Tagore and English Romanticism

“Bliss was in that dawn to be alive
And to be young was very heaven,”

wrote the highly excited leader of the romantics on witnessing theFrench Revolution, that shook the foundations of the monarchies in the European continent. After nearly a century and a half, in the far off India, a British dominion, Tagore was praying:

“Into that heaven of freedom
My father let my country awake.”

It was a curious similarity in different points of time and place, there were almost identical forces at work in political, social and religious spheres, in the continents of Europe and Asia. The French and particularly the Russian revolution have found their reverberating echoes in the national and social upheavals in India and China. The quickening pace of industrial revolution in the Asia of Tagore, was none too different in character and complexities from the 19th century England. Here was an Asia in the throes of momentous changes, eventually resulting in the independent Indian sub-continent and the Communist China. The rumblings of these mighty convulsions were felt even in the less-populated areas of South-East Asia.

It was a climate that impelled the new poets to break away from traditional and conventional cliches and seek new values and directions expressive of the urges of the changing Asia. Suffice it for the present purpose to be aware of this drop, when we discus the influence of the English Romanticism on Tagore.

Naturally, Tagore, the most prominent and even prophetic of this new generation of poets, gave the call for freedom, reform, and return to nature, in the political, religious and cultural life of the Asians.

While it is true that Tagore’s finest poetry is written under an impelling urge for the divine, the manner of it is strikingly proximate to and sometimes even identical with that of the leading poets of the romantic movement like Wordsworth, Blake, Shelley and Keats. The content of Tagore’s major work is kindred to and expressive of the Hindu Vedantic thought as gleaned from the Upanishads and the Vaishnava cult as expounded by Jayadeva and Chandi Das. Even from a superficial perusal of his poetry, the elements that characterise the English Romanticism, are to be found in no small degree in his Gitanjali, the Gardener and other poetical works. Love, a sense of beauty and wonder, the cult of nature, the contempt for convention, the glory of freedom are things that find expression in his poetry. The impact of nature on man, the spiritual kinship of one object to the other in creation, seldom fail to draw the all-absorbing interest of the poet.

Wordsworth, more than any other of the period, seems an abiding influence, with the poet. There is a close parallel in their approach, to the Divine or the Spirit in nature that something “that impels all thinking things and rolls through all things.” Tagore himself acknowledges this influence of the romantic poets in general and of Wordsworth in particular on more than one occasion in his writings. In 1924, under the title “My Life” Tagore delivered an address in which he mentions the unique atmosphere at home which was permeated with the spirit of creation. He goes on to add “I had a deep sense, almost from infancy, of beauty of nature, an intimate feeling of companionship with the trees and clouds and felt in tune with the musical touch of the seasons in the air. At the same time I had a peculiar susceptibility to human kindness.” In the same address he says, “I had been able to maintain the faith that in all my experience of nature or man, there is the fundamental truth of spiritual reality.”

These extracts would serve for us as the meeting ground for Tagore’s poetry and the romanticism of the age of Wordsworth. We have from him, his insight into an underlying spiritual reality, between man and nature, a feeling of wonder, childlike almost on watching the “first pink flush of the dawn through the trembling leaves of the cocoanut trees which stood in a line along the garden boundary while the grass glistened as dew drops caught the first tremor of the morning breeze,” and a sense of “mystery” which is in the heart of existence. Love, the sole sustenance of Shelley and his poetry, has an equal influence on the poet. He exclaims, “...What a great power is this love!…For love is the higheest human truth, and truth gives fulness of life.” And he bewails the sad history of man: “I had sighed with that great poet Wordsworth, who became sad when he saw what man had done to man... “Men are ever the greatest enemy of man.” Like Shelley he is at once an eloquently public-spirited and intensely personal man.

Tagore’s poetry shares in great measure, the inspiring strains of romantic poetry. We have, the sedative and what Arnold calls the “healing touch” of a Wordsworth in lines like,

“The morning will surely come,
the darkness will vanish and
thy voice pour down in golden
streams breaking through the sky,”

How prophetic too like a Shelley!

Again

“That vague Sweetness made my heart ache
with longing and it seemed to me that it
was the eager breath of the summer seeking
for its Completion.”

Is this feeling any different from Wordsworth’s,

“Through primrose-tufts in that sweet bower,
The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;
And ’tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.”

The poet’s interest in the lowliest and the lost is as keen as the great romantics. Take these lines from Gitanjali:

“Here is thy foot stool and there rest thy feet
Where live the poorest, and lowliest and lost”

or

“Open thine eyes and see thy God isnot before thee. He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and where the path-maker is breaking stones Put off thy holy mantle and even like him come down on the dusty soil.”

While these passages express his ardent love for and intense interest in the forsaken, they at the same time reval his strong revulsion to formal religion and ritual, and his impatience and disgust for the shams, social or religious. How aptly do the following lines from “The Leach-Gatherer” of Wordsworth, fit in with the context;

“God” said I, “be my help and stay secure;
I’ll think of the Leach-gatherer on the lonely moor.”

