Blog #93: Tagore

Remember Dr. Chakraborty who I wrote about a few blogs ago? She inspired me, through a passionate soapbox about Rabindranath Tagore, to buy a boxed set of three of his books, perhaps the most important of which is the Gitanjali, an iconic book of poetry which helped him to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. I opened it for the first time today, to a random page, and read the following poem, which I like quite a lot. (Translation to English by William Radice.)

The wave upon wave of life that night and day

Rushes through every vein of this body of mine

Is the great triumph of life that, in the same way,

Dances worldwide with marvelous rhythm and line—

Is the same life that soundlessly, joyously through

Every pore of the earth's skin upwardly pushes

Blades of grass in their billions, stimulates new

Flowers and leaves— year after year it gushes

And swings like tides of birth and death that grow

And ebb on the world-ocean endlessly.

I feel that those ceaseless waves of life now flow

In my limbs, a source of immense strength in me.

That vast vibration, age after age advancing,

Through all my veins today is dancing, dancing.