholars of Asia. Nandalal Bose and the emerging Santiniketan art school supplied a visual language that harmonized with Tagore’s lyric minimalism. The educational experiment thus functioned as a crucible where pedagogy, performance, and poetry interpenetrated, shaping volumes addressed to love, childhood, and spiritual awakening.
World War I unsettled Tagore’s early international idealism. Lecturing in Japan and the United States in 1916–17, he criticized militant nationalism and the nation-state’s deification, positions that informed his prose essays and bled into poetic motifs of exile, quest, and inward freedom. The war’s mechanized carnage, coupled with India’s own political ferment, reframed the intimate voice of his lyrics as ethical witness. In the later 1910s he published collections that oscillate between serenity and unease, articulating communion with an absolute that remains, paradoxically, a protest against all absolutisms. This tension is audible across his aphoristic fragments and longer sequences alike.
The 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar provoked Tagore to renounce his knighthood, awarded in 1915, in a public letter to Viceroy Lord Chelmsford. His correspondence with Mohandas K. Gandhi was marked by mutual respect and principled disagreement, especially over non-cooperation and schooling. Tagore’s response took practical form in rural reconstruction at Sriniketan from 1922, where cooperatives, crafts, and agronomy joined pedagogy. This ethical turn toward village life recast the function of song and poem as instruments of social renewal. Even when ostensibly private, his lyrics stand in dialogue with an India negotiating modernity, mass politics, and the wounds of empire.
Tagore’s Asian itineraries deepened his aesthetics. In Japan he engaged with figures around Okakura Kakuzo’s pan-Asianism and encountered the suggestiveness of haiku and ink painting. In China he met scholars who debated modernity and tradition. The brevity, image-pressure, and whitespace of epigram and aphorism in his English volumes resonate with these encounters. Stray Birds and later Fireflies bear the imprint of condensation and luminous minimalism, even as their metaphors remain rooted in Bengali landscape and bhakti sensibility. Travel thus did not estrange him from Bengal; it clarified how a poem’s small form could carry civilizational dialogue without polemic or ornament.
The infrastructure of song and print amplified Tagore’s reach. Rabindra Sangeet, his corpus of more than two thousand songs, circulated through periodicals, gramophone records, and stage performances, often blurring the boundary between poem and lyric. Macmillan’s uniform editions shaped an English-language canon, while Bengali journals such as Prabasi serialized poems that later formed books. This dual circulation explains the simultaneity of intimate composition and public function in love series, devotional cycles, and children’s volumes. The portability of a lyric to classroom, stage, or protest ground integrated poetry with civic life, a signature of his practice from Swadeshi through university convocation.
Language reform anchored his modernity. Tagore helped naturalize a supple, colloquial Bangla that could carry philosophical nuance without Sanskritic stiffness. He drew on the innovations of predecessors like Michael Madhusudan Dutta yet redirected epic grandiloquence toward the lyric, refining stress, caesura, and song-metre to suit everyday speech. This recalibration permitted seamless movement between children’s rhymes and metaphysical prayer, between pastoral vignette and love confession. His later Englishing of these textures required strategic loss and gain, producing spare utterances that British and American readers received as mystical or romantic. The bilingual economy of loss and resonance underwrites multiple books across decades.
Women, childhood, and the domestic sphere occupy a central place in Tagore’s ethics and aesthetics. His schools encouraged girls’ education; his dramas and songs created assertive female voices; and his poems on childhood dignified play, curiosity, and vulnerability. Personal griefs, including bereavements in the 1900s, sharpened his sense of transience and protection. These commitments echo across poems that stage the tenderness of mother and child, the apprenticeship of youth to nature, and the intimacy of love as a moral education. The texture of these works is social even when private, offering a counterpoint to the era’s public rhetoric of struggle and sovereignty.
