Tagore as Poet of Devotion

By Prof. T. VIRABHADRUDU, M.A.

Rabindranath is a Bhakta (Worshipper of God) and the most outstanding feature of his poetry is lyric devotion. His Gitanjali (Song Offerings), which is considered by many to be the poet’s greatest work, is a series of lyrics each of which describes his passionate attachment to God. The poet himself tells us what is the real basis of his poetry:

And it shall be my endeavour to reveal thee in my actions, knowing it is thy power gives me strength to act.

They see thy pictures in all works of mine.

From the words of the poet men take what meanings please them; Yet their last meaning points to thee.

Lyric poetry is defined as the description of one’s own personal emotion, and, judged from the standpoint of deep subjective emotion, Gitanjali represents lyric poetry of the highest type. The longing of the human soul for union with the Divine Spirit is described in beautiful and, at the same time, sublime language. The hopes and fears of the Bhakta (Devotee) on his path to the realisation of his goal are fully depicted. In one of his songs he says:

I am only waiting forlove to give myself up at last into his hands.

That he is very thirsty for union can be seen from his prayer:

That I want thee, only thee–let my heart repeat without end. All desires that distract me are false and empty to the core;

His enthusiasm forthis union is so great and powerful that he appeals:

Let only that be left of me whereby I may name thee my all. Let only that be left of my will whereby I may feel thee on every side, and come to thee in everything, and offer to thee my love every moment.

To him the Creator is lord, parent and friend. He is his great Master but there are moments of “weakness”:

Drunk with the joy of singing I forget myself and call thee friend who art my lord.

Sometimes the Supreme Being appears to him as the “King of all kings.” He is also his Father before whose feet he will bow in reverence. He once looks upon Him as the Brother among brothers with whom he would gladly share his earnings. On another occasion, He would be like his mother for whose neck the poet shall weave a chain of pearls with his tears of sorrow. This manifold conception of God only reflects the moods of the devotee and the attributes of the Creator that made a special appeal to him at the time. In the grandeur of natural scenery one sees the dignity and ceremony of a king. When the mercy of God and His love exercise the Bhakta’s imagination, He would assume the shape of his dear mother who shows her face of smiles and stretches out her hand of affection. It is a Hindu conception to look upon God as lord, father, mother, brother, sister and everything from which we derive happiness in this world. This idea of seeing the many in the One is brought out in another place by Tagore. Harimohini in Gora is a widow who, having lost not only her wealth but also her two children, is utterly miserable. The unfortunate woman tries her best to reconcile herself to her new lot but with no success. At last she goes to her Guru (Religious preceptor) who takes her to a temple and pointing to the image of Krishna says:

Here is your husband, your son, your daughter, your all. Serve and worship Him and all your longings will be satisfied and your emptiness will be filled.

According to one of our Puranic stories, one day in the season of autumn Sri Krishna began to play upon the flute in a forest upon the Jumna bank. It was dead of night and the Gopis (Milkmaids) ravished with the music ran in search of the Great Singer. Not able to resist the call of love, they went out of the village leaving their families to their fates. But to their surprise and dismay, the love-laden girls were severely rebuked by their Master who asked: “How is it you have all come away from your homes at this time of the night? Do not the tigers and wild beasts that live here frighten you? What a daring! What a shame! Women of respectable families running after lovers! How will the world take it and how will you sacrifice your lords, parents, brothers, sisters and children formy sake? Enough of this. Enough. Fair ones, go to your places and be happy.” The rebuke being much too strong for any one to bear, the milkmaids, with eyes full of tears and hearts full of love, confused and unable to speak coherently, looked miserable and, not knowing what to do, began to scratch the ground with their feet,¹ till at last they gathered the little courage they could muster up and said: “Sweet Lord, it is true we have to look after our husbands, parents and children. When thou art our husband, parent and child, O Omniscient, is it not but just that we should seek the pleasure of the lord, parent and child in thee?’ ²

In these lyrics the agony of the human heart, the agony of waiting, is vividly portrayed. The human soul is anxiously yearning for absorption into the All-one like a youthful girl who looks forward to enjoy a few moments of blissful self-forgetfulness in the arms of her lover. It would be cruel on his part not to appear before her when she is so innocently and passionately appealing to him. There is nothing surprising if, after long waiting, she feels disappointed and vexed with herself. The poet compares himself to the beggar-maid filling her basket with flowers–“who weeps out in vain longing.” He says elsewhere:

I live in hope of meeting thee but this meeting is not yet. Cruelly thou hidest thyself from my face. The night is nearly spent and thou art not seen.

His appeal in moments of depression is pathetic:

If thou showest me not thy face, if thou leavest me wholly aside, I know not how I am to pass these long, rainy hours.

O my only friend, my best beloved, the gates are open in my house–do not pass by like a dream.

I have no sleep tonight. Ever and again I open my door and look out on the darkness, my friend!

He seems to be tired of this waiting when he says:

Day passes by after day and thou art not seen. Lord of my heart, let there be no more waiting.

To the poet-philosopher of India, life is immortal. The opening verse of Gitanjali strikes the key-note of his philosophy–belief in immortality:

Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure. This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with fresh life.

That human life does not stop with death and that the human soul changes its garment from time to time is an idea quite familiar to the Indian mind. In poetry generally the problem of life is discussed but “the problem of death,” i. e., what happens to the human being after his chapter on earth is closed, is generally left untouched. To the ordinary individual death is a horror and a mystery. Even people in whom the philosophic temperament is extraordinarily developed, may find it difficult to get over the fear of death:

For there was never yet philosopher
That could endure the toothache patiently.
However they have writ the style of gods
And made a push at chance and sufferance. ³

It is interesting to note, in this connection, that in one of the poems composed during his last illness, the poet prays:

Momently I feel
the time comes near for me to leave.
With quiet sunset glow
screen the parting day.
Let the time be peaceful, let it be silent. ⁴

It is also his great wish to behave with full courage when the hour arrives and here is his prayer: ⁵

Before me
Lies the vast ocean of peace.
Comrade of mine for ever,
Take me and hold me close.
……………………………
……………………………
O Saviour,
Your mercy and forgiveness
Are the inexhaustible wealth
On which I draw
For this my last journey.
……………………………
And may it be given me
Fearlessly to stand face to face
Before the Great Unknown. ⁶

In English poetry the problem of life, i.e., the details of man’s aspirations and failures, has been vividly portrayed. But few have attempted to give us any details of the region of darkness, much less to welcome it. To the bold poet of Paradise Lost,

So near grows Death to Life, whate’er Death is–
Some dreadful thing no doubt.

To the greatest poet of England who could glance from earth to heaven and heaven to earth, it is an “undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns.” The dramatist in one of his plays, which is the most popular, in depicting his hero, who is nearest his own heart, represents him as doubting whether it is worth while holding on to life, but refraining from taking any action owing to the dread of something after death which puzzles the will. After a life of activity he shuts his eyes and the rest is silence. But in the Indian poet, the welcome offered to death is peculiar. To him “death is the last fulfilment of life.” Life and Death are twin brothers. He says “Because I love life, I shall know to love death as well.” The Indian poet says that to him death is as real as life and the human being feels quite at home in both the regions, for “the child cries out when from the right breast the mother takes it away, the very next moment to find in the left its consolation.” At the moment the human soul is snatched away from life there might be some unpleasantness, but the very next moment it is reconciled to the new region and is happy. With regard to the progress of man on earth the poet thinks that the older we grow, the more earthly do we become. He does not very well remember when exactly he crossed the threshold of life but he feels one thing. The older he grows, the farther is he from his original nature:

He whom I enclose with my name is weeping in this dungeon, I am ever busy building this wall all around; and as this wall goes up into the sky day by day I lose sight of my true being in its dark shadow.

This is exactly similar to the idea of Wordsworth who explains how

Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,

Till at last he is made to

Forget the glories he hath known,
And that imperial palace whence he came.

In Rabindranath’s opinion, the longer we stay in the world, the greater is the slavery that we have to suffer from in the shape of our earthly ties. After a fairly long career of ambition and achievement, the human being finds himself at last “a prisoner in my own treasure-house.” This reminds us of the deep meaning underlying the famous remark of the great philosopher who said: “Man is born free but binds himself in chains.”

Gitanjali is one of the most glorious examples of religious poetry. It contains no theology. It is Universal Religion, the religion of humanity. In true religion there are three elements: purity of heart, sympathy for mankind, and beliefin God. The true Bhakta will make an honest attempt to cleanse his heart, and his prayer to the Divine is that he may be endowed withstrength enough to be pure in word, thought and deed. The truly religious man is a lover of humanity whose heart is wide enough to hold the rich and the poor, the beautiful and the ugly. He believes also in a force which presides over the destinies of creation, to whose comprehension nothing is too vast and to whose inspection nothing is too minute. He dedicates his life to the Spirit and constantly prays that he may be taken into His bosom as early as possible. The poet admits;

My debts are large, my failures great, my shame secret and heavy;

but this is his prayer to the Lord;

Srike, strike at the root of penury in my heart.

Give me the strength never to disown the poor or bend my knees before insolent might.

In another song he makes this appeal:

Give us power to resist pleasure where it enslaves us.
Make us strong that we may not insult the weak and the fallen.

But these are not the only evils we suffer from. There are other miseries to which we become easy victims. We are selfish, covetous and greedy. We are calculating and, on the pretext of being “practical”, we transform ourselves into money-making machines and cease to take any interest in the finer and nobler things of life. Our hearts lose their softness and we become callous to human suffering. And we are so lost in the world and its activities that we have no time for any mental stocktaking and never enjoy any manassanti (Mental peace). Below is the poet’s prayer to the Eternal Father to guard him from these dangers:

When the heart is hard and parched up, come upon me with a shower of mercy.
When grace is lost from life, come with a burst of song.
When tumultuous work raises its dinon all sides shutting me out from beyond, come to me, my lord of silence, with thy peace and rest.

When desire blinds the mind with delusion and dust, O thou holy one, thou wakeful, come with thy light and thy thunder. ⁷

Again, he is not satisfied with staying away from the world. The average Indian philosopher might fear that his body and soul would be stained if he mixed with the world and hence might choose to live away “from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife.” But such an attitude does not commend itselfto the poet of modern India. To him human life gives pleasure and he sees in it the manifestation of the Supreme Spirit. He feels his life is blest, for he has been invited “to the world’s great festival.” The saint who shuns the world lest he should be corrupted, is like the child in prince’s robes who cannot enjoy the play, for his dress hampers him at every step. He says:

Mother, it is no gain, thy bondage of finery, if it keep one shut off from the beautiful dust of the earth, if it rob one of the right of entrance to the great fair of common human life.

To him God’s feet rest among “the poorest, and lowliest, and lost.” He walks “in the clothes of the humble among the poorest, and lowliest, and lost.” He keeps “company with the companionless among the poorest, the lowliest, and the lost.” He advises the ascetic to “leave this chanting and telling of beads.” There is absolutely no use in sitting in the lonely corner of a temple with our flowers and incense. If one desires to find God, one must realise Him in the tiller who is tilling his ground and the path-maker who is breaking stones. The real devotee will meet Him in the toil of his hand and the sweat of his brow. Thus he sees in every object, however mean it may be, the revelation of the Divine, and his constant prayer is that he may never lose the bliss of the touch of the One in the play of the many.

Love then is the basis of Rabindranath’s teaching, and his message is unity. His is the true religion which finds expression in his song-offerings. His love for mankind, the neglected and the down-trodden, is remarkable. His heart is as wide as the ocean, as deep as the sea. For these reasons Gitanjali is a unique example of religion in English poetry. Though the songs were originally written in Bengali, they have become a part of English literature and moreover it was the English rendering of these devotional songs that won for him the world’s recognition. If he plays an important part in Bengali literature, he plays an equally important part in English literature, for his prose and verse, his storiesand letters,his essays and treatises in English, are a remarkable achievement. Judged, then, from the standpoint of the English literature of the world, Gitanjali is a unique achievement.

It is true we find in some of the great poets of England a religious spirit. But a work in which lyric devotion is so powerfully expressed, a work which is so entirely devoted to the worship of the Supreme, seems to be more characteristic of the East than the West. John Milton, the greatest figure in the field of religious poetry, was an inspired man who subordinaied all his talents–physical, intellectual and spiritual–to the fulfilment of his life’s ambition–the justification of God’s ways to mankind. But he is much too objective in his poetry. There is a good deal of description and narration, and pure lyrical feeling is only occasional. The greatest poet of England, William Shakespeare, is really a phenomenon in the field of dramatic literature. He is a master of human life and has dived deep into the inmost recesses of the human heart. Every aspect of human love with its trials and temptations has been beautifully rendered into poetry. He has splendidly described to the reader “life’s young blossoms and the fruits of its decline.” But we miss, and sadly too, the intense spiritual devotion of the Indian mystic. There is everything relating to the problem of man but there is not what one might call “the problem of God”, so much as we find in the poetry of our country. It is indeed very difficult to find a hero like Prahlada ⁸ in English poetry. We realise Shakespeare is a solace to humanity. We admit his heroes have struggled most vigorously with the ills of life. We know that “graves, at my command, have waked their sleepers, opened, and let them forth, by my so potent art.” We very well remember that some of his heroes have realised that this insubstantial pageant will one day vanish, and vanish into thin air leaving not a rack behind. But none of his heroes is confronted with the problem like the one we see in Gitanjali. ⁹It is a poem of devotion, pure and simple. It is unalloyed with any objective element. The enthusiasm of the human being for God, the craving of his soul for union with the spirit, its hopes and fears, the moods of joy and agony, are the substance of the poem. It is a translation of Indian spiritual cravings into the English language–the interpretation of the East to the West.

Poet Rabindranath’s enthusiastic devotion to God is only an example of man’s yearning for the Infinite. While the average man is satisfied with his worldly possessions and the other material comforts he enjoys in life, there will be a few lofty-minded persons to whom this is not enough. In his essay, The Realisation of the Infinite, ¹⁰the poet-philosopher tells us:

Man’s abiding happiness is not in getting anything but in giving himself up to what is greater than himself, to ideas which are larger than his individual life, the idea of his country, of humanity, of God….His existence is miserable and sordid till he finds some great idea which can truly claim his all, which can release him from all attachment to his belongings.

Elsewhere, he expresses a similar thought:

The pain of desire for the near belongs to the animal, the sorrow of aspiration for the far belongs to man, ¹¹

a sentiment similar to what is contained in one of Shelley’s lyrics:

The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow.

Whether the ideal be the union with God or something else, the human being aims at going beyond the borders of the finite and enter the region of the Infinite. Here is a song in which this longing is described:

I am restless. I am athirst for far-away things.
O Great Beyond, O the keen call of thy flute!
I forget, I ever forget, that I have no wings to fly, that I am bound in this spot evermore. ¹²

To worldly men, all this may appear silly but idealists will always be there. The following song from one of Tagore’s dramas will show what the dreamers are like:

Do you smile, my friends? Do you laugh, my brothers? I roam in search of the golden stag! Ah yes, the fleet-foot vision that ever eludes me !

You all come and buy in the market-place and go to your homes laden with all goods and provisions...I have parted with my all to get what never has become mine! ¹³

Man’s ambition, then, is to reach the Infinite but two questions arise in this connection. How far is the goal from us and how can we arrive there? In other words, in the case of the devotee, are not Earth and Heaven, the Finite and the Infinite, two different regions, and Man and God two distinct beings separated from each other by a long distance? Secondly, can we see God and realise the Infinite while we are getting on with our human affairs in this mortal world, or have we to wait till after death or live in a mountain cave to breathe the atmosphere of the Infinite? The answers to these queries are supplied by Kabir and Rabindranath:

In the home is the true union, in the home is enjoyment of life. Why should I forsake my home and wander in the forest?….. ¹⁴

The home is the abiding place; in the home is reality; the home helps to attain Him who is real. So stay where you are, and all things shall come to you in time. ¹⁵

And the Bhakta is surprised that people do not realise this simple truth:

I laugh when I hear that the fish in the water is thirsty: You do not see that the Real is in your home, and you wander from forest to forest listlessly!

That the Formless can be seen in this world which is full of forms is an idea which may not be accepted by many, but the great devotee whose life was one of dedication to the service of God and who spent all his time on singing this glory has something very interesting to say. The subject of his dramatic poem, Prakritir Pratisodha (Nature’s Revenge), was an ascetic who cut himself off from the world and lived alone in a dark cave “merged in himself.” Convinced, at a certain stage, that he had “conquered” Nature, he allowed Vasanti, a little girl, tocome to him and love him. But, feeling by and by that he also began to love her, he ran away from the girl, notwithstanding her destitute condition and pity-exciting entreaties. He was however not happy, as the little one would not go out or his mind, and he would cry:

O my child, the sorrow of your little heart has filled, forever, all the nights of my life with sadness. Your dear caressing hand has left its touch in this night air–I feel it on my forehead–it is damp with your tears. My darling, your sobs that pursued me, when I fled away, have clung to my heart. I shall carry them to my death. ¹⁶

As light dawned on him, he felt that nature was taking revenge on the man who wanted to shun the world, as we can gather from the following confession:

Let my vows of Sanyasi go. I break my staff and alms-bowl….Oh the fool, who wanted to seek safety in swimming alone…..The bird flies in the sky, not to fly away into the emptiness, but to come again to this great earth. I am free. I am free from the bodiless chain of the Nay. I am free among things, and forms and purpose. The finite is the true Infinite, and love knows its truth. My girl, you are the spirit of all that is–I can never leave you.