The love of nature and an insight into the inner harmony of creation, despite the jarring external, the spirit that animates nature and men alike–here again, there is an extraodinary affinity between the two poets. From Gitanjali,

“The light of thy music illumines the world. The
life breath of thy music runs from sky to sky. The
holy stream of thy music breaks through all stony
obstacles and rushes on.”

So does the older poet feels when he says,

“...and there are times
I doubt not, when to you it doth impart
Authentic tidings of invisible things;
of ebb and flow and ever during power;
And central peace, subsisting at the heart of endless agitation.”

The capacity to convey the thought with almost biblical simplicity and force, isevident in both the poets,

Here is Tagore, confident of the vision profound,

“From dawn till dusk I sit here before my door,
and I know that of a sudden, the happy moment will arrive when I shall see.”

So is Wordsworth confident,

“While with an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.”

Again something of that mysticism of Blake, with that power of prayer, is what pervades the leaves of Gitanjali.

“I came out on the chariot of the first gleam of light,
and pursued my voyage through the wilderness of worlds, leaving my track on many a
star and planet.”

Or again in lines,

“What emptiness do you gaze upon! Do you not feel a thrill passing through the air, with the notes of the far away song floating from the other shore?” The whole of Gitanjaliand the Gardener is replete with this mystic strain, wherein symbolism is much used to convey the spiritual urge and destiny of man. Symbolism, the facile transmutation of an object into a general idea, is a familiar method with the poet and in it, no less in the music of his poetic creations, he is a kindred spirit to Shelley. “For true creation,” says Tagore, “is realisation of truth through the translation of it into our own symbols.” Thus it is, life often is a boat or a light or “a song” or an “ocean” and living is a voyage over disturbed seas or a “flight” in a troubled sky. This feeling has not, however, deprived the poet of his zest for life, nor has it driven him into seclusion.

While there is considerable identity of interests and faith, in their attitude to the Infinite, Truth, Beauty and Nature, even in the mode of expression and imagery, Tagore not infrequently compels comparisons with the romantic poets. Who could not remember at a first glance of these lines, the happy felicity and the happier imagery of a Keats?

In the deep shadows of rainy July, with secret steps,
thou walkest, silent as night, eluding all watchers.

How typically romantic in spirit and expression these following lines:

“The noon day air is quivering, like the gauzy wings of a dragon fly.”

With a characteristic sympathy and observation of a Wordsworth, the poet watches the melancholy clouds which complain,

“The sky gazes on its own endless blue and dreams.
We clouds are its whims. We have no home. The stars shine on the Crown of Eternity.”

Watch the way the buds bloom in the glory of the spring:

“The spring flowers break out like the passionate pain of unspoken love.”

Or this vision of a windy dawn,

“The winds still moan through the fields and the
tear-stained cheeks of dawn are pale.”

Or this picture of Autumn’s agony,

“I am like the tree that at the end of flowering
summer, gazes at the sky, with its lifted branches,
bare of their blossoms.”

Tagore is indeed so full of this romantic splendour of colour and content that it is almost an instinct with him, of which he is conscious right from boyhood.

If then romanticism of the 19th century England meant curiosity and the love of beauty, a subtle sense of mystery, and an instinct for the elemental simplicities of life, Tagore’s poetry is one which embraces with delightful ease these and other aspects of romanticism. He is one with the great romantic visionaries in his insight into the inner spirit and life, that runs through the individual entities in creation, in that burning optimism of visualising a celestial glow while grouping through a thick darkness of despair and death, that stalk the human existence, in capturing the spirit of Beauty, Truth and Love, “while ignorant armies clash by the night.” In the words of Wordsworth,

“Rapt in still communion that transcends
The imperfect offices of prayer and praise
His mind was thanks-giving to the power
That made him; it was blessedness and love.”

The thought in Tagore’s language,

“Early in the day it was whispered that we should sail in a boat, only thou and I, and never a soul in the world would know of this our pilgrimage to no country and to no end. In that shoreless ocean, at thy silently listening smile, my songs would swell in melodies, free as waves, free from all bondage of words”

There is, however, a significant difference, which cannot be lost sight of. While the poets of the romantic period rise now and then to certain spiritual heights and make excursions into the unknown, with Tagore the burden of his song is a deep and profound spiritual concern, expressing now as lover, now as a friend, another time as a mother that sweet longing for the Divine, for that blessed realisation of Infinite in his finite being. Hence there is that high seriousness and a purity of thought and expression that flow like a clear stream through the pages of his works. This, however, should not be construed as a didactic literature for religious or spiritual propaganda. They are no sermons on the mount. Instead, this theme of the here and hereafter, of life and death, of love and beauty, calls forth the best of expression, which responds with such felicity and naturalness like the fragrance that follows its flower.