Song Unsung
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.
Death
O thou the last fulfilment of life, Death, my death,
come and whisper to me!
Day after day I have kept watch for thee; for thee have
I borne the joys and pangs of life.
All that I am, that I have, that I hope and all my love
have ever flowed towards thee in depth of secrecy.
One final glance from thine eyes and my life will be
ever thine own.
The flowers have been woven and the garland is ready
for the bridegroom.
After the wedding the bride shall leave her home and
meet her lord alone in the solitude of night.
Still Heart
When I give up the helm I know that the time has come
for thee to take it.
What there is to do will be instantly done.
Vain is this struggle.
Then take away your hands and silently put up with your
defeat, my heart, and think it your good fortune to sit perfectly still where
you are placed.
These my lamps are blown out at every little puff of
wind, and trying to light them I forget all else again and again.
But I shall be wise this time and wait in the dark,
spreading my mat on the floor; and whenever it is thy pleasure, my lord, come
silently and take thy seat here.
Sri Aurobindo
on Tagore
Tagore has been a wayfarer towards the same goal as
ours in his own way—that is the main thing, the exact stage of advance and
putting of the steps are minor matters. His exact position as a poet or a
prophet or anything else will be assigned by posterity and we need not be in
haste to anticipate the final verdict. The immediate verdict after his
departure or soon after it may very well be a rough one,—for this is a
generation that seems to take a delight in trampling with an almost Nazi
rudeness on the bodies of the ancestors, specially the immediate ancestors. I
have read with an interested surprise that Napoleon was only a bustling and
self-important nincompoop all whose great achievements were done by others,
that Shakespeare was "no great things" and that most other great men
were by no means so great as the stupid respect and reverence of past ignorant
ages made them out to be! What chance has then Tagore? But these injustices of
the moment do not endure—in the end a wise and fair estimate is formed and
survives the changes of time.
Tagore, of course, belonged to an age which had faith
in its ideas and whose very denials were creative affirmations. That makes an
immense difference. Your strictures on his later development may or may not be
correct, but this mixture even was the note of the day and it expressed a
tangible hope of fusion into something new and true—therefore it could create.
Now all that idealism has been smashed to pieces by the immense adverse event
and everybody is busy exposing its weaknesses—but nobody knows what to put in
its place. A mixture of scepticism and slogans, "Heil-Hitler" and the
Fascist salute and Five-Year-Plan and the beating of everybody into one
amorphous shape, a disabused denial of all ideals on one side and on the other
a blind "shut-my-eyes and shut-everybody's-eyes" plunge into the bog
in the hope of finding some firm foundation there, will not carry us very far.
And what else is there? Until new spiritual values are discovered, no great
enduring creation is possible.
Tagore’s “Into that heaven...” read by Samuel Godfrey
George
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5OVMrad5iQ&feature=related
Tagore’s own voice in Bengali
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvTim1Kg_F8&feature=related
Life of Rabindranath Tagore 1861-1941
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=414170686302082136&hl=en#