Cosmopolitan circuits broadened through Europe and the Americas. In 1924 Tagore traveled to Argentina, where Victoria Ocampo hosted him in Buenos Aires, prompting a fertile exchange that affirmed his place in a global modernism open to non-European sources. He met Romain Rolland in Switzerland and corresponded with intellectuals across continents. Meanwhile he began painting in the mid-1920s, an intermedial turn that informed his later poetics of silhouette and pause. These networks energized poems of mature introspection and renewed eros, as well as brief, image-driven fragments. The career’s second and third acts thus remain outward-looking while returning insistently to the Bengal landscape.
The final decades brought darkening horizons. The rise of fascism, failures of liberal internationalism, and communal tensions in India culminated in his 1940 address Crisis in Civilization, an elegy for a betrayed humanism. Yet he continued to write children’s poems, love cycles, and epigrams of distilled affirmation. The long English poem The Child, from 1930, radiates a hope that history cannot extinguish. Tagore died in Calcutta on 7 August 1941, before Partition and before Bangladesh’s independence. That both India and Bangladesh adopted his songs as national anthems signals a legacy in which lyric feeling and civic imagination, across languages, remain inseparable.
Synopsis (Selection)
My Golden Bengal (Amar Shonar Bangla)
A lyrical ode to Bengal that personifies the land as a beloved mother, celebrating its rivers, fields, and seasons. It voices steadfast love and a quiet resolve to protect and cherish the homeland.
The Morning Song of India (Jana Gana Mana)
A processional hymn invoking the divine guide of India and affirming unity across the subcontinent's diverse regions. It blends reverence with a vision of collective destiny and resilience.
Gitanjali
A cycle of devotional lyrics charting a soul’s surrender to the divine through everyday beauty, loss, and joy. The poems move from yearning and doubt toward trust, service, and spiritual union.
The Gardener
Love lyrics framed as intimate monologues and dialogues that trace desire, waiting, union, and parting. Set against natural and village imagery, they explore the play of longing and fulfillment.
Fruit-Gathering
Meditations on spiritual ripeness and humility that liken life’s labor to a harvest offered to the Beloved. The poems emphasize service, inward freedom, and gratitude at the close of a season.
The Crescent Moon
Poems on childhood, the mother–child bond, and the wonder of daily life. Gentle scenes and simple images open into reflections on imagination, innocence, and growth.
Stray Birds
Brief aphoristic verses that flash insights on nature, love, time, and freedom. Each fragment offers a distilled image or thought, inviting contemplation rather than narrative.
Lover's Gift and Crossing
Lover’s Gift presents intimate love songs of desire, hesitation, and confession, while Crossing turns to a spiritual voyage. Together they pair earthly affection with a quest across metaphorical waters toward self-transcendence.
The Fugitive
Compressed, reflective poems on transience, inner exile, and the search for authenticity amid social and political tumult. The speaker turns from acclaim and constraint toward a more elusive, liberating truth.
The Child
A visionary poem in which a child’s presence leads humanity from darkness toward renewal. Through dreamlike images, it affirms innocence as a guiding light in times of despair.
Fireflies
Miniature couplets that capture fleeting illuminations of thought and feeling. Like sparks in the dark, they render wisdom and wonder in a single breath.
Songs of Kabir
Tagore’s English renderings of Kabir’s bhakti songs that call for inward realization and love of the divine within. The poems reject ritualism and sectarianism in favor of direct, transformative experience.
My Reminiscences – Autobiography
Tagore’s memoir of his early life, education, travels, and literary formation up to the founding of Santiniketan. It provides personal context for his art and the cultural milieu that shaped it.
The Complete Poetical Works of Rabindranath Tagore
MY GOLDEN BENGAL(AMAR SHONAR BANGLA)
MY BENGAL OF GOLD
My Bengal of Gold (Precious), I love you.
Forever your skies, your air set my heart in tune As if it were a flute.
In spring, O mother mine, the fragrance from your mango groves Makes me wild with joy Ah, what a thrill! In autumn, O mother mine, In the full blossomed paddy fields I have seen spread all over sweet smiles.
In spring, O mother mine, the fragrance from your mango groves Makes me wild with joy Ah, what a thrill! In autumn, O mother mine, In the full blossomed paddy fields I have seen spread all over sweet smiles.
