Gitanjali: Rabindranath Tagore Essay

Gitanjali is a collection of 103 Bengali poems which were translated to several languages like in English, and other European languages. The meaning of the term explains the nature of the book. Gitanjali, the term comes the merger of two words ‘git’ and ‘anjali’, ‘git’ means song and ‘anjali’ means offering. Therefore, it means ‘Songs of Offerings’. Gitanjali is a book to feel and cherish, the greatest book of a great writer. Tagore wrote poems for various moods, be it love ,devotion, stories, sorrow, joy even realism. 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. This 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. A vain poet would produce vain poetry, so this poet wants to be open to the simple humility of truth that only the Divine Beloved can afford him. As Yeats says, these songs grow out of culture in which art and religion are the same, so it is not surprising that we find our offerer of songs speaking to God in song after song, as is the case in #7. And the last line in song #7 is a subtle–or perhaps not so subtle–allusion to Bhagavan Krishna. According the Paramahansa Yogananda, â€Å"Krishna is shown in Hindu art with a flute; on it he plays the enrapturing song that recalls to their true home the human souls wandering in delusion. † W. B. Yeats, in the introduction to Tagore’s Gitanjali, writes that this volume has â€Å"stirred my blood as nothing has for years . . . .† He explains, â€Å"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: â€Å"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: â€Å"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 like a flute of reed for thee to fill with music. Gitanjali poem #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 like a flute of reed for thee to fill with music. These words are metaphysical yet have a beautiful message hidden. A message that is subtle yet clear. It says that love is liberated from all the social constraints†¦ pure feelings. It is a free bird just in need of communion. Human love and celestial love are brought parallel†¦ like Jayadeva does in his GeetGovind. Vaishnavs like Jayadeva derived inspiration from Lord Vishnu and his most admired avatar, Krishna. But, Tagore saw elements of similarity between human and celestial love in the Baul community of Bengal and translated them into his poetry. I feel that literature like this binds the whole country into one, highlighting pure emotions like love. The universal yet multiple culture of our country is displayed in this beautiful string of songs as one, the universality lying in emotions and the multiplicity in the many types of cultures. This string is not that of pearls or stones but of love and one that brings us closer to divine. Tagore, like Chaucer’s forerunners, writes music for his words, and one understands at every moment that he is so abundant, so spontaneous, so daring in his passion, so full of surprise, because he is doing something which has never seemed strange, unnatural, or in need of defence. These verses will not lie in little well-printed books upon ladies’ tables, who turn the pages with indolent hands that they may sigh over a life without meaning, which is yet all they can know of life, or be carried by students at the university to be laid aside when the work of life begins, but, as the generations pass, travellers will hum them on the highway and men rowing upon the rivers. Lovers, while they await one another, shall find, in murmuring them, this love of God a magic gulf wherein their own more bitter passion may bathe and renew its youth. At every moment the heart of this poet flows outward to these without derogation or condescension, for it has known that they will understand; and it has filled itself with the circumstance of their lives. The traveller in the read-brown clothes that he wears that dust may not show upon him, the girl searching in her bed for the petals fallen from the wreath of her royal lover, the servant or the bride awaiting the master’s home-coming in the empty house, are images of the heart turning to God. Flowers and rivers, the blowing of conch shells, the heavy rain of the Indian July, or the moods of that heart in union or in separation; and a man sitting in a boat upon a river playing lute, like one of those figures full of mysterious meaning in a Chinese picture, is God Himself. A whole people, a whole civilization, immeasurably strange to us, seems to have been taken up into this imagination; and yet we are not moved because of its strangeness, but because we have met our own image, as though we had walked in Rossetti’s willow wood, or heard, perhaps for the first time in literature, our voice as in a dream. REFERENCE: 1. Rabindranath Tagore. Gitanjali. Electronic text center. University of Virginia .