The finite is the true Infinite and love knows its truth! And “Lead us from the unreal to the real” is the motto printed just below the title of the play! From the Reminiscences we also learn:

This Nature’s Revenge may be looked upon as an introduction to the whole of my future literary work; or, rather this has been the subject on which all my writings have dwelt–the joy of attaining the Infinite within the finite.

The weaver-saint of the fifteenth century had expressed a similar faith when he sang:

What Kabir says is hard to understand: “The bird is beyond seeking, yet it is most clearly visible. The Formless is in the midst of all forms. I sing the glory of forms.”

In his Short Studies On Great Subjects, C. F. Andrews, one of Rabindranath’s intimate friends, points out, in the course of a discussion of Truth, Religion and Philosophy:

They (abstractions) are not the bread of life which religion gives to the hungry soul, except perhaps to a born philosopher…..

All that makes up Personality has vanished and I seem to be called upon to bow down to an Abstraction.

He gives the instance of Tulsidas who, when a philosopher was recounting to him the names of God (the incomprehensible, the invisible, the illimitable etc.), humbly pleaded, “Sir, show us the incarnate.” Talking on getting religion out of philosophy, Andrews adds:

The poet and the artist find their joy in the concrete. They are each in their way unabashed idolaters!.....

Sankara was a poet as well as philosopher. Tagore has got the same gift and he has often talked this over with me. ¹⁷

Thus Abstractions do not quench the thirst of the human soul, and without the concrete we cannot realise the Abstract. According to Kabir,

As you never may find the forest if you ignore the tree, so He may never be found in abstractions. ¹⁸

The Infinite appearing in finite shape as an Avatar (Incarnation) is not an entirely new idea; when Sri Ramachandra walked the earth in human form in ‘The Golden Age’, those that met him felt they were in the Divine presence and the sages with their Divyadrishti (Spiritual eye) saw in him the Lord coming down to earth for the establishment of Dharma in the world. The same feeling was experienced by the Rishis who lived in Sri Krishna’s time and who saw in the lovely little child the image of Narayan, the Ruler of the Universe. According to Rabindranath Tagore, in the time of the Buddha, “men felt that the Universal and the Eternal Spirit was revealed in a human individual whom they had known and touched.” ¹⁹ It may be these are exceptional cases which happen once in two or three thousand years. Rabindranath’s view that in the finite we could see the Infinite cannot be easily set aside. And the Supreme Creator sometimes appears in unexpected quarters when He chooses to confer the happiness of Paradise on a humble individual by allowing the later to see Him, talk to Him and move with Him. It is not beyond our experience to come across in our humble homes a father or mother, an uncle or aunt, a brother or sister, a teacher or friend, whom we revere and love deeply and in whose company we feel we catch glimpses of the Divine. There might have been no blazing of torches or blowing of trumpets when this person was born and he (or she) might be leading now a simple life in an obscure village, yet to us he has been the inspiration of our lives and the object of our silent worship. “God,” says Rabindranath, “is special to each individual,” and we think we are lucky in having the All-bountiful as father, mother or friend. This being may be a woman–“the woman that there is in the heart of creation” ²⁰–and to many of us in this country, the Supreme Creator is Mother. The mother will of course love her children deeply and the son, the ardent devotee, is so attached to her that, having no life without her, he will pray:

Dearest Mother, Personification of Love, Embodiment of Sweetness, Image of Perfection, Jagajjanani ²¹ in human shape. Thou hast purified my life, taught me to love creatures, animate and inanimate, and brought me out of darkness into light. Seated at thy feet, I enjoy the bliss of heaven;

And when I see thee not,
Chaos is come again.

Love is reciprocal and “the distance from that village to this is the same as the distance from this village to that” is a popular saying in the Telugu country. If we are longing for union with God, He is also eager to meet us, as the verse from Gitanjali given below will show:

If I call thee not in my prayers, if I keep not thee in my heart, thy love for me still waits for my love.

