Walt Whitman and Rabindranath Tagore

A Study in Comparison and Contrast

DR. C. N. SASTRY, M. A., Ph. D.

During the Tagore Centenary Celebrations the U. S. I. S. issued two beautiful portraits–one of Rabindranath Tagore and the other of Walt Whitman. The pictures set me thinking on the subject of comparison and contrast between these two great poets who represent the national genius of India and America and who stand as abiding bridges of good-will and understanding between the two mighty democracies in the modern world.

At a superficial glance the two bearded figures seem to resemble in many respects. But on a closer look we feel that well-trimmed and graceful figure of Tagore stands in contrast with the roughness, wildness, and gay abandon writ large upon the features of Whitman. What is true of their physiognomy holds good equally with respect to the deeper aspects of their personality and literature.

As inheritors of the Romantic tradition Whitman and Tagore resemble each other in many respects. They look at the panorama of nature with the eyes of an innocent child revealing an endless sense of wonder. Whitman gazes at the kaleidoscopic patterns of the teeming rice of his nation with infinite sense of wonder: “I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars” says Whitman and his poetic eye rolls from Earth toHeaven probing the mystery of all objects however small or grand they may be.

“Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next
Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.”

The passage provides a precise description of Whitman’s attitude to what he calls the “gliding wonders” of the world which he endeavours to absorb into his Omnivorous leaves. The same sense of wonder is revealed by Tagore’s approach to nature as it is expressed in one of his early collections of nature poetry entitled Chitra. Nature fascinates Tagore as a source of ceaseless wonder and inscrutable mystery. The title poem deals with the enchanting beauties of nature which please and tease the mind “out of thought as doth eternity.” Every morning extends an invitation to his spirit. Every rose in the garden blossoms as a tender and silent love-letter coming from God and addressed to his sensitive soul. Both Whitman and Tagore display the poetic vision which sees a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower. Both look upon the mother-earth as if she for no purpose bore them, as though they were her first-born children and as though none had lived before them.

Actuated by sense of wonder, Tagore and Whitman display remarkable affinity in their approach to children. Tagore’s Crescent Moon holds a unique place among his works because of the remarkable treatment of childhood which reveals profound sympathy and deep understanding of child psychology. Amal in The Post Office, Pathik Chakravarti in Home-Coming and Subhashini, the mute girl, in Subhabear testimony to Tagore’s penetrating study ofthe minds of little boys and girls. Whitman’s primitivism and adamic tradition may be traced to his child-like spirit which displays infinite sense of wonder. He goes to the extent of describing himself as a child. “What am I after all but a child, pleas’d with the sound of my own name, repeating it over and over?

I stand apart to hear–it never tires me.”

In Song of Myself he declares that he knows no more than what a child does.

“A child said, ‘What is the grass?’ fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.”

Whitman thereby expresses his faith in the pristine innocence of childhood whose instinctive reaction to life sometimes puts to shame the ratiocination of the adult mind and all later tuitions.

Impelled by the sense of wonder Tagore and Whitman have become great lovers of life. Whitman dotes upon himself and reveals in the delight of existence. “Enough merely to be!” he says, because every moment of life is a miracle for him. No other American poet has sought to cram a whole contingent within the covers of his book. Describing himself as the “caresser of life.” Whitman refers to every profession and trade with the loving care of a sensitive poet. His poetic sensibility is remarkably all-inclusive.

He shirks no aspect of life as unworthy and un poetical. His hungering and gymnastic soul wrestles with the baffling variety of life for what he terms “solid prizes.” His soul tends outward to all objects under the Sun, the common prostitute, the felons on trial at a court and even the compost. The gusto with which Whitman participates in the drama of life leaves one almost breathless, and we can hardly find a parallel anywhere in literature. He is more fully a poet of “joy in widest commonalty spread” than Wordsworth. Not obsessed by the Calvinist theories of original sin, Whitman regards life as an emaration from the fountain-head of joy but not a bitter cup of sorrow. “I am the ever-laughing...” he says and moves on with the procession of the gay gangs and joins their mirth-shouting music admiring their “wild-flapping pennants of joy.” Whitman’s joie de vivre is almost infectious and unique. Though pitched on a lower key, Tagore also glorifies the joy of existence as few Indian poets have done. Deriving inspiration from the Upanishadic seers, Tagore addresses men as children of the immortal spirit and children of delight. He believes with the ancient seers that all elements emerge from joy, are sustained by joy and finally merge into joy. In spite of his insistence on spiritual values, Tagore never preaches the doctrine of negation. His poetry embodies the spirit of affirmation and acceptance. Tagore does not seek spiritual salvation in isolation, in the solitude of a forest or seclusion of a cave. Musty virtues practised in emotional vacuum do not appeal to him. He never turns his upon the problems of life and is never blind to its charms.

“No, I will never shut the doors of senses. The delights of sight and hearing and touch will bear thy delight.” So the world is no delusion but a divine sport of joy. “Our master himself has joyfully taken upon him the bonds of creation.” Tagore does not seek deliverance through escape, asceticism and renunciation. He emphatically declares, “Deliverance is not for me in renunciation. I feel the embrace of freedom in a thousand bonds of delight and seeks to embrace life in all its variety and complexity.” But it must be admitted that Whitman’s acceptance of life is more cosmic than Tagore’s. Whitman accepts into his poetic world everything under the Sun because he wants not to exclude anything which the Sun does not. We may say that there is God’s plenty in Whitman’s poems, while considerations of propriety and taste which weigh strongly with Indian poets naturally prevent Tagore from going the whole hog with Whitman. In the treatment of sex as a basic fact of life Whitman stands as a bold pioneer who feels that “all were lacking if sex were lacking.” He glorifies the human flesh and all its appetites with the conviction that a proper understanding of sex forms the basis of a well-ordered life. Sexual organs and even the sexual act receive poetic treatment at Whitman’s hands. He, being turbulent, fleshy, sensual and one of the roughs, has nothing but contempt for the deinty dolce affettuoso and the “pale poetling” who lack the courage and strength to face squarely the problem of sex and who wear the blinkers of conventional inhibitions. Without being libidinous in his treatment of sex, Whitman seeks to clarify and purify the procreative urge denouncing all tendencies of suppression and repression as inimical to sane and healthy living. Sex is an aspect of life which receives no attention from Tagore the poet, even though he delineates the disastrous consequences of suppressed sex in Vinodini, a character in his famous social novel Chokher Bali. But Whitman holds a broader swath and cuts deeper than many other poets, not only Tagore, when he affirms that “sex contains all,” bodies, souls,

Meanings, proofs, purities, delicacies, results, promulgations,
Songs, commands, health, pride, the maternal mystery, the seminal milk,
All hopes, benefactions, bestowals, all the passions, loves, beauties,
delights of the earth.”
He therefore wants to bathe himself and his songs in sex.
“Through me forbidden voices, voices of sexes and lusts, voices
veiled and I remove the veil,
Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigured”
Whitman’s poetic-sensibility is all-embracing and it is more inclusive than Tagore’s. “Seeing, hearing, feeling are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle,” says Whitman with an almost primitive zest for life.

Intense love of life does not shun and shirk death but looks at it in the proper perspective. Both Whitman and Tagore share the Romantic attitude towards death, regarding it as “life’s high meed.” Tagore addresses death as a bosom friend in endearing terms:

“O, thou the last fulfilment of life, Death, my death, come and whisper to me.” Tagore finds no contradiction between love of life and longing for death and asserts thus:

“And because I love this life, I know I shall love death as well.
The child cries out when from the right breast the mother takes it away, in the very next moment to find in the left one its consolation.”

Similar attitude is displayed by Whitman because death holds no terrors for him, because he does not regard it as cessation and dissolution of life. “Has anyone supposed it lucky to be born? I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.” Whitman holds that “All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses” on the testimony provided by even the smallest sprout which shows “there is really no death.” It is significant that one of the sections of Leaves of Grass is entitled “Whispers of Heavenly Death” and perhaps Tagore and Whitman listened to the self-same whisper from Death. The affirmation of immortality rings through their poems which welcome, accept and look beyond death. “I swear, I think there is nothing but immortality” says Whitman and laughs at the idea of dissolution. “I know I am deathless. My foothold is tennon’d, mortised in granite.” At the same time neither Whitman nor Tagore suffers from the gloomy death-wish of the existentialists because the two poets reveal abiding faith in God. According to Whitman, “faith is the antiseptic of the soul”and it saves the poet from the slough of despond in which a soulless and faithless generation is trapped beyond redemption. The death-wish is the “invisible need of every seed”and “the central urge in every atom,” as Whitman describes it. It is the urge found in all organic matter to return to its original state and the release is provided by death. Therefore, Whitman welcomes Death thus:

“Thee, holiest minister of Heaven–thee envoy, usherer, guide at last of all, rich, florid, loosener of the structure knot call’d life, sweet, peaceful, welcome Death.”

