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Tagore's Gitanjali

© Linda Sue Grimes

Rabindranath Tagore has provided Western culture with strong example of Eastern Philosophy in both prose and poetry. Tagore had written his Gitanjali (song offerings) in Bengali, and after he learned from William Rothenstein of Western interest in them, he translated them into English. Chiefly for this volume, Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, the same year that Macmillan brought out a hard-cover copy of his prose translations of Gitanjali.

W. B. Yeats, in the introduction to Tagore's Gitanjali, writes that this volume has "stirred my blood as nothing has for years . . . ." He explains, "These lyrics . . . display in their thought a world I have dreamed of all my life long." Then Yeats describes the Indian culture that he feels is responsible for producing this remarkable work: "The work of a supreme culture, they yet appear as much the growth of the common soil as the grass and the rushes. A tradition, where poetry and religion are the same thing, has passed through the centuries, gathering from learned and unlearned metaphor and emotion, and carried back again to the multitude the thought of the scholar and of the noble."

He contrasts the art of his own culture: "If our life was not a continual warfare, we would not have taste, we would not know what is good, we would not find hearers and readers. Four-fifths of our energy is spent in this quarrel with bad taste, whether in our own minds or in the minds of others."

Yeats might seem harsh in his assessment of his own culture's motivation to art, but, no doubt, he has correctly identified the mood of his era. Yeats having been born of Western culture, his birth dates are famous as the markers of two horrendous Western wars 1865 and 1939. So his rough estimate of the artists being motivated by warfare is quite understandable.

On the other hand, his assessment of Tagore's achievement is accurate. As Yeats tells us, Tagore's songs are not only respected and admired by the scholarly class, but also they are sung in the fields by peasants. Yeats would never have expected his own poetry to be accept by such a wide spectrum of the population. My favorite Gitanjali poem (song offering) is #7:

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 llike a flute of reed for thee to fill with music.

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