In Tagore’s opinion, the finite and Infinite are complementary, because,

If you and I never meet, this play of love remains incomplete. ²²

He also quotes a popular song which says:

But this longing is not mine, but yours.
And therefore you are importunate, even as I am.

“Ferryman, take me across to the other shore!” is another song which the carters and itinerant grocers of Bengal are fond of. We feel we have not reached our goal. As the poet puts it,

Man is not complete; he is yet to be. In what he is he is small......In his to be he is Infinite, there is his heaven, his deliverance.

“But what is the ‘other shore’ and where is it?” one might ask, and here is the poet’s prayer which sums up his conception of man’s relation to God:

In truth, thou ocean of joy, this shore and the other shore are one and the same in thee….

Where can I meet thee unless in this my home made thine? Where can I join thee unless in this my work transformed into thy work? If I leave my home I shall not reach thy home; if I cease my work I can never join thee in thy work. For thou dwellest in me and I in thee. Thou without me or I without thee are nothing. ²³

This, the realisation of the Perfect in, or with the help of, the imperfect, leads us on to the question of the worship of idols not uncommon in our country. Rabindranath was a Brahmo by birth and the Brahmo Samaj does not believe in Hindu ritual and ceremony. Also, the God of Tagore’s worship is not the God of any denomination but Universal God. All the same, his attitude is that of a poet and not that of a religious zealot as we can learn from his novel, Gora. The following conversation between a Brahmo and an orthodox Hindu may be read with interest:

“And you now have faith in a deity that has finite form?”

“Has any one been able to penetrate its mystery?”

“But form is limited.”

“Nothing can become manifest unless it has limits. The Infinite has taken the help of form in order to manifest Himself, otherwise how could He be revealed? That which is unrevealed cannot attain perfection. The formless is fulfilled in forms, just as thought is perfected in words.”

To those who say that to take a limited object for a god is an error, the reply would be that the limits have not to be ascertained from the point of view of time and space. When we call to mind any scriptural text, it inspires us but its measure of greatness is not the width of the page or the number of letters of which it is composed! It is “the unlimited character of the idea” that is important. Otherwise,

How could your aunt ²⁴ have held so fast to it (the idol) when all her happiness in life had been destroyed? Could such a great void in her heart have been filled by a tiny stone like that if it had been mere play? The emptiness of the human heart could never be filled except by an unlimited feeling.

There is also another way of looking at it. There is a place for imagination in religion as in Art, Literature, Science and History. The worship of images is, of course, not the chief aim of religious devotions but there is one thing:

In our country imagination is very intimately interwoven with our philosophy and our faith. Our Krishna and Radha, and our Shiva and Durga, are not merely objects of historical worship, they are forms of the ancient philosophy of our race.

It has also to be remembered that “no worshipper in our country ever offers his devotion to what is limited–the joy of their worship is to lose the limits within the limited.” Rabindranath is not a worshipper of idols, but he is a poet and has a breadth of vision peculiar to himself. Also, the great devotee does not despise forms; on the other hand, he boldly proclaims:

I dive down into the depth of the ocean of forms, hoping to gain the perfect pearl of the Formless. ²⁵

As poet of devotion, Rabindranath is in the galaxy of the mystics whose songs in praise of God have been the glory of our country. To him,

My master’s flute sounds through all things
Every step I take is in my master’s house.
For he is the sea, he is the river that leads to the sea,
and he is also the landing-place. ²⁶

The human soul is like a bird which has its nest on the earth but delights in flying aloft:

O thou beautiful, there in the nest it is thy love encloses the soul with colours and sounds and odours. ²⁷

When the individual soul (the Jeevatma) becomes one with the Supreme Soul (the Paramatma),

There, where spreads the infinite sky for the soul to take her flight in, reigns the stainless white radiance. There is no day, nor night, nor form, nor colour, and never, never
a word.

In the devotee’s opinion, however, the All-pervading is both the Paramatma and Jeevatma.

Thou art the sky and thou art the nest as well.

Another aspect of Rabindranath’s devotion to God is his great optimism. He knows there is plenty of wickedness and misery in the world but he is sure that

The Pilot is at the helm
And he will guide the barge over the sea. ²⁸

He does not lose faith in his fellow creatures either, for he knows:

Men are cruel, but Man is kind.

And he relies on God, as we can see from his final appeal:

Release me from my unfulfilled past clinging to me from behind, making death difficult.