O mother mine, words from your lips Are like nectar to my ears. Ah, what a thrill! If sadness, O mother mine, casts a gloom on your face, eyes are filled with tears!
AMAR SHONAR BANGLA
Amar shonar Bangla, Ami tomae bhalobashi.
Chirodin tomar akash, Tomar batash, Amar prane Bajae bãshi.
O ma, phagune tor amer bone Ghrane pagol kôre, Mori hae, hae re, O ma, ôghrane tor bhôra khete Ami ki dekhechhi modhur hashi.
Ki shobha, ki chhaea go, Ki sneho, ki maea go, Ki ãchol bichhaeechho Bôţer mule, Nodir kule kule!
Ma, tor mukher bani Amar kane lage shudhar môto, Mori hae, hae re, Ma, tor bôdonkhani molin hole, Ami nôeon ami nôeonjôle bhashi.
THE MORNING SONG OF INDIA(JANA GANA MANA)
Thou art the ruler of the minds of all people, dispenser of India's destiny. Thy name rouses the hearts of the Panjaub, Sind, Gujarat and Maratha, of the Dravida and Orissa and Bengal; it echoes in the hills of the Vindhyas and Himalayas, mingles in the music of the Jamuna and Ganges and is chanted by the waves of the Indian Sea. They pray for thy blessings and sing thy praise. The saving of all people waits in thy hand, thou dispenser of India's destiny.
Victory, Victory, Victory to thee.
Day and night thy voice goes out from land to land calling the Hindus, Buddhists, Shikhs and Jains round thy throne and the Parsees, Mussalmans and Christians. The East and West join hands in their prayer to thee, and the garland of love is woven. Thou bringest the hearts of all people into the harmony of one life, thou dispenser of India's destiny.
Victory, victory, victory to thee.
The procession of pilgrims passes over the endless road rugged with the rise and fall of nations; and it resounds with the thunder of thy wheels, Eternal Charioteer! Through the dire days of doom thy trumpet sounds and men are led by thee across death. Thy finger points the path to all people, Oh dispenser of Indias destiny!
Victory, victory, victory to thee!
The darkness was dense and deep was the night. My country lay in a deathlike silence of swoon. But thy mother arms were round her and thine eyes gazed upon her troubled face in sleepless love through her hours of ghastly dreams. Thou art the companion and the saviour of the people in their sorrows, thou dispenser of India's destiny,
Victory, victory, victory to thee!
The night fades; the light breaks over the peaks of the Eastern hills; the birds begin to sing and the morning breeze carries the breath of new life. The rays of the mercy have touched the waking land with their blessings. Victory to the King of Kings, Victory to thee, dispenser of India's destiny.
Victory, Victory, victory to thee.
GITANJALI
Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure.[1q] This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with fresh life.
This little flute of a reed thou hast carried over hills and dales, and hast breathed through it melodies eternally new.
At the immortal touch of thy hands my little heart loses its limits in joy and gives birth to utterance ineffable.
Thy infinite gifts come to me only on these very small hands of mine. Ages pass, and still thou pourest, and still there is room to fill.
When thou commandest me to sing it seems that my heart would break with pride; and I look to thy face, and tears come to my eyes.
All that is harsh and dissonant in my life melts into one sweet harmony — and my adoration spreads wings like a glad bird on its flight across the sea.
I know thou takest pleasure in my singing. I know that only as a singer I come before thy presence.
I touch by the edge of the far-spreading wing of my song thy feet which I could never aspire to reach.
Drunk with the joy of singing I forget myself and call thee friend who art my lord.
I know not how thou singest, my master! I ever listen in silent amazement.
The light of thy music illumines the world. The life breath of thy music runs from sky to sky. The holy stream of thy music breaks through all stony obstacles and rushes on.
My heart longs to join in thy song, but vainly struggles for a voice. I would speak, but speech breaks not into song, and I cry out baffled. Ah, thou hast made my heart captive in the endless meshes of thy music, my master!
Life of my life, I shall ever try to keep my body pure, knowing that thy living touch is upon all my limbs.
