Poems

About the Book IN THIS VOLUME are published translations from the original Bengali poems of Rabindranath Tagore. They were all translated by the Poet himself, with the exception of twelve poems. They have not been published before in any book. References to the Bengali originals are given in the Notes at the end. The poems have been arranged in four sections which roughly correspond to four major divisions in the Poet's writings. The selection includes many songs composed by him during the Swadesi Movement and ends with his last poems.

Introduction HERE I send you my poems densely packed in this writing book like a cage crowded with birds. The blue space, the infinity around constellations, through which flocked my verses, is left outside.

Stars, torn from the heart of night, and tightly knit into a chain may fetch a high price from some jeweller in the suburb of paradise, but the gods would miss from it the ethereal value of the divinely undefined.

Imagine a song suddenly flashing up like a flying fish, from the silent depth of time! Would you care to catch it in your net and exhibit it in your glass vessel among a swarm of captives?

In the expansive epoch of lordly leisure, the poet read his poems day by day before his bounteous sovereign, when the spirit of the printing press was not there to smear with black dumbness the background of a resonant leisure, alive with the natural accompaniment of the irrelevant; when the stanzas were not ranged into perfect packets to be silently swallowed.

Alas, the poems which were for the listening ears are tied today as chained lines of slaves before their masters of critical eyes, and banished into the greyness of tuneless papers, and those that are kissed by eternity have lost their way in the publishers' market.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages