A
tribute to Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore, a man of
versatile genius and achievement, was the first Indian poet and writer who
gained for modern India a permanent place on the world literary map. Tagore was a poet, composer, novelist, short
story writer, play-writer, philosopher, lecturer, educator and painter. Tagore was awarded Nobel Prize for his
English Gitanjaliin 1913. He
began his literary career by writing in Bengali. He had written more than seven thousand
verses before he was seventeen. He wrote
over one thousand poems, eight volumes of short stories, almost two dozen plays
and plays lets, eight novel, and many books and essays on philosophy, religion,
education and social topics. He wrote
only one poem in English The Child.
All the other poems he wrote in Bengali. He translates his Bengali works in
English. The first English translation
of Gitanjaliwas
a phenomenal success.
Gitanjaliis a sequence of 103 lyrics
translated from selected lyrics in his own Bengali works – NaivedyaKheya and Gitanjali
and a few lyrics published only in periodicals.
The term Gitanjali, rendered as “Song Offerings”. The lyrics in Gitanjali have a total
unity. The sequence of thematic unities
runs through love of god, love of nature and love of humanity. It is the story of “Soul’s liberation, a tale
of soul’s wait to meet her eternal bridegroom, the Divine Lord, a narration of
soul’s pilgrimage and voyage to Heaven of Heavens”. The poem shows the
charm of humbleness: it is a prayer to help the poet open his heart to the
Divine Beloved without extraneous words or gestures.
The theme in Tagore’s poetry is
varied and treats them in an original manner.
In Gitanjali, he wrote on God, devotion, love, nature, childhood,
motherland, beauty and truth, humanity, spiritualism, etc. Gitanjali is an immortal work of
art. In it many themes are woven
together like flowers in a beautiful wreath.
Broadly speaking, the theme of Gitanjali is the realization of God
through self-purification, love, constant prayer and devotion, dedication and
surrender to God through service to humanity.
The main theme of Gitanjali
is devotional and mystical or the relationship between the human soul and
god. The Gitanjali songs are
mainly poems of bhakti in the great Indian tradition. It is pure poetry and pure poetry aspires to
a condition of prayer. Such poetry is
half a prayer from below, half a whisper from above: the prayer evoking the
response, or the whisper provoking the prayer, and always prayer and whisper
chiming into song. Gitanjali is full of such
poetry. The poet sings of the immanence
and glory of God. In the opening lyrics
the poet pays his obeisance to God in a spirit of humbleness and says that
according to the will of God the soul is eternal and immortal. He sings “Thou hast made me endless, such is
thy pleasure. This frail vessel thou
emptiest again and again, fillest it ever with fresh life” (Lyric 1).
Tagore, in his poetry stresses
cordiality of human relations. Human
relationships are the mainspring of spiritual life. God is not a Sultan in the sky but is an all,
through and all over all. We worship Him
in all the true objects of our worship; love him whenever our love is
true. In woman who is good, we feel Him,
in the man who is true we know Him.
Tagore has intense love for the oppressed and the persecuted, for the
misfits, for the non-conformists, for the homeless and the rejected. Man is the image of God. Alone with the relationship of the individual
soul and God, the relationship of the individual soul with other man, is also
explored. We should love every creature,
the naked and the hungry, the sick and the stranger: God loves the humble and
lives among them. He sings “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” (Lyric 10).
Tagore’s love of God consciously or
unconsciously merges with the love of man and nature. Tagore emphasizes the value of simplicity and
intimate contact with Nature. Man can
elevate himself morally and spiritually, if he lives a life of primal
simplicity in constant communion with Nature.
Divorced from Nature man is a poor creature; the farther we travel away
from Nature, the more degraded we become.
In Gitanjali, Tagore passionately loves various objects of Nature
and sensuously and picturesquely describes them. Gitanjali is a rich treasure house
of fresh, original and meaningful images which have a typical Indian favor. The appeal of Gitanjali is as universal
as it was in 1913 when it was first published in English. It reveals emotions and feelings which are
true to all ages and climates. Tagore
stands for pure beauty, for the universal.
In a very real sense, he was a world poet. It is clear that his ultimate place will be
not simple among Indian’s poet, but among those of the world.
P. Ravisankar
Dept. of English
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