I shall ever try to keep all untruths out from my thoughts, knowing that thou art that truth which has kindled the light of reason in my mind.
I shall ever try to drive all evils away from my heart and keep my love in flower, knowing that thou hast thy seat in the inmost shrine of my heart.
And it shall be my endeavour to reveal thee in my actions, knowing it is thy power gives me strength to act.
I ask for a moment’s indulgence to sit by thy side. The works that I have in hand I will finish afterwards.
Away from the sight of thy face my heart knows no rest nor respite, and my work becomes an endless toil in a shoreless sea of toil.
Today the summer has come at my window with its sighs and murmurs; and the bees are plying their minstrelsy at the court of the flowering grove.
Now it is time to sit quite, face to face with thee, and to sing dedication of live in this silent and overflowing leisure.
Pluck this little flower and take it, delay not! I fear lest it droop and drop into the dust.
I may not find a place in thy garland, but honour it with a touch of pain from thy hand and pluck it. I fear lest the day end before I am aware, and the time of offering go by.
Though its colour be not deep and its smell be faint, use this flower in thy service and pluck it while there is time.
My song has put off her adornments. She has no pride of dress and decoration. Ornaments would mar our union; they would come between thee and me; their jingling would drown thy whispers.
My poet’s vanity dies in shame before thy sight. O master poet, I have sat down at thy feet. Only let me make my life simple and straight, like a flute of reed for thee to fill with music.
The child who is decked with prince’s robes and who has jewelled chains round his neck loses all pleasure in his play; his dress hampers him at every step.
In fear that it may be frayed, or stained with dust he keeps himself from the world, and is afraid even to move.
Mother, it is no gain, thy bondage of finery, if it keep one shut off from the healthful dust of the earth, if it rob one of the right of entrance to the great fair of common human life.
O Fool, try to carry thyself upon thy own shoulders! O beggar, to come beg at thy own door!
Leave all thy burdens on his hands who can bear all, and never look behind in regret.
Thy desire at once puts out the light from the lamp it touches with its breath. It is unholy — take not thy gifts through its unclean hands. Accept only what is offered by sacred love.
Here is thy footstool and there rest thy feet where live the poorest, and lowliest, and lost.
When I try to bow to thee, my obeisance cannot reach down to the depth where thy feet rest among the poorest, and lowliest, and lost.
Pride can never approach to where thou walkest in the clothes of the humble among the poorest, and lowliest, and lost.
My heart can never find its way to where thou keepest company with the companionless among the poorest, the lowliest, and the lost.
Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads! Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner 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 of 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.
The time that my journey takes is long and the way of it long.
I came out on the chariot of the first gleam of light, and pursued my voyage through the wildernesses of worlds leaving my track on many a star and planet.
It is the most distant course that comes nearest to thyself, and that training is the most intricate which leads to the utter simplicity of a tune.
The traveller has to knock at every alien door to come to his own, and one has to wander through all the outer worlds to reach the innermost shrine at the end.
My eyes strayed far and wide before I shut them and said ‘Here art thou!’
The question and the cry ‘Oh, where?’ melt into tears of a thousand streams and deluge the world with the flood of the assurance ‘I am!’
The song that I came to sing remains unsung to this day.
I have spent my days in stringing and in unstringing my instrument.
The time has not come true, the words have not been rightly set; only there is the agony of wishing in my heart.
The blossom has not opened; only the wind is sighing by.
I have not seen his face, nor have I listened to his voice; only I have heard his gentle footsteps from the road before my house.
The livelong day has passed in spreading his seat on the floor; but the lamp has not been lit and I cannot ask him into my house.
I live in the hope of meeting with him; but this meeting is not yet.
My desires are many and my cry is pitiful, but ever didst thou save me by hard refusals; and this strong mercy has been wrought into my life through and through.
Day by day thou art making me worthy of the simple, great gifts that thou gavest to me unasked — this sky and the light, this body and the life and the mind — saving me from perils of overmuch desire.
There are times when I languidly linger and times when I awaken and hurry in search of my goal; but cruelly thou hidest thyself from before me.