It is not a matter of coincidence that both Whitman and Tagore have employed the same figures of the mother, the cradle and the sea where they describe the mystery of death. The sea whispered a word to Whitman and appears like some “old, crone rocking the cradle, swathed in sweet garments, bending aside.” The same figure with all its overtones appears in Tagore’s Crescent Moon when he describes the sport of children on the sea-shore. “Death-dealing waves sing meaningless ballads to the children, even like a mother while rocking her baby’s cradle.” Both Whitman and Tagore regard the sea as an old mother who rocks in the cradle of her waves the “delicious word” which reveals the mystery of death. Similarity of the imagery employed by the two poets may be traced to an identical outlook and approach.

Cosmic consciousness is a significant aspect of Whitman’s thought and we find a close parallel in Tagore’s philosophy of life. Whitman perceives “the vast similitude that interlocks” all material objects and feels the pulsations of the over-soul behind all the physical phenomena. He identifies himself with the ceaseless flow of life and becomes an active participant in the long process of evolution.

“I find I incorporate gneiss, and coal, long-threaded moss,
fruits, grains, esculent roots,
And am stucco’d with quadrupeds and birds all over,”

says, Whitman who mounts the ladder of evolution starting from the stage of the fetid carbon and lethargic mist and feels proud of his human personality. Tagore expresses the same thrill and satisfaction in his poetry identifying himself with ever atom and enjoying the throb of cosmic life in his pulse.

“The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.

“It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.

“It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth and death, in ebb and in flow.

“I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life. And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment,” exclaims Tagore sharing Whitman’s rapture expressed in the following passage “Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful boatmen. For room to me the stars kept aside in their own rings.” The life-throb of ages is felt by both. They ebb and flow with the ocean of universal life. Like Wordsworth, Tagore and Whitman perceive the immanence of a motion and a spirit that impels all objects and are overwhelmed by a sense sublime of something interfuscd with all creation.

Tagore and Whitman are intensely national but they both display broad universal outlook which embraces the entire human race transcending all narrow barriers. In the case of both we do not find any contradiction between national fervour and international sympathy. Tagore prays to God to lead his country into that world which is not broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls. The dust, the very air, the sky, and the water of his land are very dear to Tagore. But that intense love does not stand in his way and preclude his sweeping universal vision. He literally “incarnates” the geography of India. The swelling rivers, the flowering woods, the clear blue horizon, the golden corn, and the lofty Himalayas have passed into the texture orhis poetry. His identification with the country is so complete that he has been recognised as the typical and representative poet of India who gives a resonant voice to her spirit. The breadth of his outlook may be judged from his delineation of India as the ocean of humanity and as a confluence of the cultures of the entire world. (He more citta Tagore dhire, ei Bharater, maha manaber sagro tire.) The same intensity and expansiveness co-exist in Whitman to the same remarkable degree. To Whitman, America is “the race of races.” His spirit responds to the country’s spirit and absorbs every aspect of the national life into his poetry. “These states are the amplest poem”, exclaims Whitman and “hanging on its neck with incomparable love” he reproduces in his work the roughness of the Rocky mountains, the torrential flow of the Niagara, the expansiveness of the Prairies and the vastness of the Americans’ farms. At the same time Whitman addresses all mankind in his poems like “Salut au Mounde,” extending his love equally to all the countries of the world. Like Tagore he also breathes purer air and moves about in serener ether not caring for the narrow considerations of the world. Both transcend by their poetic vision, “the time of tenses and the space of distances”, anxious to establish the one world where all men live in a spirit of fraternity and fulness of freedom.

In their attitude to God, Whitman and Tagore follow the same line of thought. Tagore worships God who is immanent and omnipresent; God is not a remote and inaccessible absolute but an embodiment of love. It is his conviction that Finite is the true gateway to the Infinite and love has the key. So Tagore’s God is there “where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and where the path-maker is breaking stones.” He sees God in Man as Whitman does when he says:

“In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,
I find letters from God dropt in the street, and everyone is signed by God’s name.”

Not only the Transcendentalist doctrine of signatures but also Whitman’s humanism has found expression in the above passage. It is Whitman’s faith that democracy should replace God-Man by Man-God and elevate humanity to the pedestal of divinity. Therefore he urges that every man shall be his own priest and that churches be built for the worship of Man. The humanism of Tagore and Whitman derive its force from faith in God whose love does not disdain to become even a worm beneath the sod. It is not the humanism of the rationalist but the humanism of the mystic visionary that gets expressed in their poems.