Let this be my last word, that I trust in thy love. ²⁹

There is one very important thing, however. For one to reach Heaven, sincere faith is enough. Learning or religious ceremony is not essential:

“How may I sing to thee and worship, O Sun?”

asked the little flower.

“By the simple silence of thy purity,”

answered the Sun.

If God is satisfied with our simple unostentatious faith, He also speaks to us in a language which is simple and direct:

Your speech is simple, my Master, but not theirs.

That God exists, that He is everywhere and that nothing can happen without His will, even the most unlettered among us will understand. Philosophers and theologians might, with the best of motives, write learned commentaries by way of expounding their theories ofGod and the Universe, but the unsophisticated folk have no use for them. More often than not, these books bewilder them instead of giving illumination or deepening their faith in the Supreme Creator. It is not seldom that the greater poets of the world whose language has a charming simplicity suffer at the hands of their over-enthusiastic critics and interpreters, and it is no wonder that this applies to the Master Poet ³⁰ as well. In this connection, it may not be quite out of place to remember what a great admirer of England’s immortal dramatist wrote, and his observation is not wholly untrue:

If we wish to know the force of human genius we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning we may study his commentators. ³¹

In Tagore’s poetry, two things stand out prominently, his supreme faith in the Creator and his deep love for God’s creatures. In one of his Gitanjali lyrics, he says:

Many a song have I sung in many a mood of mind, but all their notes have always proclaimed, “He comes, comes, ever comes.”

As for the poet’s boundless sympathy for man, the story of the Cabuliwallah and his little’ Parvati’ in her distant mountain home is a noble illustration. In a letter written to a friend, he writes:

I feel that the highest commandment is that of sympathy for all sentient beings. Love is the foundation of all religion, ³²

a feeling similar to the one expressed by the English poet who sang:

He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small. ³³

And Rabindranath gives his poetry of devotion in a nut-shell when he says:

One word keep for me in thy silence, O World, when I am dead, “I have loved.” ³⁴

¹ Andhra Bhagavatamu, Section X: Charanamula nelavrayuchu……
² Andhra Bhagavatamu, Section X: Patulan biddala bandhulan……
³ Much Ado About Nothing.
⁴ Rabindranath Tagore: Poems.
⁵ The song, written a few days before the poet’s death, was, in accordance with his wishes, sung on the occasion of the memorial service held at Santiniketan on August 17. 1941.
⁶ From The Hindu, August 19, 1941.
⁷ Of all the Gitanjali lyrics, Mahatma Gamdhi seems to have liked this most, and, at the suggestion of Mahadev Desai, this song was sung by Gurudev at Poona when Gandhiji broke his fast on 26thSeptember 1932 (Vide: R. Tagore: Mahatmaji and the Depressed Humanity).
⁸ A boy-devotee whose extraordinary love of God is described in the Bhagavata-Purana.
⁹ There is no idea of suggesting here that one writer is superior to another. Milton and Shakespeare are two of the greatest poets of the world. One was an epic poet and the other, a playwright, deals with the subject of man, his achievements and his errors, but each of them has left “something so written to aftertime as they should not willingly let it die.”
¹⁰ “Sadhana”
¹¹ “Red Oleanders”
¹² “The Gardener”
¹³ Rabindranath Tagore; “One Hundred Poems of Kabir.”
¹⁴ “The King of the Dark Chamber.” The song had appeared in “The Gardener” a year before.
¹⁵ Rabindranath Tagore: “One Hundred Poems of Kabir.”
¹⁶ This play was composed in 1884 when the poet was 23 years old. It was later translated into English and appeared under the title of “Sanyasi, or the Ascetic.”
¹⁷ From “The Hindu”, September 20, 1937.
¹⁸ “One Hundred Poems of Kabir.”
¹⁹ “An Indian Folk Religion.”
²⁰ “Fruit-Gathering”
²¹ Universal Mother.
²² “Creative Unity”
²³ “Sadhana.”
²⁴ Harimohini in “Gora” to whom a reference has already been made.
²⁵ “Gitanjali”
²⁶ “The Fugitive”
²⁷ “Gitanjali”
²⁸ “Sheaves”
²⁹ “Stray Birds”
³⁰ cp “Kavinam Kavihi” (Poet of poets)
³¹ Hazlitt: “On the Ignorance of the Learned”
³² “Glimpses of Bengal”
³³ Coleridge: “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
³⁴ “Stray Birds”