Day by day thou art making me worthy of thy full acceptance by refusing me ever and anon, saving me from perils of weak, uncertain desire.
I am here to sing thee songs. In this hall of thine I have a corner seat.
In thy world I have no work to do; my useless life can only break out in tunes without a purpose.
When the hour strikes for thy silent worship at the dark temple of midnight, command me, my master, to stand before thee to sing.
When in the morning air the golden harp is tuned, honour me, commanding my presence.
I have had my invitation to this world’s festival, and thus my life has been blessed. My eyes have seen and my ears have heard.
It was my part at this feast to play upon my instrument, and I have done all I could.
Now, I ask, has the time come at last when I may go in and see thy face and offer thee my silent salutation?
I am only waiting for love to give myself up at last into his hands. That is why it is so late and why I have been guilty of such omissions.
They come with their laws and their codes to bind me fast; but I evade them ever, for I am only waiting for love to give myself up at last into his hands.
People blame me and call me heedless; I doubt not they are right in their blame.
The market day is over and work is all done for the busy. Those who came to call me in vain have gone back in anger. I am only waiting for love to give myself up at last into his hands.
Clouds heap upon clouds and it darkens. Ah, love, why dost thou let me wait outside at the door all alone?
In the busy moments of the noontide work I am with the crowd, but on this dark lonely day it is only for thee that I hope.
If thou showest me not thy face, if thou leavest me wholly aside, I know not how I am to pass these long, rainy hours.
I keep gazing on the far-away gloom of the sky, and my heart wanders wailing with the restless wind.
If thou speakest not I will fill my heart with thy silence and endure it. I will keep still and wait like the night with starry vigil and its head bent low with patience.
The morning will surely come, the darkness will vanish, and thy voice pour down in golden streams breaking through the sky.
Then thy words will take wing in songs from every one of my birds’ nests, and thy melodies will break forth in flowers in all my forest groves.
On the day when the lotus bloomed, alas, my mind was straying, and I knew it not. My basket was empty and the flower remained unheeded.
Only now and again a sadness fell upon me, and I started up from my dream and felt a sweet trace of a strange fragrance in the south wind.
That vague sweetness made my heart ache with longing and it seemed to me that is was the eager breath of the summer seeking for its completion.
I knew not then that it was so near, that it was mine, and that this perfect sweetness had blossomed in the depth of my own heart.
I must launch out my boat. The languid hours pass by on the shore — Alas for me!
The spring has done its flowering and taken leave. And now with the burden of faded futile flowers I wait and linger.
The waves have become clamorous, and upon the bank in the shady lane the yellow leaves flutter and fall.
What emptiness do you gaze upon! Do you not feel a thrill passing through the air with the notes of the far-away song floating from the other shore?
In the deep shadows of the rainy July, with secret steps, thou walkest, silent as night, eluding all watchers.
Today the morning has closed its eyes, heedless of the insistent calls of the loud east wind, and a thick veil has been drawn over the ever-wakeful blue sky.
The woodlands have hushed their songs, and doors are all shut at every house. Thou art the solitary wayfarer in this deserted street. Oh my only friend, my best beloved, the gates are open in my house — do not pass by like a dream.
Art thou abroad on this stormy night on thy journey of love, my friend? The sky groans like one in despair.
I have no sleep tonight. Ever and again I open my door and look out on the darkness, my friend!
I can see nothing before me. I wonder where lies thy path!
By what dim shore of the ink-black river, by what far edge of the frowning forest, through what mazy depth of gloom art thou threading thy course to come to me, my friend?
If the day is done, if birds sing no more, if the wind has flagged tired, then draw the veil of darkness thick upon me, even as thou hast wrapt the earth with the coverlet of sleep and tenderly closed the petals of the drooping lotus at dusk.
From the traveller, whose sack of provisions is empty before the voyage is ended, whose garment is torn and dustladen, whose strength is exhausted, remove shame and poverty, and renew his life like a flower under the cover of thy kindly night.