Of course the most patent point of similarity between Tagore and Whitman lies in the medium of Free-verse employed by them. Whitman’s Free-verse has sprung from an artistic compulsion to meet the demands of the modem age. It is an innovation born cut of the conviction that a new form is necessary to give full and free expression to the tone and temper of the new age and that the time has come to break down the essential barriers between prose and verse. Discarding rhyme and metrical conventions Whitman has evolved a form which reflects the spirit of democracy with its sweep of tidal rhythms. It is his poetic ambition to soar like an eagle and to surge like the ocean. The length of the line is determined by the flow of thought and punctuated by its periodicities. Its rhythm proceeds from “a supple adaptation of the words to the inflexions of feeling.” Each line stands a self-sufficient unit and bears the same relation to the whole as an individual stands in relation to the society. A remarkable fusion of form and content renders Whitman’s Free-verse a significant contribution to modern poetry. But Tagore’s aim in employing Free-verse is more modest than Whitman’s. Tagore seeks to give a rhythmical paraphrase of his highly artistic Bengali poems in English. Whereas Whitman cast his whole lot with Free-verse Tagore distinguishes himself by a mastery of intricate metrical patterns in Bengali. It is only during the last phase of his poetical career that Tagore uses Free-verse in his Bengali poems like Lipika. But his Gitanjali, Gardener and other collections in English display some striking features of resemblance to the Free-verse of Leaves of Grass. Having dispensed with rhyme Whitman relies largely upon Epanaphora and parallelism to lend mnemonic value to his poems.

“As I ebb’d with the ocean of life,
As I wended the shores I know,
As I walk’d where the ripples continuously wash you Paumanok.”

Tagore employs the device in several poems achieving the same effect.

“When the heart is hard and parched up, come upon me with a shower of mercy,
When the grace is lost from life come with a burst of song.”

The well-known poem “India’s Prayer” runs on beginning with “where,” and the principal clause is reserved for the last line. Whitman makes frequent use of parallelism and exploits its balancing quality.

“I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul,
The pleasures of Heaven are with me and the pains of Hell are with me.”

Though not so frequently Tagore also makes use of the device in lines like–“Thou art the sky and thou art the nest as well.”

“Every moment and every age, every day and every night he comes, comes, ever comes.” Tagore’s handling of Free-verse shows his full recognition of the potentialities of the medium and his increasing awareness of its value may be judged from his use of Free-verse in his Bengali works of the final phase of his literary career without confining it to his translations into English.

Though Whitman and Tagore resemble each other in many of their attitudes, there is a fundamental difference in their personalities. Tagore’s personality is all of a piece and his life is like a well-modulated symphony. The serenity of his face is an index of an inner synthesis of divergent elements in his nature. Steeped in the Upanishadic tradition Gurudev Tagore could achieve an ‘integrated vision. We cannot make the same claim on behalf of Whitman because his nature abounds in contradictions and unresolved-tensions. In spite of his ceaseless and fierce struggle for unity Whitman’s nature continues to be subject to enormous perturbations. It is creditable that Whitman does not stamp out the contradictions in subservience to any selective principle. His best poetry seems to spring from those tensions and polarities which induced a critic to call him one of the great erratics of literature. On the other hand the best poetry of Tagore comes out of a unified sensibility and integrated vision. In order to appreciate Whitman we need not elevate him to sainthood as his associates had sought to do. As one who is aware of a duplicate self which differs from what appears bland in parlours, as one who could say “O admirers, praise not me–compliment not me–you make me wince.

I see what you do not–I know what you do not. Beneath this face that lies so impassive hell’s tides continuously run. Whitman attracts the modern reader who is racked by unresolved tensions. Keen awareness of dualism in his nature links Whitman with modern poets, like C. Day Lewis, who say “Myself repudiates myself of yesterday.” Whitman takes a full share in the struggle of the modern mind which is torn between clashing loyalties to achieve an integrated view of life. While Whitman stands thus as one of the moderns, Tagore appears as a modern version of some ancient seer chanting the age-old song in a tone that is fresh and sweet. Whitman is a literary Columbus who could discover many unexplored areas of poetic sensibility and become the precursor of many literary trends of the twentieth century.

“I will scatter myself among men and women as I go,
I will toss a new gladness and roughness among them,

Whoever denies me it shall not trouble me, whoever accepts me he or she shall be blessed and shall bless me” says Whitman with boundless love, “with malice to none and charity for all.” Tagore’s parting word is characteristic of a confident visionary. “In this play-house of infinite forms I have had my play and here have I caught sight of Him who is formless. My whole body and my limbs have thrilled with His touch who is beyond touch; and if the end comes here, let it come–let this be my parting word.