In the night of weariness let me give myself up to sleep without struggle, resting my trust upon thee.
Let me not force my flagging spirit into a poor preparation for thy worship.
It is thou who drawest the veil of night upon the tired eyes of the day to renew its sight in a fresher gladness of awakening.
He came and sat by my side but I woke not. What a cursed sleep it was, O miserable me!
He came when the night was still; he had his harp in his hands, and my dreams became resonant with its melodies.
Alas, why are my nights all thus lost? Ah, why do I ever miss his sight whose breath touches my sleep?
Light, oh where is the light? Kindle it with the burning fire of desire!
There is the lamp but never a flicker of a flame — is such thy fate, my heart? Ah, death were better by far for thee!
Misery knocks at thy door, and her message is that thy lord is wakeful, and he calls thee to the love-tryst through the darkness of night.
The sky is overcast with clouds and the rain is ceaseless. I know not what this is that stirs in me — I know not its meaning.
A moment’s flash of lightning drags down a deeper gloom on my sight, and my heart gropes for the path to where the music of the night calls me.
Light, oh where is the light! Kindle it with the burning fire of desire! It thunders and the wind rushes screaming through the void. The night is black as a black stone. Let not the hours pass by in the dark. Kindle the lamp of love with thy life.
Obstinate are the trammels, but my heart aches when I try to break them.
Freedom is all I want, but to hope for it I feel ashamed.
I am certain that priceless wealth is in thee, and that thou art my best friend, but I have not the heart to sweep away the tinsel that fills my room
The shroud that covers me is a shroud of dust and death; I hate it, yet hug it in love.
My debts are large, my failures great, my shame secret and heavy; yet when I come to ask for my good, I quake in fear lest my prayer be granted.
He whom I enclose with my name is weeping in this dungeon. I am ever busy building this wall all around; and as this wall goes up into the sky day by day I lose sight of my true being in its dark shadow.
I take pride in this great wall, and I plaster it with dust and sand lest a least hole should be left in this name; and for all the care I take I lose sight of my true being.
I came out alone on my way to my tryst. But who is this that follows me in the silent dark?
I move aside to avoid his presence but I escape him not.
He makes the dust rise from the earth with his swagger; he adds his loud voice to every word that I utter.
He is my own little self, my lord, he knows no shame; but I am ashamed to come to thy door in his company.
‘Prisoner, tell me, who was it that bound you?’
‘It was my master,’ said the prisoner. ‘I thought I could outdo everybody in the world in wealth and power, and I amassed in my own treasure-house the money due to my king. When sleep overcame me I lay upon the bed that was for my lord, and on waking up I found I was a prisoner in my own treasure-house.’
‘Prisoner, tell me, who was it that wrought this unbreakable chain?’
‘It was I,’ said the prisoner, ‘who forged this chain very carefully. I thought 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.’
By all means they try to hold me secure who love me in this world. But it is otherwise with thy love which is greater than theirs, and thou keepest me free.
Lest I forget them they never venture to leave me alone. But day passes by after day and thou art not seen.
If I call not thee in my prayers, if I keep not thee in my heart, thy love for me still waits for my love.
When it was day they came into my house and said, ‘We shall only take the smallest room here.’
They said, ‘We shall help you in the worship of your God and humbly accept only our own share in his grace’; and then they took their seat in a corner and they sat quiet and meek.
But in the darkness of night I find they break into my sacred shrine, strong and turbulent, and snatch with unholy greed the offerings from God’s altar.
Let only that little be left of me whereby I may name thee my all.
Let only that little be left of my will whereby I may feel thee on every side, and come to thee in everything, and offer to thee my love every moment.
Let only that little be left of me whereby I may never hide thee.
Let only that little of my fetters be left whereby I am bound with thy will, and thy purpose is carried out in my life — and that is the fetter of thy love.
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;[2q]
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.
This is my prayer to thee, my lord — strike, strike at the root of penury in my heart.
Give me the strength lightly to bear my joys and sorrows.
Give me the strength to make my love fruitful in service.
Give me the strength never to disown the poor or bend my knees before insolent might.
Give me the strength to raise my mind high above daily trifles.
And give me the strength to surrender my strength to thy will with love.
I thought that my voyage had come to its end at the last limit of my power, — that the path before me was closed, that provisions were exhausted and the time come to take shelter in a silent obscurity.
But I find that thy will knows no end in me. And 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.
That I want thee, only thee — let my heart repeat without end. All desires that distract me, day and night, are false and empty to the core.
As the night keeps hidden in its gloom the petition for light, even thus in the depth of my unconsciousness rings the cry — ‘I want thee, only thee’.
As the storm still seeks its end in peace when it strikes against peace with all its might, even thus my rebellion strikes against thy love and still its cry is — ‘I want thee, only thee’.
When the heart is hard and parched up, come upon me with a shower of mercy.
When grace is lost from life, come with a burst of song.
When tumultuous work raises its din on all sides shutting me out from beyond, come to me, my lord of silence, with thy peace and rest.
When my beggarly heart sits crouched, shut up in a corner, break open the door, my king, and come with the ceremony of a king.
When desire blinds the mind with delusion and dust, O thou holy one, thou wakeful, come with thy light and thy thunder.
The rain has held back for days and days, my God, in my arid heart. The horizon is fiercely naked — not the thinnest cover of a soft cloud, not the vaguest hint of a distant cool shower.
Send thy angry storm, dark with death, if it is thy wish, and with lashes of lightning startle the sky from end to end.
But call back, my lord, call back this pervading silent heat, still and keen and cruel, burning the heart with dire despair.
Let the cloud of grace bend low from above like the tearful look of the mother on the day of the father’s wrath.
Where dost thou stand behind them all, my lover, hiding thyself in the shadows? They push thee and pass thee by on the dusty road, taking thee for naught. I wait here weary hours spreading my offerings for thee, while passers-by come and take my flowers, one by one, and my basket is nearly empty.
The morning time is past, and the noon. In the shade of evening my eyes are drowsy with sleep. Men going home glance at me and smile and fill me with shame. I sit like a beggar maid, drawing my skirt over my face, and when they ask me, what it is I want, I drop my eyes and answer them not.
Oh, how, indeed, could I tell them that for thee I wait, and that thou hast promised to come. How could I utter for shame that I keep for my dowry this poverty. Ah, I hug this pride in the secret of my heart.
I sit on the grass and gaze upon the sky and dream of the sudden splendour of thy coming — all the lights ablaze, golden pennons flying over thy car, and they at the roadside standing agape, when they see thee come down from thy seat to raise me from the dust, and set at thy side this ragged beggar girl a-tremble with shame and pride, like a creeper in a summer breeze.
But time glides on and still no sound of the wheels of thy chariot. Many a procession passes by with noise and shouts and glamour of glory. Is it only thou who wouldst stand in the shadow silent and behind them all? And only I who would wait and weep and wear out my heart in vain longing?
Early in the day it was whispered that we should sail in a boat, only thou and I, and never a soul in the world would know of this our pilgrimage to no country and to no end.
In that shoreless ocean, at thy silently listening smile my songs would swell in melodies, free as waves, free from all bondage of words.
Is the time not come yet? Are there works still to do? Lo, the evening has come down upon the shore and in the fading light the seabirds come flying to their nests.
Who knows when the chains will be off, and the boat, like the last glimmer of sunset, vanish into the night?
The day was when I did not keep myself in readiness for thee; and entering my heart unbidden even as one of the common crowd, unknown to me, my king, thou didst press the signet of eternity upon many a fleeting moment of my life.
And today when by chance I light upon them and see thy signature, I find they have lain scattered in the dust mixed with the memory of joys and sorrows of my trivial days forgotten.
Thou didst not turn in contempt from my childish play among dust, and the steps that I heard in my playroom are the same that are echoing from star to star.
This is my delight, thus to wait and watch at the wayside where shadow chases light and the rain comes in the wake of the summer.
Messengers, with tidings from unknown skies, greet me and speed along the road. My heart is glad within, and the breath of the passing breeze is sweet.
From dawn till dusk I sit here before my door, and I know that of a sudden the happy moment will arrive when I shall see.
In the meanwhile I smile and I sing all alone. In the meanwhile the air is filling with the perfume of promise.
Have you not heard his silent steps? He comes, comes, ever comes.
Every moment and every age, every day and every night he comes, comes, ever comes.
Many a song have I sung in many a mood of mind, but all their notes have always proclaimed, ‘He comes, comes, ever comes.’
In the fragrant days of sunny April through the forest path he comes, comes, ever comes.
In the rainy gloom of July nights on the thundering chariot of clouds he comes, comes, ever comes.
In sorrow after sorrow it is his steps that press upon my heart, and it is the golden touch of his feet that makes my joy to shine.
I know not from what distant time thou art ever coming nearer to meet me. Thy sun and stars can never keep thee hidden from me for aye.
In many a morning and eve thy footsteps have been heard and thy messenger has come within my heart and called me in secret.
I know not only why today my life is all astir, and a feeling of tremulous joy is passing through my heart.
It is as if the time were come to wind up my work, and I feel in the air a faint smell of thy sweet presence.
The night is nearly spent waiting for him in vain. I fear lest in the morning he suddenly come to my door when I have fallen asleep wearied out. Oh friends, leave the way open to him — forbid him not.
If the sounds of his steps does not wake me, do not try to rouse me, I pray. I wish not to be called from my sleep by the clamorous choir of birds, by the riot of wind at the festival of morning light. Let me sleep undisturbed even if my lord comes of a sudden to my door.
Ah, my sleep, precious sleep, which only waits for his touch to vanish. Ah, my closed eyes that would open their lids only to the light of his smile when he stands before me like a dream emerging from darkness of sleep.
Let him appear before my sight as the first of all lights and all forms. The first thrill of joy to my awakened soul let it come from his glance. And let my return to myself be immediate return to him.
The morning sea of silence broke into ripples of bird songs; and the flowers were all merry by the roadside; and the wealth of gold was scattered through the rift of the clouds while we busily went on our way and paid no heed.
We sang no glad songs nor played; we went not to the village for barter; we spoke not a word nor smiled; we lingered not on the way. We quickened our pace more and more as the time sped by.
The sun rose to the mid sky and doves cooed in the shade. Withered leaves danced and whirled in the hot air of noon. The shepherd boy drowsed and dreamed in the shadow of the banyan tree, and I laid myself down by the water and stretched my tired limbs on the grass.
My companions laughed at me in scorn; they held their heads high and hurried on; they never looked back nor rested; they vanished in the distant blue haze. They crossed many meadows and hills, and passed through strange, far-away countries. All honour to you, heroic host of the interminable path! Mockery and reproach pricked me to rise, but found no response in me. I gave myself up for lost in the depth of a glad humiliation — in the shadow of a dim delight.
The repose of the sun-embroidered green gloom slowly spread over my heart. I forgot for what I had travelled, and I surrendered my mind without struggle to the maze of shadows and songs.
At last, when I woke from my slumber and opened my eyes, I saw thee standing by me, flooding my sleep with thy smile. How I had feared that the path was long and wearisome, and the struggle to reach thee was hard!
You came down from your throne and stood at my cottage door.
I was singing all alone in a corner, and the melody caught your ear. You came down and stood at my cottage door.
Masters are many in your hall, and songs are sung there at all hours. But the simple carol of this novice struck at your love. One plaintive little strain mingled with the great music of the world, and with a flower for a prize you came down and stopped at my cottage door.
I had gone a-begging from door to door in the village path, when thy golden chariot appeared in the distance like a gorgeous dream and I wondered who was this King of all kings!
My hopes rose high and methought my evil days were at an end, and I stood waiting for alms to be given unasked and for wealth scattered on all sides in the dust.
The chariot stopped where I stood. Thy glance fell on me and thou camest down with a smile. I felt that the luck of my life had come at last. Then of a sudden thou didst hold out thy right hand and say ‘What hast thou to give to me?’
